Bad Luck Girl

by Sarah Zettel

  There’s the human world, there’s the fairy world, and then there’s betwixt and between. Betwixt and between is a place that’s no place in particular. It’s got no shape of its own, except it’s all the shapes of the surrounding worlds piled on top of each other. It’s got no time except forever, and no light, except all the sunlight, starlight, and fairy light leaking through from one side to the other.

  At least, that was what it was like last time I walked out there.

  This time somebody’d turned those lights out. The whole world had gone gray. I froze on the threshold of the gate I’d opened. While I stared, something grabbed hold of the part of my blood and brain where my magic waited. It turned me, like I was a compass needle, toward the Unseelie borders, toward the home I’d never really seen. It tried to tell me this was the right way to go, whether I wanted to or not.

  “What’s happening?” asked a voice from far away. I thought it was Papa, but I wasn’t sure.

  I had no chance to find my words. A low, terrible river boiled out from the direction of the Unseelie world. It rolled through the shifting twilight that had taken over betwixt and between, making the air ripple with a rough and gritty darkness, like the wind that brought the dusters to Kansas. But this was more than wind or thunder. This was alive. In fact, it was a whole lot of alive. A thousand thousand separate beings boiled past me in that dark. All of them grappled and fought to move faster. They climbed over each other, straining to reach their destination. And as I stood there, open-mouthed, I felt their hunger, fear, and anger rush over me. They must have felt something too, because they all turned, and they all looked at me.

  The shock of recognition from those thousands of minds staggered me, and I toppled over. My hand slipped from Jack’s, and I was falling into nothing. Jack’s hand snatched at mine, but he screamed and his fingers spasmed.

  “Trap!” I heard him holler. “It’s a trap!”

  Betwixt and between trembled around me. I twisted my mind and my body, struggling to hang on, to find a foothold, anything. But the pull, the pressure, and the craziness were too strong. Someone was grabbing at me. My fingers were slipping. My ankles were being pulled apart. I clamped my hand around Jack’s curling fingers and felt him wish me out of there. But it wasn’t just him.

  “I wish it open!” shouted Mama. “Daniel, I wish it open!”

  Their wishes were faint and shaky and far away, but I grabbed at the straws of power they loaned me, jammed them into that tiny space I could sense around Jack’s wrist, and shoved hard.

  The pressure snapped. Jack hollered. I shrieked and shot out of the darkness, tumbling down onto the pavement. Next thing I knew, Mama had her arms around me to pull me to my feet.

  “Look at me, Callie. Look at me.” Her hands cupped my face. I made myself pull my eyelids open. Everything was blurry for a second, but it cleared up quick and I could see Mama’s frantic eyes staring into mine.

  “Are you all right?” Mama’s rough fingers poked at my skull and my arms, feeling for breaks. “Do you hurt anywhere?”

  Truth was, every bit of me hurt, but I shook my head anyway. “Jack?”

  “Yeah.” Jack was slumped against a streetlamp, cradling his wrist. His face had turned a really bad shade of white. “That sure was a surprise,” he croaked.

  “Here.” Papa took Jack’s arm. Jack winced and hissed a curse through his teeth. I felt Papa’s magic wrap around Jack. Jack winced again, but his face flushed from dead white to red, and I felt his pain dissolve as easy as sugar melting in the rain.

  “Thanks.” Jack flexed his fingers as Papa lifted his hands away.

  “What happened, Callie?” demanded Mama.

  “I don’t know. It was like … I can’t describe it.”

  Papa came up beside her. The shine from his fairy eyes had dimmed down almost to twilight. He’d lifted his face, turning this way and that like he was trying to catch some scent or sound that had already passed. There was a closed-up drugstore behind us, with posters for Pepsodent and milk of magnesia hanging in its plate-glass window. Papa breathed on the glass and rubbed it with his sleeve.

  “Think about what you saw, Callie,” he said urgently. “This is important.”

  I swallowed, and as much as I didn’t want to, I made myself remember the storm of bad feeling, the rolling darkness, the churning lives. Papa stared into the glass, and I thought I saw something ugly that shifted vague and dim in the reflection. Whatever he saw, it seemed to draw the strength out of his straight back. Papa leaned against the window, pressing his palm hard against the glass.

