Bad Luck Girl (22 page)

Touhy took me under the trees with their bobbing,
mixed-up lights. The breeze kicked up again and a smell I didn’t know I’d been missing hit me—the full, dull, earthy smell of a farmyard. We passed a set of pens with cows, even a few sheep and one old horse. I could hear more voices, muttering, creaking, rumbling.

“What says the ’ville?” A man’s dry voice rose above the others. “Fair?”

“Fair!” the others shouted back.

We cleared the last of the trees. On the far side of the Hooverville, somebody’d dug a shallow amphitheater out of the lawn. They’d lined it with benches, and those benches were lined with Halfers. There were more paper cutouts like Touhy, and people who might just as easily have been cats or rats or dogs or bugs. They sat with people made of stone, of bronze, and brass, of tree branches and tin cans, brick, and marble. I spotted Claremont, the glass-shard girl from Dan Ryan’s gang. She sat with Cedar, and the girder boy, and Dan Ryan himself.

Halfers whispered and pointed as Touhy led me down the amphitheater aisle. Ryan glowered at me with his bright rat eyes, and fingered the burlap bag hanging from his rope belt. I tried to lift up my chin and get mad, but I was shaking too much inside to make it work.

Touhy kept nudging me along until we reached the end of a line of Halfers that snaked down to the bottom of the hollow. A table had been set up there, and three Halfers sat behind it. One was a man who might have been built from a
fallen-down house. Splinters stuck out of him like quills and his shirt looked like it had been made from old shingles. The woman in the middle chair was mottled brown and white, with a black nose three times as long as anybody’s should be. The last man reminded me of the Halfer Edison from Los Angeles, except he was smoother around the edges and glowed bright orange instead of silver.

All three of them were listening to a stooping black-and-gray Halfer that looked to be made of driftwood stuck together with tar. He, or maybe it was she, held a bawling calf on a halter.

“What did you pay?” the splintery man asked the wood-and-tar Halfer. His voice was the dry voice I’d heard before.

“The stockman’s daughter has influenza,” answered Tarry. “She’ll start to get better when he kisses her good night.”

There was some mumbling from the Halfers on the benches, and the splintery man behind the table lifted his voice to them. “What says the ’ville? Fair?”

“Fair!” The crowd, including Touhy, called back. A man shaped from brick and mortar came up to help Tarry lead the bawling calf away.

“Okay. Now, Halsted,” the splintery man said. “What have you brought?”

“A pound of butter.” Halsted had a man’s voice and was mostly a pile of rumpled rags. He pulled a brown paper package out of what could have been a pocket, or a fold of
his body. “And a bolt of cotton cloth.” I couldn’t even see where all that calico came from, but Halsted laid it on the table too.

“What did you pay?” asked Splintery Man.

“The shopkeeper’s husband’s been gambling to try to make the rent. Tonight he’s going to win.”

This brought on another round of mumbling before Splintery Man asked his question again. “What says the ’ville? Fair?”

“Fair!” the ’ville called again.

It went on like that. Touhy crowded close beside me, making sure I moved along with the line. By now the people at the table had seen me, and they were having a tough time keeping their minds on the rest of the parade. Everybody who wasn’t outright staring at me was sneaking plenty of little glances. But it wasn’t enough to disrupt business. The Halfers kept laying down what they’d gotten hold of. They brought food and clothes, kegs of nails, and scraps of about anything that could be scavenged off the streets. Every one of them named some kind of price that had been paid, and the Halferville accepted them all.

Finally, the line in front of me and Touhy cleared out. As Touhy led me the rest of the way forward, the noise the Halfers made was more like the clash of a train yard than a crowd of voices.

“All right, all right, settle down!” Splintery Man hammered his fist on the tabletop and it sounded just like a judge’s gavel.

“Who’s this, Touhy?” The mottled woman’s skin rumpled almost like Touhy’s did, but she wasn’t paper like I’d thought at first. She was a bird lady, and covered in sparrow feathers.

“Seems pretty obvious, Ashland.” The glowing man’s voice sputtered like a radio when it’s not quite tuned in to the station. “Looks like we got us the heir to the Midnight Throne.”

“Well, well.” The feathered woman—Ashland—looked down her long, curving nose at me. “Where did you ever find this, Touhy?”

That was too much for Dan Ryan. “Touhy didn’t find her! I did!” He shot out of his seat. “She’s mine!”

