Golden Girl (11 page)

There was something fishy going on in this house, and I had plunked myself right down into the middle of it. I had to find a way to straighten out everything that had happened and get a good look at it. If I didn’t, I was never going to figure out what I should really be doing. Including what I was going to tell Mr. Robeson. I hoped he wasn’t waiting for me. I hoped he wasn’t angry at me for not turning up like I said I would. I tried to remember how right Jack had been about being fooled by someone who seemed to be helping us, but I couldn’t get my heart into it. This wasn’t the same. I couldn’t have explained how, but it just wasn’t.

A breeze swirled through the checked curtains; it smelled of green things and hot concrete. I felt a million miles away from the world, and it was not a good feeling. In this house in the middle of this city that was busy cranking out money and movies, I was alone.

“Dear Mama,” I whispered under my breath. “I’ll be there soon, Mama. We’ll find a way.” I wrapped my mind around those words and held on tight. Because if I forgot what I was really doing here, I’d be worse than alone. I’d be lost.

“Well, well, a job already.” Shake leaned against the lopsided dresser and watched me pack my battered case. “You do work fast.”

I shrugged. I needed to get this done. Mr. Sumner was waiting for me out front, fighting a losing battle to keep the neighborhood kids from climbing all over the car’s fenders. Except I didn’t just need to pack up what few things I owned. I needed to figure out what I was going to do about Shake. Mrs. Constantine was only letting him stay because we were family. The long list of people she didn’t let rooms to included single men, and there wasn’t enough magic in the Unseelie court to make her think she’d changed her rules. I couldn’t exactly turn up back at Ivy Bright’s bungalow with my fairy uncle in tow either, but I just as sure couldn’t leave him out here to do as he pleased.

“Jack says it’s perfect.” I folded up my nightgown and laid it down next to my old yellow dress.

“Ah, yes.” Shake nodded solemnly. “The young Mr. Holland.”

“What about him?” I snapped, and Shake had the nerve to look startled.

“Did I say anything about him?”

“You wanted to. Jack’s my friend and he’s saved my life, unlike
some
people,” I added, just in case he didn’t get the whole point. “You leave him alone.”

“I’d be glad to, but since you insist on keeping company with him, I don’t think I can.”

All the anger and worry I’d been trying to keep ahead of caught up with my good sense and shot right past it. “You lay a finger on Jack—you so much as look at him funny—and so help me …!”

“All right, all right, Callie. Calm down.” Shake spread his crooked hands. “I won’t do anything to hurt your Mr. Holland.”

Which might have been a fine answer coming from an ordinary person, but this was Shake talking to me. “Promise,” I said.

That one word took all the relaxation out of his skinny frame. He stiffened, as though he’d just heard an alarm bell ring. “I’ve got no reason to hurt him, Callie, or you.”

“Oh, no. That’s you trying to change the subject.” And I was not falling for it this time.
“Promise.”

Shake went quiet for a long, slow minute. The longer he
stayed quiet, the farther the lid drooped over his white eye, and all at once he looked tired and old, older than anybody had a right to look. “Very well. I promise to take no action that will hurt your Mr. Holland.”

“Okay.” I pulled the silk stockings I’d ruined off the back of the room’s one battered chair. With a twinge of guilt at the waste, I wadded them up and threw them into the trash basket. There’d be other stockings someday, once I got out of this mess. Problem was, I didn’t feel like I was any closer to getting out of it. I looked around for something else to pack, but there wasn’t anything.

Shake had settled onto the edge of the chair. His back and shoulders were bowed and his broken hands dangled between his knees. He looked the way he had out on the street: like a bum without home or hope.
It’s for show
, I tried to tell myself. But I couldn’t stop seeing the scar on his face or his broken fingers. Those were real things. Something deep inside me said the exhaustion and hunger that drew his skin tight across the bones of his face were real too.

“I wish you’d decide to trust me,” he whispered. “I really do want to help you.”

“Then how about a straight answer? If you haven’t got any magic anymore, how come you found me before anybody else could?”