  “I was afraid of this.” Papa’s fingers curled up, scraping at the glass, looking for something to hold on to. Mama moved up next to him, resting her hand on his shoulder. His free hand stole around her waist.

  “What is it, Mr. LeRoux?” asked Jack.

  “The war,” Papa said as he wiped his hand hard across that magic reflection. He did not let go of Mama. “It’s started.”

  “But it can’t!” The words burst out of me, like if I said it strong enough, I could make it true. “It’s too soon. It’d take time to get the armies ready and, and stuff. Wouldn’t it?”

  “They’ve been ready for years,” said Papa. “The Seelie king was just waiting for an excuse.”

  “Ivy.” The smell of gunpowder and copper came right back when I said it, and I heard the explosion of the gunshot all over again. “When I killed Ivy, he declared war.”

  Papa nodded. “The blood of his daughter has been shed. He has the right to exact a blood price in return. My parents have been building up the defenses of the Midnight Throne for years, waiting for the attack.” He looked back at the window, a sour mix of disappointment and anger bubbling around him. “I am sorry, Margaret,” he whispered to Mama. “I had hoped we’d have at least a small moment.…”

  “The king can go ahead and start a whole war because one girl got shot?” said Jack. “And it’s legal? That’s nuts!”

  Papa suddenly went all stiff and formal. He plainly did not care for Jack’s assessment of the situation. “The whole human world went to war when one man was shot. What was his name? Archduke Ferdinand, I believe.”

  Jack dug his hands into the pockets of his new white flannel trousers. “Well, that was different.”

  “Was it?”

  “This is no time to argue politics.” Mama gave Papa’s shoulder one firm squeeze that seemed to straighten them both up again. “We need to work out what to do.”

  I tried to quiet the shivers that ran up my spine. We couldn’t stay here. If the Seelies were already on the attack, they’d be after me. Us. I was the one who’d killed Ivy. It was an accident, but that didn’t seem to matter. She was still dead and I still did it. They wanted the gate powers I worked. They wanted the prophecy on their side, and they weren’t going to care a whole lot about what I wanted. “I can try again.… Maybe if I open a different gate, we can get around it.”

  “No,” said Mama flatly. “I know you’ve been through a lot, Callie, but we are not walking into a war zone. We need to find another way.”

  “Train?” said Jack.

  “No,” said Mama again. “Not that either.”

  “What’s the matter?” I felt something smoldering behind my eyes. Where’d she get the idea she was in charge all of a sudden? She didn’t know anything about my magic or the gates, or everything we’d already been through. “If we can’t walk through betwixt and between, the train is easiest.”

  “It’s the iron,” Papa said lightly. “In the train and the rails.”

  Iron’s poison to fairies. It didn’t bother me so much because I am half human, but I’d seen the kind of things it could do to full-blood fairies like Papa, and they were not good. Guilt smacked hard against me. How could I have forgotten?

  “It’s going to be a little uncomfortable for me, but I’ll be fine.” Papa made his voice bright and easy and patted Mama’s hand for emphasis. “We need to get a move on. With the war started, the c
ourt’s allies in this world will be out, searching for power to feed the armies, and looking for Callie especially.” His voice went grim. “With her power over the gates, she’s a living weapon worth all the armies either side could raise.”

  Right then a siren wailed in the distance and we all jumped. Then we looked at each other and saw how pale we’d gone. Without any more argument, Jack and I moved up close to my parents and we started walking.

  As usual, Jack knew which way to go. It was like he’d been planning how to hightail it out of Los Angeles since the day we got here. Maybe he had. He’d hoboed around a lot, both before and after taking up with me. Another streetcar carried us up Central, taking us to the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Los Angeles station. From there we could catch a train east, maybe even all the way to New York. With the way things had gone so far, though, I wasn’t figuring we’d have that much luck, or any at all.

