Bad Luck Girl

by Sarah Zettel

  It was too much. I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You get out of here, Lorcan deMinuit!” I shouted. “And stay out!”

  I put everything I had into the command. But it went nowhere. It just swung back around and I felt the blow of my own power knock me back, all the way out of my own dream. Behind me in the dark, my uncle and his friends all laughed, and kept on laughing.

  5

  I’ve Got Double Trouble

  My eyes snapped open. It was still dark, but nothing like as dark as my dream had been. The shadows of the drawing room compartment rocked with the steady rhythm of the train’s wheels against the tracks. After a few hard, panicky blinks, I could make out Mama sitting on the bed, holding Papa’s hand like she hadn’t moved since we’d shut off the lights. Jack’s snores drifted down from the upper berth. Of course he was sound asleep. There was nothing on God’s green earth that could keep Jack Holland awake when he’d decided to get his forty winks.

  I lay still for a while, waiting for my heart to slow its galloping and for my fingers to decide to let go of the bedsheets. Papa coughed hard. Mama held a glass of water for him to drink and then patted his forehead with a handkerchief. All her attention was on him. She didn’t even notice me waking up after my nightmare. I bit my lip hard against the anger. I wouldn’t give in. I couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I didn’t want to be mad at her. I didn’t want Papa to be so sick, or her to be so worried, especially not with my uncle’s voice ringing in my head, saying I should think hard about how soon we were going to die.

  I’d thought when I found my parents, everything would be all right. Well, I had found them, but if I counted up the number of seconds when things had actually been all right since then, I might have had all of a minute and a half.

  Of course I didn’t really believe anything like she might love me less now that she had Papa back. He was sick. Of course she had to pay attention to him now. Thinking she should have taken my side just a little back in Los Angeles was small and mean. After all, I was supposed to be on Papa’s side. That was where a good daughter would be, wouldn’t it? I turned that thought over. Some kind of charity or sympathy should have come up, but none did. What came up was the idea that that was my fairy Papa over there, and if neither one of us was going to sleep, I might as well try to get some answers out of him.

  I kicked back the covers and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The movement finally got Mama to turn around.

  “What’s the matter, Callie?” she said, and I couldn’t help hearing the fear underneath the words.

  “I can’t sleep.” Which was mostly true. I’d scared myself good and awake. “I’ll sit up with Papa a bit. You should get some rest.”

  “Oh, no. I’m fine,” Mama lied right back.

  “We get into Chicago tomorrow. We’re all going to need to be ready to help Papa change trains.” I felt bad playing on her worries like that, but it was the one thing I could be sure would get through to her. Papa lifted his head and coughed again, and I saw by the shine of his eyes that he knew exactly what I was doing. I was getting Mama out of the way.

  “Well. I suppose,” Mama said slowly, like you do when you’re pretty sure you’ve just agreed to a bad idea. “For a few minutes.”

  She slid under the covers of the bed I’d just left, adjusting her borrowed nightgown. I took her spot on the edge of Papa’s bed and sat there, staring at my hands. I felt Papa watching me, but I didn’t look at him. Not until Mama’s soft breathing slowed and deepened, and I knew she was as sound asleep as Jack.

  “So, Callie.” Papa’s fairy eyes glimmered silver, gold, and midnight blue in the darkness. I didn’t answer, just squirmed in my seat. I thought I’d known what I was going to say, but right then it hit me how this was the first chance I’d ever had to talk with my father, and suddenly I had no idea what to do with myself.

  “Me either,” Papa croaked in answer to my thoughts, and tried to give me a grin. I almost managed one back. Silence fell again and I spent the pause pulling my leaky thoughts closed. I didn’t want him to find out what was going on inside me until I was ready, if I ever was. I knew I should just go on and tell him about Uncle Lorcan, but what good would it do? It wasn’t like either one of us had enough magic to do anything about it, and an extra worry wasn’t going to help him when he was so weak.

