Dust girl

12

“No. No. This ain’t right.” I looked to Jack for some kind of help, but he was just sitting there with his jaw hanging open like it had come unhinged. “This can’t be right.”

“It is right.” Shimmy straightened up, smoothing her skirt.

“You, Callie LeRoux, are the heir to the Midnight Throne.” Shake smiled and blew another big cloud of smoke. His gold-and-silver eyes glittered on the other side of the cloud, and I shivered.

“Your grandparents have had us out looking for you for the last thirteen years,” Shimmy went on.

Jack finally managed to pull himself back together a little bit. “If it’s what you say… why’d her papa leave? Why didn’t he bring her mama to the… her grandparents’ kingdom?”

Shimmy probably would have ignored him, but I folded my arms and cocked my head, because it was a really good question. Shimmy saw my stubborn face and sighed. “Your papa was supposed to marry the Seelie princess, but he’d already fallen in love with your mama. So he decided to run off and be a mortal man with a mortal wife.” Shimmy plucked Shake’s cigarette out of his fingers and took a drag. “As if Their Majesties were ever gonna let that happen.” She blew the smoke toward the ceiling and handed the cigarette back to Shake.

He runs for that other woman, but he can’t run fast enough. The Shining Ones capture him and lock him away, but he still won’t marry their woman. The room tried to start spinning. I knotted my fists and dug in my heels. There was no telling how much longer these two would feel like talking. I would just have to get dizzy later.

“So where is he?”

Shimmy shrugged. “If you don’t know, nobody does.”

“Do you know?” Shake looked at the glowing tip of that cigarette, but I could feel him watching me.

I shook my head and tried hard to think about the taste of the barbeque we’d just finished, instead of what Baya had told me. Just in case they could read minds or something. If they were… were… fairies, they just might.

Shimmy frowned, and I felt something bunch up tight inside her.

“Well, that’s all right,” said Shake. “We’ve got you here and that’s what counts. Your grandparents are gonna be real happy when we take you to them.” His eyes sparkled through the smoke again.

I was beginning to wish I hadn’t eaten so much, because my stomach and heart were both flipping back and forth, not sure which way to settle. On the one hand, I did not like Shake. I did not like the way he looked at me with those glittery gold-and-silver eyes, as if he hadn’t had enough dessert.

But at the same time, he’d said I had grandparents. Grandparents. Mama’s parents were dead. I’d never really let myself think about my papa having family. Longing rose up in me as strong as the hunger had been. Right then I didn’t care if they were a king and a queen; what mattered was that they were alive and I could talk to them.

“If her grandparents want to find her so bad, why aren’t they here?” prompted Jack. It was funny: he was the one who’d wanted all this fairy stuff to be true, but now that it was, he couldn’t seem to believe a word they said.

Shimmy rolled her eyes. “Since when does the king run his own errands?”

I thought that made sense, but there was no way to be sure. Too much had piled up in my mind. I needed room to breathe and clear it all out.

“I know it’s tough, honey.” Shimmy laid her hand over mine. It was cool and soft. Shimmy was not somebody who did a lot of work. “And we’ll help you all we can.”

“That’s right.” Shake nodded and stubbed out his cigarette. I felt a current between them so strong that if I’d thrown a rock at it, I’d have struck sparks.

“I ain’t staying with you.”

“None of us is staying here. Too many of them around.” Shake jerked his chin toward the window. “Looking for you, may I add. We gotta head for the city gates and get you safe inside.”

“No.” I shook my head again. “I gotta find Mama. When that’s done, I’ll come see my… whoever wants to talk to me.”

“Your mama.” Shake made a face like he wanted to spit. “They got your mama.”

“Who?”

“Them,” snapped Shimmy. “The pretty, shiny ones. The bright, light, straight, and uptight.”

“You mean the Seelie court,” said Jack.

Shake tilted his head toward Jack, like he was just seeing him properly for the first time. I edged a little closer to Jack, because something way down inside me said he didn’t want Shake to see him, not really. “That’s right, young man. They got her but good,” Shake said, all slow and thoughtful.

“Then I’ll get her back,” I said, trying to sound like it was no big deal.

“Ha!” laughed Shake. “You don’t understand, do you? They got her. She won’t want to leave now.”

“Don’t listen to him, Callie,” said Jack. “He’s just trying to get you all mixed up.”

He was right. I shouldn’t listen. They’d already tried to fool me twice that I knew about.

“You trust this boy over one of your kin?” Shake asked softly. “Callie girl, you ain’t even begun to find out what kind of liar he is.”

I was glad he said that, because it reminded me who my friends really were. “You leave Jack alone!”