Shake turned his head back and forth, looking at me with his amber starlit eye, and then with his milk-white scarred eye. After he’d taken a good long look, he nodded.

“All right, a straight answer. I may not be able to cast enchantment now, but not even the king and queen could change my nature. I knew what you were wishing for most, and I followed that wish.”

“How’d you know what I wish?”

“I felt it in you when we met.” A proud little grin across Shake’s tired, hungry face. It made me think of Jack when he’d just been especially clever, and I wished I could bury that thought somewhere else. “It took a while for me to understand you really do want to free your parents, not just your father but your mother too. The king and queen”—he jerked his chin toward the door, as if they waited in the hall—“never worked it out. I could have told them, of course, but they weren’t going to listen to me.” His voice went soft under the weight of anger and memory, and that milk-white eye glittered as bright as the one full of starlight. For a moment I felt something sharp under my own eye, like a knife point, and I winced. “They’re trying to sniff out your ambition, grab hold of the texture of your scheming.” Shake’s little grin spread and grew into a full-blown smile, and that smile had nothing to do with any polite feeling. “They don’t know to look for your love.”

“Why wouldn’t they figure I love my parents?”

“Love is not natural to us, Callie,” said Shake. “Not the deep, lasting love that humans know. Ordinarily, love for us comes slow and passes quick, like ripples on a pond.”

Cold trickled down my spine. I told myself Shake’s “us” didn’t really include me. I was only half Unseelie. I had just
as much human in me. Of course I loved my parents. It didn’t matter that sometimes the only thing keeping me from turning around was that I had nowhere to turn to. That was just on bad days, when things got hungry, or lonesome, or just plain hard. It didn’t count.

“Your grandparents, my parents, think you want to be a princess, Callie.” Shake’s words poked at me, searching out a soft spot. “That’s the only reason they can understand for what you’re doing. They believe you want to take their place on the Midnight Throne and that you don’t intend to wait for them to make way for you.”

That yanked me right out of my private worries, and I was glad to go. “The king and queen think I want to
kill
them?”

“Can you blame them? Especially after you went and set fire to their earthly palace and summoned a train to run over the Kansas City gate.”

“The train was an accident,” I muttered.

“You’ve got a way of creating really big accidents, niece Callie.” Shake chuckled. “They’ve got a name for you around the Midnight Throne now, you know. You’re not the Prophecy Girl anymore. They call you the Bad Luck Girl.”

Bad Luck Girl. Those words didn’t just poke; they sank straight in. Amerda had called me that, and I’d been able to let it go past. But it was different when Shake said it. It hit too close to home.

I’d always been afraid I was a jinx. I never talked about
it, not with Jack, not with anybody, but I’d always felt it. When I got near people, bad things happened. If it wasn’t for me, Mama wouldn’t be kidnapped. If it wasn’t for me, Jack wouldn’t be in danger all the time. Mrs. Constantine took me in, and now she was being magicked into believing whatever Shake wanted, whatever I wanted. Shimmy’d died because she’d tried to catch me and then help me.

I had a lot of experience not thinking about things, and I used it now. I needed something to distract me, and it needed to be something big. I made myself look at Shake. He was in the mood to talk about family, but there was only one person out of all my Unseelie relations I really wanted to know about.

“What was … what is my father like?”

“Your father?” Shake repeated slowly. He leaned back on that rickety chair and crossed his legs, making a great show of thinking hard. “Your father was different from the rest of us,” he said. “We all like humans, of course, but he was enthralled by your kind. He spent as much time in your world as he did in ours. I did try to warn our parents that he was absorbing much more than music to bring home.”

“Did he …” I bit my lip.

“Did he what?”

I shook my head and snapped the catches on my case shut. I was
not
asking this question.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to. “You want to know if he loved your mother,” my uncle whispered. “You want to know if he even
could
. Isn’t that it?”

“Yes.” Tears pricked, as bright and sharp as the anger.

“Look at me, Callie.”

I did look at him, right in the mismatched eyes.

“I said that
ordinarily
, love for us is fleeting. Your father was never ordinary. He did love your mother. Our parents couldn’t say or do anything to change it, and believe me, they tried every trick in their book. He was perfectly prepared to give up everything to be with her.”

