The Modern Faerie Tales Read online

  Corny started, looking at her as though he didn’t know her. Even as he slid on the gloves, he did so numbly, and then stared at his rubber-encased arms in puzzlement.

  Walking out, the shine of a pair of chromed handcuffs lined in mink caught Kaye’s eye and she picked them up, running her thumb over the soft pelt. Years of shoplifting instincts made her slip them into her pocket before she hit the door.

  “I can’t believe you jumped some guy in a bathroom,” Kaye said as soon as they’d crossed the street.

  “What?” Corny glowered. “I can’t believe you just stole a pair of fuzzy handcuffs, klepto. Anyway, he wasn’t some guy. He was from the Seelie Court. He was one of them.”

  “One of them? A faerie? Like I’m one of them?”

  “He was there to get you. He said he was supposed to bring you to Silarial,” Corny yelled at her, and the name seemed to carry through the cold night air.

  “And for that you almost kill him?” Kaye’s voice rose, sounding shrill even to her own ears.

  “I hate to break this to you,” Corny said nastily, “but Silarial hates you. You’re the one who screwed up her plan to take over the Unseelie Court, plus you’ve been screwing her ex-boyfriend—”

  “Will you stop with the—”

  “Right, I know. Impossible quest. Look, I’m sure I could list more things about you she hates, but I think you get my point. Whatever she wants, we want the opposite.”

  “I don’t care about her or her messengers!” Kaye shouted. “I care about you, and you’re acting crazy.”

  Corny shrugged and turned away from her, looking through the window of a shop as if he were seeing some other place in the racks of clothing. Then he smiled at himself in the glass. “Whatever, Kaye. I’m right about Adair. They love to hurt people. People like Janet.”

  Kaye shuddered, guilt over Janet’s death too fresh for his words not to feel like an accusation. “I know—”

  Corny interrupted her. “Anyway, I got cursed, so I guess I got what I deserved, right? The universe is in balance. I got what I was asking for.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Kaye said. “I don’t even know what I mean. I’m just freaked out. Everything’s coming apart.”

  “You’re freaked out? Everything I touch rots! How am I going to eat food? How am I going to jerk off ?”

  Kaye laughed despite herself.

  “Not to mention I am going to have to dress up in down-market fetish-wear forever.” Corny held up a gloved hand.

  “Good thing that turns you on,” Kaye said.

  He rolled his eyes. “Okay, it was dumb. What I did. At least I should have found out what Silarial wanted.”

  Kaye shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go back to Brooklyn and figure out what to do about your hands.”

  Corny pointed to a pay phone hanging outside of a bar. “You want me to call your mom’s cell? I could tell her we got kicked out of the club for being underage. I can lie like crazy.”

  Kaye shook her head. “After you beat up someone in the bathroom? I think she knows what we got kicked out for.”

  “He was hitting on me,” Corny said primly. “I had to protect my virtue.”

  Kaye let herself and Corny into her mother’s apartment and threw herself down on the bed. Corny flopped down beside her with a groan.

  Looking up at the popcorn of the ceiling, she studied the grooves and fissures, letting her mind drift from Corny’s curse and the explanation she didn’t have for running out on her mother’s show. She thought of Roiben instead, standing in front of the entire assemblage of the Unseelie Court, and of the way they’d bowed their heads. But that made her think of all the children they’d snatched from cradles and strollers and swing sets to replace with changelings, or worse. She imagined Roiben’s slender fingers circling flailing, rosy limbs. Looking across the bed, she saw Corny’s fingers instead, each one encased in rubber.

  “We’re going to fix things,” Kaye said.

  “How are we going to do that, exactly?” Corny asked. “Not that I’m doubting you, mind.”

  “Maybe I could take the curse off of you. I have magic, right?”

  He sat up. “You think you can?”

  “I don’t know. Let me get rid of my glamour so I can use whatever I’ve got.” She concentrated, imagining her disguise tearing like cobwebs. Her senses flooded. She could smell the crusts of burnt food in the burners of the stove, the exhaust from cars, the mold inside the walls, and even the filthy snow they’d tracked across the floor. And she felt the iron, heavier than ever, eating away at the edges of her power, as clearly as she felt the brush of wings across her shoulders.

