Ironside (18 page)

Kaye traced her fingers through the dust.
Impostor,
she wrote.
Fake.

A gust of wind blew through the open window, scattering the photographs. With a sigh, she started gathering them up. She could smell the droppings of squirrels, the termite-eaten wood, the rotted sill where the snow had soaked through it. Up in the eaves something had made a nest of pink insulation, garish against the planks. Looking up at it, she thought of cuckoos. She shoved the pictures into a shoe box and headed for the stairs.

No one was inside the second-floor bathroom, but another night-light glowed beside the sink. Kaye felt empty in this familiar space, as though her heart had been scraped hollow. But she had guessed right; no one had packed away her dirty clothes.

Picking through the hamper, she pulled out T-shirts, sweaters, and jeans she’d worn the week before, balled them up, and tossed them out the window onto the snowy lawn. She wanted to take her records and notebooks and novels too, but she didn’t want to risk going into her bedroom to get them. What if the changeling screamed? What if Ellen walked in and saw her there, clutching the stupid rubber necklace she’d five-fingered at a street fair?

Carefully, Kaye opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, straining for the sound of her rats. She couldn’t just leave them to get dumped out in the snow or given to a pet store like her grandmother threatened whenever their cage was particularly filthy. She felt panicky at the thought of not being able to find them. Maybe someone had put them on the enclosed porch? Kaye crept down the staircase, but as she snuck into the living room, her grandmother looked up from the couch.

“Kaye,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in. Where were you? We were very worried.”

Kaye could have glamoured herself invisible or run, but her grandmother’s voice sounded so normal that it rooted her to the spot. She was still in the shadows, the green of her skin hidden by the darkness.

“Do you know where Isaac and Armageddon are?”

“In your mother’s room—upstairs. They were bothering your sister. She’s afraid of them—has quite an imagination. She says they’re always talking to her.”

“Oh,” Kaye said. “Right.”

A Christmas tree sat near the television, trimmed with angels and a glitter garland. It was real—Kaye could smell the crushed pine needles and wet resin. Underneath sat a few boxes wrapped in gold paper. Kaye couldn’t remember the last time they’d put up a tree, never mind bought one.

“Where have you been?” Her grandmother leaned forward, squinting.

“Around,” Kaye whispered. “Things didn’t go so well in New York.”

“Come on, sit down. You’re making me nervous, standing there where I can’t see you.”

Kaye took another step back, into deeper darkness. “I’m fine here.”

“She never told me about Kate. Can you imagine that? Nothing! How could she not tell me about my own flesh and blood? The spitting image of you at that age. Such a sweet little girl, growing up robbed of a family to love her. It hurts my heart to think of it.”

Kaye nodded again, stupidly, numbly.
Robbed.
And Kaye was the robber, the shoplifter of Kate’s childhood. “Did Ellen say why Kate is here now?”

“I’d thought she’d have told you—Kate’s dad checked himself into a rehab. He had promised not to bother Ellen, but he did and I’m glad. Kate’s a strange child and she’s clearly been raised terribly. Do you know that all she’ll eat is soybeans and flower petals? What kind of diet is that for a growing girl?”

Kaye wanted to scream. The disconnect between the normalcy of the things her grandmother was saying and what she knew to be true seemed unendurable. Why would her mother tell her grandmother a story like that? Had someone enchanted her to believe that was the truth? Magic choked Kaye, the words that would conjure silence sharp in her mouth. But she swallowed them, because she also wanted her grandmother to keep talking, wanted everything to be normal for one more minute.

“Is Ellen happy?” Kaye asked quietly instead. “To have…Kate?”

Her grandmother snorted. “She was never really ready to be a mother. How will she manage in that little apartment? I’m sure she’s happy to have Kate—what mother wouldn’t be happy to have her child? But she’s forgetting how much work it all is. They’re going to have to move back here, I’m sure.”

With growing dread, Kaye realized that Corny had been right all along. Giving her mother a changeling child had been a terrible plan. Ellen had just been getting ahead with her job and the band, and a kid completely derailed that. Kaye’d screwed up, really screwed up in a way she had no idea how to fix.

“Kate’s going to look up to you,” her grandmother said. “You can’t be running around anymore, missing important family things. We don’t need two wild children.”

“Stop! Stop!” Kaye said, but there was no magic in her words. She put her hands over her ears. “Just stop. Kate isn’t going to look up to me—”

“Kaye?” Ellen called from the top of the stairs.

