Unlucky Charms

  Now the ogre came plowing through the trees, bellowing and holding a third moped over its head. John’s phone rang and went to voice mail. He readied his sword, and Finchbriton set the moped alight so that the beast dropped it on itself. Then the little bird let loose with an inferno that engulfed the ogre itself, transforming the monster into a crackling blue blazing nightmare. And still it advanced, oblivious. Finchbriton sputtered, his flame spent, and barely made it back to John’s shoulder.

  “Tell your daughter …,” said Prince Fi. “Tell her I rode in a pocket.”

  “Come now,” said John. “You know neither one of us is going to see Polly again.”

  The ogre slammed his fiery fist down, and John rolled to the right, came up with his sleeve smoldering. He struck the ogre’s arm with his sword.

  “I don’t think this thing is even sharpened,” he muttered. Then he ducked another swing from the ogre and plunged the sword tip into its belly. Sharpened or no, the blade went in, but then the monster turned and yanked the weapon from John’s hand. John’s phone rang again.

  “Perhaps we should answer?” said Fi.

  John took off running and called the number back. The ogre followed, dizzy and half blind from the smoke of his own burning flesh.

  “Dad!” said Scott. “I’ve been calling.”

  John was shocked into silence for a moment, and so was Scott. He’d said Dad. But it didn’t seem like the time to discuss it.

  “I know,” John answered. “Sorry. Been busy.”

  “Are you still near the museum? We’re circling Russell Square right now in the poppadum truck.”

  “That’s terribly good news. Meet me at the northeast corner.”

  He pushed through a wild hedgerow and emerged at the corner of the square, but the truck hadn’t arrived yet. And now he found he was right against another of those pointy iron fences he hadn’t wanted to vault before. He set about gingerly climbing over it.

  “Hurry, man!” said Fi. Finchbriton chirruped.

  Then there was a great rustle behind him, and he turned to see the ogre break through the bushes. It swayed, lurched, a smelly black cinder. It raised both arms and roared in horrid victory. A frozen moment followed. Then it pitched forward, falling on its face and driving the longsword deep into its gut. And then it was still.

  The truck pulled up, and John stumbled over the fence to meet it. The back opened, and Scott put out his hand.

  “Punched the queen again, didn’t you?”

  “To be fair, this was an entirely different queen.”

  When he thought they were far enough away, when he heard distant sirens, Erno allowed himself a glance back. There was a dark tower of smoke rising up from where he thought John’s house should be.

  Emily was half awake, squinting foggily over Biggs’s shoulder. “No surprise,” the big man said. “Like t’ burn things.” Erno agreed—he remembered what the Freemen had done to Biggs’s treehouse—but he was thinking of the goblins. So was Harvey.

  “We should have let them go,” said the rabbit-man.

  CHAPTER 17

  The new address, the one Erno had found, was on a sunny little street called St. George, in Islington, in the north of London. It was lined with friendly trees and tall row houses. They’d all made it here, and they’d all converged quite naturally on this particular house without even checking the address—it was like one rotten fang among a set of otherwise fine teeth. A neglectful gray, with scabby wood and pockmarked masonry. A tiny yard that somehow gave the impression of being both dead and overgrown at the same time. A garden where all the troublemaker plants came to smoke.

  They’d converged on this house because they all felt, without realizing it consciously, that they belonged in a place like this. They were home. They stood in front of their new home now, exposed and unsure how to proceed. It wasn’t even noon.

  “Why is there a big sign that says TOILET?” asked Erno.

  “Because you can’t read,” Emily answered. “It says TO LET.”

  “Oh, right. Why is there a big sign that says TO—”

  “It means for rent. The house is for rent.”

  There was a phone number at the bottom of the sign. On a whim, Erno dialed it. After a moment, he held the phone to Emily. “Listen.”

  It was a voice-box message from the building’s owner. He was on holiday, it said, wasn’t showing the property right now, but leave your name and number, etc.

  “It’s … Dad,” said Emily. “It’s Mr. Wilson.”

  “Really?” said Scott.

