Bad Luck Girl

by Sarah Zettel

  They ignored me.

  “You brought her here?” shrieked the bottle-shard girl I figured was Claremont. “Have you gone screwy? You’ll have the courts down on us in no time!”

  “That’s the idea.” Dan Ryan grinned all over his ratty face. “The courts are both offering bounties on her. Now’s our chance to finally cut a deal!”

  “You can’t be serious!” The tree man shook with anger, or with fear. “We can’t deal with the courts!”

  Dan Ryan cocked his head at the tree. Strings of greasy, dark hair slanted across his sloped-back forehead. “Can’t we, Cedar? Not even to get our own back?”

  “You people got something you want from me, you talk to me!” I shouted.

  “You shut up,” snapped the tree called Cedar. The words hit me so hard I knew there had to be magic behind them. “Ain’t nobody talking to you.”

  “How come you’re all standing around like those babies on the council?” said Dan Ryan to the others. “What’d we form up for anyway? We said we was gonna do a raid—well, now we don’t have to. We can just do a deal.”

  The little gang was murmuring in that way that lets you know people are thinking about what they just heard. Maybe even agreeing with it. Goose bumps puckered the skin over my spine and I started looking around for a way out. Nothing good was showing itself. I was hemmed in between a cement wall and a stream of rushing, rattling traffic, and these magic people who thought I could be auctioned off like a prize pony.

  “We got together to plan, you dope!” The girder boy’s voice creaked sharp and painful enough to make me wince. “So we could figure out what …”

  But Dan Ryan wasn’t having any of it. “We don’t need to plan no more neither! That’s what they do. Plan, plan, plan. Talk, talk, talk! They don’t do nothin’! Ain’t that what we all said?” Nobody answered him. “Well, I done it! We got the Bad Luck Girl now! The courts will give anything to get their pretty, grubby hands on her! We can drive a bargain that’ll make ’em squeal and they’ll never even think of touching a Halfer again!”

  Halfers. That was the word Edison had used. Not Undone, as Papa had called them. Halfers made them sound like they were half fairy, like Ivy Bright was, and Shimmy, and me. But the three of us were half human and they were … they were half everything but. Half glass, half tree, or ragbag, or railroad bridge. Half anything and everything and half magic all shook together and coming up alive.

  “What’d you pay?” whispered someone. The voice was light and high, so something in my head labeled the owner as a girl.

  “What?” snapped Dan Ryan. His greasy hair on his head bristled like he was raising his hackles. The Halfers shifted, and one of them stepped forward. “She” was rumpled and wobbly, and looked like she was made out of paper strips, newspaper scraps, pieces of brown bags, and white butcher paper all bundled up together. She even rattled like paper as she moved forward.

  “Touhy!” Dan Ryan’s whole long face wrinkled up as if he smelled something bad and he glowered at the rest of the Halfers. “Which of you clowns told her about this?”

  “Nobody told me,” answered paper Touhy before any of the others were done glancing around. “I followed you. It wasn’t that hard. The whole ’ville’s known for weeks you’re up to something, Dan Ryan.”

  “Yeah? So? What’re you gonna do about it?”

  While I stared, the crumpled surface of Touhy’s skin shifted and rattled. Edges and patches folded together and opened back up again. Now, instead of just a crazy paper quilt around her eyes, there was a newspaper photo of a plump-cheeked girl, and that girl was talking.

  “Word down the line was the Bad Luck Girl was traveling with her family. You must have stole her from them.” Touhy folded and unfolded herself again, and now she had a black mask over her big green eyes. “What did you leave in return?”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. I wanted to say I wasn’t for sale, but I got the feeling this paper girl—Touhy—might be trying to help, so maybe it was better to keep quiet. If nothing else, she was buying me time. Jack and my folks were on the way. I knew that down in my bones. I had to hang on until they got there, or until I could find my own fast exit.

  “If you stole her without making payment, you can’t bargain her to the courts.” Another three trucks barreled past practically bumper to bumper on the roadway. The harsh breeze doubled Touhy over, but she snapped back up straight. “If the courts find out you’re bartering stolen goods, they’ll use it as an excuse to cheat any deal you make.”