  Say something! I shouted at myself. Anything. You can’t just sit here!

  But it was Papa who spoke next. “You’ve been through a lot, Callie.” His voice had turned ragged and raspy, nothing like the clear laughing voice he’d had before we got on the train. “I can see it in you.”

  “You can?”

  “It would take more than a bit of iron to completely separate me from you, especially now that we’ve met and learned each other’s names.”

  “Oh. I guess … I guess I’ve got a lot to learn about being a fairy.” So that was the source of the leak: the names. It would be. Fairies were flat-out crazy over people’s names and what they could do.

  “And I’ve got a lot to learn about being a human … and more, I think, about being a father.” Another smile flickered in his dimming eyes. “I do intend to be the best father I can. I’m only sorry I’ve made such a bad beginning of it.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I whispered to my hands.

  “Well, that’s nice of you to say, anyhow.” Silence fell again, and it was heavy, but not cold. Something was different this time, a little bit, around the edges. This silence held a feeling like a memory returning. It was the feeling of having my father close by, and I wasn’t even trying to reach out to him. He was right. We weren’t ever going to be truly separate again. I squirmed. I’d been lonely for so long it should have been a beautiful idea, but I just couldn’t be sure how well I really liked it. Especially not with Uncle Lorcan waiting back in my nightmares like he was.

  “How about you tell me about your journey?” Papa sagged farther down onto the pillows. “I haven’t heard the whole story yet.”

  Mama rolled over, murmuring uneasily in her sleep. I swallowed. I told her I’d look after Papa. I should at least try. “Um, shouldn’t you be trying to sleep?”

  Papa’s smile was as weak as the light from his shining eyes. “No. To tell you the truth, I think sleep would be very bad for me right now.”

  I understood what he wasn’t saying and fear skittered through me. He knew that, of course, but neither of us mentioned it. Instead, I started talking. I told him about the dust storm that took Mama away from Slow Run, and about the monsters that had come for me afterward, about meeting the Indian spirit Baya, about meeting Jack, and the half-fairy woman Shimmy, who did the best she could for us, and finally, about meeting Uncle Shake and all he’d tried to do to me.

  Nothing could have gotten me ready for my father’s anger. It swept through me, raw, red, and hotter than any fire. His eyes flared red and gold with it until all the storm-cloud blue burned away. He reared up hard on those pillows, and Mama whimpered in her sleep and even Jack’s snores hitched.

  “Stop, Papa,” I gasped, dragged halfway to my feet by a need to run, or hit something. “Please, you’ll wake them up.…”

  After a moment’s struggle, the anger pulled back, and I dropped back onto the bed. Another coughing fit reached up and shook Papa hard. I grabbed the water glass and held it for him so he could sip. He waved me back.

  “I’ll be all right. I’ll be … By my blood and bone, Callie, I never, ever thought he’d try murder.”

  “He wants the throne,” I said. “He says he’s got friends who can help him get it.” I thought about all the pale fairies I’d seen around him. I should have been thinking about something else, something important. An idea was scratching at the back of my head, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “He has nothing. Not while you breathe,” Papa muttered.

  “I told him I’d abdicate, like you did. But he wasn’t interested. It’s probably got something to do with the prophecy.
Everything else does.” This time the anger I felt was my very own. “Why’s there a prophecy at all? Why’s it got the Seelies in such a lather? And my … our … family? They’re so high and mighty, why would any of them even care what I do?”

  “They may be so high and mighty now, Callie,” said Papa seriously. “But your power could lay them all low in very short order. You must see that.”

  “No, I don’t. How can that be?”

  Papa stared at me in disbelief for a long time. “I forget,” he breathed at last. “There’s so much you can do, I forget how little you actually know. Callie, we of the fairy kind don’t just like humans, we need them. We are dependent on them.” He coughed again, and that one cough touched off a whole storm of others. He pressed his arm against his mouth, trying to muffle the sound, and screwed his eyes shut. I knew how bad that kind of coughing hurt. I remembered it from when I had the dust pneumonia. Was that what was ailing Papa? Was the iron somehow filling up his fairy lungs? I opened my mouth to ask if he wanted some more water or if I should rub his back. But Papa held up his hand and managed a couple of deep breaths.