Touhy and I both ignored him.

“She wanted to see the ’ville,” Touhy told the three at the table. “She’s our kind, after all.”

“The Bad Luck Girl wants to join us?” Ashland’s feathery eyebrows knotted up tight.

“Callie,” I said back. “I’m called Callie, and I don’t plan on staying anywhere I’m not welcome.”

Touhy shoved a crinkling elbow into my ribs. “She can help us, Calumet,” she said to the splintery man. “She’s got powers none of us do. She can get our people back.”

The first thing I wanted to do was yell, at the Halfers and especially at Touhy. She might have warned me what she was bringing me into. Even if I had yelled, nobody’d have heard me. Everybody else had already started up their own shouting, and the air was full of clashing, clanging, rushing voices.

“What about Stripling?” Dan Ryan hollered above all the rest. “You all heard the story Edison sent down the line. This one”—he stabbed one long finger at me—“she stood around while her old man had a Halfer killed!”

“That was an accident!” I shouted back. “He didn’t know.” Except he did. He just hadn’t cared.

Touhy elbowed me again. “It’s not her old man standing here now, is it? When have we ever turned one of our kind away because of how they got made?”

“She’s not our kind!” Dan Ryan spat. “Look at her! What kind of Halfer’s got a face like that?”

The force of his words whirled me right around, and I planted my hands on my hips. “So your problem with me is I don’t
look
right? That’s what my papa says about you all.”

I regretted those words the second I said them. The Halfers on the benches surged to their feet—or whatever they had under them—and started yelling all over again. They yelled at the three behind the table. They yelled at each other, at Dan Ryan, and at me. It felt like the crowd around the eviction when I’d magicked Ben and Simon.

“Enough!” Calumet’s brittle shout crackled over the heads of the Halfer crowd and he banged his gavel hand so hard on the table something snapped. “Simmer down, all of you!”

Everybody must have been used to Calumet being in charge, because enough of them quieted down to make the rest notice they were shouting at their neighbors, and they
quieted down too. Which left me standing in the center of a bunch of angry glaring magic folks, and wondering what kind of order Calumet, or feathery Miss Ashland, or Glowing Man would give next.

“Is that really what you’re doing here, Bad Luck?” Calumet’s splinters quivered under the collar of his shingle shirt, making me think of porcupines and other dangerous critters. “You’ve really come here to help us against the courts?”

I couldn’t answer. I hadn’t come here to do anything or help anybody. I’d come here to hide. But if I said that out loud, this could turn ugly. Uglier.

Ashland seemed to be thinking the same thing. She put her feathered hand on Calumet’s shoulder, carefully. “This is going to take some time to sort out. If it’s true this one … Bad Luck … is properly a Halfer, and she’s here of her own free will, she deserves the protection of the ’ville just like any of our people.” She said this straight to Dan Ryan, and all Dan Ryan’s greasy black hair stood on end, but he kept his mouth shut. “That is, as long as she agrees to abide by
our
laws.” This she said to me. She had gray eyes in her brown-and-white face, and they were warning me not to start any nonsense.

“What says the ’ville?” Calumet raised his dry voice. “Fair?”

There was a heartbeat of emptiness, but then the Halfers called back, “Fair.” It was grudging, and it was fainter than it had been for the butter or the calf, but it was there.

Glowing Man made a noise somewhere between a snort and spitting. “All right, Touhy, you brought her here, you get to keep her. If she makes any trouble …”

“Thank you.” Touhy wrapped her fragile hand around my elbow. “Come on, Bad Luck. You can stay with me while the council makes its decision.”

I wanted to say something about the name she’d saddled me with. I wanted to say even more back to Dan Ryan about the way he looked at me as Touhy hustled me up the amphitheater aisle. But what was I gonna do? It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.

Touhy, it turned out, lived in a tree house even smaller than the back room of Jack’s tenement. Wires ran in through its window to hook up three electric lights hanging from the ceiling beams. Their light fell on a tidy white bed, a braided rug, a carved table, and a chair with an embroidered cushion. The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with books. They were in bad shape—water rumpled, with covers missing, and pages burned or torn or chewed. Probably they’d been scavenged and mended as well as they could be, just like everything else in this place. Me included.

“Why’re you doing this?” I asked, keeping my hand over the notebook in my pocket. The pages and words were rustling, like they wanted to come out and play.