  “If they find out.” Dan Ryan snarled at Touhy and swiped the air with hooked fingers. If that boy was half anything, it was half rat, and I suddenly wanted to find me the world’s biggest tomcat. “Who’s gonna tell ’em, huh, Touhy?”

  “You big dope!” Touhy twisted herself toward the others. She was thin as paper too. From this angle I could barely see her. “Her father is high court! You think he’d wait to squeal on the likes of us? You have to pay for what you take, or it’s theft, and the rules can be broken!”

  “Well, I didn’t take her,” announced Dan Ryan. “She followed me!”

  “Is this true?” The girder boy creaked hard as he turned suspicious brown eyes toward me.

  I licked my lips, trying to pull together the exact right words. Words were important to fairies, even half fairies. Dan Ryan, with his twitchy snout and raised hackles, was waiting for one little mistake. If I didn’t get this exactly right, he’d jump all over me and he might just bring the rest of his gang along. “I followed him to get away from the dogs that were chasing me. But I didn’t volunteer to get into his sack, and I sure didn’t want to leave my family.” Or Jack, I added silently.

  “There!” Touhy’s soft voice crackled angrily. “She was stolen. If Dan Ryan can’t pay a fair price for taking her, he’s got to give her back!”

  “That’s if she belongs to the people she was traveling with.” Claremont tapped her glass chin with her glass finger, making a bright clinking noise. “If the Bad Luck Girl belongs to anyone, it’s to the Unseelie court, and they owe us for all they’ve taken.” She smiled, showing rows of teeth like a broken rainbow. “We can claim payment.”

  A snide chuckle drifted up from the gang and my anger reared back.

  “I don’t belong to the Unseelies!”

  “Whaddaya mean?” said Dan Ryan. “You’re the heir to the Midnight Throne!”

  “That doesn’t mean I belong to them. That means they belong to me.”

  This earned me a long, startled laugh. Paper Touhy nodded once. She didn’t want to, but she approved. Dan Ryan, however, most definitely did not, but I wasn’t going to give him a chance to get any more digs in.

  “You got no right to rule anything about me,” I told them all. “You got no right to do anything but let me go.”

  “Why should we?” The tree, Cedar, swayed forward, bending its branches down, like it meant to claw at me. I hate to admit it, but I took a half step back. “You already killed one of us. What’s to stop you going after the rest?”

  So Edison hadn’t been exaggerating. Word had gone out, and it had gotten here first. “That was an accident,” I croaked, trying to pull back my eyes, which were about ready to pop out of my head. “I didn’t know.…”

  “You high court hotshots never do,” Dan Ryan sneered. The Halfers snickered and elbowed one another. “You think you can do whatever you want to us. The Undone, you say. We don’t count for nothin’ to you.”

  “I just wanted to help,” I tried. “If I’d known the tree was …”

  “Stripling.” Cedar’s mouth was a ragged hole in the tree bark and its eyes were barely knotholes. If it stood still, I wouldn’t have seen anything but the tree. I could hardly believe I was holding a conversation with it. I almost wanted to laugh, but I saw its hooked branches and how it loomed over me. I thought about that other tree and its prison shacks and that urge to laugh died away. “Her name was Stripling. You will show some respect.”

 
; “Stripling,” I agreed. “If I’d known Stripling was in trouble too, I would have done what I could.” The problem was, I had known. And I hadn’t done anything like enough.

  “Too late for that.” Cedar stretched its arms, its branches, toward me. I smelled damp, rotting wood over the exhaust that filled the tunnel. “You owe us for the death of one of our own, and we mean to collect.”

  “Stripling wasn’t part of our ’ville,” said Touhy firmly. “We can’t claim the blood price.”

  I thought for a second about edging toward Touhy, but she looked at me with murder in her bright green eyes, and I stayed put. She might be defending me, but she was not interested in being friends.

  “What is the matter with you, Touhy?” roared Dan Ryan. “The courts and their mob are raiding every camp they can find. We can’t wait anymore! We’ve got something to bargain with, and we need to use it!”

