The fey-cursed were vulnerable to the fey themselves.
The fey had never taken over live bodies before—only the shrapnel-flecked bodies of the dead. Because fey bombs were meant to kill. Because humans with fey substance in them tended to be dead.
But they had never had all these live bodies with fey smeared over them, upright and walking around. And Jane wasn’t thinking of the bedraggled and outcast ironskin, though it was true they were equally vulnerable.
The masks.
The masks that those women bought, that Edward put on. A hundred highly placed people, each of whom had turned herself into a host for a parasite: a silver birch waiting to be strangled by mistletoe.
Jane went to the window and looked through the mesh screen onto the back lawn. The maypole glinted in the first light of dawn, its orange and red ribbons hanging loose around it like a flame.
May Day. A time for celebration.
And all the guests who could be coaxed (the girls, mostly) would dance around it, never knowing that on several of their faces lurked a ticking time bomb.
The exact same substance that scarred Jane’s own cheek.
Fear riddled her heart, and with it, determination. It didn’t matter whether she was ugly or beautiful—she was just as in danger.
So she was determined to be normal. That desire had not lessened one whit. She would have the face she was meant to have, the simple whole Jane face. Perhaps the desire for normal was tangled up in her desire for Edward. Perhaps she was no better than the women who would change their face “as easily as a dress.”
If wanting to be herself was wrong, then so be it.
For once she was going to have exactly what she wanted.
Numb and taut, Jane went through the black early morning to his studio. She made her way to the workbench she had passed by earlier—her hand went to that cloth, thrown over his current project.
She stood there, fingers trembling.
Nina had called her new face pretty.
But what sort of pretty did she mean?
Jane almost fled. Almost was sick, almost ready to smash the mask without lifting the cloth.
She lifted the muslin.
Jane knew what she had feared when she saw it. Her own face stared up at her, white and pale, black eyes hollowed out.
But not her own face. Ten—a hundred times more lovely than her own face. Beauty that any girl would die to possess.
He had done a masterful job. She would be more lovely than Blanche, than Nina.
As beautiful as any fey.
Chapter 16
MAY DAY
“With a face like that, all men would be at your feet,” said Edward.
She whirled, finding him there, a black hole of absent moonlight. Pale, drawn, enervated. Sagging, sad, but the fierce words still came to attack him: “I didn’t ask for all men. What demon possessed you to make this?”
“You do not want to know.”
“I know all too well.” His warmth versus his chill—oh, she knew. She picked up the mask and shoved it on her own face.
The inside of the mask was cool on her skin. Sensuous, molding—like skin itself rather than cold clay. She peered out at him and it was like looking through binoculars the wrong way. Everything seemed distant, cut off. “How do you like me now?”
His eyes were invisible. “I like you as you are.”
She could not hear in his voice whether that meant “before” or “now.” Could not feel it, either. She was turned all upside down by the clay on her face. It seemed to thrum with implied power, but differently than her curse had, so that she would have to recalibrate everything she knew.
She turned past him to the mirror at the end of the room. Her eyes looked out from behind the mask. Her own visage, yet transformed. Enduring. Only her frightened eyes marred its regal beauty.
He came up behind her, slid a hand to her waist.
She could not move from the mirror.
“You think I mock you. You think I want you to be other than you are.” He drew his fingers down the cheek of the mask—she felt it as a coldness that slid over her real skin, her damaged skin. “How could you not?”
“When the proof is right here.”
“I used to be a fine artist,” he said. “I used to find beauty in what was. Now I sculpt every mask and it turns fey under my fingertips.” He pulled the mask from her face and she cried out as her reflection appeared again. And hated herself for the agony her own reflection stirred.
“I tried to form your face. Your face, undamaged. Yet the clay twisted under my fingers, edges where there should be none, roundness where there should be none—remaking your face into some horrid fey ideal. Turning a pretty human face to grotesque parody.” He tossed the mask to the worktable, and its forehead chipped. “I had no idea what I’ve become.”