  We looked more respectable this time, and the car was starting to fill up with people on their way to work, so we didn’t stand out so much. We got out near Fifth Avenue with a small crowd of men with hard hats and lunch pails. These streets weren’t like any of the Los Angeles I’d seen so far. I’d gotten used to thinking the whole city was white, clean, and brand-spanking-new. In this neighborhood, though, sooty brick alleys sliced apart rows of mismatched buildings, and sagging black power lines stitched them loosely back together. Raggedy hoboes rolled up in their coats and tried to catch a little sleep in the fading shadows. Chinese men eyed us from the doorways of battered shops and shuttered restaurants, some dressed in shirts and trousers, some in long coats with round caps on their heads. They looked hard and sad, and moved around at their work to the clang and clash rising up from the train tracks behind the jumbled buildings.

  It was easy to see what saddened those men. One wall of the street maze had been demolished. Instead of city streets there was a flat expanse of pale dirt with cranes and bulldozers standing guard. It looked like somebody had dropped a piece of Kansas in the middle of Los Angeles, and then fenced it in with barbed wire and wooden slats. The hot, hard California wind stirred up miniature dust devils in the tire tracks. The Chinese men eyed it uneasily, like they were waiting for the day the dirt would stretch out and flatten the last few buildings blocking its view of the tracks.

  We paired up as we started up the sidewalk. Papa walked ahead, his arm in Mama’s, and I walked beside Jack. We were all on edge and trying not to show it, but it was hard. Even Papa looked too stiff as we walked the gray line of cement street that cut between the old Chinatown and the new construction site. The railway station, a square granite building with tall windows and wide steps, was up ahead, across a broad, busy intersection. People were heading in and coming out, and everything about it was normal and everyday under the bright morning sun. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling like I was in one of those dreams where I was in a long hallway, and no matter how fast I ran, the end kept getting farther and farther away.

  Cut it out, I told myself. There’s nothing wrong. It’s a normal day, full of normal people. Wherever the Seelies are, they’re not here. Look around. It’s just us.

  It was good advice, even if it came from myself. I did look around. I saw the men heading into work. I saw the broken Chinatown with its people talking with each other or carrying boxes in and out of the stores. Even though it felt like it was taking a million years, we were getting closer to the street corner and to the intersection. It was a matter of taking one step at a time. We just had to get across those streets with their noisy rivers of traffic. We just had to get to the train station. Just one more step, and one more, and one more.

  I was all but chanting as we walked. Papa looked over his shoulder once, and I bit my lip. Could he feel me being afraid? I dragged my emotions deeper inside and put some space between me and Jack. And kept walking. No matter what, I told myself, we will keep walking.

  We passed a broken-down shop—if it wasn’t a restaurant—with a neon sign that was a bunch of Chinese characters. It was the last building of the broken Chinatown. On the far side was a lot that would have been vacant except somebody had cobbled together a sad little cluster of shacks from scraps of cardboard, lumber, canvas, and tin.

  Jack and I had seen a lot of these places since we’d left Kansas. We’d even stopped overnight in a couple. They were called Hoovervilles, after President Hoover, who oversaw the stock-market crash that brought the Depression down on the country. Some of them were not okay. They were hobo jungles full of hard, dangerous men looking for a drink or trouble, whichever came by first. But mostly these shanties were built by people who’d lost their homes. They’d been put out, shut out, tractored out, starved out, and now they were here, huddling together, trying to stay alive long enough for things to get better. Probably some of the Hooverville men would be hanging around that construction site’s gate, hoping for a day’s work. The rest would either be out on the bum or curled up in their shacks sleeping off whatever they’d found to ease their way through the night before. If there were families living there, we’d see the kids running around, kicking a can or some such.

  At least, we should have. This set of tin-and-scrap shacks, though, was less like the Hoovervilles I’d seen before and more like a miniature ghost town. There weren’t any kids, or anybody else. The crooked doorways waited blank and empty. One black crow perched on a roof and looked out at the morning with its shining eyes. Nobody was hanging around by the fence to ask about a job. The only people at the gates of the construction site were the men with their hard hats and lunch pails.

