Bad Luck Girl (7 page)

“Like human beings?” I thought about how many times
I’d used Jack’s wishes to shape my magic. I’d needed his help more than once to be able to do anything at all. I hadn’t stopped to think that taking his wishes might be hurting him.

“Wishes, creativity, imagination, will, and feeling,” Papa said softly. “All of this is the essence of what mortal beings are. It is the power of this world manifest in them. If we can reach it, our kind can convert any or all of it into our magic, in much the way one of those new dams Mr. Roosevelt is building can convert the motion of water into electricity. You’ve felt this, I’m sure.” He didn’t exactly look toward Jack in his upper berth, but I knew he was thinking about him. I sure was.

I clenched my fists. The cabin rocked around us, and the noise of the tracks clacking under the wheels sounded very loud as I tried to get my mind around what Papa said about what he was, about what we were, and I did not like any of the ideas that came running up to meet me just then.

When I was little, before the dusters started, there was a pond down by the school. Everybody knew there were leeches in it. Casey Wilkes had gone wading on a dare and come out with his legs covered with squishy brown sluggy-things. I remembered the blood running in red ribbons down his shins. I’d actually been glad when that pond dried up, because it meant all those nasty things died. I could sort of stand being bad luck, and being a fairy princess had some advantages sometimes, but what if I was also some kind of gigantic Callie-shaped leech?

“No,” said Papa, and I jumped and cussed silently. I’d
been leaking thoughts again. But Papa just waved his hand. “You were thinking it loud enough that they probably heard you in the caboose. One wish taken at a time, a little feeling, a little music or good cheer won’t hurt your friend.” He waved his hand again, this time sort of toward Jack. “Or anyone else. Especially if it’s freely given, and only once in a while. It’s when you keep drawing it down that they wither and they die, whether they are human or fairy kind.”

“But you’re saying if I start closing gates, so the fairies can’t get to human beings, I’ll be, what? Starving the fairy country out?”

Papa swallowed some more air. “Succinctly put. There are many gates, large and small, but close even a few and the Seelie or the Unseelie would begin to lose touch with the essence of life and magic they need to survive and to flourish. They’d set to fighting over what access remained, which would use up their magic more quickly, which would starve them faster. Oh, yes, Callie,” said Papa as the blood drained slowly from my cheeks. “You could kill them all if you decided to. And they know it.”

I had no way to answer this. It was too big. I didn’t want to understand it. I didn’t want to be the person who held that much power inside her. So I shied away from it. “What’s the third world?”

“I’m sorry?”

“It was something Mr. Robeson said, about the other part of the prophecy.
See her now, daughter of three worlds. See her now, three roads to choose.…
Well, there’s the human
world, and the fairy world, and everybody’s trying to get me to choose between them. But I ain’t seen a third world yet. Where’s that?”

Papa was quiet for a while and I swear I could feel him fighting to think. But in the end he just shook his head. “I don’t know. I never did pay much attention to the prophecy when I was still with my family. I never thought to see it fulfilled, so it didn’t seem important. Another mistake, I suppose.”

That felt like an honest answer, but it wasn’t the one I wanted. “How do we find out, then? Because it’s a little important.”

“A little,” Papa agreed, and coughed again. “I think perhaps that’s our first order of business, after getting to New York in one piece, of course. And when we do get there, we can’t have any more scenes like back with that prison tree, do you understand, Callie? Not until we’ve found help, and a protected place to stay.”

I didn’t want him to be right, and I sure didn’t mean to make any kind of promise like that. Not even to my father. I made sure to keep that thought to myself, though, and quickly changed the subject.

“What was that tree?”

“Sorry?” Papa coughed again.

“When we went past the Hooverville, in Los Angeles. You saw something was wrong right away, but you wouldn’t tell me what it was. You said, ‘Not them.’ ”

“Oh.” He was trying to decide how much of the truth to
tell me. I could feel it, and I wasn’t going to put up with it. And he could feel that. And he smiled. “They are the Undone.”

“The what?”

