The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen (21 page)

Except that Bergdorf probably knew where Tiffany was. And I’d have to go past her if I ran away, and how lame would that be?

Before he even reached us, Stonewall started to apologize. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was horrible, I know. I did it because I needed to get in with the East Siders. The whole plan just came to me, like a flash of lightning.” Stonewall looked embarrassed. “I guess I was afraid if I explained, it wouldn’t work right. So I just went with it.”

“You
went with it
,” Danskin said. “Then go with this. What you did was mean, low down, and hurtful. It was like you’d suddenly turned into some kind of evil wizard or demon prince. You freaked us
out
.”

I got the impression Stonewall was counting to ten. “I’m
sorry
,” he said at last. “Really and truly. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I didn’t mean any of it. Please believe me. It was totally Folk-like, and I deserve to be turned into a cockroach.” He took a deep breath. “Is everything copacetic? Neef?”

The kobold stumped over with our pitcher of milk, slapped it down on the table, and stumped away.

I looked at Stonewall. “I’m too mad to get over it just like that. But I’ll work on it.”

Danskin adjusted his sling. “What she said.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Fortran said. “But I do wonder what
she’s
doing here.”

Through all this, Bergdorf had been glaring at the painting of the bowling dwarfs as if it offended her. Now she looked at Fortran, her eyes as big and blue as Tiffany’s—the result of Elizabeth Factor’s makeover, I guessed. “Since you ask, Geek Boy,
she
is wishing you’d turn into the frogs you so gigantically resemble.”

Stonewall rolled his eyes. “Bergdorf, we’ve
talked
about this. You said you’d cooperate.”

Bergdorf shrugged. “I’m here, aren’t I? Not that anybody seems gigantically excited about it.”

She obviously meant to sound snotty, but she only managed pathetic. Bergdorf was scared. And from the way she wasn’t looking at me, I figured it was me she was scared of.

I decided to show her the Wild Child could be nice—when she wanted to be. “We’re delighted you decided to join us, Bergdorf,” I said in my best Astris tea-party voice. “Please sit down and have some milk.”

Bergdorf glared at me. I smiled as warmly as I could and offered her my seat. While I was getting another chair, I reminded myself of the Diplomat’s handy hints for negotiators. Listen more than you talk. Smile a lot. Let someone else ask the questions.

Everybody else must have been remembering, too, because the silence went on for a long time. Finally, Bergdorf said, “I promised Tiffany I wouldn’t tell. But I so can’t deal anymore, and Stonewall said you might be able to help.”

Mukuti the Kindhearted gave her a sympathetic smile. “We’ll do our best.”

“When we’ve got the skinny,” Espresso added practically.

“So tell us everything,” said Fortran.

“Okay,” said Bergdorf. “So Tiff and I go to Madame Elizabeth Factor for makeovers. She’s got all these magic mirrors, and they show what’s wrong with you, and then she fixes it? So we do the makeovers, and it’s horrible but totally worth it, and then Madame Factor asks Tiff if she’ll do her a gigantic favor, and Tiffany’s like, Duh, of course. Then Madame Factor gives Tiff this package and says it’s a mirror with a curse on it and Tiff has to get rid of it for her. And then we go to her house and unwrap it, and, OMG, it’s the Magic Magnifying Mirror of the Mermaid Queen!”

“So she recognized it right away?” Fortran asked.

Bergdorf looked insulted. “Hello? Gold star in Talismans? Tiff was like, Great Talisman, I can know everything in the world, I can even control the Dragon of Wall Street, gigantic power, I’ll show everybody, blah, blah, blah. I was like, do you even know how to use it? And she was like, I’m so smart I’ll figure it out.”

We exchanged glances. Espresso spoke for all of us. “So did she?”

“Not so much. But she wouldn’t quit trying. I got all bored and started looking through her closet to see if there was anything I wanted to borrow. And then I heard her saying it.” Bergdorf stopped short.

