Bad Luck Girl

by Sarah Zettel

  I knew all of this in a single heartbeat. In the next I knew something else.

  “You are going to pay for this, Callie LeRoux deMinuit.” The Seelie king stood smack-dab in the middle of the gate I’d left open behind me. But Ivy’s skin that he wore wasn’t looking so good right now. Ivy was streaked with mud and she wasn’t standing up straight. Papa must have fought hard.

  The king in Ivy’s broken body lurched forward. “You will get down on your knees, Prophecy Girl, Bad Luck Girl, Dust Girl.”

  The command hit hard enough to rock me back, but nothing worse. A sort of grin spread across my face, and this time I was the one who showed all my teeth.

  “Get outta my way,” I said to him as I stepped in front of Mama. I had bigger things to worry about than the Seelie king slinging wishes around in front of my gate. Papa was still back in the other country, sinking fast and struggling for breath. I knew what it was like to be smothered alive. I was not leaving my papa to that. “Or I’ll make you get outta the way.”

  The Seelie king made Ivy grin, but even that was lopsided. “Really, Callie? Now. What’s the saying I’m looking for?” He tapped Ivy’s chin with one crooked finger. “Oh, yes! You and what army?”

  Mama gave a little tittering laugh, and slapped her hand over her mouth.

  “Oh, I do beg your pardon,” she murmured.

  “You have something to add, Margaret?” said Ivy, short and sharp. “Because when you were my guest before, you were not nearly so cheerful, or so talkative.”

  If he thought he was going to frighten my mother with that, he was badly mistaken. Mama just put two fingers to her mouth and whistled hard. I admit, I stared. When had she learned how to do that? And why was she doing it now?

  I didn’t have to wonder for long. Jack pushed himself away from the wall behind the burnt-out threshold. Of course Jack was there. Jack was always right where I needed him to be. I about melted with relief and pure, bright joy at the sight of him. He wasn’t alone either. One by one, the Lincoln Park Halfers stepped out of the shadows. They came down off the shelves, and out of the ashes. Dan Ryan was right up front, next to splintery Calumet, and Jack. Jack had a couple of handles sticking out over his shoulders from something strapped to his back. The Halfers all carried packs of some kind at their sides or over their shoulders, and they all had steel or iron of some kind in their hands: shovels, picks, axes, crowbars beat up from construction jobs, and sledgehammers still stained from their work at the stockyards. I wondered how much the Halfers paid for those.

  “She said you should get outta the way.” Jack let the crowbar he carried swing loose at his side. For a second he sounded just like his brother Ben. “Are you moving, or are we moving you?”

  The Seelie king made Ivy laugh, and clapped her limp hands. “Oh, you are all so cute! You really think …”

  I didn’t see who threw the brick, but it whistled straight past the king’s head, ruffling those dirty golden curls. The king whipped around, fury rising like the dust, but the Halfers and Jack had already charged, hollering at the tops of their lungs.

  Ivy’s voice screamed and I felt the summons rippling out through the open gate. By the time Calumet got close enough to swing his hammer at Ivy’s head, there was a guardian stone in the way. The goblin leapt up, grabbed Calumet’s arm, and bore down on him. Other guards poured through the gate; the stones and sticks and all the other soldiers of the Unseelie kind, shouting their own heartrending war cries. They carried obsidian spears and bronze swords. Metal and stone clashed and ground together until the old house shook from the force of the fighting and the noise. Glowing Dearborn waded through the chaos, grabbing up every Unseelie he could reach and tossing them aside, raising the stench of hot metal and burning skin. Jack shoved his crowbar into the solar plexus of an Unseelie guard twice his height and when the guard doubled over, he slammed it across the back of his head for good measure. Calumet was shouting orders. Dan Ryan had his sack open, letting out a flood of rats, and calling to the stones to get in the sack, get in the sack, get in the sack!

  But fear followed fast behind the Unseelies. It blew like a hurricane wind between the Halfers. It was cold, desperate, and paralyzing. It poured over us, slowing the Halfers and making them stagger so they could be cut down more easily. The iron, magic, and anger they carried couldn’t keep it all at bay and the Halfers began to stumble back. The Seelie king laughed and made Ivy wave twinkle fingers at me.