  “Why’re you … How could we be dependent on humans?” I asked. Fairies were the ones with magic and illusions and all the other powers. Fairies could make human beings do anything they wanted, even dance themselves to death. How could creatures like that be dependent on humans?

  “We can’t heal,” said Papa.

  “What?”

  “We can’t heal,” he repeated. “Unlike humans, we can’t renew or heal ourselves from the inside. We need to use magic to heal, or change, or grow. And when we use up what we have inside us, we must replenish ourselves from the outside, with the magic or the life essence of other beings.”

  “Like human beings?” I thought about how many times I’d used Jack’s wishes to shape my magic. I’d needed his help more than once to be able to do anything at all. I hadn’t stopped to think that taking his wishes might be hurting him.

  “Wishes, creativity, imagination, will, and feeling,” Papa said softly. “All of this is the essence of what mortal beings are. It is the power of this world manifest in them. If we can reach it, our kind can convert any or all of it into our magic, in much the way one of those new dams Mr. Roosevelt is building can convert the motion of water into electricity. You’ve felt this, I’m sure.” He didn’t exactly look toward Jack in his upper berth, but I knew he was thinking about him. I sure was.

  I clenched my fists. The cabin rocked around us, and the noise of the tracks clacking under the wheels sounded very loud as I tried to get my mind around what Papa said about what he was, about what we were, and I did not like any of the ideas that came running up to meet me just then.

  When I was little, before the dusters started, there was a pond down by the school. Everybody knew there were leeches in it. Casey Wilkes had gone wading on a dare and come out with his legs covered with squishy brown sluggy-things. I remembered the blood running in red ribbons down his shins. I’d actually been glad when that pond dried up, because it meant all those nasty things died. I could sort of stand being bad luck, and being a fairy princess had some advantages sometimes, but what if I was also some kind of gigantic Callie-shaped leech?

  “No,” said Papa, and I jumped and cussed silently. I’d been leaking thoughts again. But Papa just waved his hand. “You were thinking it loud enough that they probably heard you in the caboose. One wish taken at a time, a little feeling, a little music or good cheer won’t hurt your friend.” He waved his hand again, this time sort of toward Jack. “Or anyone else. Especially if it’s freely given, and only once in a while. It’s when you keep drawing it down that they wither and they die, whether they are human or fairy kind.”

  “But you’re saying if I start closing gates, so the fairies can’t get to human beings, I’ll be, what? Starving the fairy country out?”

  Papa swallowed some more air. “Succinctly put. There are many gates, large and small, but close even a few and the Seelie or the Unseelie would begin to lose touch with the essence of life and magic they need to survive and to flourish. They’d set to fighting over what access remained, which would use up their magic more quickly, which would starve them faster. Oh, yes, Callie,” said Papa as the blood drained slowly from my cheeks. “You could kill them all if you decided to. And they know it.”

  I had no way to answer this. It was too big. I didn’t want to understand it. I didn’t want to be the person who held that much power inside her. So I shied away from it. “What’s the third world?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It was something Mr. Robeson said, about the other part of the prophecy. See her now, daughter of three worlds. See her now, three roads to choose.… Well, there’s the human world, and the fairy world, and everybody’s trying to get me to choose between them. But I ain’t seen a third world yet. Where’s that?”

  Papa was quiet for a while and I swear I could feel him fighting to think. But in the end he just shook his head. “I don’t know. I never did pay much attention to the prophecy when I was still with my family. I never thought to see it fulfilled, so it didn’t seem important. Another mistake, I suppose.”

  That felt like an honest answer, but it wasn’t the one I wanted. “How do we find out, then? Because it’s a little important.”