“You’re the one who should leave him alone.” Shimmy leaned forward, her brown eyes shimmering, her voice low and urgent. “You come with me and Shake. We’ll take you to your grandparents. They’re the ones who want you. They’re the ones who will teach you who you really are, Your Highness,” she added.

I felt the current rolling between Shake and Shimmy again. It was almost like the feeling of the magic when it shot through my blood. All at once, Shimmy shifted gears.

“Poor Callie,” she said suddenly. “You’ve had a bad time, haven’t you? And so much to wrap your head around. You deserve a treat. Both of you.” She tossed a smile toward Jack. “I tell you what. Why don’t the pair of you go to the pictures?” She got her purse from where it sat on the back of the piano and pulled out two green cardboard stubs.

“Shimmy…,” said Shake. “That is not a good idea.”

“Oh, hush. It’s a fine idea.”

“You’ll be sendin’ ’em straight to…”

“The movies.” Shimmy cut him off firmly and laid the tickets down on the table.

Jack and I glanced at each other. Did we have our own current that Shimmy and Shake could feel?

“I don’t…,” I started.

“Go on, go on, take them.” She pushed the tickets toward me, and I remembered how I’d pushed that bread pudding toward Letitia Hopper, just before I tried to lay her out with Mama’s silver tray. “Enjoy yourselves for a change. It’ll be good for you. We can talk more later.”

To my surprise, Jack picked up those tickets and slipped them into his coat pocket. “Thank you kindly, Miss Shimmy,” he said. “We were just talking about how much fun it would be to get to the picture show, weren’t we, Callie?”

Sometimes you don’t need a kick in the ankle to get the hint. “That’s right. We were talking about that.”

“Well then!” Shimmy spread her hands and beamed.

Shake frowned hard, shook his head, and lit a fresh cigarette. The smell of all that smoke made my stomach churn.

Shimmy grabbed Shake’s new cigarette from his fingers and took a long drag. “Have fun, Callie LeRoux,” she said, exhaling smoke with her words. “And we’ll see you around.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

And that was that. With Shimmy and Shake grinning like Christmas morning and the Fourth of July, Jack and I walked out the door into the twilight that had fallen across Constantinople. The door swung shut behind us. Jack grabbed my hand and hustled us both off the porch. He didn’t stop until we were a good twenty yards down the street.

“What do you think?” Jack asked, jerking his chin back in the direction we’d come.

There were a thousand answers to that, but none of them were any good. “I think she wanted us to go to the movies awful bad, but Shake didn’t. Why do you suppose that was?”

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. “That was a con game if ever I saw one.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want to get a mark, I mean a person, to do something they shouldn’t. So you and your partner, you stage an argument. Make out like one of you is telling the mark something they shouldn’t know. Your partner says, ‘No, no, don’t tell him that!’ which makes the mark think he’s on to something, that maybe he’s outsmarted you. Next thing you know, that mark’s doing exactly what you want.”

“Like in the story when Brer Rabbit says to Brer Fox, ‘Don’t throw me in that briar patch,’ when that’s exactly what he wants to have happen.” I did not like the sound of it. I did not like the smile on Shake’s face or the light in his glittery eyes.

Jack glowered hard back toward Shimmy’s. The dark was lowering slowly, covering the clapboard houses and all the world around them. “Besides, they were lying to your face about what they want with you.”

“What?”

“They didn’t say a word about the prophecy. It was all about Princess Callie and how your family wants you back so bad. Nothing about gates or worlds or choices.”

He was right, of course, and I could have kicked myself for forgetting. I’d been all caught up in the idea that I had kin who might actually want to see me. Part of me started wondering if it was Letitia Hopper who’d been lying, but I shook that off. She’d been too far gone with her own hunger to fool anybody. I knew what that felt like now.

“So what do we do?”

“We don’t go into that briar patch,” said Jack firmly.

“What else are we gonna do?” Shimmy wanted us-wanted me-to see something, that much was certain, and I was already wondering what that something might be. Shimmy had played it smart. She’d told me just enough of the truth to get me thinking about what else I could find out from her. It was a con game, all right. Just like Jack said.

“We get to the rail yard and hop the first train west. When we find your parents, they’ll be able to tell us what’s really going on.”

He was right. Of course he was right. We couldn’t do what Shimmy and Shake wanted because we couldn’t trust them. Probably that whole princess thing was a kind of fairy story, just to try to get me to come along quietly. Probably I didn’t even have grandparents.

Jack set his face toward the rail yard, pulled his hat down low against the spreading dark, and started walking. The only thing I could think to do was follow, never mind that I felt like I was leaving bits of myself in the dust with every step.