by Sarah Zettel
So, why did you come? It was a dreadful risk.
No choice. If I didn’t, you’d be running out the back door. You’re good at that.
Coming from you, that’s a true compliment. The king laughed, a flat, hollow sound. Well, Callie. Now that you are here, what do you propose to do?
He was waiting for me to attack. He was figuring on one last pitched battle, which he’d win. He’d devoured a whole world, and was looking to down another. He was stronger and hungrier than I’d ever be. He was just waiting for me to make the first move. That was his game. He set people up and knocked them down. The despair as they fell fed his greed like nothing else could.
Well, Callie? said the king.
I reached out with my power. But not to the king. I reached back the way I’d come. To the gate. I found the lock. I twisted it shut.
NO!
The king screamed and roared past me, shaking the edges of his dead kingdom. The dead wind blew cold, forcing the dust into my eyes and throat. But there was nothing to break open, nothing to knock down. He was too late. The gate was already gone.
See her now, three roads to choose, I said. Where she goes, where she stays, where she stands, there shall the gates be closed.
The Seelie king raged; he screamed. His fury battered me, and it hurt. It hurt a lot. But I’d been hurt before.
Open the gate! he ordered. Callie LeRoux deMinuit, Prophecy Girl, Bad Luck Girl, Dust Girl, OPEN THIS GATE!
That all you got? I really missed not having arms to fold, then something occurred to me. What’s your name, anyway? Or did you eat that up too?
I’d meant it as a kind of joke, but as soon as I shaped the thought, I knew it was true. That was why he had no shape, no heart, nothing but emptiness. You’ve got no power left, have you? You used it all up. You’ve only got what you devour, other people’s power, other people’s lives, and you’ve eaten everything here.
I will make you suffer for eternity!
So do it. I put a shrug into my thoughts. Make a meal outta me, like you do everything else you get near, but you’ll still be stuck here, and you’re going to starve to death because you’ve got no gate to drag the power through anymore.
The king surged forward. He grabbed hold of me and started to squeeze. I closed myself up, and I tried not to be scared. He squeezed harder. It hurt. It hurt. But it’d be over soon. This was it. This was the end.
Open the gate! The king’s order beat against me. Open it! Open it!
I was really going to die this time.
Open it! Open it! Open it!
Hunger. I’d taken myself to the end of the world and there was nothing here but hunger. After all the fighting and the schemes and the glamour and deception, there was only the king’s hunger and it was going to kill me dead.
Open!
But it was okay. I’d seen what was out that way, and it wasn’t so bad. I’d seen worse. I’d miss my parents. And Jack. I’d always miss Jack, but at least he’d be alive, and he’d be free. The Halfers, the Seelies, the Unseelies, Mama and Papa, and Jack, they’d all be free if I just held on.
Openopenopenopen!
You know what the funny part is? I said back. None of this had to happen. If you’d just left us alone, I never would have come after you. I never would have known anything about you!
OPEN!
No.
Then he whispered. Then curse you, Callie LeRoux … wish you … wish you …
And there was nothing. I was alone. The king was dead. He’d burned himself up, and there wasn’t even a single extra grain left. The wind fell away, and the dust dropped like snow around me, piling into dead white dunes under a dead white sky.
I pulled my thoughts together. Victory was a strangely quiet, tiny thing. I was so tired. I was hungry too. That wasn’t surprising, or it shouldn’t have been. I was a fairy too, after all. I needed magic just like the rest of them. I turned. Even when I’d closed a gate, I could feel its seams. I could get my power into that and open it again.
But this time there was nothing. The king had cut it off from me, or me off from it. That was what his last wish, his last curse had been. He’d burned himself trying to trap me in here to die of fear and starvation in this dead dust country, all that remained of a fairy kingdom.
“Don’t be afraid,” I told myself. My voice was thin and small. I coughed. “They’ll find you.” Mama, Papa, and Jack. They’d always find me. I just had to be patient.
I sat down on the crest of the dune. Each movement kicked up a little of the sparkling dust. I coughed. It hurt, a terribly familiar pain I thought I’d left behind. The dust couldn’t get me, but I was going to get hungry soon, for food and for magic. Thirsty too. And there was nothing here. Nothing but me.
They’ll find me. They will. It’ll be okay. I just have to wait.
There was no time. No motion except my beating heart. There was no sound except my coughing and the grinding of grains of dust when I shifted my weight.
It’ll be okay, I told myself. It hadn’t been that long yet. They’d find me. I wasn’t that hungry yet. I wasn’t that thirsty. It hadn’t been that long. It’d be all right.
I’d won. We’d won. That was what mattered. Not the endless, still white dust. Not the silence pressing against my ears and my mind. It hadn’t been that long yet. It hadn’t been. I was only shaking because I was scared. I wasn’t getting weak. Not yet. I had plenty in me yet. They’d find me. They’d find me. They wouldn’t leave me alone. Mama, Papa, and Jack, they’d know I had to be somewhere. They wouldn’t give up. They wouldn’t turn away. They couldn’t possibly think I was already dead.
I wasn’t going to end up in the dust. It wasn’t going to end like that. It couldn’t. This wasn’t why I was named the Dust Girl. I wasn’t going to think about how the prophecy talked about the gates closing, but never about them opening. I’d made my stand here, and the gates had closed. But that wasn’t the end. It couldn’t be. My family would find me. They’d come help me. They had to. They had to. Had to. Had to.
