Bad Luck Girl (12 page)

“Callie needs to begin to understand her magic, Margaret. It’s been left too long already.” He paused. “I think it would be better if you stayed in here.”

Mama hesitated, then nodded, and a strange rush of disappointment passed through me. I wanted her to argue, but I had no idea why. I knew how my magic worked, but not well. I wanted to learn more, and if anybody could teach me, it would be Papa. Why would I want Mama to get up in the way of that?

I glanced at Papa to see if he’d picked up on any of that stray thinking. In answer, he just flashed me a smile that was meant to be encouraging, but it didn’t quite do the job. We had to settle for me following him like a good daughter.

Out in the other room, Ben and Simon were still sitting at the table. They’d gotten out a battered deck of cards and
were playing two-handed pinochle across that greasy surface. As Papa and I stepped out of the back room, their expressions slid from startled to slimy.

“Now, is there something we can do for you, folks? Wouldn’t want you to think you were receiving less than our finest hospitality for your fifty.” As nasty as the look Simon had given Papa had been, the one he gave me was worse. He looked like he was wondering how I’d taste between his dirty teeth, and if I’d run too fast to be worth the trouble of catching.

Papa didn’t seem to see it. “I hope neither of you gentlemen would object to a little music?” He snapped off the radio.

Ben didn’t like that. “Depends,” he said darkly, “on who’s playin’.”

“Well, that would be myself.” Papa gave them a fine, shining smile and bowed, reminding me a whole lot of Lincoln Jones putting on his porter face. At the same time, though, I felt the magic swirling out of him, making its way across the room, easing into Jack’s big brothers.

Simon shrugged. “The boy wants to play, let ’im play. Come on, Benny, your bet.”

Papa didn’t say one word about being called
boy
. He just lifted the lid on the piano keys and beckoned me over to sit beside him on the bench. He touched the middle C and winced. Even I could tell that piano was really out of tune.

“You’ll be taking the bass line,” he whispered. “Here,
and here.” He showed me where to put my hands and set his fingers to the keys farther up the board.

“I don’t know, Papa.” I knew I could play. The magic in me could turn out music without me even having to think about it. But the one time I’d actually sat at a piano, things had not gone so good, or any kind of good at all.

“It’ll be all right,” he murmured. “Just follow my lead.”

“But Jack …”

“We don’t need his permission anymore,” said Papa, entirely missing the point he hadn’t given me a chance to make. “Those two accepted our payment and laid no conditions on our stay. We are already inside.” Papa nodded his head, marking time. “Five, six, seven, eight …”

Papa began to play. His music was slow and lazy, light, gentle, and complicated all at once. His graceful hands drew a soft stream of song effortlessly from the old piano and somehow the bad tuning didn’t matter. It was still beautiful. It made you think of sunrise, of anticipation.

I don’t think I could have kept my hands still if I wanted to. The magic in me caught up that anticipation, that ease, and spun it into music. I touched the deeper keys, and built up a foundation for the tune, a rich bass contrast to support the sweet melody line.

Ben and Simon weren’t playing cards anymore. They’d shoved back their chairs to listen. I could feel their attention as clearly as I could feel the keys under my fingers.

Now, daughter
. Papa’s voice sounded in my head, and it wasn’t startling at all. He’d been there since we’d begun to
play. It was so natural, I just hadn’t noticed.
Here’s where we show them we mean business. Five, six, seven …

I knew what I needed to do and I knew I could do it. I changed the rhythm I was keeping. Slowed it down, making the tune deeper and calmer. Papa’s hands and magic took that calm up into the brightness of the melody line, spreading it wide, turning the music into sunrise to fill the room, the whole dingy apartment, and Jack’s no-good brothers.

You’re safe
, that tune said.
All safe. This place is ours. We belong here. As long as we are here, you are safe and sound. There can be no danger while we are here
.

Very good, daughter
, came Papa’s voice. His magic worked on mine, showing me how to make the spell shaping easier, to make each note, each beat of my heart, each idea do what was needed, no more. He showed me how to stretch out and lay claim to what I needed, but quietly, carefully. Insidiously. We needed this place; we needed these two. We’d make them ours and this was how.

