Golden Girl (7 page)

“Oh, no. Not dead. No more than you are.”

“No thanks to you!” My fists bunched up. Fear took it on the lam and left anger behind, spoiling for a fight. “You get out of here, or so help me I’ll magic you into the middle of next week!”

“Now there’s your father’s daughter!” That big, sloppy grin split Shake’s scarred face again. Three of his front teeth were nothing but jagged stumps, and a couple others were flat-out missing. He’d been hit in the face, hard, and there was a dent in his skull that pushed his forehead out of shape. “Don’t you worry, Callie. Things have changed. I want us to be friends. Best of friends.”

Before I could think of any kind of answer to that, the porch light snapped on overhead, and we both froze.

“What on earth is going on out there?” Mrs. Constantine’s voice sounded over a flurry of snapping of locks on the other side of the front door. She appeared on the threshold in a pink housecoat with her hair all knotted up in white rags.

“Callie LeRoux! What are you doing out this time of night? And who is this … fine gentleman?” She crossed her arms and blocked the door, all the while looking Shake up and down like the cat had not only dragged him in but took a few good chomps out of him in the process.

“Oh, um, ah …”

While I sputtered like a fool and wished Jack was here, my uncle shuffled up to my side. Before I knew what was what, he had his hand on my shoulder. His bent fingers felt thick and heavy and too cold to be normal. Something sharp dug into my mind and I felt just a little magic welling up, like blood around a splinter.

“Mrs. Constantine?” Shake held his hat over his breast.
“How do you do? Lawrence LeRoux. I understand you’ve been looking after my niece Callie since she’s been in town?”

As Shake spoke, Mrs. Constantine’s eyes went fuzzy, like she wasn’t quite seeing what was in front of her. Which she wasn’t. I knew just what she was seeing because Shake was pulling it out of me along with the magic. Whether I wanted to or not—and I really didn’t—I was conjuring up a vision of a well-dressed man holding a new snap-brim fedora as he smiled politely at my landlady. He had shiny wingtip shoes on his feet and a leather suitcase beside him with stickers on it for places such as St. Louis and Chicago.

“Mm-hmm.” Mrs. Constantine pasted a frown on her face, but now only because she thought she should. The anger had drained away as the illusion took hold. “Well, Mr. LeRoux, where’re you in from?”

“Kansas City.” Shake stepped us into the front hall so smoothly I wasn’t even sure how it happened. “What a charming house,” he said, and Mrs. Constantine puffed up with pride. “I am so sorry to have to disturb you at such an hour, but the train broke down on the way across the border. Callie had come to meet me at the station. Wound up asleep on a bench, poor girl.” He shrugged.

“Land sakes.” Mrs. Constantine shook her head in sympathy. But then, because she didn’t want it to look like she was letting anybody off the hook too easily, she added, “Callie, why didn’t you tell me your uncle was coming today?”

I opened my mouth, searching for an excuse, but Uncle
Shake squeezed my shoulder hard. It was a good thing it wasn’t the one Amerda’d gotten hold of, or the noise I’d have made would have startled everybody. As it was, I understood what he was trying to signal. He’d already got a spell around Mrs. Constantine. If I tried to say something different now, she might not believe me. Even if she did, once I broke the spell I’d still have to try to get away from Shake and throw him out of the house and the neighborhood. Then I’d have to explain to my landlady how things had gone so far that this broken bum could have said even once that he was my uncle. I wasn’t sure I could do any of that, because my legs were going all shaky again and my other shoulder was starting to set up a whole jazz band’s worth of pain. Plus, with this magic leaking out of me, I was putting myself in a spotlight. If Amerda and the Seelies had set anybody on my tail, they’d follow the feel of magic like a hungry cat following the smell of fish straight to the market door.

I had to stop this whole thing, fast, and the fastest way was to go along with it.

“But I did, Mrs. Constantine,” I said, feeling every bit the liar I was. She didn’t deserve this. She’d been nice to me. “You saw the letter when it came. I said he’d be arriving on the twelfth, and you said you’d have a room for him.”

“So you did!” Mrs. Constantine slapped her forehead, as if she was really remembering something, instead of just finding the new idea Shake and I had put into her mind. “I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on my shoulders.
Well. You just rest yourself in the parlor while I get your bed made up, Mr. LeRoux.”