  “Touhy’s right,” said girder boy. He unfolded himself until he was almost as tall as Cedar. “If Bad Luck was taken from her family, the act needs to be paid for. That’s the law.”

  “She’s mine!” shouted Dan Ryan. “I found her, and if you’re all too yellow to do what we gotta, I’ll keep her!” He shook open his burlap sack and I grabbed at my magic. There was no way I was going back in there.

  The Halfers screamed and for one wild second I wondered if I was just that scary before I heard an engine gunning and the squeal of tires.

  “Leave her alone!” thundered a new voice.

  A black Ford sedan swerved off the road with Papa on the running board on one side and Mama hanging out the window on the other and Jack hunched behind the wheel.

  I’d been found.

  9

  If You See Me Comin’

  Jack swerved that Ford sedan out from between the trucks, over the low curb, and straight through the heart of the gang. Halfers jumped and scrambled every which way and Jack slammed on the brakes so the car spun out in a mad squeal of tires one bare inch away from the wall. Dan Ryan shrieked high and sharp, squealing out the word of his nonsense chant of a spell like an angry pig. Or an angry rat.

  “… train should jump the track, Callie LeRoux, get in the sack!” His magic swung at me, with the full force of his anger behind it. But this time I was ready.

  “You first, Dan Ryan!” I grabbed that order up, twisted it right around, and threw it back at him.

  Dan Ryan hollered, and he was gone. The burlap bag was on the ground, with something kicking around inside it. Claremont’s scream was like a whole brewery’s worth of bottles falling downstairs, and she lunged for me. Girder boy yanked what could have been a plumber’s wrench out of his pocket and was raising it up to take a swing at my head. I snatched the burlap sack with all my strength, swung it around, and let it fly. Girder screeched and ducked.

  Papa jumped off the running board and spread his arms wide.

  “Back off!”

  Papa’s magic hit the Halfers like a storm wind, slamming them all against the tunnel wall, except Girder. He was struggling to get the sack open. I took off running. Mama had the sedan’s door open. I scrambled in over her lap and plopped down in the space between her and Jack. Jack didn’t even wait for her to get the door shut. He just gunned the engine and slammed the gears into reverse. Papa charged alongside and jumped onto the running board, just as the car leapt backward. Jack shoved the pedals down, crashed the gears together, and we were headed forward, jouncing down over the curb and into the street. Horns blared and truckers shouted and Jack ignored them all. He just kept his foot pressed hard on the accelerator. The sedan shot out of the tunnel and up a ramp into daylight.

  “What were those things?” cried Mama as she fought to get the door closed.

  “Nothing!” shouted Papa from his perch on the running board. “Detritus. Callie, did they hurt you?”

  “No, I’m fine. But, Papa, they said they were—”

  “Jack!” Papa cut me off. “Where are we going?”

  “Away from them!” Jack wrenched the wheel around. The sedan took the corner hard. I slammed against Mama, and the only reason Papa stayed on that running board was a burst of magic. The car dropped down again and bounced. Mama grabbed my shoulders with one hand and the door handle with the other and I didn’t even try to pull away.

  Jack was driving us straight into traffic. Cars and vans and pedestrians swerved and dodged. A police whistle shrilled as we went past, and I swear I heard a cheer. Jack wrenched the wheel around again. The sedan plunged into an alleyway. He gunned it hard to cut across the path of a big black van. Mama screamed and I ducked reflexively, and then we were through, bumping down into another street. Jack turned right and geared down. All at once, we were rolling gently along like the calmest Sunday driver you ever met.

  A streetlight turned red, and Jack stopped.

  “Do you want to get in, Mr. LeRoux?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” breathed Papa. I noticed his knuckles had turned white where he hung on to the door. “I think I’d better.”

  It took him long enough to climb into the sedan’s backseat that the traffic behind us was starting to honk. Jack ignored them until Papa tapped the seat to say he was ready, and then Jack drove on at the same stately pace.

  “Where do we go now?” asked Mama. “The train left hours ago.”

  “And the station’s watched,” added Papa. He was looking at his palms. They were blistered. My own hands tightened up in sympathy.