  “Callie!” Mama snatched up a bar someone had dropped and slammed it across the jaw of the nearest stone.

  I grabbed Mama’s arm and dragged her to the edge of the fighting. “Papa’s still in there!” I bawled in her ear.

  She nodded, and reached into her pocket and pulled out the shining crystal wish he’d left with her. She dashed it to the floor in a shower of sparks and magic. We waited. And we waited. And around us the Halfers and the Unseelies screamed and clashed and fought and fell. And Papa didn’t come. The wish that was supposed to summon him didn’t. Mama blanched white, and I was having a tough time breathing.

  “Callie!” someone was screaming. “Need some help here!”

  I hauled my nerve and head together. Then I hauled on my magic too, gathering up the anger and the fear being smeared across my friends. I balled that feeling up, turned it around, and opened it out over the Halfers, as if it were a great umbrella to keep off the storm of the Seelie king’s magic. I was instantly battered and beaten by that same magic and the orders it carried. I wanted to back away. I wanted to kneel down. I wanted to obey. But not as much as I wanted to stand there and hold the line for Jack and the Halfers. Not even close.

  “We gotta go, Margaret!” A burly Halfer covered in soot and hair grabbed Mama by the arm and started hustling her toward the door to the human world. Our eyes met. She was trying to tell me she wasn’t running. She had a job to do. I knew that. She was going for supplies and reinforcements and to help get the wounded out. That was the plan.

  “Find him!” she shouted to me. “Promise me, Callie!”

  “I will!” I called back. “Promise!”

  I whipped around to face the battle again. One of the Unseelie soldiers reared up out of nowhere, his sword stabbing straight for my stomach. Jack was there, maybe from the same patch of nowhere, swinging his crowbar at the soldier’s knees. The soldier screamed and fell, and a brass-and-glass Halfer hauled him away.

  I stared at Jack. He grinned at me. “We gotta get the Halfers through the gate!” he shouted.

  “Right!” I spun around and faced the gate, where the Seelie king was still standing. Ivy’s face wasn’t smiling anymore. He was making her clench her fists, and stare over the mob. I felt him straining with every ounce of will to try to knot together enough magic to pull the Halfers down, to force them to lay down their weapons and submit. Some did begin to walk toward him, but others pulled them back.

  Except Dearborn. Shining bright orange in the darkness, Dearborn stumbled forward wide-eyed. No one could touch him without burning themselves. The Unseelie guards laughed and dodged out of his way. Dearborn staggered up to the king and the king stretched out Ivy’s hands and his own magic.

  Dearborn grabbed Ivy’s slender, broken body up around the waist and tossed her aside. The king screamed and snarled and shoved Ivy upright. Dearborn and Calumet shouted and the Halfers who still could move turned to charge the king. The king snarled and lashed out with magic and searing hate. For one horrible moment, I saw the Halfers the way he did. Misshapen monsters, all of them. They did not understand the gift of their magic. They did not understand they existed to bow down before the purity and the beauty of their superiors. Aberrations, freaks, animals, food. He was going to drain us dead and dry for what we’d done. All of us.

  My stomach lurched and I fought to close my magic senses against the hate. It wasn’t easy, because I had to reach out as well. Jack was wishing and I needed to grant that wish. Holding the shield over the Halfers against the worst of the king’s fear w
as hard enough. To try to hold it while I was trying to shape magic of my own took everything I had. I groped for Jack’s wish and twisted it hard. The effort might have knocked me flat, except Jack was there, like always, to hold me up.

  For one second, the Halfer army was in front of us, beating back the fairies. Then they weren’t. The Unseelies were swinging at nothing, and staring around themselves in confusion as the hammers and crowbars and shovels clattered to the floor. I doubled over with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. The Halfers were on the other side of the gate, just like Jack wished them to be. They were in the Unseelie country, all of them, and I was trying not to be sick.

  Jack grinned, tipped the king a two-fingered salute, grabbed my hand, and bolted for the gate. I found my stride and raced ahead of him, leaping over the threshold, and pulling him through behind me.