Mrs. Constantine bustled into the house and up the stairs. Shake steered me through the brocade curtains to the parlor. The big cabinet radio was the only new thing in the room. It was sure newer than the pair of sofas, the four armchairs, and the card table with its mended leg. There was a grand piano covered with silver-framed photos of a plump, pretty little girl, who I had a feeling was Mrs. Constantine’s daughter. Miss Patty played that piano sometimes. I could have too, but I didn’t dare. Music brought out the magic in me even faster than people wishing.

The curtains dropped shut behind us. Shake let go of my shoulder and groped for one of the saggy armchairs. It was clear he was in pretty sad shape, but I wasn’t in the mood to feel sorry for him.

“What’d you do to me?” I wished I could shout, but I held my voice to a whisper. I couldn’t risk anybody else waking up.

“Just used a little of your magic, Callie.” Shake sat down slowly and carefully, like an old man. “Nothing to get on your high horse about.”

“Are you cracked? Slinging my magic around! They’ll find us!”

“Who will?”

“The Seelies! Every time I make a wish they’re all over me!”

“That’s because you don’t know what you’re doing.”
He had the nerve to shake his head at me. “My magisterial parents have taken my power, but they didn’t take my brains and my skill. No one beyond our Mrs. Constantine felt a thing.”

“You promise?” I hated how scared I sounded when I said it.

“I do.” He turned his amber eye to me as he looked me up and down. That eye had both light and darkness behind it, midnight and starshine all mixed up together. “Hmmm. I would have thought Shimmy would have done better by you.”

“You leave her out of this. She didn’t have any time to teach me much of anything because we were busy running away from the vigilante man
you
set on our trail!”

All the twisted good humor disappeared from Shake’s scarred face. “You kept me from my throne. It should have been mine when your father abdicated.”

“That’s not my fault!”

“No,” Shake agreed. “But I wanted you to die just the same.”

Shake—whose real name was Lorcan deMinuit—was my papa’s younger brother. Papa quit his job as heir to the Midnight Throne so he could marry my mama. This should have left Shake next in line to become the big boss for the Unseelie fairies. Problem was, I’d been born before Papa could finish with whatever passed as paperwork with the fairies. According to their law, that made me, not Shake, next in line for the throne. It turns out fairies can’t break
their own laws any more than they can break a promise. As long as I was alive, I was first in line to take over the Midnight Throne, and there wasn’t a thing Uncle Shake could do about it. Except kill me.

I started to throw up my hands, but my right shoulder pulled and the pain sparked hot.

“You’re hurt.” Shake leaned forward. “Who hurt you, Callie? What have you been doing?”

“It’s none of your business!”

“Shhhhhh!” Shake held up one broken finger to his lips. “Here comes Mrs. Constantine.”

I heard her rustling on the other side of the curtain a second later.

“Your room’s all set, Mr. LeRoux.” Mrs. Constantine came back into the parlor. “That’ll be seven-fifty for the week, meals included. Cash. In advance.” Which just goes to show you the limits of fairy magic when it’s facing a city lady running her own boardinghouse.

“Of course.”

Shake had hold of me again, and he wasn’t even touching me. My magic bled away into him as he dug into his pocket and brought out a handful of nothing. He handed that nothing to Mrs. Constantine. My landlady took it, counted it, folded it neatly, and tucked it into her housecoat. “That’s fine, then. I’ll show you up.”

I followed them up the stairs. I spent the whole climb promising myself I’d find a way to get Mrs. Constantine her money, or at least make up to her for helping Shake push
his way into her house. Of course, that’d have to be after I found out what he was actually doing here.

“Laundry is picked up on Thursdays,” Mrs. Constantine was saying as she pushed open the last door on the right, the one directly across the hall from mine. “Sheets are changed every Monday. No smoking in the rooms. No callers except in the parlor. No visitors of any kind after ten. This is a
respectable
house.”

The rooms at Mrs. Constantine’s were about as bare-bones as you could ask for—one old brass bed, a mishmash of worn-out furniture that would have been up in the attic of any house that could afford better. But everything was clean as a whistle and the roof didn’t leak. Considering that before this I’d spent a stretch sleeping in rail yards and chicken coops, it counted for a lot.

“This will do splendidly, Mrs. Constantine.” Shake looked around the room with his amber eye. I wondered where he’d been sleeping lately. I told myself I didn’t care, but I never was much of a liar. “Again, I sincerely apologize for getting you out of bed at this hour.”

