Bad Luck Girl

by Sarah Zettel

  Those words hit me hard. I couldn’t even move for a long time. I didn’t want to feel bad for that greasy rat-kid with his burlap sack, but how could I stand there and not feel for someone else who’d had a parent taken away?

  Jack put his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, wishing the words would get from here to Dan Ryan.

  “So, will you help us?” said Touhy.

  I hadn’t been planning on it, after being kidnapped and everything. But now … now I had to think again. “What do you want?”

  Touhy unfolded further, stretching herself out until she was tall enough to look me in the eye. “Open a gate for us. Give us our own way into the fairy worlds so we can rescue our people.”

  My fingers curled in on themselves. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Oh, don’t gimme that! We all heard the prophecy too, you know. You can punch a hole through anything! And you already went and bulldozed the Seelie Castle out in California.”

  “You know about that?” interrupted Jack.

  “Are you kidding? Everybody knows about that.”

  “Who’s everybody?” My head was starting to spin. I was used to being one of a kind. The couple of times I’d found another half fairy, they’d been as much on their own as I was. But now … now it was turning out there were whole camps full of them. “Just how many Halfers are there?”

  “Enough to make your life miserable if we decide to,” Touhy shot back.

  Touhy might be made of paper, but she was no weakling. I had no idea where Papa was getting his information from, but it was starting to look a little out-of-date.

  Something in her bluster sounded a little off-kilter, though. I took a deep breath and held it, and made myself think about how I’d heard the other Halfers arguing in that tunnel. “What about this council Dan Ryan was talking about? Do they know you’re here doing a deal with me?” Touhy didn’t answer and I knew I’d hit it. She was here on her own, so any threats she made were her own as well. “How about Dan Ryan?” I added. “Does he know you’re here?”

  “I told you, he’s just mad.” But her nerve was flagging. She rustled and crackled and shrank back down to her little-girl size. “He’s really all right. And he’s strong. We’ll need him if we’re going to make any kind of raid work.”

  “Because of that bag of his?”

  “That, and because he’s so plain nasty, nothing can keep hold of him.”

  I snorted. There was a good chance Touhy was telling the truth about what was happening to the Halfers. It sure sounded like something the Seelie king would do. If he could send his own daughter to be shot, he wouldn’t even bat a borrowed eyelash at sucking the living out of some stranger. And if that was true, well, maybe it didn’t matter what Dan Ryan had done to me personally (although we were still going to have a talk about that). Nobody deserved to have their folks dragged off by the fairies.

  What was worse, though, was I could picture my grandparents doing the exact same thing if they needed to.

  “You do owe us, you know,” said Touhy. “They may not be ready to do a smash-and-grab on the high courts, but the ’ville council is all set to rule on Stripling’s death, and I don’t think they’re gonna let you off.”

  Jack frowned. “For somebody who wants a deal, you’re sure making a whole lot of threats.”

  “I’m just telling it like it is. Bad Luck here’s gotten too big to hide.” The front of Touhy’s pink dress bunched up and smoothed out to become a sandwich board with newspaper headlines: STILL NO LEADS IN IVY BRIGHT CASE—HOOVER CALLS FOR JOINT INVESTIGATION.

  I winced. “That’s not fair.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s still true.” Touhy closed her pink dress over the headlines again. “You got whole worlds after you. No matter how you pull down the shades in there, somebody’s gonna find you. You need help.”

  Even Jack didn’t have an answer to that one. “It’s not like we’re asking you to come with us,” said Touhy. “Just open the gate. We’ll do the rest.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t even sure how to think about this. She’d been ready to help me when I was in trouble with her people. Kind of, anyway. But it was pretty plain she didn’t like me or trust me much. Same went for the rest of that Halfer gang, beginning and ending with Dan Ryan.

  “So what if she does it?” asked Jack suddenly.

  “We get you out of Chicago,” Touhy answered. “All of you. Safe and sound.”

  “Would you promise?” I asked.

  “Swear to it,” said Touhy. Promises were serious business among magic folks. They are really hard for us to break. Some of us can’t do it, even when we want to. That’s why there’s the whole big deal around words and rules and agreements. They could make up those bindings and borderlines for magic that Papa was getting so upset over.

  “Callie?” Jack was asking.

  There were a thousand and one reasons to say yes. Not the least of them was that Jack wanted me to. Unfortunately, there were just that many reasons to say no, plus one extra.

  “Papa won’t like it.” I still could see how his face screwed up tight with disgust as he spat out the words nothing and detritus to describe the Halfers. What did he know about them that made him hate them so much?

  “He wouldn’t have to know.”

  A minute ago Jack had been so angry about me keeping secrets from him. Now I was supposed to go set up a huge one to keep from Papa? Why would he ask that of me? But I knew why. Jack was thinking about getting us away from his brothers, before Papa took it into his head to work any more magic on them. I couldn’t say anything about that in front of Touhy, though. She already knew too much about our business for anybody’s good.

  But how could I say yes when I couldn’t open any kind of gate at all? My uncle was waiting on the other side for me. If I couldn’t get past him to save myself, how was I going to smuggle a whole boatload of Halfers past him?

