Bad Luck Girl (6 page)

Yesssss …
, said a soft, beautiful voice.
There she is. Yesssss … I see her now
.

Away wherever my real body’d gotten itself to, I’m pretty sure my heart stopped and my mouth went dry. I knew that voice. I’d heard it before, coming out of nowhere, just like this.

“Shake,” my dream mouth said. “Uncle Shake.”

I felt a jolt of recognition, and more than a little fear. But just for a minute.
Well, well, little niece
. I could hear the smile Uncle Shake forced into his voice.
You have been a busy girl
.

“Where are you?” I tried to turn around, but since there was nothing but a world’s worth of solid black all around me, I couldn’t tell whether I actually managed it.

Nowhere you know
, my uncle’s voice answered.
Where are
you?

I tried hard to think about the boarding house where I’d stayed in Los Angeles, about Ivy Bright’s bungalow, about anything except the train I was riding on. The last thing we needed was Uncle Shake coming around to add to our troubles. The Seelies and their friends were giving us more than enough to do.

Unfortunately, what popped up easiest in my mind was my father lying in his bed, sweating and restless from the fever the iron laid across him. Maybe I couldn’t see a single thing about my uncle, but he had a front-row seat to what I was thinking.

I heard Shake’s tongue click.
Does my brother really look that bad, or are you having nightmares?

“Show yourself!” I shouted back. I did not like his voice coming out of nowhere and everywhere. I did not like being blind as well as frozen and the rising fear was making it hard to think straight. “Show me your face, Lorcan deMinuit!”

The power of my uncle’s real name rang through that nightmare dark, and all at once, I did see him.

The first time I met my uncle, he was a handsome man with medium-brown skin, a pencil-thin mustache, and fairy eyes like amber and starlight all mixed together. He’d stood at his royal father’s side and his smile was full of confidence and cleverness. The second time I met him, he was nothing but a broken-down hobo who’d been kicked out by his parents, my grandparents. They’d left him with a scar that had ruined one of those eyes, turning it milk white and near blind under a sagging eyelid. I’d never found out how it happened, but it sure looked like somebody’d cut him deep.

Wherever he was now, he’d changed again. Uncle Lorcan sat in a chair carved of ebony, his crooked hands lying lightly on its arms. He wore a black silk shirt and gray silk trousers trimmed with silver, and boots cuffed and traced with more silver. He looked like a Russian dancer I’d seen once when my human grandparents took me to a vaudeville show, only more sparkly. I guessed these were his fairy prince clothes. He wore a mask too. It was shining, obsidian black, molded across his eyes like a second skin. Silver ribbons tied
it to his head, and more silver made patterns across the front, like vines, or maybe veins. Where the eyeholes should have been, there were mirrors, round and shining. Anyone who met Shake’s gaze would see their own eyes staring back at them. I shivered. That mask reminded me too much of being in the Seelie king’s palace. There’d been a whole party’s worth of fairies there, all of them in jeweled masks, all of them laughing at me.

My uncle wasn’t alone. A crowd of what had to be fairies surrounded his ebony chair. They were tall and beautiful, but more like trees than humans, with long white fingers and blank white eyes and glimmering white robes. There were other, smaller people clustered around their knees, people like pale sticks, and people like marble stones, all of them beautiful and terrible in their own ways. Every last one of them was armed. They carried spears or swords, or long-handled axes. A silver shield rested at my uncle’s feet, marked by a golden mask. All the pale people around him had that golden mask on them somewhere too, on a shield or embedded in a spear shaft, or sunk straight into their white skin.

Now that Shake could see me, his friends could all see me as well, and they did not like what they saw. There was somebody else too. Behind the rest of the crowd I could feel the burn of a fire made from nothing but hate.

So, my little niece thinks she knows how to use true names now
. My uncle’s sneer was as smooth and sharp as any knife blade and all those pale, pretty creatures laughed at it.
That’s good, that’s good. You keep thinking, Callie LeRoux. Think
very hard about this war you’ve made possible, and how soon you’re all going to die for it
.

It was too much. I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You get out of here, Lorcan deMinuit!” I shouted. “And stay out!”