  “A little,” Papa agreed, and coughed again. “I think perhaps that’s our first order of business, after getting to New York in one piece, of course. And when we do get there, we can’t have any more scenes like back with that prison tree, do you understand, Callie? Not until we’ve found help, and a protected place to stay.”

  I didn’t want him to be right, and I sure didn’t mean to make any kind of promise like that. Not even to my father. I made sure to keep that thought to myself, though, and quickly changed the subject.

  “What was that tree?”

  “Sorry?” Papa coughed again.

  “When we went past the Hooverville, in Los Angeles. You saw something was wrong right away, but you wouldn’t tell me what it was. You said, ‘Not them.’ ”

  “Oh.” He was trying to decide how much of the truth to tell me. I could feel it, and I wasn’t going to put up with it. And he could feel that. And he smiled. “They are the Undone.”

  “The what?”

  “Not all offspring of the magic and the mortal are, well, babies, like you were, or Ivy, or this Shimmy. Sometimes magic works on the world itself, or on … lesser creatures. The result is an in-between creature, one very much subject to manipulation by both worlds. They’re weaker than we are, and malformed. They’ve got no place in either world, no proper role in the web of being, or even any real business existing at all. That makes them … more easily swayed, I guess you could say, very ready to be used by anyone stronger.”

  I thought about the determination in Edison’s eyes as he whispered his promises to me, and I realized I was not sure about that last bit at all. I strained to hush that idea, but it turned out I needn’t have bothered.

  Papa wheezed a few times and sagged farther down against the pillows. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I’m afraid I have to rest for a while.”

  He struggled for a minute and I realized he was trying to lie down. I helped get the pillows out from behind him and held his shoulders so he could lie back slowly. He felt light and bony under my hands, like there were no muscles left under his skin.

  “Never thought,” Papa breathed.

  “Sorry?”

  “Never thought to have a daughter, especially not one so brave. Or so like her mother.” He breathed in and out hard, three or four times. “I do love her, Callie.” His eyelids fluttered. “Not as a fairy, loving her life like a glutton loves a good steak. As barren as it may be, I do have a heart, or I did. I gave it to her.”

  He didn’t say anything after that. His shining eyes drifted shut. I sat there a long time, staring at him. Papa coughed and twisted like he was trying to turn over but couldn’t quite. My stomach knotted up. I di
dn’t know what to feel. I wanted to love my father. I wanted it so bad it was like a hunger inside me. But I couldn’t tell if I really did love him, or if he was worth loving. He said he wanted to be a good father, and I believed that. But at the same time, he’d been ready to leave people to die back under the prison tree, and he had Mama so snarled up, she’d been ready to smack me because I wouldn’t do what he said. He’d gotten us into trouble, but he’d gotten us out too. His courage in riding the train was genuine, because this trip was just plain killing him. It wasn’t being slow about its work either. If Papa was this sick already, how was he going to last all the way to New York City?

  I wished hard I’d never thought of that, but nothing happened.

  6

  To My Sweet Home Chicago

  “LaSalle Street Station!” called the conductor outside our compartment door. “Final stop, LaSalle Street Station! All change at LaSalle!”

  I have never in my life been so glad to hear anything as I was to hear those words.

  I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. When morning finally came, Jack took Mama to the dining car, so she could get a little fresh air and stretch her legs. I went myself after that, but I couldn’t eat anything, and I hotfooted it back to the compartment after about five minutes. Papa didn’t even try to sit up. I don’t know for sure what Mama and Jack saw when they were with him, but to me it looked like he was fading away. Once, he slid his hand across the blankets to touch Mama’s, and I was sure I saw her pale fingers right through his dark ones.

  The Golden State Limited pulled into the station with a long whoosh of steam and a squeal of brakes. Jack, as usual, scrambled out ahead of the rest of us. While Mama and I were trying to figure out if Papa was even going to be able to stand, Jack slipped back in through the door.