"Kaye?" Corny asked.
The girl smiled at him, but her smile was too fierce. The skin tore on her lower lip.
He was frozen, staring at her.
She scooted past him into the office, stretching her twiglike fingers. He stifled a whimper, trying to keep his eyes focused on the credit-card unit, the dirty papers, the laminated nude air freshener, all familiar things. He could smell her, a weird combination of pine needles, moss, and leaf piles. It was making him dizzy.
She sat down on the floor on top of papers and fast-food boxes.
"What the hell happened to you?"
Kaye held out her hand and tilted it slightly in the light. "I'm sick," she said. "I'm really sick."
He crouched down and looked at her again. There was a luminescence to her skin, a kind of brightness about her that made her eyes glitter feverishly. There was something about her shape itself that was strange, a hunching of the shoulders, a slight bulge of the back.
He picked up a block of wood with a dangling key. "Let's go in the bathroom. The light's better and you can wash more of this crap off."
She got up off the floor.
"I could take you over to the hospital," he said. She didn't reply, and he didn't pursue it. He knew this wasn't a hospital-type thing—he just felt like he ought to say it.
The bathroom was grimy. Corny certainly couldn't recall anyone doing more than changing the toilet paper in all the time he had worked there. The once-white tiles were cracked and grayed. There was barely enough room for two people, but Kaye squeezed in obediently next to the toilet and stripped off her sweater.
"Take off the rest of it. There's something on your back."
She threw a considering look at him and seemed to decide either he didn't care or she didn't. She kicked off her boots, pulled off the sweater and then the nightgown until she was only in her panties.
Bunching up her nightgown under the faucet, he got it sopping wet. He used the cloth to scrub off what was left of her skin and the pigment of her hair. Her skin was thin as crepe on her back. As he rubbed the cloth over the bump between her shoulders, the skin cracked.
A thin whitish fluid leaked out between her shoulder blades.
"Uuughh!" Corny moved back from her.
Kaye looked back at him, and her face said that she just couldn't take any more weirdness. Of course it was hard to know whether he was reading her strange eyes right.
"Its okay," he said in as soothing a voice as he could. Outside he heard a car pull into the gas station. He ignored it.
"What happened?" There was something moving under the surface of her back, something slick and iridescent.
"Hold on," he said. The thick fluid was wiping off, showing white-veined iridescence all the way down her back. Suddenly something flicked loose, rising so that it almost slapped Corny before it fell wetly against her back.>Spike shook his head. "We don't know the answer to that any more than we know why we were told to watch you."
It was staggering to Kaye to realize that there might be another Kaye Fierch, the real Kaye Fierch, off somewhere in Faerie. "You said… glamoured. Does that mean I don't look like this?"
"It's a very powerful glamour. Someone put it on to stay." Spike nodded sagely.
"What do I really look like?"
"Well, you're a pixie, if that helps." Spike scratched his head. "It usually means green."
Kaye closed her eyes tightly, shaking her head. "How can I see me?"
"I don't advise it," Spike said. "Once you pull that thing off, no one we know can put it back on that good. Just let it be until Samhain—that's when the Tithe is. Someone might figure out what you are if you go messing with your face."
"Soon it'll be off for good and you won't have to pretend to be mortal anymore if you don't want," Lutie chirped.
"If the glamour on me is so good, how did you know what I was?"
The Thistlewitch smiled. "Glamour is the stuff of illusion, but sometimes, if deftly woven, it can be more than a mere disguise. Fantastical pockets can actually hold baubles, an illusionary umbrella can protect one from the rain, and magical gold can remain gold, at least until the warmth of the magician's hand fades from the coins. The magic on you is the strongest I have seen, Kaye. It protects you even from the touch of iron, which burns faerie flesh. I know you to be a pixie because I saw you when you were very small and we lived in Seelie lands. The Queen herself asked us to look after you."