Bad Luck Girl by Sarah Zettel

Author:Sarah Zettel [Zettel, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-98320-7
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

16

Up Jumped Aunt Hagar

The smell of damp, dirt, and old sewer surrounded me like the dark. A spider scuttled across my shoe and I jumped back, banging against the cellar wall and sending a shower of dirt down on my own head. I shrieked and swatted the air around me and got hands full of cobwebs. A spider scampered up my arm and I shrieked again and swatted at it.

And the cackling laughter rose up again. Anger and shame burned away my fear. How could a couple spiders and a little dirt be getting to me like this? I was not gonna make myself any more ridiculous in front of … of … whatever it was in here with me.

The dim light drifting in through the open door showed where there was a naked lightbulb overhead and a cob-webbed chain hanging down. I lifted up my scraped hand and pulled the chain. There was a chink, and the light came on.

I saw the ruined basement around me, its floor littered with trash, leaves, and scraps of rotted wood. But in the back corner, there was another room altogether, almost another world. It was a tidy place, with a fire in a fieldstone hearth and a clean rag rug on the floor. There was a handmade rocking chair and a carved table. The white-haired woman in the rocking chair was stick thin with skin a color somewhere between umber and bronze. Her long, knobby fingers worked a set of knitting needles as delicate as tree twigs. A huge spill of pure white spread across her lap and around her shoulders like a snowy shawl, except she was still knitting it. Instead of the yarn coming up from a ball like it should, it was coming down to her from a hundred different directions.

It was coming from each and every one of the spiderwebs that hung in the old beams over her tidy space of a room.

This was wrong, very wrong. This neat, petite old woman sat here drawing cobwebs onto herself to knit into a blanket. I wanted to back away. In fact, I did, until I bumped into the door that had shut behind me without making a sound.

“So much for the famous Callie LeRoux.” Her sunken lips pursed. A quick hand darted out from under the white blanket and caught the slack spider thread up for her busy needles. At first her eyes were rich brown human eyes, but as they narrowed, I caught a shift, and for one second, I was looking into the stars. I felt a strange twist of nerves and a rush of relief at the same time. Whoever this was, she wasn’t the fairy kind. I’d seen eyes like this before.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, trying to remember my manners. Once I’d started dealing in magic, I learned pretty quick there were people around you that you had better be polite to. I would have bet everything I owned she was one of them. “Um, you wouldn’t by any chance know an old Indian called Baya, would you?” I asked.

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