  The Unseelie country folded around me, but it was different this time. I didn’t mistake the feelings roaring through my blood for welcome. This land wanted to claim me. It wanted to drown me. It wanted to use me because I was strong and it needed that strength. I grit my teeth and shoved the land’s smothering presence back as hard as I could. I wasn’t going to be able to keep this up forever, especially if I had to keep wishing for other things on top of it. But for now, I could think and I could see for myself.

  Beside me, Jack was getting his first look at the Unseelie country. He was staring around himself, blinking hard in the starlight and twilight.

  “You okay?” I panted.

  “I think so, yeah.” He shifted his weight carefully, like he wasn’t sure the ground under him would stay steady.

  The noise of a fight exploded up ahead, but I almost didn’t notice. Now that we were through the gate, I could feel Papa out there, fighting in the dirt. His fear shivered through my bones. I had to find him. Now, before the forces that held him carried him clean away. Jack noticed, though. His face went grim, and he reached over his shoulder. I finally saw what he had strapped to his back. He’d lost the crowbar, but he’d brought an old, splintery baseball bat. Actually, he’d brought two. He handed the second to me.

  “Just in case,” he said.

  We took off running, or, we tried to. I was used to Jack being light on his feet, but that was in the human world. Here, he lurched and staggered as he ran, like he was dragging some invisible weight. He clenched his jaw and kept slogging forward. I clamped my teeth together so I wouldn’t scream at him to hurry.

  We reached the boundary wall, and ran right into the battle. Calumet was shouting something and his magic rippled out, rocking the ground under the remaining squadron of guardian stones. Halfers ringed the stones, grabbed them up, heaved them aside. The goblins screamed and flailed and bounced back, but they had to fight their way through Calumet’s wishing, and Dearborn’s, and three or four others’. The Halfers weren’t anything like as strong as the full-blood fairies, but they were used to working together, and together they could be just strong enough. They slowed the stones down, so the other Halfers could run through the gaps into the Bone Forest. I felt the hate pouring out of the Halfers. I felt how they hated their empty hands and the Bone Forest and the rest of this world for all that had been done to them and theirs. They wanted to take it apart. They’d tear it down to get to their own.

  “No! Stop!” I shouted, but not one of them heard me. “They’ll kill it, Jack! They’ll kill the Unseelie country!” Why should I care? I didn’t know. But this world was part of me, like my names and my family, whether I wanted it or not. It was all alive, and the wrong that had been done to the Halfers had not been the choice of the trees or the stones or the gardeners. They didn’t deserve to die.

  “Just hold on, Callie.” Jack squeezed my hand and held hard. “They’ll stick to the plan.”

  The Halfers spread out into the Bone Forest. Most of them ran forward, but some stopped near us. I saw Cedar digging its long toes into the soil and untying a sack from around his neck. The others snatched the sacks off their backs or off their belts and yanked them open. A new smell rose up on all sides, as familiar as sunrise. It was the rich smell of fried dough.

  Doughnuts. Griddle cakes. Johnnycake. The Chicago Halfers pulled them all out of their sacks, and scattered them on the ground. They speared them on tree branches. They crumbled them up and tossed them into the wind.

  My jaw flapped open. They were feeding the Unseelie country. All of it. Those cakes had been made with magic mixed in. The Halfers carried wishes made solid, all the way from the human world, and now they were being scattered all around. There were wishes for the Unseelies to be free, to be fed, to be strong and awake.

  Jack reached out and gently pushed my jaw shut. “You’ll catch flies,” he said with a grin.

  It was ridiculous. It was crazy as a whole colony of bedbugs. We could not possibly have planned to conquer the Unseelie country with doughnuts. But things were starting to happen. The trees bent their twigs around the doughnuts, and the doughnuts vanished. The cakes that had been broken on the ground sank into the soil. Birds and butterflies and flowers floated down to catch the crumbs on the breeze.

  “Mama,” I breathed. “I knew you could do it.”

  The Unseelies moved. As they filled up on the sweet food that had been made with care and wishes, they opened their eyes, and pulled their roots from the ground. The ones who had shapes like birds and insects and butterflies spread their wings and fluttered down. All the Unseelies that made up that forest moved toward the Halfers.