I believed him. Maybe it was just because I wanted so bad for what he said to be true, but I did believe.

“What … what’s his real name? Mama called him Daniel, but that can’t be it.”

“Oh, now, Callie, you know with us that’s a very serious question.”

“I know. I also know you keep saying you want me to trust you.”

Shake didn’t speak for a long time after that. Finally he said, “You understand I am putting him in your hands if I tell you. You could well be used against him.”

“I know your name,” I reminded him.

There was another long pause as he thought that one over. “Donchail,” Shake whispered at last.

Now that I had the name, I knew I’d never lose it. My father was Donchail deMinuit, and he loved my mother.

“Thank you,” I said, and I really meant it. For the first time he’d given me something I could hold on to. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it was lots better than the aching nothing I’d had so far.

Shake nodded once, accepting the words. His starlit eye narrowed, and my insides set about tying themselves into sailor’s knots.

“You found something in there.” Shake jerked his chin toward the window this time. He meant the studio. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “Maybe nothing.”

“Callie, Callie.” Shake leaned closer. “I just gave you something of great value, and this is how you pay me back?”

“This ain’t about paying back.”

“Isn’t it?” He was giving me his smile again, the one that looked so clever and so similar to one of Jack’s. It was creepy and wrong, and he was doing it on purpose. I knuckled my eyes. I had so much I needed to hold on to. I had to figure out what to do with Shake, and I had to get back to the studio so I could find out what was going on around Ivy Bright, and I had to find my way through the gate to my parents. But my head was too tired to keep its grip on even one of those things. I needed time—time to sleep and time to think—but there just wasn’t any.

“There is, though,” answered Shake.

“What are you talking about?” But I already knew. I’d been wishing for time, and he’d felt it.

Shake chuckled again. “Poor Callie. She needs so much, but she doesn’t even know what she’s got. Stop pretending you’re human, little niece of mine. You are a queen-in-waiting among the Unseelies. You can have all the time you need.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re tired, Callie. You need to rest. Open yourself a gate and step outside, and stay for as long as you want.”

I stared at him. I knew my magic could open a gate in time. I’d once opened a window that looked back a hundred or so years. But I’d never thought about being able to get past time altogether.

“How?” I probably should have just told him to be quiet, but I had to admit, he had my curiosity going.

“Let me show you.”

“You can’t open gates.” That was supposed to be something only I could do, which was what all the fuss was about in the first place.

“But you’re going to let me inside, and then I’ll be able to show you how your power works.”

This was not good. In fact, this was really bad. I’d refused this idea before, and I should do it again this time, no matter how tired I was, no matter how badly I needed to understand my magic. “You just want something from me,” I said, but my voice wasn’t anything like as strong as it should have been.

“Of course I do. That doesn’t mean I can’t teach you how to use your powers as well.”

I wished I wasn’t alone. I wanted Mr. Robeson there, or Jack. I needed an anchor to keep me tied to the memory of all that Shake had done to us. The problem was, I wanted more than that. I hated not knowing about my magic. It felt
like a bad dog on a short chain inside me. I didn’t have any real idea what it was going to do when I let it off that leash. I really was tired too, all the way from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet. The thought of having time enough to sleep sounded sweeter than anything I’d heard in days. All those things got together and ganged up on the rest of my sense.

“Okay,” I said to Shake. “Show me.”

My uncle smiled until his mismatched eyes twinkled. He held out his crooked hand. It was still cool and weak. If I squeezed even a little, I’d break those bones all over again. That nasty idea didn’t linger long, however, because something else was happening. Something new pricked my mind and started worming its way into my veins, down deep into my blood. Not something, I realized. Someone.

Walk with me, niece. Let me show you your true world
.

This person inside my head wasn’t any broken bum called Shake. This was my uncle Lorcan deMinuit, a scion of the Midnight Throne. I was finally hearing his true voice, the voice that could call up magic as easily as whistling and twist it into any shape required. I had a voice like that inside me, as soon as I was ready to use it.