  The old, tired anger that I’d been carrying since I walked out of Kansas leaned hard against me. I didn’t want any of these gate powers. I didn’t care about fairies or Halfers or anything in between. I wanted to be left alone with my family and with Jack. I’d give anything for it. Anything and everything.

  My thoughts skipped a groove, and played over again. I’d give anything and everything to be left alone. I’d cut any kind of deal, sign any kind of paper. But there were so many enemies in this mess, which of them could I cut a deal with? It wasn’t like I could sit them down like some kind of magic League of Nations or anything.

  My throat clamped shut.

  “What is it, Callie?” said Jack.

  I turned to him. I felt my heart swelling and my eyes shining. There was a way. We could do it. There was a third road and I finally knew what it was. I grabbed Jack’s hand, but before I could say anything, the porch door opened and a shadow fell across us.

  “You get away from my daughter.”

  12

  Daddy, What You Doin’?

  Papa stood in the doorway, the light shining hard and cold in his eyes. “I said, get away!” For one wild second, I thought he was talking about Jack. But he meant Touhy, and she was already retreating to her corner of the porch.

  “It’s okay, Papa …,” I started.

  “It is not okay. What do you want here?” He glided forward. There was a strength and a grace about him I hadn’t seen before. “How dare you come to my door?”

  “No, Mr. LeRoux, it’s not like that,” began Jack, all calm and casual. “Touhy tried to help Callie when she was with the Halfers and she was just making sure we were okay. Right, Touhy?”

  Touhy didn’t answer. She let herself drift backward until she was plastered against the porch railing. She didn’t take her eyes off Papa, and I couldn’t blame her. If this was the first time I’d seen him, I’d’ve been scared too.

  “Get out of here, Undone.” Papa said the word like it was something filthy. “And you tell the others to stay away from
my family.” He lifted his hand, and his palm was shining as bright as his eyes.

  For a couple seconds, Touhy didn’t move. She wanted to let Papa see she wasn’t afraid, even though she was. Her edges were trembling and her green eyes darted this way and that.

  “Well,” she said to me and Jack finally. “You can’t say I didn’t try.” Then she folded and twisted, sliding between the railings. The sooty breeze blew, and Touhy threw herself on it, tumbling away like the stray bit of paper she was.

  Papa planted both hands on the porch railing and watched until Touhy was well out of sight.

  “Jack,” he said, without turning around, “I’d like a private word with Callie, if you don’t mind.”

  From the way Jack looked at me, I got the idea he’d stay if I asked him to, but that’d probably just make everything worse. So, I jerked my chin toward the door as a signal he should go on inside. Which he did, slowly. Like Touhy, he meant to show Papa he wasn’t afraid. Except he was, and his fear tightened up my throat.

  Papa didn’t turn around. He just waited until we heard the screen door swing shut. I stayed where I was too, my heart drumming louder than all the city traffic.

  “I warned you about those creatures, Callie.” He spoke so softly that for a second I thought he was talking inside my head.

  “Jack was telling the truth,” I said to his back. “Touhy did try to help me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s still one of them.”

  “What’s so bad about the Halfers?”

  Papa swung around, genuine shock plain on his face. “What kind of question is that? You’ve seen what they are.”

  “They’re magic people. I’ve met worse.”

  “They tried to hurt you; that should be enough.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was almost as hard to believe what I was saying. “All kinds of people have tried to hurt me, Papa. I don’t hear you talking like this about the Seelies, or your parents, or your brother either, and they all tried to kill me.”

  “That is entirely different.”

  “How is it different? You’re not making sense.”

  Papa leaned his weight against his hands, staring down into the darkness that had gathered below the tenements. “Callie, I have said they are dangerous. They don’t belong in any world. There’s no place for them. That should be enough.”

  “Well, it ain’t.” The words were out of my mouth before I had time to think they might be a bad idea. All I wanted was to get him to turn around. If he was going to spout nonsense, he was going to look at me while he did it.

  He did turn. Slowly. His face was tight, and the shine from his eyes laid more shadow than light across his face. “Callie, I know you’re used to making your own decisions,” he said with that hard calm that people use when they want to make you think they sort of agree with you. “This time, though, you just have to accept I know more about these things than you do. You stay away from the Undone. You do not talk to them, and you do not listen to them. If they try to get near you again, you call me.” He moved closer, one slow step at a time. I felt as if I were shrinking down, becoming younger and smaller the closer he got.

  Time to stop that, right now. No matter who this was in front of me. “But why? What’s so bad about the Halfers?”

  That surprised him. He pulled right back. “We’re done talking about this. You need to get inside.”

  He was almost to the door before I figured out what to say next. “You sound like you don’t even know why you’re so scared.”

  He lifted his hand off the screen-door handle. His shoulders slumped, in defeat, I thought. I even thought I might actually get an answer. “I’m not scared, Callie,” he said, turning to face me again. “Their power is nothing compared to ours, but they are dangerous, and you will do as you are told.”