“Saying what?” Fortran asked eagerly.

“
You
know. The thing you say to mirrors.”

“‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’?” Mukuti asked, puzzled.

Bergdorf’s face was as white as her untouched milk. “No! The other thing. The incantation that summons
her
.”

“Her?” I asked.

Espresso suddenly looked sick. “She means the one she challenged you to summon at Hallowe’en, Neef.”

Mukuti gasped. “The Angry One?”

There was a moment of horrified silence. Then Danskin said what I was thinking. “That wasn’t too bright, was it?”

Bergdorf glared at him. “Well, she paid for it.” Her voice teetered, and she bit her bottom lip. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You don’t have to,” Stonewall said gently.

“Yes, she does,” Fortran objected. “I want to hear. Did Old Five-Inch Nails rip her into strips? Ow, Espresso. That
hurt
.”

Bergdorf’s chin came up. “I saved her, as it happens. I said the genie spell.”

Everyone looked even more shocked than they had before. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “What?”

“The genie spell,” Bergdorf said, sounding defiant. “The thing that puts genies in bottles or lamps or whatever and keeps them there. They teach it in Advanced Talismans, for emergencies. This was an emergency, so I said it. And it worked: the Angry One disappeared.”

There was a long silence, broken by Stonewall. “So what you’re saying is, you bound a wild urban power, who doesn’t belong to any Neighborhood or accept any authority, in one of the Great Talismans of New York Between?”

Bergdorf’s eyes widened. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

“Whoa,” Fortran said.

The kobold appeared with a fresh pitcher of milk. He traded it for the old one and stomped off again.

“Okay,” Stonewall said to Bergdorf. “What else didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged. “You wanted to know about Tiffany.”

“So, what
about
Tiffany?” I asked.

Tiffany had been a gigantic mess. Her face was all bloody and she was moaning and there was blood on the white wall-to-wall carpet and her new designer sweater was totally ruined.

“I was this close to a meltdown,” Bergdorf said, “and then I hear her fairy godmother knocking, and she’s like, Is everything all right, girls? And I’m all, Everything’s fine, Mother Carey, thanks for asking. Like she was going to believe
that
. So Tiff quick stuffs the mirror down her jeans and Mother Carey comes in and starts screaming that Tiff’s totally ruined and all her hard work’s gone for nothing. I get out before she decides it’s all my fault, and that’s all I know. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“So where’s Tiffany?” Airboy burst out impatiently.

I sighed. “New York’s a big city. She could be anywhere.”

Stonewall shook his head. “She’s ugly now, remember? Mother Carey would send her where nobody would care what she looks like.”

Mukuti gasped. “You mean, she sent her
Outside
?”

Bergdorf looked shocked. “Even Mother Carey’s not
that
evil. No, she’s got to be in the other place, where changelings go when they lose their looks.”

“There’s a
place
for that?”

Bergdorf shot me a disbelieving look. “Like your fairy godmother isn’t threatening you with it all day and night? I almost ended up there when I got zits. I swear, I have nightmares about it.”

“Me, too,” Danskin said. “The Artistic Director wanted to send me there when I broke my arm, but my fairy godfather persuaded him that I could be fixed.”

Airboy said, “The Mermaid Queen doesn’t care what you look like. On the other hand, when she gets mad at you, she drowns you, so I guess it all evens out.”

And I’d felt sorry for myself for being thrown out of the Park.

“Right,” Stonewall said. “Different strokes, I guess. In City Neighborhoods, they mostly send their unwanted changelings to the Bowery.”

Even in the Park, we knew that the Bowery was all about junk. The Bowery Bum collected it: broken talismans, outgrown bogeymen, worn-out spells, out-of-work hobgoblins, cracked mirrors, bad-luck demons, nicked swords, lost hopes, bad fairies of many lands.

And broken-down changelings, apparently.

“The Bowery,” I said. “Great. The worst Neighborhood in New York Between. Anybody got a magic sword I can borrow? A Helmet of Invisibility? A Horse Swifter Than the Wind?”