  “Okay,” she said, rolling toward him. “Take off a glove.”

  He removed one and held out the hand to her. She tried to imagine her magic as she’d been told to, like a ball of energy prickling between her palms. She concentrated on expanding it, despite the iron-soaked air. When it settled over Corny’s hands, her skin stung like she clutched nettles. She could change the shape of his fingers, but she couldn’t touch the curse.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said finally, helplessly, letting her concentration lapse and the energy dissipate. Just the attempt had exhausted her.

  “That’s okay. I heard about a guy who breaks spells. A human.”

  “Really? How’d you hear about him?” Kaye fumbled with her pocket.

  Corny turned his face away from her, toward the window. “I forget.”

  “Remember the paper that girl gave me? The Fixer? There’s a place to start. Fixing sounds like what we’re looking for.”

  Corny yawned and put the glove back on. “Your mom is going to totally make us sleep on the floor, isn’t she?”

  Kaye turned to him, pressing her face against his shoulder. His shirt smelled like bug spray and she wondered what the faerie who’d cursed him had wanted. She wondered about the other Kaye, still trapped in the Seelie Court. “Do you think I should tell her?” she mumbled into the T-shirt.

  “Tell her what? That we want the bed?”

  “That I’m a changeling. That she has a daughter who got stolen.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” He lifted his arm and Kaye ducked under it, pillowing her head on his chest.

  “Because none of this is real. I don’t belong here.”

  “Where else would you belong?” Corny asked.

  Kaye shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m neither fish nor fowl. What’s left?”

  “Good red herring, I think,” he said. “It’s a fish.”

  “At least I’m good and red.”

  A key rattled in the door.

  Kaye jumped up and Corny grabbed her arm. “Okay, tell her.”

  She shook her head hurriedly. The door opened and Ellen walked into the room, her shoulders dusted with new-fallen snow.

  Kaye reached for the shreds of her glamour to make herself human-seeming, but it came to her uneasily. The magic and the iron had eaten up more of her energy than she’d supposed. “It’s not working,” Kaye whispered. “I can’t change back.”

  Corny looked panicked. “Hide.”

  “I heard you guys got into some trouble, eh?” Ellen laughed as she dumped her guitar case on top of the paper-covered kitchen table. She tugged off her coat and dropped it on the floor.

  Kaye turned her back to her mother, hiding her face beneath her hair. She wasn’t sure how much her glamour hid, but at least she could no longer feel her wings.

  “He was hitting on me,” Corny said.

  Ellen raised her eyebrows. “You should learn to take a compliment better.”

  “Things got out of hand,” Kaye said. “The guy was a jerk.”

  Walking over to the bed, Ellen sat down and started tugging off her boots. “I guess I should be glad you two vigilantes weren’t hurt. What happened to you, Kaye? You look like you got a jar of green dye dropped on you. And why are you hiding your face?”

  Kaye sucked in her breath so hard
that she felt dizzy. Her stomach twisted.

  “You know,” Corny said. “I think I’m going to walk down to the corner store. I feel a sudden need for cheese curls. Want anything?”

  “Some kind of diet drink,” Ellen said. “Grab some money out of my coat pocket.”

  “Kaye?” he called.

  She shook her head.

  “Okay, I’ll be right back,” Corny said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him give her a look as he unlatched the door.

  “I have something to tell you,” Kaye said without turning.

  She could hear her mother banging in the cabinets. “There’s something I want to tell you, too. I know I promised we’d stay in Jersey, but I just couldn’t. My mother—she just gets to me, you know that. It hurt me when you stayed behind.”

  “I—” Kaye started, but Ellen cut her off.

  “No,” she said. “I’m glad. I guess I always figured that so long as you were happy, then I was an okay mother no matter how strange our lives got. But you weren’t happy, were you? So, okay, Jersey didn’t work out, but things will be different in New York. This place is mine, not some boyfriend’s. And I’m bartending, not just doing gigs. I’m turning things around. I want another chance.”

  “Mom.” Kaye half turned. “I think you should hear what I have to say before you go on.”

  “About tonight?” Ellen asked. “I knew there was more to the story. You two would never attack some guy because he—”

  Kaye cut her off. “About a long time ago.”

