Tithe (9 page)

“What do I really look like?”

“Well, you’re a pixie, if that helps.” Spike scratched his head. “It usually means green.”

Kaye closed her eyes tightly, shaking her head. “How can I see me?”

“I don’t advise it,” Spike said. “Once you pull that thing off, no one we know can put it back on that good. Just let it be until Samhain—that’s when the Tithe is. Someone might figure out what you are if you go messing with your face.”

“Soon it’ll be off for good and you won’t have to pretend to be mortal anymore if you don’t want,” Lutie chirped.

“If the glamour on me is so good, how did you know what I was?”

The Thistlewitch smiled. “Glamour is the stuff of illusion, but sometimes, if deftly woven, it can be more than a mere disguise. Fantastical
pockets can actually hold baubles, an illusionary umbrella can protect one from the rain, and magical gold can remain gold, at least until the warmth of the magician’s hand fades from the coins. The magic on you is the strongest I have seen, Kaye. It protects you even from the touch of iron, which burns faerie flesh. I know you to be a pixie because I saw you when you were very small and we lived in Seelie lands. The Queen herself asked us to look after you.”

“But why?”

“Who can tell the whims of Queens?”

“What if I did want to remove the glamour?” Kaye insisted.

The Thistlewitch took a step toward her. “The ways of removing faerie magic are many. A four-leaf clover, rowan berries, looking at yourself through a rock with a natural hole. It is your decision to make.”

Kaye took a deep breath. She needed to think. “I’m going to go back to bed.”

“One more thing,” the Thistlewitch said as Kaye rose from the bank and dusted off the backs of her thighs. “Heed the warning of your shattered eggshell. Where you go, chaos and discord will follow.”

“What does that mean?”

The Thistlewitch smiled. “Time will tell. It always does.”

***

Kaye stood on the lawn of her grandmother’s house. It was dark except for the silvery moon, the moon that didn’t seem anthropomorphic tonight, just a cold rock glowing with reflected light. It was the bare trees that looked alive, their twisted branches sharp arrows that might pierce her heart.

Still, she could not go inside the house. She sat in the dew-damp grass and ripped up clumps of it, tossing them in the air and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Some gnome ought to pop out of the tree and scold her for torturing the lawn.

A pixie. The word sounded so … so
frolicky
. It made her smile, though, to think of being magical, of having wings like Lutie, of having quick fingers like poor Gristle.

Her stomach clenched when she thought about her mother, though. Her mother, whose head she’d fished out of toilets, who dragged them from apartment to apartment and from bar to bar following some distant dream. Her mother, who once broke one of Kaye’s favorite LPs because she was “sick of listening to that talentless whore.” Her mother, who had never told her she was weird, had always encouraged her to think for herself, stood up for her, and never, ever told her that she was a liar.

What would her mother think if she realized that her daughter wasn’t the girl she’d
lived with for sixteen years? No, Ellen’s baby had been boosted by quick-fingered elves.

It was just too fucked-up to dwell on.

And if she wasn’t Kaye Fierch, freaky human girl, then what was she? She knew that they didn’t want her to mess up the plan for Halloween, but right now, she just wanted to see what she looked like.

There were patches of clover on the lawn.

Leaning into the patch of brown, half-dead clover, she spread her fingers out and searched. There were so many, even in autumn, there had to be one with four leaves.

It was slow going in the dark, and yet none of the clover she dug through had more or less than three leaves. She was getting desperate enough to tear one of the heart-shaped leaves down the middle and find out whether this magic stuff was more symbolic or literal. Still, it wasn’t like she had to find it, she only had to touch it….

Oh, that was too stupid. That could never work. Even if it did work it was still stupid.

Kaye spread herself out on the ground, hoping no cars were driving by at this hour. Then she rolled over the patch of clover. The ground was cold, the dew dusted with frost. She rolled dizzily, holding her arms above her head. She had to laugh as she did it—the whole thing was absurd and it was making her damp and really, really cold, but there was something in the smell of the earth and the touch of the
grass that enervated her. Her laughter spun up out of her mouth in warm gusts of breath.

