Two peanut butter and bacon sandwiches sat on chipped plates Kaye could see the brown meat curling past the edges of the white bread. “I heard it ring.” She stood at the kitchen counter, pouring hot grease into a tin can. “Was that your mother on the phone before?” Kaye’s grandmother asked. Lutie followed, flying on moth wings, keeping out of sight as Kaye jogged down the stairs. She looked at herself a moment longer before pocketing Armageddon, scratching behind the ears of Isaac, and walking toward the door. There was a slight prickling as the glamour restored her familiar human face. Leaving her hair green, she let magic slide over her skin, coloring and plumping it.

Shoving her foot into the other boot, she tugged on her jacket. Or maybe it seemed too real, too much a reminder of why she didn’t belong in the room at all. When he’d seen the mural, Roiben had remarked that she could glamour the room into looking any way she wanted, but a magical veneer-no matter how lovely-still didn’t seem real to her. Although she’d thought it would, the decorating still hadn’t made the room feel like hers. It was half finished-a tree with deep, intricate roots and gilded bark. Her old bed frame was in pieces in the attic, her old dolls were dressed in punk-rock finery, and above the new mattress on the floor Kaye had painted a mural where a headboard might have been. I mean, if you can get him to not run away.” Kaye laced up one thick-soled black boot and limped around the room looking for its mate.

“Be there in a second!” Kaye shouted back. Kaye heard her grandmother’s voice calling from downstairs. One of her moth wings dusted the side of the cage with pale powder. “He’s just a rat,” Lutie said, turning toward Kaye. “Can you really understand what he’s saying?” Kaye asked, pulling an olive skirt over her head and wriggling it onto her hips. Isaac was curled in a white ball in the far corner. Inside, Kaye’s brown rat, Armageddon, sniffed the air. Kaye turned toward the lidded fish tank, where the doll-size faerie had her thin, pale fingers pressed against the outside of the glass. “Your rat wants to come,” Lutie-loo said. After all, she wasn’t human.įingering the hole on the left side of her fishnets, Kaye poked at the green skin underneath as she considered herself in the mirror. At least that’s what Kaye thought human girls were like. They don’t go around stealing other girls’ mothers. They have their very own parents, whom they love. They have a single fixed shape rather than shifting with their whims like windblown smoke. Human girls cry when they’re sad and laugh when they’re happy. Something waits beneath it-the whole story doesn’t show. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape-the loneliness of it-the dead feeling of winter.

Ironside holly black series