  “Then this is definitely th’ place,” said Mick.

  “Whatever place this is,” said John.

  They continued to stare at it and didn’t notice the little girl approaching from behind until Finchbriton twittered.

  “’S haunted,” the girl said, her tone letting them know that haunted houses bored her personally, but she thought maybe these nice people with their bird and cat might be interested.

  “It does look pretty scary, doesn’t it?” John turned and said, smiling.

  “These squatters?” said the girl. “Were squatting in it. That means they were living there for free. And one of them? Turned into a stag. So the other squatters ran out screaming, ‘HE TURNED INTO A BLOODY GREAT STAG,’ and no one’s been in since.”

  Everyone mulled this over.

  “Haunted,” the girl concluded. “I can’t play right now. My mum’s making curry. I’d invite you, but I’m not allowed to talk to strangers. What’s a ghost’s favorite fruit?”

  “Is it booberries?” asked John.

  “Specterines?” said Merle.

  “It depends on the ghost. Okay, bye.”

  They watched her cross the street.

  “That girl was weird,” said Polly.

  “You were exactly like her not two years ago,” Scott replied.

  Emily was studying the house. “Are you guys all thinking what I’m thinking?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Scott, nodding. There’s a fairy in there, turning people into animals.

  “There’s a rift in that house that leads to Pretannica, the magical Britain,” Emily finished.

  Scott looked at the others. “Wait—is that what we were all thinking?”

  “I wasn’t really thinking anything,” said Erno.

  “I was thinking of my brothers,” said Fi.

  “I was thinking about that chip shop we pathed back by the tube thtation,” said Harvey. “Could anyone elthe go for thome chipth right now?”

  Emily looked exasperated. “When someone makes the Crossing, they have to trade places with another living thing of similar size on the other side, remember? Some squatter got a trip to Pretannica, and a stag ended up here. C’mon.” She strode right up to the house, stepped onto the porch, and pushed through the door.

  The building was broken up into single-room flats and zippered up the middle by a staircase so out of plumb it was nearly a ramp.

  “Nobody try going upstairs,” said Merle.

  The ground floor had two flats, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a door to the basement. The ceilings were clouded over with water stains. The electricity was off, but John showed them little coin-slot boxes in each room that could be paid with pound coins to turn it on, as if the whole house was a grim nickelodeon. They got the juice flowing in the kitchen, which flustered an anxious, naked lightbulb in the ceiling and set the refrigerator to jittering back and forth between the cabinets like a bumper car. There was a single sheet of paper stuck to the fridge with a pie-shaped magnet, and the vibrations sent it skating across the surface of the freezer door until Erno unstuck it and gave it a looking over.

  Emily, meanwhile, was blithely leading everyone into the basement. The door opened onto a creaky but serviceable set of stairs and a pull chain that wasn’t attached to any actual lightbulb. And now Emily hesitated at the edge of the dense blackness. “Here,” said Merle as he lit his flashlight. The cold spill of it fell on an old stone wall, a concret
e slab floor, the flinch of a cricket, other bugs, lots of bugs—and then horns, hooves, bones.

  “Gah! Skeleton horse!” said Scott before he could stop himself. There was a polite pause.

  Emily said, “I think it’s the stag—”

  “Okay, yeah. I got it.”

  It was almost entirely skeletonized. The lower jaw had nearly fallen away and gave it a look that was more or less completely terrifying. Its ribs had come loose and were set like kindling on the floor. Something slick and dark twisted in the kindling.

  “Ooh, careful there,” said John. “That looks like a black adder.” The snake coiled itself into a question mark, a formal written request to be left alone.

  Further investigation of the basement would reveal a lot more bugs, some food wrappers, and another skeleton (they’d eventually agree on badger), but the real discovery was a large cabinet against the wall opposite the stairs.

  It was tall and plain, shabby really, with symmetrical doors. They opened these carefully to find that the back and floor of the cabinet had been removed, and a small octagon was drawn in chalk just behind it on the wall. Emily waved at it.

