Golden Girl (21 page)

“Uh-oh,” murmured the lifeguard.

All my fear of water vanished. I sucked in a big breath and dove down deep. My arms and legs pushed through the water as though it wasn’t even there, until I crouched on the bottom of that pool. The lifeguard’s legs kicked overhead. I grinned and jumped.

I shot up off the bottom in a geyser of foam and bubbles, coming up behind the lifeguard and wrapping my arms around his neck. “Hey! No fair!” he shouted.

Jack was weaving between the statues. That white horse darted after him. It would have looked as silly as the rabbit if it hadn’t been for the hooves the size of soup plates, the huge snapping teeth, and the fire in its way-too-smart eyes. It somehow managed to flow between the laughing people
on the deck chairs, who gossiped and sipped their drinks and ignored the horse and us.

The lifeguard grabbed my arm where I had it looped across his shoulder, and rolled us both over. I kicked at his back, but I couldn’t land a good one. He rolled again and again, trying to hold me under or shake me off. My lungs started to burn, and desperation sank in. I got my face right up to the lifeguard’s shoulder and bit down hard.

He screamed. I kicked off against his back, shot free, and collided with another swimmer. She brushed me back and looked around in confusion. A different pair of hands grabbed hold of me, and I was out of the water, on the deck, and staring straight at the piano player.

This time nobody’d covered him with makeup. I could see his real face. My father was lean and tall, with mahogany skin and his hair cut close to his scalp. He had a strong jaw and high cheekbones, a full mouth, and deep eyes the color of smoke and storms. Those eyes set off memory sparks way in the back of my mind.

“Is it you?” he whispered. “Is it?”

That voice reached into me, and I knew him. I knew him like I knew the feel of my heart hammering against my ribs or the light from the Unseelie country.

“Papa,” I breathed.

But the lifeguard had climbed onto the blue deck and was staring at us both. “Uh-oh,” he said again.

Jack hollered. He tried to duck behind the last of the
Roman soldiers, but his foot skidded on the wet tiles and he fell hard. The horse reared and laughed, a high screaming sound, then brought its flashing hooves down toward Jack. I grabbed hold of all my magic and
shoved
.

The horse screamed again and fell sideways. While it struggled to get back on its feet, Jack launched himself into a run in the other direction. He shoved a waiter into a deck chair, spilling a tray of drinks. Now the pretty people were on their feet crying out and calling the waiter all sorts of rude names. The horse lunged after Jack, snorting.

“Oh, no you don’t!”

I whirled around just in time to see the lifeguard’s fist coming down. But a brown hand caught it, twisted, and yanked. I felt magic too, twisting just as hard, and the lifeguard went sprawling.

“Go!” my father shouted. “Get out of here!”

I charged across the deck, right at that white horse. Jack tried to run toward me, but the horse plunged forward, got hold of his shoulder in its yellow teeth, and hauled him off his feet.

“No!” I shoved at it again with everything I had. The horse dropped Jack onto the deck, turned around, and opened its mouth. My magic drove straight in and got stuck.

It was like punching tar. I yanked and backpedaled, but it was too late. The monster was sucking me in, dragging me down. Jack was hollering. The lifeguard was laughing, and so was the horse. I think I was screaming, but I couldn’t tell because I was being swallowed whole.

Callie!

There was a rope around my middle. I grabbed hold of it.

Now!

And I knew what to do. I aimed straight for the center of the dark and pitched a wish through it. The dark shattered, and I was back on the pool deck again. The horse was gone. All the swimmers were back to talking lazily and laughing all around us. The monster was in rabbit shape again, looking flat, wet, harmless, and just about dead on the pool deck. For a second I felt a flash of hatred so strong it made me stagger backward.

“Go! Go!” Papa hollered. “I’ll hold her. Go!”

“But … no!” Something shoved at me, making me turn and look.

The lifeguard was missing. So was Jack. The guard was at the bottom of the pool, and he had Jack down there with him. He had his mouth right up against Jack’s, and Jack wasn’t moving.

I dove in, straight down. I grabbed hold of both the guard’s ears and twisted hard. He howled and shook me off, but he’d let go of Jack, and Jack was floating up. He wasn’t moving. One bubble lifted slowly out of his mouth. He was drowning, maybe drowned. I grabbed the collar of Jack’s shirt and dragged him down toward the gate. I kicked and struggled and held on to Jack’s collar like grim death. I dove again, this time into the whirlwind of colors, into the place where it didn’t matter if you could breathe or not,
because it was no place and I was nothing in it, just motion. Just falling.