“Not all offspring of the magic and the mortal are, well, babies, like you were, or Ivy, or this Shimmy. Sometimes magic works on the world itself, or on … lesser creatures. The result is an in-between creature, one very much subject to manipulation by both worlds. They’re weaker than we are, and malformed. They’ve got no place in either world, no proper role in the web of being, or even any real business existing at all. That makes them … more easily swayed, I guess you could say, very ready to be used by anyone stronger.”

I thought about the determination in Edison’s eyes as he whispered his promises to me, and I realized I was not sure about that last bit at all. I strained to hush that idea, but it turned out I needn’t have bothered.

Papa wheezed a few times and sagged farther down against the pillows. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I’m afraid I have to rest for a while.”

He struggled for a minute and I realized he was trying to lie down. I helped get the pillows out from behind him and held his shoulders so he could lie back slowly. He felt light and bony under my hands, like there were no muscles left under his skin.

“Never thought,” Papa breathed.

“Sorry?”

“Never thought to have a daughter, especially not one so brave. Or so like her mother.” He breathed in and out hard, three or four times. “I do love her, Callie.” His eyelids fluttered. “Not as a fairy, loving her life like a glutton loves a good steak. As barren as it may be, I do have a heart, or I did. I gave it to her.”

He didn’t say anything after that. His shining eyes drifted shut. I sat there a long time, staring at him. Papa coughed and twisted like he was trying to turn over but couldn’t quite. My stomach knotted up. I didn’t know what to feel. I wanted to love my father. I wanted it so bad it was like a hunger inside me. But I couldn’t tell if I really did love him, or if he was worth loving. He said he wanted to be a good father, and I believed that. But at the same time, he’d been ready to leave people to die back under the prison tree, and he had Mama so snarled up, she’d been ready to smack me because I wouldn’t do what he said. He’d gotten us into trouble, but he’d gotten us out too. His courage in riding the train was genuine, because this trip was just plain killing him. It wasn’t being slow about its work either. If Papa was this sick already, how was he going to last all the way to New York City?

I wished hard I’d never thought of that, but nothing happened.

“LaSalle Street Station!” called the conductor outside our compartment door. “Final stop, LaSalle Street Station! All change at LaSalle!”

I have never in my life been so glad to hear anything as I was to hear those words.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. When morning finally came, Jack took Mama to the dining car, so she could get a little fresh air and stretch her legs. I went myself after that, but I couldn’t eat anything, and I hotfooted it back to the compartment after about five minutes. Papa didn’t even try to sit up. I don’t know for sure what Mama and Jack saw when they were with him, but to me it looked like he was fading away. Once, he slid his hand across the blankets to touch Mama’s, and I was sure I saw her pale fingers right through his dark ones.

The Golden State Limited pulled into the station with a
long whoosh of steam and a squeal of brakes. Jack, as usual, scrambled out ahead of the rest of us. While Mama and I were trying to figure out if Papa was even going to be able to stand, Jack slipped back in through the door.

“It’s all set,” Jack said. “Mrs. LeRoux, the porter will come knock when the rest of the passengers have cleared out and help you with Mr. LeRoux. Callie can come on ahead with me to scope out the station.” The look Jack gave me then hushed my questions. “We’ll meet you both on the platform.”

The platform was a stretch of concrete in a long shed made of iron girders and frosted glass. The smell of diesel and hot metal filled the air and the platform itself was filled to the brim with passengers and porters trying to sort out who needed to be where. I glanced around, half afraid to open my magic senses, but more afraid not to. But when I did, all I felt was the tumult of the human beings surrounding us. I tried to stretch my awareness out, but I kept running into the blocking iron—in the trains, in the support beams and girders that held up the shed around us and framed the glass panels in its roof. This place wouldn’t give Papa much of a break.

Jack pulled me away from the train, toward a big marble archway I guessed led to the main station. With his usual instinct for navigating a crowd, he found what seemed to be the single empty spot near the wall.

Jack faced me. “Callie, there’s something I need you to do.”

“What?” Jack seemed anxious, which was not normal for him. I wondered for a second if it had something to do with being in Chicago. Jack had been born here, but he’d run away from his bootlegging family years before he’d met me. I could imagine all kinds of reasons he might not be so glad to be back.