  “This is Chicago.” Jack shrugged. “We can get a hotel someplace. You can protect us, can’t you, Mr. LeRoux? Callie said you put a protection on the Imperial, back in Kansas.”

  “It’s not that easy. I can set a protection around a place, yes, but it’s got to be a home, not just a hotel.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because otherwise it won’t work, that’s why!” Papa shouted, and I jumped. “This blasted and bedamned world of yours! It’s got boundaries, it’s got time. It plays Cain with what magic can do! It—”

  “Daniel!” said Mama coldly and Papa stopped. I felt him trying to wrestle his temper back into place. “We’re going to need somewhere to stay while we work out what to do next,” Mama went on. “Have we got any useful ideas?”

  “Jack?” I said softly. I knew what had to happen. I also knew how bad Jack was trying to come up with a different answer. I was having a hard time believing any place could be safe again. We had the courts at war on the other side of the gates, and the Halfers (the Undone, whoever they were) after us on this side. But we had to at least try to get out of sight. “Jack, we’re in a stolen car and you’ve only got”—I tapped the gauge—“half a tank of gas, and no real money. And those guys, the Halfers, they saw this car. We try to get out of the city like this, they’ll be after us in a heartbeat.”

  Jack stopped at another streetlight. He clenched the steering wheel. I watched his face. He was struggling with something at least as tough as Papa’s sudden burst of temper or my fear of being caught again. When the light changed, he eased us forward. His eyes flickered to the street signs, to the street in front of us, and back again. Not once did he look over at me. “All right. I guess I’m gonna have to take you home.”

  Chicago’s a pretty flat place. I don’t quite know why it seemed like we were going down as we drove, and down deep at that. At first, we made our way between skyscrapers and stores with signs like Walgreens, O’Malley’s Gentleman’s Tailoring, and Paddy’s Saloon. White men and women in stout but stylish clothes walked the streets. Slowly, the buildings got lower and older and crowded closer together. The signs changed to things like Polanski’s Quality Butchers, Petrovski’s Fresh Fish, and Gutman’s Pawnbrokers. The women weren’t so stylish here. They wore dark skirts with their hair tied up in colored scarfs. Another few blocks and I couldn’t read the signs at all because they were written in swoopy, squared-off script. The men wore black coats and black hats with round crowns here, and most of the women were in black dresses and had dark wigs on their
heads. There weren’t any street signs that I could see. But Jack, as usual, knew where he was going.

  He turned up a narrow side street that was more mud than cobblestone. Raggedy kids in short pants who had been playing stickball scrambled out of the way, and then ganged up behind to chase after us and cheer, because we were in what was easily the fanciest car on that block. The buildings here were mostly wood: squared-off, three-story clapboard places with peaked roofs, dark windows, and faded curtains. They were crowded so close together you could have sat in your kitchen and still snatched a doughnut off the dining room table in the house next door. Smokestacks made a distant, forbidding fence for one side of the neighborhood. There was a smell too, and it was everywhere. I’d never been in a barnyard or outhouse that smelled as bad as that smudged-over, crowded-up, worn-down street.

  The roadster splashed through a long set of potholes as Jack drove right up to the street’s dead end. Beyond it was the kind of muddy, open space I’d hesitate to call a field. Heaps of ashes and clinker had been dumped there, making a set of gray and black dunes that stretched to the river. Crows and seagulls traded insults across the ash heaps. More raggedy kids climbed over the piles, calling to each other in raucous games of king of the hill. Jack parked, and I climbed out of the car, stunned. I’d known he came up poor, but I never imagined he came from someplace that made my dust-bowl home seem rich.

  Jack wasn’t looking at me. He was walking over to the last of the narrow buildings on the right-hand side of the street. The porch steps creaked as he climbed up to the front door. The screen door squeaked even louder when he pulled it open, and we all followed Jack inside.

  The outside stench was replaced by smells of old fish and cabbage. A narrow staircase ran up along the left-hand wall. A dark and dingy hallway ran along the right. As we crowded inside, its one door opened so a hatchet-faced woman in a sack of a dress could peer out at us.