Ironskin

Jane tugged on his sleeve. “Stay with me,” she said fiercely.

 

He willed himself back to the present with a great effort. Strain showed around the corners of his eyes. “The forest has changed,” he said hoarsely. “When I knew it as a child, it wasn’t evil. You could still walk there by day, at least. It wasn’t a habitat.” He looked around, palms spread out as if trying to determine where he was by feeling the air around him. “But … closer to the creek, I think. If we walk…” His hands groped through the air as if questing for that spot. “If we walk through here…”

 

Edward pushed through an unlikely looking pair of bushes and Jane followed on his heels. They spilled out into another clearing—the forest seemed to be nothing but round clearings linked by dense brush, which sent shivers down her spine. That was not natural growth, nor human-made—no, that was all fey.

 

Habitat, as Edward had said.

 

Edward felt forward with his hands, palms outward. “Most peculiar,” he muttered to himself. “I can almost feel the way with my hands.… This way or this way.…”

 

“Is that—what is that?” She lunged for a scrap of blue just past Edward, down the first “this way.” Caught her toe in the fork of a fallen branch, went flying. Her veil caught and snicked tight around her throat and she pushed breathlessly, uselessly at it, tried to extricate herself from the wild and weaving branches that framed the clearing. Spots danced in front of her sight, silver and blue.

 

Then strong hands were around her waist, hauling her upward, untangling her veil from the bush, and as they touched her she suddenly thought, He loves me, and in the next instant didn’t know why she thought she knew it. Once standing, his hands did not linger, but took the blue scrap of cloth from her to study.

 

“It’s hers,” Jane managed, between catching her breath, trying not to look sideways at this man who had hauled her up so effortlessly. Not effortlessly in the sense of strength, though he was strong, but in the sense that he could touch her waist and recover, that it should so clearly not bother him when she could still feel the imprint of his fingers on her ribs.

 

How could she think that he loved her? She knew full well he did not think of her at all. How could he, when he’d never even seen her face? He had no object to fasten on—she could only ever be a cipher to him, a shadowy governess form hidden behind cotton veils, behind an iron mask.

 

“This way,” he said, and hurried past the bush, squeezing his lanky figure past it into the next open space, hands feeling forward in that strange testing, questing motion, as if they were drawn by a magnet.

 

She was following him, and then she caught something out of the corner of her eye and she went that way, plowing through black branches that tore at her hands and dress and veil, pushing through leaves coated in sticky sap and spiderwebs, twigs with thorns and bark that raked her ankles and elbows. Her veil caught and pulled, but it had been unwound in the first tumble, and now it ripped free. Her hat came completely off and she felt air against her cheek, but she did not stop.

 

In the clearing ahead—

 

“Dorie!” shouted Jane, and then a blue-orange light blinded her.

 

Jane’s cheek flamed hot and she stumbled, momentarily sightless. As she fell, groping for purchase, she wondered wildly if perhaps there were no fey in the woods at all. Perhaps she had misjudged the limits of Dorie’s abilities, perhaps—and her heart raced as she hit the ground, still waiting for the world to come back into focus—perhaps giving Dorie permission to work on her skills had changed her, developed her beyond their ability to control.

 

That exploded doll. Shards of porcelain.

 

Dorie’s stricken face.

 

Perhaps Jane had unwittingly unleashed a monster out of this little girl.

 

Vision was returning slowly, like the old fey cameras did, their blue-and-white image slowly revealing itself on the page. Dorie, she only saw Dorie, raising her hands against the sky.

 

Jane rubbed her eyes, strained them trying to see in more detail than shades of twilight blue. Still Dorie, only Dorie …

 

The thought flashed that this was what taking chances was—you always thought in the back of your mind that doing the right thing would lead you down the right path to the right outcome. But when it came down to it, you might still fail, and everything might end in disaster. Faith in your decision did not mean that the best was going to happen.

 

Color leaked into Jane’s sight and she froze, watching the clearing now with full vision.

 

In the green-lit clearing, the little girl was both there and not there, shimmering like the gold and sapphire scarves of light that whisked around her. The old instinctive fear ran sharp and hot through Jane; her fingers curled, everything tensed, and her face was on fire.

 

That was not just Dorie, and she was not imagining things.

 

That was the fey.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14

 

 

ATTACK

 

 

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