Panicked, Kaye headed for the kitchen door. She yanked it open, glad for the cold air on her burning face. Right then she hated everyone—hated Corny for being right, Roiben for being gone, her mother and grandmother for having replaced her. Most of all, she hated herself for letting all those things happen.

“Kaye Fierch!” Ellen shouted from the doorway in her seldom-used “mom” voice. “You get back in here right now.”

Kaye stopped automatically.

“I’m sorry I lost it,” Ellen said, and Kaye turned toward her, saw the distress in her face. “I handled things badly, I admit that. Please don’t leave. I don’t want you to leave.”

“Why not?” Kaye asked softly. Her throat felt tight.

Ellen shook her head, walking out into the yard. “I want you to explain. What you were going to tell me last time, at my apartment—tell me now.”

“Okay,” Kaye said. “When I was little, I got switched with the—the human—and you raised me, instead of the—the human girl. I didn’t know until we moved back here and met other faeries.”

“Faeries,” Ellen echoed. “Are you sure that’s what you are? A faery? How can you tell?”

Kaye held up one green hand, turning it over. “What else would I be? An alien? A green girl from Mars?”

Ellen took a deep breath and let it out all at once. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of any of this.”

“I’m not human,” Kaye said, those words seeming to cut to the thing that was the most terrible and incomprehensible about the truth.

“But you sound—” Ellen stopped, correcting herself. “Of course you sound like you. You are you.”

“I know,” Kaye said. “But I’m not who you thought I was, right?”

Ellen shook her head. “When I saw Kate, I was so afraid. I figured you did something dumb to get her back from whatever had her, didn’t you? See, I know you.
You.
”

“Her name’s not Kate. She’s Kaye. The real—”

Ellen held up one hand. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yeah.” Kaye sighed. “I did something pretty dumb.”

“See, you’re exactly who I think you are.” Ellen’s arms went around Kaye’s shoulders and she laughed her deep, cigarette-rough laugh. “You’re my girl.”

The lawn in front of Corny’s trailer was decorated with a giant inflated penguin wearing a green scarf and hat and a red Star Trek shirt complete with an insignia on the left breast. It sat on the lawn, glowing erratically. As Luis pulled into the gravel drive, multicolored lights strobed from the roof of the trailer next door, turning the whole lot into a disco.

“Aren’t you going to tell me what a beautiful home I have?” Corny said, but the joke felt forced, lame.

Ethine leaned forward, her fingers on the plastic seat.

Luis shut off the car. “Is that penguin dressed as—”

“Tip of the iceberg,” said Corny.

Leading Ethine by the fur-lined handcuff, Luis waited as Corny unlocked the front door. Inside, the rainbow fiber-optic tree illuminated a pile of dirty dishes. Framed needlepoint samplers hung on the wall next to signed pictures of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. A cat jumped down with a thud and started to wail.

“My room’s down that hall,” Corny whispered. “Home sweet home.”

Luis padded over the worn carpet, leading Ethine behind him. There was a musty smell that Corny hadn’t noticed before. He wondered if he’d just gotten used to it.

Corny’s mother opened the hall door. There was something sad about her thin nightgown, her tangled bed-hair and bare feet. She hugged him before he spoke.

“Mom,” Corny said. “This is Luis and…Eileen.”

“How can you just walk in here like this?” she said, stepping back and looking him over. “You missed Christmas, this year of all years. The first Christmas since your sister’s funeral. We thought you were dead too. Your stepfather cried like I’ve never seen him.”

Corny squinted, as though some problem with his vision could explain her words. “I missed Christmas? What day is it?”

“It’s the twenty-sixth,” she said. “What are you three wearing? And your hair’s black. Where have you been?”

Five days gone. Corny groaned. Of course. Time ran differently in Faerieland. It had seemed like two days when it had been twice that. Crossing to that island had been like crossing another time zone, like flying to Australia, except there was no way to gain that time on the way back.

“What is wrong with you? What have you been doing that you don’t know how long you’ve been gone?”

Corny plucked at his tunic with a yellow-gloved hand. “Mom—”

“I don’t know if I can ever forgive you.” She shook her head. “But it’s the middle of the night and I’m too tired to listen to your excuses. I’m exhausted from worrying.”

She turned toward Luis and Ethine. “There’s some more blankets in the closet if you get cold; remind Corny to turn on the space heater.”

Ethine seemed ready to say something, but Luis spoke first. “Thank you for letting us stay.” He looked almost shy. “We’ll try not to be any trouble.”

Corny’s mom nodded absently, then squinted her eyes at Ethine. “Her ears are…” She turned to Corny. “Where
have
you been?”