I lay down in the dust because I couldn’t sit up anymore. The prophecy had come true, and this was the end. I wondered if Daddy Joe and his train would come for me here. Or if I’d just be the Dust Girl for real and forever.
Thhheeerrre shhheee isss …, said a voice, and my head jerked up. I ssseeee hhheeerrr.… Theeerrre shhheee isss!
Papa? I couldn’t talk. My throat was too dry and dust clogged.
But it wasn’t Papa. And it wasn’t my uncle.
It was Jack.
Of course it was.
And I reached out, and I took his hand, and Jack pulled me through, and home.
Epilogue—The Child Who’s Got Her Own
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Callie LeRoux. She left her home in the Dust Bowl and traveled across three different worlds to free her parents from the evil king. On the way she found her worst enemy, her best friend, and her own name.
When the evil king had been conquered, and the worst enemy captured, and her grandfather mourned, and all was reconciled with her grandmother, Callie and her parents and her best fella, Jack, all settled down in the great city of Chicago. There, her parents claimed the bones of an old manor house and opened the Midnight Club. People said some strange things about it, but they still came there from all across the country to hear jazz and blues and eat the food and enjoy the scene. On weekends Callie worked as a hostess, or helped her mama in the kitchen, and sometimes she sang with her father’s band. Her best fella, Jack, got a job as a copyboy for the Chicago Tribune and wrote stories for magazines like Weird Tales and Black Mask and Thrilling Wonder Stories. When she was old enough to go to college, Callie got her degree in restaurant management and came home to marry her best fella and open up some of the finest nightspots in all Chicago. And when the war came, Jack went to Europe as a correspondent, and Callie sat up late, listening for his broadcasts on the radio and wishing hard.
But no matter what else she did, Calli
e LeRoux still kept a close eye on the Midnight Club, and people still said all kinds of strange things about it. They said there was a back room where you could catch sight of a whole lot of funny-looking people coming and going. But that was Chicago for you. Nobody asked too many questions. But they said other things too. They said in the basement of the Midnight Club there was a different back room, and in that back room was an old iron safe. They said if you went and put your ear up to it, you could hear something rustling, like cloth, and somebody whispering, and somebody knocking.
Despite all the things people said, Callie and her parents and her best fella, Jack, just kept getting on with the business of living happily ever after.
Until …
Author’s Note
I knew from the beginning Callie was going to wind up in Chicago. There were a lot of reasons why. First among them was that Chicago is right in the middle of the country and the middle of the two courts, as I always saw the Seelie court as being based more on the West Coast and the Unseelie more on the East Coast. Since Callie was always walking the line between worlds, loyalties, and identities, it made sense to have her ending come in the middle of all of these.
There’s also a personal connection. My mother grew up in Chicago. My grandfather worked for the Rock Island Line (and, incidentally, tried his hand at writing). It’s also where my parents met. Chicago shaped my ideas of what a major city is and could be. I don’t get back as much as I’d like to, but when I do, I still have the sensation of coming home.
Another reason for finishing the story in Chicago is that Chicago was a significant end point for Americans who made the Great Migration. The city offered relative freedom for African Americans in the years between the World Wars. Chicago is one of the furnaces that forged American culture from the beauty, struggle, creativity, sweat, and blood of the people who make their journeys here, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.
Then, of course, there’s the blues. There are a lot of arguments about the exact birthplace of the blues, but there’s no question that they flourished in Chicago. As American music has been such an integral part of these books, I couldn’t end the story without acknowledging blues. I’ve included one more playlist here. Some of these songs didn’t emerge onto the scene until after the year when the story takes place, but because they are icons of early blues, I’m exercising a bit of artistic license in including them.
I want to thank everyone who has shared this journey with Callie and Jack. It’s been a tremendous adventure, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Playlist
“Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” W. C. Handy and J. Tim Brymn, circa 1920
“Double Trouble,” Brownie McGhee, 1941
“Easy Street Blues,” Henry Thomas, Texas Easy Street Blues, 1928
“God Bless the Child,” Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr., 1939
“Goodnight, Irene,” Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, 1933
“Hellhound on My Trail,” Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues, 1936
“Mama Don’t Allow,” traditional
“The Midnight Special,” traditional, made famous by Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, 1934
“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” Jimmy Cox, 1923
“Oh Daddy Blues,” Bessie Smith, 1924
“Papa’s on the Housetop,” Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, 1934
“Reckless Blues,” Jack Gee and Fred Longshaw, 1925
“Rising Sun Blues,” traditional, collected by Alan Lomax, 1937
“Rock Island Line,” traditional, collected by John and Alan Lomax, recorded by Leadbelly
“St. James Infirmary Blues,” traditional, made famous by Louis Armstrong, 1928
“St. Louis Blues,” W. C. Handy, 1914
“Stackerlee,” traditional American murder ballad, lyrics first published in 1911
“Sweet Home Chicago,” Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues, 1936
“Walkin’ Blues,” Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues, 1936
“Willow Weep for Me,” Ann Ronell, 1932
About the Author
Sarah Zettel is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author. She has written more than twenty novels and many short stories over the past nineteen years, in addition to practicing tai chi, hiking, learning yoga, marrying a rocket scientist, and raising a rapidly growing son. The American Fairy Trilogy is her first series for teens. Visit her at sarahzettel.com.