But I wasn’t the only one. Someone was screaming behind me. I felt the magic, scrabbling, squeezing, trying to yank us back.

Darkness rushed up, but this time I was ready for it. I held my breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and knotted my fingers tighter around Jack’s collar. We burst into the oily, black water under the Waterloo Bridge. I kicked until we broke the surface. The water stank and stung as it dripped into my eyes. Jack wasn’t moving. If it hadn’t been for the bridge supports, I would have fallen into the slime. Jack floated on the water, his eyes shut. I sobbed as I kicked, half swimming and half floundering, to tow him onto the bank. The skin all around his mouth was torn and bloody. And he wasn’t moving.

“Jack!” I grabbed his shoulders. “Jack! Wake up!”

Jack’s eyes opened. His skin was white as a sheet. He was cold. He wasn’t breathing. Footsteps sounded on the bridge. I felt Ivy coming up on us before I saw her.

I didn’t bother with magic. I just stood up between her and Jack. “Get out of here,” I said, making sure each word was clean and clear. “Get out of here, or I will kill you.”

Ivy stopped and backed away. Her face was blank and smooth as her sparkling blue eyes looked into mine. I felt her pushing at me, looking for a soft spot, but I had none left. So she bunched her fists, scrunched up her face, and screamed.

It was better than magic. All at once people were shouting and running toward us. Hands pulled me away from Ivy, and from Jack, and I was shouting something and Jack still wasn’t moving. Somebody was saying something about an ambulance. A bunch of men had crowded around Jack and were hoisting him off the ground. A woman was running up with a blanket, but they were all carrying Jack farther away from me.

“Jack! No!” I tried to lunge forward, but somebody held me.

“Calm down, Callie. Calm down,” said a deep, rumbling voice.

It was Mr. Robeson.

“Mr. Robeson!” I grabbed his big hand. “It was
them
! Jack’s hurt. I’ve got to get to him!”

As soon as my words sank in, Mr. Robeson started elbowing his way through the milling people. Ivy was crying in the middle of a crowd, everybody around her babbling and issuing nine kinds of orders. She had the nerve to meet my eyes, and I hoped she had her magic open so she could feel the hate and the promise I pushed at her. She’d pay for getting Jack hurt and for whatever was happening to my father right now back in San Simeon. She’d pay with everything she had plus interest, and she was really lucky I had to stay with Jack or the payback would have started then and there.

A whole crew’s worth of people surrounded Jack. Mr. Robeson plowed straight through them. The ambulance
pulled up, lights flashing. Two white-coated white men leapt out, while a third passed a stretcher out to them.

Jack didn’t even twitch as they laid him down on the stretcher, covered him with a blanket, and strapped him in.

“Wait!” I ran past Mr. Robeson.

“Sorry.” The nearest attendant, a beefy white guy with tired eyes, pushed me back. “Nobody allowed in but family.”

“But he’s my friend, he—”

“Rules are rules, sister.”

I gaped at him. Mr. Robeson came up behind me, anger smoldering slowly. I took hold of that anger and his hand at the same time and looked the ambulance man right in the eye.

“I’m his sister, and this is his father. You’re glad we’re here because he’s hurt bad.”

The attendant’s eyes blurred, and he nodded. “Get in—we have to hurry.”

“Callie,” said Mr. Robeson, and the warning was plain. He had an idea what I’d just done, and he did not like it.

“Please, please, don’t,” I begged before he could get any further. “I’ve got to concentrate.”

Because it wasn’t just the one attendant. I had to keep the wish up for every new person who saw us. So I had to wish at all the ambulance attendants, at the driver, and then at the nurses and orderlies who met us with a gurney at the hospital’s emergency entrance. They wheeled Jack into
a stark white examination room. I had to wish at the doctor there, who asked us all kinds of questions about Jack: his age, his weight, and whether he’d always had that red ring around his mouth. I was worn out by the time the doctor told us in no uncertain terms that it didn’t matter who we were, we had to wait in the hallway.

