Bad Luck Girl (25 page)

The shield cracked open. Not much, just a little hole. We both lost some skin and raised some blisters squeezing through, but we made it, and we ran.

Halferville was in chaos. Dozens of voices screamed and shouted and the crows cawed in answer. Halfers ran for the shelter of the trees and shacks with the giant crows sailing in behind them. One of those birds lit onto the grass and it started to grow, like Mimi and the dog pack had grown, but it didn’t stay bird shaped. It turned human shaped, with crow eyes in a gray face and trailing black robes. While I watched, a tin-can boy snatched a baby that looked like it was made of bread crumbs off the grass and took off running. One of the crow men stretched out curving, clawed hands to grab up the tin-can boy and the crumb baby and slide them into those robes like popping them into sacks.

Sacks. Where was Dan Ryan and his sack? I couldn’t see him anywhere. Where were Touhy and the councilors?

Not everybody was running away. Halfers charged out of their houses with hatchets and hoes and whatever else had come to hand, hollering at the tops of their lungs. The crows didn’t have the air to themselves either. Ashland stood on a shack roof, her arms raised as she cried out in a voice almost too high to hear at all. Sparrows wheeled in the sky, laughably small next to the dark carrion birds, but there were a whole lot of them, and they pecked and screamed their tiny, righteous rage.

There were rats too. Hordes of them, filthy and squealing, and worrying at the ankles of the robed man shapes. The crow men kicked them aside, but sometimes not fast enough, and if any crow man fell, he was covered over by a living flood of black and brown.

One robed man cawed sharp and high. He tossed the tarry Halfer I’d seen the night before high into the air for a crow to grab in its talons. The Halfer screamed, and Ashland screamed, sending her sparrows after him, but the crow was too fast, and it was lost in the smoggy blue. The crow man laughed and the crows overhead cawed.

Jack wasn’t standing around. Somebody’d dropped a long-handled hoe. He scooped it up, running into the middle of a cluster of crow men who’d surrounded a couple of brick Halfers. Jack clobbered the nearest crow across the head, and reeled around to face the others.

An arrow whizzed past, trailing fire to sink deep in the heart of a crow as it swooped down. A gunshot exploded from one of the shacks, and then another. A crow man hollered and fell and a Halfer shouted in triumph, and there was another shot. A crow dropped out of the air and flopped onto the ground. Jack swore and ducked.

I heard Touhy shouting. She was leaning out her window and waving and pointing at me. I understood and yanked my notebook out of my pocket and shook it hard. Words and live pages scattered onto the wind.

Go, go!
I told them.
Help Touhy!

They swirled up into the sky, in time to meet Touhy as she spread herself on the breeze, gliding and screaming toward the nearest crow. She wrapped her body around its wings and held on tight, driving it to the ground where another Halfer could grab hold of it.

I turned in place. It was too much, too crazy. I didn’t know what to do or how to do anything at all. I couldn’t think what to grab or where to run next.

Then I saw Dan Ryan. He was stretched out on the ground by the sheep pen, and he wasn’t moving. A crow man bent over him, ready to scoop him up. Everything suddenly became very clear and I took off running toward him. There was so much fear and anger swirling around, I almost didn’t need to reach for it. I just grabbed and twisted one hard wish around it and swung out. I knocked that crow man back a good ten feet without breaking stride.

An idea hit me as hard as I’d hit the crow. When I’d ridden
in that sack there’d been metal rattling around with me. Maybe here was something I could use. I yanked the sack off of Dan Ryan’s rope belt. He stirred weakly. Blood trickled down his long face.

“Sorry.” I jerked the mouth of his sack open and upended it.

A whole new flock of crows burst out of the sack, screaming at the top of their lungs and knocking me tail over teacup. I cussed hard as I sat up again and the crows cheered to see their friends.

But it wasn’t just crows. Pigeons flew out of that sack and rats ran to join the others attacking the crow men. There was bread and cans and—oh, thank heaven—scrap iron. Half a junkyard’s worth of scrap iron, nails, broken bars, and old pans poured out of that magic sack.

Jack appeared at my side. He didn’t need any telling. He just grabbed up a rusty bolt, took aim, and hurled it at the nearest crow. The bird screamed and toppled toward the ground. It never hit. The sparrows swirled around it, and got it first.