She didn’t feel changed, but she did feel better. She was grinning like a fool, anxiety put to rest by silliness.

Lying back, Kaye tried to imagine herself as a faerie, all sparkly with hair that was always blowing in the breeze. The only image she could summon up, however, was that of a pale green face she had thought she’d seen as she was leaving the diner bathroom. She could remember it in such detail that it felt less real than a memory. Perhaps it was something from a movie.

Kaye rolled over to get up and go inside when she noticed that a piece of skin on her hand was loose. When she touched it with a tentative finger, it sloughed off like a sunburn, revealing tender green skin. Kaye licked her finger and tried to rub off the pigment. It didn’t come off; the area only spread wider. Her hand tasted like dirt.

Kaye stopped moving. She was scared, scared, sick with scared, but calm too, calm as nothing.
Get a grip,
she told herself,
you wanted to see this
.

Her eyes itched, and she rubbed her knucklebones over them. Something came off against her fingers. It felt like a contact lens, but when she looked down, she saw that it was skin and that with the rubbing, even more skin had come off her hands.

As she looked up, it seemed that the whole world had grown brighter, shimmering with light. Colors danced along the grass. The brown of the trees was many-hued, the wrinkles of shadows deep as newly turned secrets, and beautiful.

She spread her arms as wide as they would go. She could smell the pungent green of the grass she stamped as she rose. She could smell the sharp chill of the air as she spun, full of car exhaust, of crumpled leaves, of smoke from some distant leafpile burning. She could smell the rot of desiccated wood, the spoilage of the hoards that ants piled away for winter. She could hear the churning of termites, the whine of electricity in the house, the wind rustling a thousand paper-dry leaves.

She could taste chemicals in the air—iron, smoke, other things she had no names for. They played over her tongue in dark harmony.

It was too much. It was overwhelming. There were so many sensations buffeting her, too many for her to filter out. She couldn’t go inside the house like this, but right now she wanted to; she wanted to burrow under her blankets and wait for all-forgiving dawn. She wasn’t ready for this—it had been a whim, her curiosity.

What did she really look like?

She should go back now, back to the swamp, confess all, and let the Thistlewitch
explain what she’d just done to herself. Kaye forced herself to take a few quick breaths without thinking what they tasted like. She was fine, better than fine, she was fucking supernatural. All she had to do was walk back to the swamp and not touch any of her skin on the way.

But once she started, she knew she couldn’t walk. She was running. Running through the backyards of houses, hearing dogs barking, and her legs wet from unmowed grass. Running, through a parking lot, mostly empty, where a boy pushing carts stopped to look at her, and into the lot behind, and the sweet reek of trash, where she stopped, panting, and held her sides. There it was, the thin disguise of trees and the small river that flowed through it.

“Spike! Lutie!” Kaye called, frightened by the breathless gasp of her own voice. “Please …”

Nothing answered her but silence.

Kaye staggered down the hill, her boots sinking in the mud. The eggshells were gone. There was only the stink of stagnant water. The shattered bottles shimmered like jagged jewels through her new eyes. She stopped, awed by the beauty.

“Please, Lutie, someone …”

No one answered.

Kaye sat down in the cold mud. She could wait. She would have to wait.

***

Kaye stretched and turned. The leaves over her shifted and blew with the morning wind. Drops of cold water tapped her cheek, then her arm, then the lid of her one eye. Kaye sat up. Her eyes felt hard and her lips were sore and swollen.

There was a green sheen to Kaye’s skin when she turned her arm against the light. Her fingers seemed too long and curled fluidly with a new fourth joint, coiling like snails when she made a fist. She brought up her other hand, where the skin had come loose last night. Beneath it, her skin was a dusky emerald.

No one had come. Another droplet spattered her bare leg, and she jerked upright. Her nightgown was filthy, and she was shivering, even under her sweater.

Biting back tears, Kaye folded her arms around herself and started walking. She couldn’t go home—not yet, not when she knew she wasn’t the girl who belonged there—but she had to get out of the rain. At least Janet couldn’t call her a liar this time.