Touhy didn’t answer. She glided over to a dresser made of brass and copper. It even had a mirror fitted together from panes of pale colored glass, two yellow and two pink. She
slid open a drawer and pulled out another couple of braided rugs and a lumpy green pillow. “Because no matter what kind of bee Dan Ryan’s got in his bonnet, you are one of us,” she said, spreading the rugs on the floor. “You’re part magic, part not, and you sprang up in this world without nobody asking for you.”

“That’s what Halfers are? Just part magic and part not?”

She nodded. “The Seelies, the Unseelies, they come here and they scatter all their magic around, granting wishes and fooling humans. You get too much of it in one place, and eventually, you get one of us.” She spread her arms, letting her trailing scraps flutter in the breeze.

I pulled my hand out of my pocket and tried not to feel those words and pages twisting around. “Um … yeah, but … are any of you … born?”

“You mean are we part human, like you? Some. Dan Ryan for instance.”

My mouth shut hard at that, and Touhy’s wrinkled face split into a big grin. “His father was a human soldier back in the old country, but his mother was a fairy lady. Seelie, I think. Anyhow, she left the baby and that sack with him when she went back to her country.”

“But, but, he’s …”

“He’s what?” asked Touhy coldly. “He’s ugly? Looks like a rat? You wait, Bad Luck. When this world mixes with our magic, we all change shape. You stay here, you’ll change too.”

My fingers twisted together. I’d grown up trying to hide
my bad hair, and keep my skin from turning too brown in the sun, so nobody’d guess I was the wrong color. I’d thought I’d gotten over thinking like that, but now it all came flooding back. What else would I have to hide if I stayed with the Halfers?

Touhy, apparently, didn’t like my being so quiet. She drifted up to me, and poked a paper finger into my chest. “Listen, Bad Luck. I stuck my neck out to get you a fair hearing. Do not make me regret it.”

I thought about swatting her hand away, but it seemed like too much trouble just then. “You stuck your neck out on your own. I didn’t ask you to.”

She just snorted, and the sound was like tearing paper. “You really think you’re something special, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Ooh, look at me!” Touhy’s face flipped around, coming up with a bunch of arrows pointing at her eyes. “I’m the tragic little girl. Everybody’s after me! Everybody hates me! I got to run away from it all.” She slapped the back of her hand against her forehead. “You should be glad you came out pretty, Bad Luck. They wouldn’t have been near as careful with you if you looked like one of us.”

“Shut up!” I clenched my fists tight to my sides. “You got no idea what I’ve been through!”

I wanted to tell her the fairies weren’t careful with the pretty ones. I wanted to tell her about Shimmy, and Ivy, who were both laid out dead somewhere because the courts couldn’t be bothered to protect them. About Major, who’d
been sent after me and was just as dead as the others. The courts used us all, however they needed to. But Touhy wasn’t giving me the chance. She just unfolded to her full size and looked me right in the eye.

“I got no idea? You sure about that, Bad Luck?”

A strange, soft pressure leaned against my mind. Touhy was magic too, and she was showing me her memories, pushing them inside me whether I wanted them or not. She showed me being cold and scared and alone, of thinking she was the only thing like her in the whole world. She’d been almost killed in fires that broke out in the South Side slums. She remembered hard trying to find enough food, and enough decent feeling to survive on. She ran from the dark things that came to life when magic and smog mixed with blood down by the slaughterhouses. She ran from everything and everybody, until the splintery man, Calumet, found her and brought her here.

I turned away. I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t. Something inside me had hardened up too much for that. Mama probably would have called it stiff-necked pride, but I didn’t want to think about that either.

Touhy crinkled and rustled behind me, whispering something I couldn’t hear. Then she hopped into the air and drifted down slow, until she lay flat on the little rug pile. “Get some sleep. One way or another, you’re gonna need it.” She closed her eyes.

As if that was some kind of signal, the lights winked out. Not just in Touhy’s little house, but all over the ’ville. I guess
somebody’d thrown a central switch or some such. I sat down on the white bed. There was a feather mattress under the white wool blankets, all cozy and inviting. Touhy didn’t think much of me, but here she was giving me her bed. I stared at the floor where the silver moonlight puddled on the rag rug. These people lived off the city and the people in it, but paid for what they took. That was a lot different from what I’d seen the Seelies do. Or the Unseelies.