Jack wasn’t the only one who saw what was happening. A bunch of the Halfers grabbed up the busted, rusted iron, and ran hollering at the crows. Glowing Man snatched up a frying pan, and it went red hot in his hands. He was screaming orders to the archers in the trees, screaming at the wooden ones and the paper ones to fall back while fiery arrows rained down. The crow men didn’t break. They flew at the Halfers, they grabbed them up, vanished them away.

“Engine, engine number nine!” I shouted, pulling together all the magic I could muster. “Going down Chicago line! If that train should jump the track, crows, crows, get in the sack!”

It wasn’t easy. This wasn’t my magic, and this sack didn’t like me. I didn’t have names to work with, but the nearest crow man vanished into Dan Ryan’s bag. And I turned and I shouted, and the next one tumbled in, and the next.

“Duck!” hollered Jack, and I did. Something whistled over my head, and went
thwang!
A crow man hit the ground beside me. And I saw Jack standing over him, a metal bar with a curved end clutched in both hands.

“Crowbar?” I gasped. Jack grinned and turned, and waded back into the fight.

More Halfers grabbed up the scrap iron. Glowing Man was with them, shouting more orders. The Halfers spread out in a kind of formation, ringing around the crow men, driving them down into the hollow of the amphitheater. But their enemies were still birds, and they could still fly. Black-robed men jumped into the air, changing into birds again, with talons that could gouge and wicked sharp beaks that could stab. They wheeled out of the way of the bird shot and the arrows and came down screaming on the Halfer archers, tearing them from the trees and carrying them away. I felt one of my pages tear, and then another, and then a whole book’s worth. More crows swallowed my words by the handful. Tears stood out in my eyes to feel them die, but I couldn’t
stop. I shook the sack and hollered the incantation and shoved the crow men in with all my might and magic. But the crows just kept on coming. I saw a crow man grab up Cedar and shove it under his robe. Ashland staggered on the roof where she stood and a crow dove low, aiming straight for her. A gun banged and the crow dodged, and it dove down again.

I opened the bag, and my mouth. Then I saw another crow shoot up into the air. This one had a squirming wad of paper in its claws.

“Touhy!” I shrieked, and I heard her scream in answer. But only just for a second. Then she was beyond hearing at all.

Jack grabbed my hand. I’d lost track of him, but he hadn’t left my side. He’d gone dead white, but I knew that crazy look in his eye. He didn’t like Touhy, but he wasn’t going to let her be lost to these monsters, and he had a plan.

“Callie,” he said. “I wish you could fly.”

We stared at each other for a single heartbeat. Then I turned and took off at a run, my arms spread out to catch the wind and the force of Jack’s wish behind me. I jumped.

And I flew.

The air hit hard, and the cold followed fast as I shoved head and shoulders through a wind that felt as near solid as the Halferville barrier had. But the wind was worse because it didn’t stay still. It twisted around me, tangling me like ropes. It pushed me up one second, and dropped out from under
me the next. The world was nothing but a colored blur on the other side of my tears. If there hadn’t been so many crows, and they hadn’t been so black against the blue sky, I never would have been able to follow them because I wouldn’t have been able to see them.

But they were and I could. They made a black cloud straight in front of me, and I plowed through the wind after them. I tried not to think about what I’d do if any one of them turned around and came at me. It was taking every ounce of concentration and magic I had to keep after them. I had nothing left to fight with.

Slowly, slowly I started gaining on them. Smokestacks flashed by, and church steeples. I swear a carved angel turned its head when I skirted too close to its marble wing. The crows dropped lower and I pulled my arms in, kicking at the air like I was diving down to the bottom of a swimming pool. The wind was worse down here, funneled through solid walls of brick buildings, becoming a rushing river, and I was trying to force my way against the current.

The crows banked, and something brushed against my arm. Pain burst through me and I saw stars. When they cleared, I saw a sprawling hulk of a burnt-out building rushing to meet me. The crows flew into it like flakes of ash settling over a dead fire. I felt a familiar sensation blossoming inside me. I was near a gate. The crows were flying in and through. I stretched my magic out in front of me. I wobbled and the world tilted, but I had the edges, I had them …

Arms wrapped around my waist and the next thing I
knew, I plowed into the ground, toppling head over heels, fighting with someone big and heavy who was cussing and calling my name. But I finally got free and scrambled to my feet.