  Ellen took out a cigarette from a pack on the table. She lit it off of the stove. Turning, she squinted, like she’d just noticed Kaye’s skin. “Well? Shoot.”

  Kaye took a deep breath. She could feel her heartbeat like it was pounding in her brain instead of her chest. “I’m not human.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Ellen frowned.

  “Your real daughter has been gone a long time. Since she was really little. Since we were both really little. They switched us.”

  “What switched you?”

  “There are things—supernatural things out in the world. Some people call them faeries, some people call them monsters or demons or whatever, but they exist. When the . . . the faeries took your real daughter, they left me behind.”

  Ellen stared at her, the ash on her cigarette growing long enough to rain on the back of her hand. “That is complete bullshit. Look at me, Kaye.”

  “I didn’t know until October. Maybe I should have guessed—there were clues.” Kaye felt as though her eyes were raw, as though her throat were raw as she spoke. “But I didn’t know.”

  “Stop. This isn’t funny and it isn’t nice.” Ellen’s voice sounded torn between being annoyed and being truly frightened.

  “I can prove it.” Kaye walked toward the kitchen. “Lutie-loo! Come out. Show yourself to her.”

  The little faerie flew down from the refrigerator to alight on Kaye’s shoulder, tiny hands catching hold of a steadying lock of hair.

  “I’m bored and everything stinks,” Lutie pouted. “You should have taken me with you to the party. What if you had gotten drunk and fallen down again?”

  “Kaye,” Ellen said, her voice shaking. “What is that thing?”

  Lutie snarled. “Rude! I will tangle your hair and sour all your milk.”

  “She’s my evidence. So that you’ll listen to me. Really listen.”

  “Whatever 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.

  6

  All was taken away from you: white dresses,

  wings, even existence.

  —CZESLAW MILOSZ, “ON ANGELS”

  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 the things he touched. But it wasn’t him withering. Only everything else. He imagined all the things he hated, all the things he could destroy, and found his grip on the cup so tight that the cardboard bent and coffee splashed his leg.

  Kaye pushed though the front door with enough force to nearly send it crashing against the side of the building. Lutie fluttered alongside her, darting out into the safety of the air.

  Corny stood up reflexively.

  Kaye paced back and forth on the steps. “She pretty much hates me. I guess I should have pretty much expected that.”

  “Well, the
n I’m not bringing her a soda,” Corny said, popping the tab and taking a swig. He made a face. “Ugh. Diet.”

  Kaye didn’t even smile. She wrapped her purple coat around herself. “I’m going to get back the other Kaye for her. I’m going to switch us back.”

  “But . . . Kaye.” Corny struggled to find the words. “You’re her daughter, and that other kid . . . she doesn’t even know Ellen. Ellen doesn’t know her.”

  “Sure,” Kaye said hollowly. “It might be awkward at first, but they’ll work it out.”

  “It’s not that simple—” Corny started.

  Kaye cut him off. “It is that simple. I’m going to call the number on that piece of paper and go see the Queen. If she wants something from me, then I have a chance of getting the other Kaye back.”

  “Sure. I bet she’d trade Chibi-Kaye for your head on a platter,” Corny said, frowning.

  “Chibi-Kaye?” Kaye looked as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or hit him.

  He shrugged. “You know, like in those mangas where they draw the cute, small version of a character.”

  “I know what a chibi is!” She dug around in her pocket. “Give me your cell phone for a second.”

  He looked at her evenly. “You know I’m coming with you, right?”

  “I don’t—” Kaye started.

  “I can handle it,” Corny said before she could finish. “Just because this is dumb doesn’t mean you get to do it alone. And I don’t need your protection.”

  “And I don’t want to screw up your life more than I already have!”

  “Look,” Corny said. “Before, you mentioned that maybe this Fixer guy would know something about my curse. We would have called this person and I would have gone with you anyway.”

  “Fine, okay, okay. Cell?”

  “Let me call,” Corny said, holding out his hand.

  Kaye sighed, seeming to deflate. She held out the paper. “Fine.”

  Corny punched in the number, although it took a few tries with the thick gloves. The phone rang once and a computer voice said, “Hit pound and dial your number.”

  “Pager,” he said to Kaye’s questioning look. “Yeah, your guide to the Seelie Court is totally a dealer.”