  “Wake up,” the Halfers wished. “Wake up and meet your friends!”

  “Who are you?” the Unseelies asked. “What are you doing here? What is this?”

  Some of the Halfers got themselves into a loose ring around the Unseelies, and others shouted orders and waved signals, and still others loped on ahead. Then I saw what was really happening. The Unseelies that were being herded aside by the Halfers weren’t rising up to join the battle, even though the Seelie king’s summons still tumbled through the air. They were being taken out of the fight, and the way ahead was being cleared.

  “Your mouth’s open again, Callie,” said Jack. “Where’s your father?”

  That snapped my attention back where it belonged. Papa was close, or he should have been. The trees were moving around us, wading after the Halfers. Some of them were taking up the offerings, but some of them waded off to fight. They planted themselves right in front of me and Jack and snatched at us with their branches. We ducked when we could, and slammed our bats onto those branches when we couldn’t. I wished and ordered and shoved back with all the magic I could get my mind around, and we blundered ahead through the ferns and the moss. I had a picture in my head of a clearing where the edge of the wood used to be. My wish to find my father pulled me along like a lifeline, until we came to a place where the dirt and pale, rotting leaves had been churned up around a shallow hole, like somebody’d dug into a grave with their bare hands. Or maybe out of it. It didn’t really matter which, because it was empty now.

  I cussed a bright blue streak and dropped to my knees, driving my fingers into the dirt, scrabbling with my Unseelie senses for memories. I tried desperately to grab hold of them without losing myself to the drowning pull of the land around me.

  “What’s wrong?” demanded Jack.

  “Papa! He was here! I can’t see him!” I didn’t know if that made any sense to Jack, but I didn’t have the words to explain. As long as I held myself apart from the Unseelie country, I couldn’t use its eyes. I couldn’t see what was beyond my immediate surroundings. I could only feel it, distantly, uncertainly. I knew Papa had been here. This grave had been meant for him. He’d fought and called out, and raged. He’d called to me, but I’d been too slow.

  I froze in place, my hands buried in the living warmth of Unseelie earth. I felt something underneath me. Something soft and cold.

  “Callie, talk to me!” Jack stood over me, his bat in both hands, trying to watch in all directions at once.

/>   My hands were shaking. They’d gone numb. I brushed carefully at the soil. I felt the shape of a head, then a forehead. A cheek. This was a person under my hands, and they were cold. Cold and dead. I was choking on my breath. I couldn’t see.

  “God Almighty,” whispered Jack. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “It’s Ivy,” he said.

  My eyes flew open and I stared. It was Ivy, or Ivy’s body, anyway. Still and dead, and laid out straight in the grave that had been dug for my father.

  “B-but …,” I stammered. “But the king was in her! What happened?” I cast my thoughts around frantically, looking for memories, but there was nothing. The king was nowhere. I scrambled to my feet again. I didn’t for a second believe the Seelie king was really dead. But if he wasn’t inside Ivy, where was he? What was he hiding inside now?

  Before Jack could answer, there was another shout out of the shifting, struggling forest. Dan Ryan broke through the ragged line of the trees, a flock of rats scattering around him.

  “Where’s Touhy?” he shouted as he pelted up to us. “You’re supposed to be finding the prisoners!”

  “Where’re the Halfers?” demanded Jack, but Dan Ryan just glanced over his shoulder, his eyes wide with anger and fear. Nobody else broke out of the forest, and the trees were starting to close ranks.

  Uh-oh.

  I faced the Emerald Fields. The Ebony Road was undulating and switching back and forth so like a snake, I was sure it would rear up at us any second. No going that way. The Seelie king was out there somewhere, hiding beneath the surface like a land mine. But there was still a war going on around us, and we had to get to the palace. The palace was the heart of the Unseelie country. From there we could find the prisoners, and Papa and my uncle. My uncle was out here somewhere too, and I was ready to bet my last nickel that if we found him, we’d find the king. Where else would the Seelie king have gone? If he retreated to his own country, he knew I could shut him out for good. There was nowhere left for him except inside the skin of his best friend.