“A sci-fi convention. I’m so sorry, Mom.” Corny opened the door to his bedroom and switched on the light, letting Luis and Ethine walk past him, inside. “Seriously, I don’t know how I lost track of so much time.”

“A convention? Christmas con? I expect to hear a much more convincing story in the morning,” she said, and went back into her own room.

A computer hummed on his desk, the screen fading between a series of screen shots from
Farscape.
A poster of two angels hung above his bed, one with black wings and one with white, their hands twined together by a cord of thorns, their blood the only color on the large glossy paper. Piles of books were stacked where he dropped them right before he fell asleep. Manga volumes sat on top of graphic novels and paperbacks. He kicked a few under the bed, embarrassed.

He had always thought of his room as an extension of his interests. Now, looking around the room, he thought it looked as dorky as the penguin on his lawn.

“You can sleep here,” Corny told Ethine, nodding toward his bed. “The sheets are pretty clean.”

“Gallant,” she said.

“Yeah, I know it is.” He walked over to his dresser, where a white King and a black King stood side by side. He liked to signal his moods by which one was in front, but he’d stopped doing that after Janet died; there was no annoying sister to signal to. Opening the drawers, he pulled out a T-shirt and boxers and tossed them onto the bed.

“You can wear these, if you want. To sleep in.”

Luis unlaced his boots. “Can I grab a shower?”

Corny nodded and rummaged for the shirt that had the least pathetic logo. He found a faded navy blue one that said,
I CAN DRINK MORE COFFEE THAN YOU CAN
. Looking up, ready to hand it to Luis, he froze as Ethine stripped off her dress with complete nonchalance. The blades of her shoulders were covered with what looked like the buds of wings, pink against the handkerchief white of her skin. As she slid his boxers up her thin legs, she looked over at him and her eyes were chilling in their emptiness.

“Thanks,” Luis said too loudly, taking the cloth out of his hands. “I’m going to borrow jeans, if you don’t mind.”

Corny nodded toward a few pairs stacked on a basket of clean clothes. “Take whatever.”

Ethine sat on the edge of the bed, the unnaturally long toes of her bare feet scrunching in the rug as Luis left the room.

“I could enchant you,” she said.

He stepped back, looking away from her face.

“Not for long. Luis or Kaye would come in, and you can’t enchant them.” But, of course, Kaye was at her grandmother’s house and Luis was in the shower. A quick glance told him that he hadn’t bothered to lock her other cuff to anything. She’d have plenty of time.

“Even with the sound of my voice, I could make you do my bidding.”

“You wouldn’t tell me that if you were going to.” He thought about the little faery he’d captured the night of the coronation, and slid his hand behind the dresser, to where the iron poker was leaning. “Just like if I say that I could make your skin wrinkle like the old waitress at that diner, you can be pretty sure I’m not planning on it.”

“And your sweet mother, I could enchant her, too.”

He turned around, whipping the brand through the air, toward her throat. “Lock the other cuff. Do it right now.”

She laughed, high and bright. “I only meant that you should not forget that by bringing me here, you are putting those you love in danger.”

“Lock the cuff anyway.”

She leaned over and cuffed herself to the support on his headboard, then twisted so that she was lying on her stomach. Her gray eyes flashed as they caught the light of the side table. They were as inhuman as the eyes of a doll.

Crossing to the window, Corny took the key out of his jacket, opened the window, and tossed it out into a leaf pile. “Good luck ordering me around now. Enchanted or not, it’s going to take someone a while to find that key.”

He watched her, poker in hand, until Luis came back wearing Corny’s jeans and a bleached towel wrapped around his braids. The mahogany skin of his chest was still flushed with the heat of the shower.

Corny looked down quickly at his gloved fingers, at the thin layer of plastic that protected him from ruining everything he touched. It was better, looking down, instead of taking the chance that his eyes might stare too long at all that bare skin.

Luis unwrapped the towel from his head and seemed to suddenly notice the poker and the locked cuff. “What happened?”

“Ethine was just messing with me,” Corny said. “No big deal.” He set down the metal rod and stood, going into the hall and leaning against the wall for a moment, eyes closed, breathing hard. Where was Kaye? Almost half an hour had passed; if she was quick about getting her stuff and if she walked fast, she could show up at any minute. He wished she would. She always came through for him, saving his ass when he’d thought he was beyond saving.

But they had a creepy hostage and no idea what the next attack would be or when it would happen, and he didn’t think even Kaye could get them out of this one.

She could be in a lot of danger.

She was too upset to be thinking straight.

And he’d let her get out of the car. He hadn’t even thought to give her his phone.