I put everything I had into the command. But it went nowhere. It just swung back around and I felt the blow of my own power knock me back, all the way out of my own dream. Behind me in the dark, my uncle and his friends all laughed, and kept on laughing.

My eyes snapped open. It was still dark, but nothing like as dark as my dream had been. The shadows of the drawing room compartment rocked with the steady rhythm of the train’s wheels against the tracks. After a few hard, panicky blinks, I could make out Mama sitting on the bed, holding Papa’s hand like she hadn’t moved since we’d shut off the lights. Jack’s snores drifted down from the upper berth. Of course he was sound asleep. There was nothing on God’s green earth that could keep Jack Holland awake when he’d decided to get his forty winks.

I lay still for a while, waiting for my heart to slow its galloping and for my fingers to decide to let go of the bedsheets. Papa coughed hard. Mama held a glass of water for him to drink and then patted his forehead with a handkerchief. All her attention was on him. She didn’t even notice me waking
up after my nightmare. I bit my lip hard against the anger. I wouldn’t give in. I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I didn’t want to be mad at her. I didn’t want Papa to be so sick, or her to be so worried, especially not with my uncle’s voice ringing in my head, saying I should think hard about how soon we were going to die.

I’d thought when I found my parents, everything would be all right. Well, I had found them, but if I counted up the number of seconds when things had actually been all right since then, I might have had all of a minute and a half.

Of course I didn’t really believe anything like she might love me less now that she had Papa back. He was sick. Of course she had to pay attention to him now. Thinking she should have taken my side just a little back in Los Angeles was small and mean. After all, I was supposed to be on Papa’s side. That was where a good daughter would be, wouldn’t it? I turned that thought over. Some kind of charity or sympathy should have come up, but none did. What came up was the idea that that was my fairy Papa over there, and if neither one of us was going to sleep, I might as well try to get some answers out of him.

I kicked back the covers and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The movement finally got Mama to turn around.

“What’s the matter, Callie?” she said, and I couldn’t help hearing the fear underneath the words.

“I can’t sleep.” Which was mostly true. I’d scared myself
good and awake. “I’ll sit up with Papa a bit. You should get some rest.”

“Oh, no. I’m fine,” Mama lied right back.

“We get into Chicago tomorrow. We’re all going to need to be ready to help Papa change trains.” I felt bad playing on her worries like that, but it was the one thing I could be sure would get through to her. Papa lifted his head and coughed again, and I saw by the shine of his eyes that he knew exactly what I was doing. I was getting Mama out of the way.

“Well. I suppose,” Mama said slowly, like you do when you’re pretty sure you’ve just agreed to a bad idea. “For a few minutes.”

She slid under the covers of the bed I’d just left, adjusting her borrowed nightgown. I took her spot on the edge of Papa’s bed and sat there, staring at my hands. I felt Papa watching me, but I didn’t look at him. Not until Mama’s soft breathing slowed and deepened, and I knew she was as sound asleep as Jack.

“So, Callie.” Papa’s fairy eyes glimmered silver, gold, and midnight blue in the darkness. I didn’t answer, just squirmed in my seat. I thought I’d known what I was going to say, but right then it hit me how this was the first chance I’d ever had to talk with my father, and suddenly I had no idea what to do with myself.

“Me either,” Papa croaked in answer to my thoughts, and tried to give me a grin. I almost managed one back. Silence fell again and I spent the pause pulling my leaky thoughts closed. I didn’t want him to find out what was going
on inside me until I was ready, if I ever was. I knew I should just go on and tell him about Uncle Lorcan, but what good would it do? It wasn’t like either one of us had enough magic to do anything about it, and an extra worry wasn’t going to help him when he was so weak.

Say something!
I shouted at myself.
Anything. You can’t just sit here!

But it was Papa who spoke next. “You’ve been through a lot, Callie.” His voice had turned ragged and raspy, nothing like the clear laughing voice he’d had before we got on the train. “I can see it in you.”

“You can?”

“It would take more than a bit of iron to completely separate me from you, especially now that we’ve met and learned each other’s names.”

“Oh. I guess … I guess I’ve got a lot to learn about being a fairy.” So that was the source of the leak: the names. It would be. Fairies were flat-out crazy over people’s names and what they could do.