“Well, these things happen, Mr. LeRoux. I’ll wish you good night now. I’m sure Callie can show you where everything is.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I agreed. I wanted her out of there. I had more than a few things left to say to Shake.

Mrs. Constantine left, and I shut the door behind her and shot the bolt. Then I turned on my uncle.

“No more games, Shake. What’re you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing, Callie. You shouldn’t be within a hundred miles of the Seelie territory.”

“I’ve got to find my parents!”

“What a coincidence. I also want to find your parents.”

“Oh, sure you do. You want to kill them too?” How had I even let him come near me? Why hadn’t I magicked him the second I recognized him?

“I told you, Callie, you got me all wrong. I want to help them, and you. I want to see you on the Midnight Throne.” He gave me his sloppy, broken-toothed grin. “Just like you’re supposed to be.”

I waited to feel his magic wrapping around me, all warm and cozy, trying to get me to believe what he said. But it didn’t come. It wasn’t possible he was telling the truth, was it? Slowly I stepped forward. I made myself look at his scarred face and milky eye, his lopsided head, and down, to his fingers.

“What happened to you?”

“You did, Callie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Shake sighed. “Well, for some reason Their Majesties weren’t too happy that I tried to kill you.”

This surprised me. Their Majesties, my grandparents, weren’t exactly the squeamish type. They certainly hadn’t shown any hesitation about dancing Jack to death—which was something we were going to have a little talk about,
just as soon as I got over being terrified at the thought of them.

“If I’d finished the job, maybe they would have thought I’d done them a favor,” said Shake, like he knew what I was thinking. Which he just might have. “But blood’s thicker, as they say, and then there was the little matter of this prophecy regarding your power over the world gates. So I had to stand trial, and it did not go well. They marked me as a traitor.” He touched the scar that ran across the lid that drooped over his milky eye. “And they broke my hands.” I winced. I couldn’t help it. When I’d first met Shake, he’d been playing a piano. I remembered how graceful his hands had been then, and how his slow, lazy music made you want to listen all day. Now those hands didn’t look like they could hold a spoon, let alone play a piano.

“I have since been cast out to walk the mortal world.” Shake smiled broadly. “Let that be a lesson to you, Callie. When you set out to challenge the Midnight Throne, don’t you dare to fail.”

“Yeah, well, I hope you don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.” I tried to fit the mad back into my voice. I didn’t want to feel anything for him. He’d hurt me and scared me and just told me to my face he wasn’t a bit sorry. But at the same time, I couldn’t help thinking how the fairies collected beautiful things and beautiful people. They probably thought making someone ugly was worse than straight-up killing him. And the king and queen of the Midnight Throne had done this to one of their sons. “I’m just the
one you tried to murder,” I said, almost as much to remind myself as to remind him. “Why should I care what you—”

“Okay, okay, Callie LeRoux.” Whatever magic he’d taken from me must have been wearing off, because the wobbles had crawled back into his voice. “Have it your own way. Now I’m tired, tired, tired. ‘
Been walkin’ all day and I’m nearly done …
,’ ” he crooned, and flashed that big gap-toothed grin again. “We’ll continue this so-pleasant conversation in the morning, isn’t that right?”

I knew what I should be doing. I should be magicking him out of there, the way I’d magicked away Ivy Bright and Ruth Markham. The problem was, I didn’t have any wishes, or anything else to feed the magic, and Uncle Shake wasn’t the only one who was tired. There was something else too. An idea was putting itself together in the back of my brain. It wasn’t a good idea. In fact, it looked awfully dangerous.

“In the morning. Right.” I turned to go.

“Callie.”

I stopped. My uncle moved faster than I would have believed. His hand closed around my bad shoulder, and I felt him dig into my magic and I yelped in pain. Then the pain was gone and he backed away and fell into the chair.

“You can go now,” he wheezed.

I left him there. I crossed the hall to my own room and shut the door. Miss Patty’s snoring hitched once and then settled in for the long haul. On the other side, Mr. and Mrs. Jones rolled over in a chorus of creaking springs and heavy-duty snoring. I took a deep breath, and another. I tried to
tell myself that this new, bad idea was from Shake, not from anywhere inside me. It didn’t work.