  “Where’re the people?” Jack asked softly. “In the Hooverville?” He’d noticed it too. There were men hunkered down in the broken alleys and pale shadows of Chinatown, but nobody around those empty houses. Where had they all gone?

  Cold worry touched the back of my neck. I didn’t like it, and I could tell by how Jack’s face had gone all tight that he didn’t like it either. Had the cops cleared the place out? That made no sense. If the people had been run off, the Hooverville would’ve been torn down to keep them from coming back. This was a deserted place where there should have been people. Instead, there was only that fat crow, looking very satisfied with itself. That crow, and a smell like burning rubber.

  No, whispered a voice in my head, and I pulled up short. Because that voice was not mine. Jack shot me another worried look. But his look was nowhere near as worried as the way Papa was staring at that crow.

  Not them, said the voice in my head that wasn’t mine. For a wild second, I thought it was the crow talking about us. Not here. Not yet.

  But it wasn’t the crow I was hearing or Jack. I was hearing my father thinking.

  “What is it?” I caught Papa’s sleeve. “What’s happening?”

  That startled him. I felt a shift around the edges of my mind, like a very small door closing, and I knew I was right. This was one of the things that could happen when Unseelies got together, and probably Seelies too. Our minds and magics would try to cozy up close to each other, and it took work to keep them apart, just like it took work to keep out the wishes and feelings of the humans around us. I hated this bit about being part fairy. The last person who got in my head without permission was my uncle Shake. But he had wanted me either under his thumb or under the ground, so he had encouraged the situation. I hadn’t really thought I’d have to watch out for this around my father. His thoughts must have leaked out by accident, or maybe I leaked in because he was so worried he couldn’t completely close his magic self. That was not a comfortable idea. What if my thoughts sprang their own leak? I wanted to get to know Papa, but I had plenty of secrets I wanted to keep to myself, thank you very much.

  “Don’t stop.” Papa moved one extra inch closer to Mama’s side and lengthened his stride, forcing me and Jack to pick up our pace. “Keep moving.”

  “Why? What is it?” Jack asked.

  “Come along, Jack,” said Mama. “You too, Callie. We don’t want to miss the t
rain.” But she didn’t know what time the train left any more than we did. She was just afraid. I could feel the fear beating against the inside of her mind. If we didn’t get away, if we didn’t make it into the safety of the railway station, we could be caught by the Seelies. She could be dragged away again to be locked in another magic prison. But she would not show her fear. She would not look around and let any of us see the terror in her eyes. She would be strong.

  I swallowed hard and tried not to know what Mama wanted so badly to keep private.

  Papa didn’t bother to answer Jack. He just took a better hold of Mama’s arm and kept right on walking. Something sizzled, and that burning-rubber smell I’d noticed before got stronger. One of the Chinese men came out of the last shop on the edge of the Hooverville and cussed something in his own language. He lifted his battered broom and beat at the switched-off neon sign over his doorway. I swear I saw a spark jump from the sign’s twisted symbol to the black wire sagging overhead. It sizzled again and slid along the power line. Now I smelled smoke.

  “Papa?” I said. My father ignored me. I tried again, but silently this time. Papa?

  Not here. Not now, said his thoughts, but I couldn’t tell if he was actually answering or if I was just eavesdropping some more.

  “But what …?” Jack was saying.

  “Trouble,” said Papa evenly. “That’s all you need to know.”

  We had to stop at the curb and wait for a clear spot in the roaring traffic. Even though this was the intersection of two four-lane streets, nobody had bothered to put up a streetlight on the corner. There was just a little cement island in the middle. All the cars seemed to be taking advantage of this fact to rattle past at top speed. Jack eased himself back behind the rest of us. His worry spiked. I could feel it pricking at my mind, even sharper than Mama’s. He was getting ready for whatever new, bad thing was set to catch up with us.

  I clamped my teeth down on my temper. Papa had no business treating us like we were know-nothing kids. If something was up, we had a right to hear about it. Then we could stop being scared and start being ready. He didn’t know what we’d been through already any more than Mama did. Less even. He’d left us and gotten caught and started this whole mess tumbling across our lives.