Nobody laughed.

Espresso burst out, “That rule about flying solo, that’s just off-time jive. I’m going with you.”

I was trying to think of some way of saying no without hurting her feelings when Airboy beat me to it. “I’m Neef’s sidekick,” he said. “I’ll go.”

I opened my mouth to ask if he had a quest pass, then closed it again. Some questions it’s better not to ask.

 

 

T
here’s always a three-day weekend around Hallowe’en, so at least I knew exactly when I’d be going to the Bowery. In the meantime, all I had to do was at least pretend to pay attention to my lessons. Questing? Piece of cake. Mortal History? Not so much.

When I wasn’t trying to sit still, I was drinking dirty milk at the Mansion and trying to make plans. What made this difficult was that nobody really knew much about the actual Bowery. Espresso, who was turning into a Folk lorist Astris would have been proud of, was full of fun facts about roving gangs of snappily dressed Bowery Boys and their little silver knives, and rogue vampires who drank fairy blood even though they were allergic to it because it gave them beautiful dreams. But not even Stonewall knew where changelings went once they’d been banished there.

The whole thing was starting to give
me
nightmares.

Airboy finally lost patience.

“The Bowery runs into the Canal,” he said. “The Canal runs into the East River on the Lower East Side. I’ll meet you on the Grand Street pier two hours after dawn. Then we’ll play it by ear.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

 

The next morning, I paced the dock at the south end of Grand Street, watching the water for Airboy.

It was frost spirit weather, touched with a chill wind and the promise of rain. I dug my hands into the pockets of my black coat and wished I’d asked Astris for an umbrella.

The pier was busy. Two trollish longshoremen in homburgs staggered by, carrying a huge wooden crate between them. “Out of the way,
maidele
,” one grunted. “You want you should be squished flat like a bug?”

I wandered away from the water to the foot of Grand Street, where peddlers hawked pickles and potato knishes and old clothes from pushcarts. A fiddler perched on a roof played a lively mazurka. I’d just bought a bag of roasted chestnuts when I heard a terrified shout.

“Help! A sea demon!
Gevalt!
”

I bet I knew that sea demon.

Everybody in earshot rushed to the end of the pier. I elbowed and shoved and wiggled my way through the crowd. When I finally made it to the front, I saw two giant longshoremen advancing threateningly on a small, scrawny, dripping black figure with a many-pocketed Harness strapped across its chest.

“Stop!” I yelled. “
Hert oyf!
He’s not a demon! He’s a mortal changeling, like me.”

The longshoreman eyed me doubtfully. “He don’t look like you,
maidele
.”

“We’re in school together,” I said. “Miss Van Loon’s. We’re on a quest.”

The longshoreman shook his head stubbornly. “Mortals have hair. He don’t have hair. And how come he don’t say the Words?”

Airboy yanked off his merrow cap and recited the Words of Protection proper to the Lower East Side. The crowd laughed and agreed that anybody who spoke Yiddish that badly was probably harmless. An old
alte-zachin hendler
popped a bright blue sweater from her pushcart over Airboy’s head. It hung down past his knees and hid his hands.

“So the
boychik
shouldn’t freeze,” she said. “You want I should find you some shoes? It’s not so healthy to walk
borves
on the city street.”

“I have shoes.” Airboy snaked his hands inside the sweater. The
alte-zachin hendler
and I watched as the sweater bulged and wriggled like a sackful of gremlins. When the hands reappeared, flourishing sneakers and the glamourist’s magic map of New York, the peddler applauded.

Airboy flushed and handed me the map. “Figure out where we’re going, will you?”

I studied the map while the
alte-zachin hendler
watched, probably to see if we’d do something else amusing. Unfamiliar names and buildings popped out at me. “Krimhild’s Garden,” I read. “The Oompa-pa Music Garden. Woden’s Flophouse. CBGB. Do you know what any of this means?”