She stopped in a parking lot and twisted the side mirror of a car toward her so that she could see her profile. Her hair was matted in a nimbus of twigs, wet with dew, and she saw that her skin was shadowed with the lush dark green of moss. Not a stain, but a tint, as though a veil of green lay over her. Her ear was longer,
sticking up through her hair to the top of her head. Her cheek, sunken and sharp, and her eye, slanted and black, all shiny black, with a pinpoint of white pupil. Like a bird eye or a single bead.

She reached up and touched her face. The skin tore easily, revealing a strip of grass-green skin.

Her hand hit the mirror, spiderwebbing the glass, and surprising her. Ignoring the pain in her wrist and the damp burn of blood on her knuckles, she started to run.

Corny squinted. A girl in green makeup ran across the street and under the awning of the gas station. She looked up, and he thought he recognized her, but when she got closer, he wasn’t so sure.

“I was going to Janet’s,” she said, sounding just like Kaye. “But I just remembered she’s at school.”

Up close the girl didn’t look anything like Kaye. She didn’t look anything like anybody. Her upturned eyes were black as oil spills. She was too thin. Tall ears parted her tangled hair on either side of her head. Her skin seemed to be flaking, showing patches of green underneath.

“Kaye?” Corny asked.

The girl smiled at him, but her smile was too fierce. The skin tore on her lower lip.

He was frozen, staring at her.

She scooted past him into the office, stretching her twiglike fingers. He stifled a whimper, trying to keep his eyes focused on the credit-card unit, the dirty papers, the laminated nude air freshener, all familiar things. He could smell her, a weird combination of pine needles, moss, and leaf piles. It was making him dizzy.

She sat down on the floor on top of papers and fast-food boxes.

“What the hell happened to you?”

Kaye held out her hand and tilted it slightly in the light. “I’m sick,” she said. “I’m really sick.”

He crouched down and looked at her again. There was a luminescence to her skin, a kind of brightness about her that made her eyes glitter feverishly. There was something about her shape itself that was strange, a hunching of the shoulders, a slight bulge of the back.

He picked up a block of wood with a dangling key. “Let’s go in the bathroom. The light’s better and you can wash more of this crap off.”

She got up off the floor.

“I could take you over to the hospital,” he said. She didn’t reply, and he didn’t pursue it. He knew this wasn’t a hospital-type thing—he just felt like he ought to say it.

The bathroom was grimy. Corny certainly couldn’t recall anyone doing more than changing the toilet paper in all the time he had
worked there. The once-white tiles were cracked and grayed. There was barely enough room for two people, but Kaye squeezed in obediently next to the toilet and stripped off her sweater.

“Take off the rest of it. There’s something on your back.”

She threw a considering look at him and seemed to decide either he didn’t care or she didn’t. She kicked off her boots, pulled off the sweater and then the nightgown until she was only in her panties.

Bunching up her nightgown under the faucet, he got it sopping wet. He used the cloth to scrub off what was left of her skin and the pigment of her hair. Her skin was thin as crepe on her back. As he rubbed the cloth over the bump between her shoulders, the skin cracked.

A thin whitish fluid leaked out between her shoulder blades.

“Uuughh!” Corny moved back from her.

Kaye looked back at him, and her face said that she just couldn’t take any more weirdness. Of course it was hard to know whether he was reading her strange eyes right.

“Its okay,” he said in as soothing a voice as he could. Outside he heard a car pull into the gas station. He ignored it.

“What happened?” There was something moving under the surface of her back, something slick and iridescent.

“Hold on,” he said. The thick fluid was wiping off, showing white-veined iridescence all the way down her back. Suddenly something flicked loose, rising so that it almost slapped Corny before it fell wetly against her back.

“Oh, God,” Corny said. “You have wings.”

The damp things moved feebly.

The sight of it sent a thrill through him, despite the fear. This was the real thing.

“C’mon,” he said. “My house.”

“Down the hill I went, and then,
I forgot the ways of men
For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool
Wakened ecstasy in me.”

—SARA TEASDALE “August Moonrise,” Flame and Shadow

Kaye sat down gingerly at the edge of the couch, so that her new wings hung off the edge and wouldn’t get crushed if she moved suddenly or leaned back.