Mr. Robeson took my hand. His was warm and strong and real. He was sorry. Not angry or suspicious or planning. Just sorry. We sat like that for a long time. He didn’t try to talk. He just let me get on with whatever was happening inside me, and I was grateful. Hospitals are full of wishes. People wanted to live. They wanted to die. They wanted to be born. They wanted to be better. Most of all, they wanted to be somewhere else. All those wishes buffeted my head and bruised what little concentration I had left. I felt the tears trickling down my face from trying so hard and being so afraid. I couldn’t stop seeing Jack’s face all paper white. I couldn’t remember if I’d seen him breathe since I’d pulled him away from that other place.

I lost track of time. It might have been minutes or hours until the doctor came out of Jack’s room.

“Mr. Holland?”

“Yes?” Mr. Robeson stood up. “What can you tell us, Doctor? How’s the boy?”

“I’m afraid he’s in serious condition. His pulse is very irregular, and we’ve had to use oxygen.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“I can only give you a few minutes. He must not be disturbed.”

Mr. Robeson nodded, and the doctor opened the door. Kids weren’t allowed in hospital rooms. Nobody really wanted to see me going through that door, so I made sure they didn’t.

They’d taken Jack’s shirt off and put him in one of those hospital gowns. He was white as the sheets they had pulled over him. His eyes were shut. I couldn’t see the red ring around his mouth now because of the black rubber oxygen mask.

I walked over to the bed like I was wading in molasses. Mr. Robeson stayed by the door, in case someone tried to open it. I lifted up Jack’s hand. It was stone cold. I reached with my magic, the same way I’d reached for the gate. I tried to feel Jack. But Jack wasn’t there. There was a body. It was alive, kind of. But there was nobody inside. They’d bled him away.

“Jack.” I stopped, then started again. This time, I whispered his real name. “Jacob. Come back. You said you wouldn’t leave me alone. You
promised
.”

Nothing happened. I couldn’t even feel a stirring of Jack. Fear rose in me, one huge, horrible lump. I swung around to Mr. Robeson.

“You’ve got to help me.” I choked the words out. “Mr. Robeson, you’ve got to.”

“What do you need?”

I thought fast, trying to squeeze all I knew about magic and this man into some kind of idea. I needed to drag Jack back from wherever he’d been taken. I needed all the power I could muster, but I was so hollowed out from everything that had happened that I was sure to fall over any second now. But I couldn’t, because if I did, Jack would die. I needed wishes; I needed feeling, human feeling that I could take in and turn around.

“Sing,” I begged. “I can … I can use the music to pull him back.”

I could tell he didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. Mr. Robeson drew himself up ramrod straight and soldier proud. He looked down at the pair of us, weighing something in his own mind. Then he gave one solemn nod, took a long breath, and began to sing.

“We are climbing Jacob’s ladder …”

His voice was deeper than any I’d ever heard. I could have sworn it made the floor and the walls vibrate. The music of the spiritual poured straight into me. It pried the lid off my magic and let it all come rushing out. I barely had time to catch it up and shape it into a wish. I laid both my hands on Jack’s arm and closed my eyes. I stepped sideways, turned in place, rounded a corner, and stepped down.

“Every round goes higher and higher …”

I couldn’t see anything here. All I knew was the feeling of being pulled, drowned, swallowed. It was like when the ghost horse had turned on me, but worse this time. Stronger. Deeper. Pure ice cold slid into my veins and wound
around my magic. It tried to pull me under, freeze me solid, but I held on to Mr. Robeson’s singing for dear life. For both our dear lives.

“Brothers, brothers, we are climbing …”

Blind, I groped farther into the cold. I was cold as death. Frozen to death. I strained to open my senses, but the cold was too thick. I was crying, I was terrified. I grabbed hold of that music, wrapped it around all my memories of Jack, and pushed it out in front of me.

Jack! I’m here! I’m here!

I stretched, I strained. I waited. There was no time, and there was all the time in the world, and I was dying from stretching out and having to wait.

Then I heard it. The faintest breath of a whisper.

Callie?

I threw myself forward, paying Mr. Robeson’s music out behind me like a lifeline—and I slammed straight into a wall. I screamed and reeled. Somebody snickered.

Well, well
, drawled my uncle’s voice.
Well, little niece, what’s this?

For a moment I couldn’t understand what was happening. It seeped in slowly.
Oh, no. Oh, no, not now, not now
.