  “Ta-da, the rift. He put a wardrobe in front of it,” she added, smirking. “I guess that was his idea of a joke.”

  “I wonder if the rift’s open,” said Merle.

  “It’s open,” said Scott.

  Most of the rest turned to look at him. Not Polly and John, though. They were still staring at the octagonal rift as well, tilting their heads and squinching up their eyes.

  “It’s kinda … glimmery,” said Polly.

  “It looks like oil on water,” said John.

  Emily frowned at the chalk octagon. Because she could still only hear and not see the Fay among them, she said “Mick, Harvey, are you down here? Can you see what they’re talking about?”

  “Nope,” said Harvey.

  “No,” said Mick. “Maybe it’s ’cause they’ve fairy blood, but they were born here? They’re of both worlds.”

  “The rift’s bigger than the octagon Mr. Wilson drew,” said Scott. “Like, four times bigger. Mick could walk right through it.”

  “It’s growing,” said Emily. “Probably gets bigger and bigger toward May Day.” She grinned. “Who wants to go to Pretannica?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Scott slept through the afternoon in one of the musty ground floor apartments and awoke to find plans crackling all around the house. They’d gotten the lights working in the basement, which didn’t really do the basement any favors appearance-wise, and had moved the wardrobe aside. The rift was noticeably larger even than it had been before Scott went to sleep. In the corner now was a stack of metal cages, ropes, stakes, and bags and bags of animal feed.

  Scott eyed the cages blearily. “For the … snake?” But the snake was still coiled in its little tepee of ribs.

  “We seem to have a working arrangement with the snake,” said Emily. “Just don’t put any part of yourself near his mouth; he’s poisonous. No. The cages are for whatever comes through the rift.”

  Scott thought. “Because …”

  “Because some of us are going through there, and when we do, it’ll only be because something else happens to be on the other side. Hopefully it’ll be an animal, and we can capture that animal and keep it here in the basement to swap it back for our team when they’re ready to be extracted.”

  “When our team is ready to be extracted?”

  Emily shrugged. “Your dad is big on this kind of talk.”

  “But then …,” said Scott. “What if the thing that comes through isn’t an animal? What if it’s a Pretannican human, or an elf?” Or an ogre? Or a dragon?

  “At this point our plan is mostly hoping it won’t be.”

  Scott glanced at the snake again. “Do you think that thing is from Pretannica? Maybe it isn’t even a regular snake. Maybe it’s magic or, like, an enchanted prince.”

  Polly walked up as he said this. “You should definitely kiss it,” she said.

  “Ha ha. Shut up. Speaking of enchanted princes—”

  Just then Fi surfaced from Polly’s jacket pocket. “Well met, Scott,” he said.

  “Oh. Oh, hey, Fi. I didn’t think you liked pockets.”

  “It’s been brought to my attention recently that I should try new things,” said the prince.

  Mick hopped down the stairs with two walkie-talkies. “Got ’em,” he said. “We ready to do this?”

  “Ready if you are,” said Emily.

  “Wait,” Scott said to Mick. “Are you going to Pretannica right now? And a walkie-talkie? That’s never going to work, is it?”

  Emily took one of the walkie-talkies from Mick. “We know it will, thanks to your mom’s research. Remember? She said so in an email.”

  “Asking her all those scientific questions was your idea,” Scott reminded Emily. “I was mostly skimming to make sure she hadn’t been kidnapped by Freemen.”

  “Well,” said Emily. “Her research showed that all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum bounced back from the rift in Antarctica except radio waves.”

  Mick got in position where the octagon was drawn and said, “This abou’ right, kids?”

  Scott narrowed his eyes. The shimmering octagon was transposed over and around and through Mick—he couldn’t believe the elf couldn’t feel it. “Step just a hair to your left. That’s good.”

  “So now what?” said Polly. “We just wait for something Mick’s size to wander by on the other side?”

  “That’s right.”

  Polly fidgeted. “That sounds like it’ll take forever. I’m gonna get a snack.”

  “No, Polly, please stay,” said Emily. “We may need help with whatever comes across.”

