Ironside by Holly Black Page B

it is,” Ellen said, “you’re nothing like it.”
    Kaye took a deep breath and dropped what glamour was left. She couldn’t see her own face, but she knew how she looked to Ellen now. Eyes black and glossy as oil, skin green as a grass stain. She could see her hands, folded in front of her, her long fingers, with an extra joint that made them seem curled even when they were at rest.
    The cigarette dropped from her mother’s fingers. It burned the linoleum floor where it fell, the edges of the melting plastic crater glowing, the center black as ash. Black as Kaye’s eyes.
    “No,” Ellen said, shaking her head and backing away from Kaye.
    “It’s me,” Kaye said. Her limbs felt cold, as though all the blood in her body rushed to her face. “This is what I really look like.”
    “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you are. Where is my daughter?”
    Kaye had read about changelings, about how mothers got their own babies back. They heated up iron pokers, threw the faerie infants on the fire.
    “She’s in Faerieland,” Kaye said. “I’ve seen her. But you know me. I’m still me. I don’t want to scare you. I can explain everything now that you’ll listen. We can get her back.”
    “You stole my child and now you want to help me?” Ellen demanded.
    In pictures Kaye’d been a skinny black-eyed little thing. She thought of that now. Of her bony fingers. Eating. Always eating. Had Ellen ever suspected? Known in that kind of gut-motherly way that no one would have believed?
    “Mom…” Kaye walked toward her mother, reaching out her hand, but the look on Ellen’s face stopped her. What came out of Kaye’s mouth was a startled laugh.
    “Don’t you smile,” her mother shouted. “You think this is funny?”
    A mother is supposed to know every inch of her baby, her sweet flesh smell, every hangnail on her fingers, the number of cowlicks in her hair. Had Ellen been repulsed and ashamed of her repulsion?
    Had she stacked up those books as a seat, hoping that Kaye would fall? Was that why she’d forgotten to stock the fridge? Why she’d left Kaye alone with strangers? Had her mother punished her in little ways for something that was so impossible that it could not be admitted?
    “What the fuck did you do with my child?” Ellen shouted.
    The nervous giggling wouldn’t stop. It was like the absurdity and the horror needed to escape somehow and the only way out was through Kaye’s mouth.
    Ellen slapped her. For a moment Kaye went completely silent, and then she howled with laughter. It spilled out of her like shrieks, like the last of her human self burning away.
    In the glass of the window, she could see her wings, slightly bent, glistening along her back.
    With two beats of them, Kaye leaped up onto the countertop. The fluorescent light buzzed above her head. The blackened wings of a dozen moths dusted its yellowed grill.
    Ellen, startled, stepped back again, flattening herself against the cabinets.
    Looking down, Kaye could feel her mouth grinning wide and terrible. “I’ll bring you back your real daughter,” she said, her voice full of bitter elation. It was a relief to finally know what she had to do. To finally admit she wasn’t human.
    And at the very least, it was a quest she might be able to accomplish.

Chapter 6
    All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
    —C ZESLAW M ILOSZ , “O N A NGELS ”
    Corny shivered on the steps of the apartment building. The cold of the cement soaked up through the thin fabric of his jeans as flurries of snow froze in his hair. The hot coffee he had bought at the bodega tasted like ashes, but he grimaced through another sip for the warmth. He tried not to notice that thin hairline cracks had already begun to form at the very tips of his rubber gloves.
    He didn’t want to think too carefully about the relief he’d felt when Kaye couldn’t remove the curse. He’d felt diseased at first, like it was him rotting away and not