  I felt it then, the pressure of him. Papa was willing me not just to understand, but to believe, and to do as I was told. I bit my lip hard, because in that moment I wanted to. Not because of the magic, but because this was my father. I’d wanted to find him, to have him come home and be my family as bad as I’d ever wanted to find Mama, and for much, much longer. If I turned away from him now, would any of the badness I’d been through be worth it? Would I have killed Ivy Bright for nothing? I didn’t think I could stand it if that was true.

  I don’t know what of all that Papa picked up on. Maybe none of it. Maybe he just saw the look on my face. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up again, he didn’t look scary anymore. He just looked sad.

  “I’m sorry I was cross, Callie. You will understand one day. I hope, anyway.” The silence that fell between us wasn’t anything like as comfortable as the one between me and Jack. We were both searching after something to say, and neither one of us could find it. “You’d better go in to your mother and get some sleep.”

  My jaw dropped. “You’re scared to death of the Halfers, Uncle Shake’s spying on us, Grandma’s sending me warnings through mirrors, and there’s a war going on over in the fairy world, and you want to send me to bed!”

  He bowed his head. “Tomorrow, Callie. When the sun’s up again. We’ll face it then, I swear, but I need time.” His shoulders shook. “I was so long in that prison, Callie. You have no idea how cut off he kept us, how starved I have been.” His words curled around me, sinking in through my skin. They brought the hunger with them, the fear, and the loneliness, and the loneliness was worse than anything else. It was like the end of the world. “Then on the train … all that life. All that heart,” he whispered, and that whisper shook. “I could feel it, but I could touch none of it. I thought I would die. I thought I would run mad, and all that time your mother was beside me. I almost … She can never know how close I came …” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. I understood, no matter how badly I wished I didn’t. Papa lifted his eyes to me, and this time it wasn’t the fairy lights that made them glitter. It was tears. “You must let me have tonight, Callie.”

  “What are you going to do?” I croaked, and tried not to be afraid, but I didn’t make it.

  “I’m going to keep watch out here for a bit. Tell your mother not to wait up.”

  I left him there, facing out across the back alley, his long fingers resting lightly on the rail. I felt his magic stirring at my back all the way down the hall. At first, I thought he was extending the protection, but slowly it came to me that he was reaching out much farther than the boundaries of the porch. He was letting his magic touch the houses and the streets. It eased between the nearest boundaries to find the dreams, waking and sleeping, of the people here. He was sipping just a little from each person he touched to ease his magic hunger. He was healing himself from the dreams of a hundred different strangers, so he wouldn’t be tempted to draw too much from Mama. Or Jack. Or me.

  I let myself back into the dark hallway. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about anything anymore. Except when I walked into the apartment, there were Jack’s brothers sitting at the greasy table, playing cards, a cluster of beer bottles standing guard between them.

  I bit my lip again and walked up to them. Ben glanced past me, like he’d already forgotten why he’d taken his eyes off the game, and then popped the cap off a fresh beer. Simon didn’t even do that much. He just puffed on his cigarette a few more times and rearranged a couple of the cards in his hand.

  I opened up my magic. Papa’s spell, the one I’d helped him spin, wound like cotton wool around the pair of them, thick enough to blind them both. Underneath that spell, Ben wanted to win the game. Simon wanted another beer, and another cigarette, and a whole set of other things. I steered my knowing away from them, fast. I was going to have to rinse my brain out after this.

  Papa’d showed me how to be careful. I was careful now. They weren’t giving me a whole lot of wishing to work with, but it was enough. I loosened the cotton-wool spell, thinned it down to gauze, leaving just the lightest veil behind, just enough to fool my fat
her that the magic was still in place if he happened to glance at them.

  This is for Jack, I thought toward them. This is for Jack.

  Ben grunted and tossed down another card. Simon swore and swigged more beer. I went into our room and closed the door behind me.

  13

  Mama’s in the Kitchen, Messin’ All Around

  Mama did not take it well when I told her Papa said not to wait up. Not that she complained or anything. She just moved briskly around the room, unfolding the dressing screen so each of us would have some privacy for changing into the pajamas waiting in the dresser drawers, turning down the sheets, and determinedly not looking out the windows or listening at the door for my father’s step in the hall.

  Papa didn’t come back for hours. I know because I couldn’t fall asleep. I was dog tired, but between everything that had happened with Touhy, and then with Papa, my thoughts wouldn’t settle down long enough to let me find any sleep. I just lay in my comfortable bed, stared at train lights flashing past outside, and counted Jack’s snores for what felt like hours. When I couldn’t take that anymore, I turned onto my other side and stared at the mirror hanging over the dresser. It wasn’t cracked anymore. I watched its darkened surface, waiting to see my grandmother again. But nothing moved in there, and nothing moved in there, and the longer nothing moved in there, the tighter my insides knotted together, because there should have been something. And the more nothing there was, the more worried I got.

  When I finally did hear Papa moving outside the door, I shut my eyes fast and tried to make my breathing all even. It was a pretty bad acting job, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just slipped across the room and helped himself to some pajamas. I heard him move behind the screen, and then the soft creak of the mattress as he climbed into bed beside Mama.

  “Is everything all right, Daniel?” she whispered.

  “As right as it can be, Margaret.”