  Mick looked anxious but excited. “Goin’ home,” he muttered. “Never thought I’d see it. Scott? If … if somethin’ bad happens an’ I can’t get back, don’t yeh cry. Livin’ ou’ my days in a doomed world won’t be so bad if it’s home.”

  “You … you don’t mean that.”

  “I’m Irish. We all think we’re doomed anyway.”

  It would have been a good exit line, but the truth was they had to wait another fifteen minutes before anything happened. But then it happened. Polly gasped, so Scott knew she saw it, too. He didn’t think Mick and Emily realized anything was going on. Mick’s shape grew dark, flat, and then it joined with another shape, something sharp eared and bushy tailed and quadrupedal. Behind Scott, the adder hissed. Then Mick was gone, and a fox was in the basement instead.

  It crouched low and darted off to a corner as Polly made a grab for it. Scott took a cage from the stack and tried to help her, but the little fox was everywhere, its claws ticking on the hard floor—up and down the stairs, nearly bitten by the adder, U-turning around Emily, who so far hadn’t even gotten up from where she was sitting.

  “Come in, Mick,” she said into the walkie-talkie. “Are you there? Over.”

  The radio crackled. “It’s IRELAND!” said Mick. “I’d know it wi’ my eyes closed. An’ the glamour! Sweet Danu, the glamour. I’m gettin’ fluthered on it. Um, over.”

  “Hmm,” said Emily to the others as they scrambled around her. “If it leads to Ireland, then the snake can’t be from the rift. There are no snakes in Ireland, you know.” The fox turned, an orange firecracker, and the Doe kids turned too, their sneakers scuffing, Scott accidentally whanging Polly with the metal cage. “I bet a lot of little Pretannican rodents and things trade places with all the bugs down here, and the adder just realized this basement made for easy hunting.” Emily spoke into the radio. “Mick, it’s going to be a minute before we extract you, we have a rogue fox situation in the basement. Over.”

  “No rush. Over.”

  “Now that I think about it,” Emily told Scott and Polly and Fi, who had just managed to maybe corner the thrumming little fox with the cage and a jacket, “we should have started out with Mick already in the cage. Then the fox would have just popped up in ther
e. I’m sorry, I’ve been so distracted.”

  Finally they coaxed the animal into the hutch, and everyone seemed relieved, fox included. They put it back in position over the rift.

  “Mick, fox is in the henhouse. Over.”

  “Is that a code yeh just made up to mean it’s back on the rift? Over.”

  “Yes. Over.”

  Maybe thirty seconds passed, and then the fox’s form went dark, and was conjoined with Mick’s, and then it was just the leprechaun in the cage, looking sort of magnificent.

  “Get me out of this thing,” he said, smiling.

  “Mick!” said Emily, jumping to her feet. “I can see you! Is that really what you look like?”

  “More wrinkled than I recall,” said Fi.

  Scott opened the cage door, so Mick tossed him a tip—a gold coin, almost worn smooth, the faintest portrait of a bearded king on its obverse side, a dragon on the other.

  “Where’d you get this?” asked Scott.

  “Found it,” said Mick. He was grinning from ear to ear. “An’ for the lady,” he added, and handed Emily something small and green.

  A four-leaf clover.

  CHAPTER 19

  Scott had slept in the afternoon, and so wasn’t tired at night. And that was good—someone had to watch Emily. Erno was certain that she’d somehow told Nimue and Goodco their location in her dreams, and she couldn’t really assure them that this wasn’t the case. Scott was to watch her and try to wake her at the first sign of any disturbance in her sleep.

  “But it’s not Nimue I keep dreaming of, it’s my mom,” she told Scott as she crawled into bed. She had tired eyes. Old eyes. “Why isn’t he just here? Dad. Mr. Wilson, I mean. He could just be here, waiting for us. He could just tell us things, instead of leaving us stupid games. You know Erno thinks the thing that was on the refrigerator is another clue? I’m too angry to look at it.”

  “He’s helping us, at least, in his own way,” said Scott, taking a chair.