Page 14 of The Red Woman and the White Bear

Now, she waited for her closest friend to change her into one of the creatures from her mother’s accounts and take her to the place she’d demanded Aisling never visit. She’d be the one calling Aisling crazy for this.

“We should go inside. It’s going to rain soon.” Aisling didn’t so much as glance toward the late eveningsky, but Rodney peered upward to examine it from where he sat beside her on the steps of his mobile home. It was hazy, but cloudless.

Not ten minutes later, dark clouds had blown in and the first drops of rain began to pelt the roof.

He watched it coming down through the window as Aisling settled on the couch. “I don’t know how you always do that.”

“In the city I never could. I can’t tell you how many times I got caught out without an umbrella. I can always smell it here, though.” She shrugged, dropping one hand to scratch Briar’s head where he lay on the ground beside her. “Something in the soil maybe, or in the trees.”

“Either way, it’s impressive.” He let the cheap plastic shade fall closed and moved to stand in front of the couch. “We need to get ready.”

“It’s too early,” Aisling complained. She was stalling, and they both knew it.

“It’ll take a bit for us to get out there, and I need time to make sure I have the glamour right,” Rodney argued.

Aisling sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. “I can’t look like me.”

“I know.”

“Anythinglike me, Rodney,” she insisted. There shouldn’t be a single trace of her left when he was done—not hair or skin or eye color, build or bone structure.

“I know, Ash.” He was getting annoyed. He pulled a magazine out of a half-empty moving box on the floor and tossed it at her.It was two years old; she wasn’t quite sure why he still had it. “Pick someone. I need a reference.”

She flipped through the pages and pointed at random to a model in a perfume ad insert that had long since lost its scent. “Here, use her.”

He tore the page out and studied it for a moment before he folded it into a tiny square to tuck in his pocket. Rodney was already dressed for the occasion in a slim-fitting satin suit, a deep shade of maroon with black lapels. It clashed just enough with his orange hair that the whole look almost seemed to work. He’d seen it in a magazine, too, along with the shiny patent loafers that would more than likely give him blisters by the end of the night.

Rodney returned to the kitchen to attend to the whistling kettle on the stove. Aisling could smell the brew from the couch and wrinkled her nose in disgust. The acrid scent burned her nostrils. Briar, too, huffed in annoyance.

“Christ, that smells,” she choked out.

“It’ll taste even worse,” Rodney promised grimly. He handed Aisling a chipped mug he’d pocketed from a diner on the mainland and she swirled the liquid in it. It was a pale pink, only a few shades darker than completely clear. It looked weaker than it smelled.

“What is it?”

“Quicken tea. Brewed from dried rowan berries.” Rodney had pulled the perfume ad back out of his pocket and was examining it closely, memorizing the planes and angles of the model’s face. “Drink it all.”

With it tipped toward her face, the rising steam made Aisling’s eyes water. She screwed them shut tightly and drank the too-hot tea down in three big sips. She had to purse her lips together to keep from gagging. “Why did I drink that?” she rasped once she could speak again.

“To protect you from enchantments.” He noticed her alarmed look and tried to placate her: “It’s only a precaution. These celebrations sometimes get out of hand. You should be fine, just don’t eat or drink anything that I don’t give you.”

Rodney’s glamour felt at first like a heavy down quilt being draped over Aisling’s head: both comforting and stifling, a cocoon that prickled over her bare skin. It took several minutes to settle against her form. Once the magic had pressed itself into every dip and curve of her body, the feeling dissipated. Then, at most, it felt like a thin film. The smell of it lingered faintly—the same indescribable scent she’d caught the night he’d turned playing cards to cash.

Aisling’s honey-brown hair had darkened to the deepest shade of chestnut, very nearly black, which matched her wide, upturned eyes. The freckles that peppered across her nose and under her eyes had disappeared. Her face was now heart-shaped and angular, with high, sharp cheekbones and rosebud lips. Aisling wasn’t large to begin with, but her athletic build had diminished to a much more petite size. Her waist was tiny, and she’d lost about a foot of height. Shesmiled, satisfied with her newly-elongated digits and viridescent skin that seemed to glow in the moonlight.

“You take entirely too much pleasure in this,” Rodney pointed out sardonically.

“Of course I do, look at me.” When she twirled, the small wings on her back fluttered in place. “I wish I looked like this all the time.”

He scowled. “I like you better as you.”

Aisling rolled her eyes. They felt too big for her sockets. “This was your idea.” She smoothed her hands over her dress, green as grass and embellished with shining gold stitching that made it look like a patchwork of leaves. It was short, much shorter than anything Aisling owned, but she hadn’t been glamoured this way for fun. She needed to look the part that she’d be playing.

Rodney had cast his magic not far from the Thin Place, and the pair made their way there in silence. Aisling was buzzing with nervous energy. She’d turned down Rodney’s offer to take a shot or two beforehand, and she was regretting that decision now as they wound through the dark woods.

He’d been overly secretive in the weeks leading up to this night about the location of the Unseelie Thin Place, but now that they were close, Aisling knew exactly where it was. Of course she did—she chided herself for never having guessed. It was perhaps the most obvious place on the island for it to be hidden.

The old lead mine had closed in the 80’s, well before Aisling was born, and Brook Isle had never recovered. Though it was never featured in her mother’s stories, its black, gaping maw had long given her an uneasy feeling. She’d always chalked it up to the safetypresentations the island’s fire and rescue squad put on for the school at the beginning of every year: don’t get caught out on the mud flats at low tide. Don’t throw things off the docks. And never, ever go into the mine. They warned of cave-ins. Toxic fumes. Open chasms one might fall into in the dark that could swallow a grown man whole. All enough to terrify children, sure, but she never outgrew the feeling. When Aisling visited its entrance years ago, on a dare, it wasn’t fumes or unstable rock that made her blood run cold. It was the feeling of being watched.

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