Turns out I was wrong again. “I want you to fix my eyes so I can see fairies, like you can,” said Jack.

My first reaction was to tell him to keep his voice down. Then I realized nobody in the crowd could hear us. With the clash of voices, steam whistles, and train brakes, we could have planned a bank job without anybody hearing a word.

“Oh, Jack, I don’t know.” Everything Papa said about fairies sucking the life out of human beings came flooding back. “What if I get it wrong? I could make you go blind, or worse.”

“Then we’ll just wish me back the way I was,” Jack said breezily.

Somehow I didn’t think it’d be that simple, but I didn’t say so. Not that Jack gave me time to.

“Come on, Callie, you gotta. The Seelies have been one step ahead of us the whole way. They’re waiting for us around here somewhere, and they’ll be in New York too. If we can both see the magic it’ll be that much harder for them to sneak up on us.”

I really hated to admit it, but he had a point. I wasn’t going to be able to watch all directions at once and if the Seelies weren’t here now, they would be soon. Heck, it might
even be the Unseelies. Uncle Shake knew where I was, and who I was with. It wasn’t going to take a whole lot of work for him to figure out where I was going.

“Okay.” I tried to summon my nerve. Then I tried to figure out how I could do what Jack asked. “You’d better … you’d better bend down.”

Jack brought his face level with mine. He smelled like coffee and Pepsodent. I laid my hands over his eyes. Touching him did not help me think straight. Instead, the warmth of his skin under my palms brought on butterflies in all kinds of new places. Especially when his breath touched my cheek. I needed to get past this. One thing I did know about magic was that if you didn’t concentrate while you worked, you could really mess up. The idea of hurting Jack stuck straight into my heart, and twisted. That sure didn’t help the whole thinking-straight situation any.

“Should I wish?” Jack asked. “Or sing something?
Close your eyes
.” He started warbling a tune we’d heard on the radio coming in.
“When you open them, dear, I’ll be here by your side. Close your eyes.…”

I giggled, more than a tiny bit nervously, and he chuckled. Jack’s voice resonated through my fingers and that shared laughter was just what I needed.

Magic is warm when it’s working, and comfortable. It also has this nasty tendency to stop me from thinking clearly and make me believe I can take on the world with one hand tied behind my back. But right then my worries were more than enough to keep my head clear. I caught the feel of Jack’s
laughter up and swirled it around and shaped it into light. Then I let that light flow into Jack’s clever eyes.

See clear
, I wished for him.
See true. No magic can fool your eyes now, Jack Holland, Jacob Hollander, and not ever again
.

I closed off the magic, bit my lip, and lowered my hands slowly. Jack’s eyes hadn’t changed, except maybe they were a tiny bit brighter, and maybe a tiny bit bluer. Or maybe that was just because we were standing so close together. I wasn’t even touching him anymore and I could still feel how warm he was.

“Well?” I asked. “Did it work?”

Jack squinted around over my head. “Hard to tell. Nothing looks different.” He flashed a grin. “That’s probably a good thing.”

“How about me? Do I look any different?” I was part magic, after all.

Jack tilted his head a little sideways, considering this, and my cheeks started to burn.

“No,” he said softly. “You look just like you should, Callie.” He raised one hand and ran his fingertips down my braid, where it lay against my shoulder.

Those butterflies changed into woodpeckers, and they all started drumming against my heart. I might not have looked different, but he did, as if he was seeing something new, and he liked it. I would have given everything I had to stand there forever and have Jack look at me just like that. But as much as I wanted that, part of me was shouting I wasn’t
ready. Why’d this have to happen now, anyway? We were on the run and we were going to stay that way for who knew how long. Plus, my parents were going to be out here any second now.

It was right then, in fact, that I saw Mama step off the Golden State Limited. Mr. Jones, the porter, all but handed Papa down the steps to her. Papa sagged hard against Mama and she half supported, half dragged him away from the train.

“We gotta get over and help.” I was saying the words, but they seemed to be coming from a long ways away.