“And I’ve got a lot to learn about being a human … and more, I think, about being a father.” Another smile flickered in his dimming eyes. “I do intend to be the best father I can. I’m only sorry I’ve made such a bad beginning of it.”

“It’s not your fault,” I whispered to my hands.

“Well, that’s nice of you to say, anyhow.” Silence fell again, and it was heavy, but not cold. Something was different this time, a little bit, around the edges. This silence held a feeling like a memory returning. It was the feeling of having
my father close by, and I wasn’t even trying to reach out to him. He was right. We weren’t ever going to be truly separate again. I squirmed. I’d been lonely for so long it should have been a beautiful idea, but I just couldn’t be sure how well I really liked it. Especially not with Uncle Lorcan waiting back in my nightmares like he was.

“How about you tell me about your journey?” Papa sagged farther down onto the pillows. “I haven’t heard the whole story yet.”

Mama rolled over, murmuring uneasily in her sleep. I swallowed. I told her I’d look after Papa. I should at least try. “Um, shouldn’t you be trying to sleep?”

Papa’s smile was as weak as the light from his shining eyes. “No. To tell you the truth, I think sleep would be very bad for me right now.”

I understood what he wasn’t saying and fear skittered through me. He knew that, of course, but neither of us mentioned it. Instead, I started talking. I told him about the dust storm that took Mama away from Slow Run, and about the monsters that had come for me afterward, about meeting the Indian spirit Baya, about meeting Jack, and the half-fairy woman Shimmy, who did the best she could for us, and finally, about meeting Uncle Shake and all he’d tried to do to me.

Nothing could have gotten me ready for my father’s anger. It swept through me, raw, red, and hotter than any fire. His eyes flared red and gold with it until all the storm-cloud blue burned away. He reared up hard on those pillows,
and Mama whimpered in her sleep and even Jack’s snores hitched.

“Stop, Papa,” I gasped, dragged halfway to my feet by a need to run, or hit something. “Please, you’ll wake them up.…”

After a moment’s struggle, the anger pulled back, and I dropped back onto the bed. Another coughing fit reached up and shook Papa hard. I grabbed the water glass and held it for him so he could sip. He waved me back.

“I’ll be all right. I’ll be … By my blood and bone, Callie, I never, ever thought he’d try murder.”

“He wants the throne,” I said. “He says he’s got friends who can help him get it.” I thought about all the pale fairies I’d seen around him. I should have been thinking about something else, something important. An idea was scratching at the back of my head, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

“He has nothing. Not while you breathe,” Papa muttered.

“I told him I’d abdicate, like you did. But he wasn’t interested. It’s probably got something to do with the prophecy. Everything else does.” This time the anger I felt was my very own. “Why’s there a prophecy at all? Why’s it got the Seelies in such a lather? And my … our … family? They’re so high and mighty, why would any of them even
care
what I do?”

“They may be so high and mighty now, Callie,” said Papa seriously. “But your power could lay them all low in very short order. You must see that.”

“No, I don’t. How can that be?”

Papa stared at me in disbelief for a long time. “I forget,” he breathed at last. “There’s so much you can do, I forget how little you actually know. Callie, we of the fairy kind don’t just like humans, we need them. We are dependent on them.” He coughed again, and that one cough touched off a whole storm of others. He pressed his arm against his mouth, trying to muffle the sound, and screwed his eyes shut. I knew how bad that kind of coughing hurt. I remembered it from when I had the dust pneumonia. Was that what was ailing Papa? Was the iron somehow filling up his fairy lungs? I opened my mouth to ask if he wanted some more water or if I should rub his back. But Papa held up his hand and managed a couple of deep breaths.

“Why’re you … How could we be dependent on humans?” I asked. Fairies were the ones with magic and illusions and all the other powers. Fairies could make human beings do anything they wanted, even dance themselves to death. How could creatures like that be dependent on humans?

“We can’t heal,” said Papa.

“What?”

“We can’t heal,” he repeated. “Unlike humans, we can’t renew or heal ourselves from the inside. We need to use magic to heal, or change, or grow. And when we use up what we have inside us, we must replenish ourselves from the outside, with the magic or the life essence of other beings.”