These walls and roof will shelter us. We belong here. You will protect us
.

That spell sank into Ben and Simon. Ben’s scarred hands stopped their restless fiddling with the cards and instead started to drum in time with our lazy, persistent rhythm. Simon’s half-moon eyes crinkled around the edges, not like he was smiling, but like he might be thinking about it. I did smile as I played, enjoying the way my fingers added little flourishes to the tune. This was good. Those two greasy mooks had to do what we said now. Our spell wrapped itself
around their hearts and tied a pretty bow. There’d be no more dirty looks, no more snide little insults. We owned this place now. It was ours.

Now, the big finish
, Papa told me.

The tune changed again. It became slower yet brighter, stronger than it had been yet until we brought our hands down together in a final rich, ringing chord. As the music faded, the magic dissolved into the flat, becoming part of the boards, the bricks, the window glass, the warp and weft of the ragged carpet, and the blood and bone of the Hollander brothers.

My father lifted his hands from the keys and turned himself around to face the Hollanders.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I hope that did not offend anyone’s sensibilities.”

“Uh, nah, nah.” Benny shook himself. “You play anytime you want, ol’ man. That’ll be fine by us.”

“And I trust there will be no problem with us staying as long as we wish?”

Simon pulled his cigarette out of his mouth and frowned at it, trying to figure out why it had gone dead. “Sure, sure, whatever you want.”

“And you will say nothing to anyone about us,” Papa went on, his voice velvet soft, and just as dark. “Or any other matter we do not choose to have discussed.”

“Yeah, yeah, just like you say.” Ben had already scooted his chair back around to face the table. “Come on, Sy, whose bet?”

They went right back to the cards. I got the feeling I could have danced the tango on the piano bench and they wouldn’t have looked up, unless and until Papa told them to.

Papa smiled. I had to look away. That smile made him look way too much like Shake. It didn’t sit well with the shine I felt in my own eyes, and a shiver skittered between my shoulder blades.

The door downstairs opened and footsteps pounded up the stairs. A second later the knob rattled and Jack burst into the room, a half-dozen paper sacks clutched in his fists.

“Ah, our hero yet again.” Papa slapped his knees and got to his feet. “Thank you, Jack. I’m sure Callie’s about perishing, aren’t you, Callie?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Jack.”

But Jack wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at his brothers. Simon puffed his cigarette. Ben tossed a card down. Neither of them so much as turned his head to see him standing there. It was like they had blinders on. But Jack didn’t have any kind of blinders. He saw plain as day, thanks to the wish I’d granted him, and Jack’s understanding that we’d enchanted his brothers slid knife-sharp across my skin. Then I felt something else. Jack was afraid. Jack Holland was really, truly, badly afraid of me.

I hauled my magic senses shut before I had to feel that for one second longer. I followed Papa and Jack into the back room like nothing had happened. But it had, and I was never getting away from that look in Jack’s eyes again.

We didn’t sit down to dinner right away. First, Papa fixed up our room. As quick as being on the train had robbed him of his strength, being out in the open air had brought it back. Cinderella’s fairy godmother would have blushed to see the kinds of changes my father was able to work. By the time he’d finished walking round it, the grimy back room had turned into a tidy hotel room, with a plush carpet on the floor. There were three beds so spick-and-span they could have been just made up by Mr. Jones, the porter, plus a plump sofa long enough for even Jack to stretch out on. There were clean clothes in the closet and in the dresser. Four chairs clustered around a table with a vase of flowers and a lace doily. The window was not only cleaned, but dressed with fresh, ruffled curtains. Best of all, the old-cabbage smell was gone, replaced by the scent of wash soap and lavender.

“It’s just for tonight, right?” Jack turned in place and stared at the now-comfortable room. He didn’t sound anywhere near as excited as he had when he first got his set of new clothes for traveling fairy class. “It’ll be gone in the morning?”

“Not this time,” answered Papa cheerfully. “Now that we’ve laid the protection down, we belong fully in this place and what we do here can be permanent.”

I didn’t quite like the slow way Jack mouthed the word
permanent
, as he pulled up a chair with the rest of us and took the sandwich Mama handed him. Or the way he sat quiet through the rest of the meal. Or even the way he offered to take all the wrappers and empty paper cartons out to the trash. But most of all, I didn’t like the way he didn’t come back.