And I looked down at Papa, groaning and clutching his shoulder as he lay on the sooty steps of that burnt-out mansion.

“What are you
doing
?” I struggled to my feet.

“I could ask you the same thing.” Papa wheezed and pushed himself up on his knees.

Crows screamed somewhere up ahead. So did Touhy.
Touhy
.

I hurt and I couldn’t catch my breath, but I staggered up the steps toward that ruined house anyway.

“Callie!” Papa shouted. I ignored him. If he wanted me, he could follow me.

He did, faster than I would have figured. He grabbed me by the arm and spun me around. “Callie, you stop this, now.”

“No!” I shook him off. “They got Touhy! And Dan Ryan and Ashland! I can’t leave them!”

“Daughter, listen to me carefully.” Papa had lost his hat somewhere, and his fairy eyes shone bright, even in that
broad city daylight. “You are coming with me. I will spellbind your arms and legs so you can’t move yourself without permission for a month if I have to. But you will come. Do I make myself clear?”

He did. His words and his will dropped like stones against my thoughts. Maybe if I’d been whole and strong, I could have shifted him, but I wasn’t. I was banged up, exhausted, and out of breath, and I was pretty sure I was bleeding on my arms and forehead. And Touhy and Dan Ryan and who-knew-how-many others were gone. I could feel it. I stared at the burnt-out building they’d vanished into. It had been a mansion once, but now all its arched windows were broken and blind. Ash and soot turned its sides black, and the roof was nothing but a mass of broken timber. The gate was in there. I could feel that too, and the crows had taken their prisoners to the other side of it.

It hadn’t been enough. We’d fought back with everything we had, and they’d still gotten snatched right out of their home. And I didn’t even know who had them.

“I’ll find you,” I said to whatever waited on the other side of those ruined doors. “I will.”

“No.” My father cut me off solid and sharp just as I finished the word.

“Whaddaya mean no?”

“I mean no.” He raised his face, checking the wind and the light. I could feel his every nerve standing on end. “As soon as we’ve gotten Jack and your mother, we’re leaving.
The Midnight Throne has fallen. I felt it,” he added in a whisper, his shining eyes drifting toward that old, ruined mansion. “I felt my parents’ will swallowed whole.”

I closed my mouth. His fear was cold and it woke up all the fear I hadn’t had time to feel yet. I wanted to run, just like he said. Run fast and run far.

But I couldn’t. “They took friends of mine, Papa. I can’t leave them.”

“You have to. Callie, don’t you understand?” He jabbed his finger toward the broken house. “You’ve been seen. They know you’re here now. They know we’re all here. We have to run before they come back!”

But run where? Where was left?

“I know you feel for these Undone …,” Papa was saying.

“Halfers. They call themselves Halfers.” My thoughts were stumbling in all kinds of directions. I thought about my pages and my words. I didn’t even have names for any of them. I didn’t know for sure what they even were, but they’d given themselves up to help me, and the Halferville. And it still hadn’t been enough.

Papa waved his hand hard, the gesture showing how little this mattered to him. “Whatever they are called, they have nothing to do with us. We have to get your mother and Jack and get out of this city. When we’ve found a safe place …”

I shook my head. New understanding was rising up in me, slow and quiet, like the dust rising in the distance. “There is nowhere safe,” I said. “You know that, Papa. Same as me.” It was here. I saw it. It spread across the horizon of my
thoughts and I was never getting away from it, not ever. “We both tried running away. You abdicated. I lit out. It didn’t work and it isn’t ever going to work. We have to turn around, Papa. We have to face this. All of it.”

Papa lifted his hand like he was going to tug on his hat brim, but when it wasn’t there, he smoothed down his close-cropped hair. I’d stunned him, but not for long. “How do you suggest we do that?” The contempt in his words smacked hard against my new understanding. “We’re alone here.”

“We’ve got each other. And Jack, and Mama. That’s a lot right there.”

“Not anything like enough to defeat the Seelie army if their king takes it into his head to send them through that gate in the next thirty seconds.” Papa grabbed my hand again. “We are getting out of here.
Now
.”