Pushing himself off of the wall, he gathered up a bunch of blankets and old pillows from a shelf over the the water heater in the hall closet. Everything would work out—things would be okay. Kaye would come back here and she’d have a clever plan. They’d trade Ethine for the promise of safety for their families and themselves—something like that, but smarter. Kaye wouldn’t give up Roiben’s name. Without Silarial knowing his name, he’d win the duel against the Unseelie Court champion. Roiben would apologize to Kaye. Things would go back to normal, whatever normal was.

And Corny would wash his hands in the same ocean that had killed his sister, and the curse would be gone.

And Luis would ask him out on a date, because he was so cool and collected.

Walking back into the bedroom, Corny dumped the pile of blankets onto the bed. “Kaye can take the bed with Ethine when she shows. We can just spread out a few of these on the floor. I think it’ll be bearable.”

Luis had the borrowed T-shirt on and was sitting on the floor, flipping through a dog-eared copy of
Swordspoint
. He looked up. “I’ve slept on worse.”

Corny unfolded an afghan with a zigzag pattern of yellow and neon green and arranged it, then rolled out another layer of a slightly stained baby blue comforter on top. “Here,” he said, and started to prepare his own bed beside that one.

Luis settled himself, pulling a blanket up to his neck and stretching luxuriously. Corny tucked himself into his makeshift pallet. His room looked different from the floor, like an alien landscape full of discarded paper and dropped CDs. Leaning his head back, he stared up at the water stains on the ceiling, spreading from a dark center drop like the rings of an old tree.

“Hey, I’ll get the light,” Luis said, getting up.

“We’re still waiting for Kaye. And your brother, right?”

“I tried to call again, but I couldn’t get him. I left your address with Val—that girl he was going to stay with—in case he calls her or just shows up. I hope he did what he said he would do and got on a train.”

Luis stopped. “You know, though, Val said something else that was weird. She’s got a friend among the exiled fey in the city. She said that he’d been paid a visit from your Lord Roiben himself a couple of days ago. Must have been before Roiben’s visit to the Seelie Court.”

Corny frowned. His tired brain couldn’t make any sense of that. “Huh. Weird. Well, I guess now all we do is wait. Kaye knows her way in. We’d all be better off if we could get some real sleep.”

Luis hit the switch, and Corny blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the room. Lights trimming nearby trailers made it bright enough to see Luis kneel back down.

“You’re gay?” Luis whispered.

Corny nodded, although Luis might not see that in the dim light. “You knew, didn’t you? You acted like you knew. You kissed me like you knew.”

“I figured it didn’t matter.”

“N
i
ce,” Corny whispered.

“No, I don’t mean it like that,” Luis said, kicking his feet out from under the afghan. He laughed softly. “I mean, you were bespelled. Girls, boys, you didn’t care. If it had a mouth, you were kissing it.”

“And you had a mouth,” said Corny. He could feel the close proximity of their bodies, noticed every movement of his thighs, the clamminess of his hands inside the gloves. His heart beat so loudly he was afraid that Luis could hear it. “It was smart, though. Quick thinking.”

“Thanks.” Luis’s voice seemed slowed somehow, like he couldn’t quite get his breath. “I wasn’t sure it would work.”

Corny wanted to lean in and taste those words.

He wanted to tell him it would have worked, even if he hadn’t been bespelled.

He wanted to tell him that it would work right now.

Instead, Corny flipped over, so that Luis couldn’t see his face. “Good night,” he said, and shut his eyes against regret.

Corny woke from a dream where he’d been paddling, doggy-style, through an ocean of blood. His legs would tire, and when he missed a kick, he would drop under and glimpse, through the red, a city under the waves, full of friendly beckoning fiends.

He woke as his leg kicked ineffectually at the blankets. He saw a figure near the window and for a moment thought that it was Kaye, sneaking in so as not to disturb his mother and stepfather.

“Brought us right to your hidey spot, he did,” a voice hissed. “For just a lick of nectar.”

Cold air drifted down to chill Corny.

“I get it,” he heard Luis whisper. He was the figure, but Corny couldn’t see who he was speaking with. “I’ll trade. Ethine for my brother. I’ll bring her to the front door.”

Corny’s whole body tightened with betrayal.

Metal flashed in the moonlight as the creature handed the key through. Corny felt like an idiot. He’d thrown it right to them.

He stayed very still as Luis walked toward the bed, then grabbed his leg. Luis fell and Corny rolled on top of him. He ripped off the glove with his teeth and brought down his fingers, spread like a net, to inches above Luis’s face.