Papa had declared we were to all spend the evening resting, and Mama agreed. He’d managed to conjure a couple of books from somewhere, and now my parents sat together on the sofa, reading over each other’s shoulders, just being close. I should have been glad to see it. And if Jack had been there, I think I would have.

I excused myself, saying I needed to go to the bathroom. There was just one for the entire building, and it was down the dingy hallway next to the door that let out onto the porch. Each of the three floors had its own back porch. Maybe it was supposed to be someplace you could get fresh air and sun, but it would fail pretty miserably at both, because all three porches were stacked right on top of each other like
pancakes. So here in the middle, there wouldn’t be any sun getting through, and there wasn’t any fresh air in this part of the city anyhow.

Jack was sitting on the porch railing with his elbow hooked around the post. He did it so easily, I knew he’d sat like this for hours, probably with a book in his hands, like he did now. The torn screen door squeaked when I pushed on it, but Jack didn’t turn around. He just stayed bent over his notebook, slowly turning the pages. The only light was the dim lamplight filtering through the curtains, and the lights of the barges slogging their way up the river, so I wasn’t sure he could actually read anything. Maybe he just wanted to touch the pages, to remember that he had things to write about, that he’d been somewhere else and there was still somewhere else to go. Or maybe he wanted an excuse not to look at me.

I walked across the warped boards to stand beside him. I knew he heard me, but he didn’t look up. I swung my legs over the rail so I was sitting on it like I would a fence rail back home. I looked down into the dark alley for a little while. Then I looked up. The smoke and clouds had cleared just enough overhead to show the bleary face of the moon. Cars roared and honked. Somebody down in the street shouted and somebody else cussed. The train Jack called the El rattled in the distance, flashing silver light up over the tenement roofs. A hot breeze blew hard. The tar paper rattled on the roof above us and the old building creaked uneasily in answer.

It was a long time before Jack closed his notebook. He
still didn’t look at me. He stared over the ash piles toward the river. “I never should have brought you here,” he said.

“There wasn’t anyplace else to go.”

Jack’s jaw had hardened, and right then he looked years older than he should have. In fact, he looked a lot like Ben.

“You did something to them,” he said flatly. “You did something to Ben and Simon, and you didn’t tell me.”

“We didn’t have a choice, Jack, and besides …”

“Besides nothing! Your old man just went and magicked them and you didn’t do anything to stop it! You didn’t even bother to tell me!” His voice was tight and hard as his jaw. It would have been a shout, but Jack knew how thin the walls were, and that there were people on the other side listening. So he kept the words low, but they were deadly sharp all the same.

“You didn’t need me to tell you. You saw it for yourself.”

“Yeah, I did, and maybe you should remember that. Or are you going to take back that wish so I won’t find out anything else I’m not supposed to?”

His words slapped me hard enough to knock any answer right out of me. The one thing I’d been able to count on for this whole long disaster of an adventure was Jack, and now he’d stopped trusting me. Over one stupid thing.

Worse than that, though, was how my magic stirred under my skin, like it was woken up by my anger.
You can make him understand
, it told me.
It would be easy. You know how
. I wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else knowing I’d
done it either, not even Papa or Mama. Jack wouldn’t even know himself.

I told my magic to put a sock in it, but that took a lot longer than it should have.

“I’m sorry, Jack. I should have done something, you’re right. But Papa was afraid they might decide to kick us out after all, or ask for more money.” I’d felt that. I was sure of it when we were working the spell. That was why we did it. It was part of the protection. Wasn’t it?

“Oh, yeah?” Jack’s voice dropped even lower. “And what’s he gonna decide to do if
I
don’t behave right?”

“You don’t … you don’t think I’d ever let anything happen to you, do you?”

“No,
you
wouldn’t.”

He meant Papa might. “You can’t really think that,” I said, but what I really meant was I didn’t want to think that. I didn’t want to remember the soft, satisfied tone in Papa’s voice after we’d worked the protection spell and the Hollander Brothers had started agreeing with whatever he said. He’d never do anything like that to Jack. I wouldn’t let him. Ever.