Tina Connolly - Copperhead

“It’s not battle,” said Helen. “We’re just going to show up and take our faces back. Oh, and take apart his weapon, whatever the heck it is. Then leave.” She began to repin her hair, using a small round mirror hanging between the show posters. It was funny, but she felt as though she moved differently in the slacks. They were just clothes, weren’t they? And yet she of anyone should know the difference that clothes made.

“Bacon, bacon, bacon,” said Stephen, dropping it onto plates. “And what’s to stop him from making another weapon?”

“Well, he won’t have us to do it with,” Helen said to the reflection. “There’s that.”

“He didn’t exactly have his wife’s permission, did he?” said Stephen.

“How did you know about that? I didn’t think you were here last night.”

Stephen shrugged. “Jane’s been telling us the whole story. How you went to look in the warehouse window last night and saw him there. Oh, and talking to someone in a sort of fey trance. Did she make it all up?”

Helen sat down at the table, straddling the back of the chair because she could, and looked hard at Jane. “You know things,” she said. “I didn’t mention those details.”

“I know things,” Jane said dreamily.

“Listen, Jane,” Helen said. “There’s a fey inside you. I know it.”

Tam raised his head from his hands, looking wide-eyed at Jane.

Jane suddenly backed up from the table, skittering away, and Helen cursed herself for a fool. “He’s not, he’s not,” she said, eyes wide. “He’s not.”

“What do you mean, he’s not?”

Jane closed her eyes. “He comes and goes,” she said. “Sometimes I vanish. Sometimes I see everything. I saw you in the warehouse. I saw Millicent. I saw her go out into everything, searching into all the blue. And then … go.”

Stephen looked from one to the other, eyes wide.

“Tell me,” Helen said urgently, and she gripped the back of the chair. “Are you Jane now? Can you tell?” She did not know what this sometimes business was and yet it fit with everything she’d seen so far. She had thought Jane was warring with a fey that lived inside her. But how could the fey come in and out? Jane herself had said several months ago that the fey could not do that. Once they went into a person they were there until death—their death, or the body’s.

Jane’s eyes darted around. She seemed unable to speak.

“Tell me,” Helen pressed. Subconsciously her hand closed on the copper necklace. “Tell me.”

Jane’s mouth opened. “That’s him,” she said, pointing at the necklace. “That’s him too.”

They all looked at the copper hydra. The necklace that had been clinging around Helen’s neck like a snake itself ever since Alistair had given it to her. The necklace that did not want to come off. Helen started to pull it off and said, “That’s silly, Jane. How could a necklace be a fey?” She let it fall again.

“Copper’s not poison to fey,” said Stephen. “Back when we had all the bluepacks—bits of fey I guess they were—you put them in copper casings to run things.”

“I think my lapel pin’s hollow,” said Tam. “Maybe they all are.” He rubbed bleary eyes, peering at Helen’s hydra charm as if he were much older.

“It seems so silly to want to take it off,” said Helen. “And now that’s making me feel very disturbed. Why don’t I want to take it off?”

“You should keep it on,” Jane said dreamily.

“I think not,” said Helen. But her hands did not move.

“I’m not touching it,” said Stephen.

“I’ll do it,” said Tam. He scrambled off his chair and clambered up on the one next to Helen, binoculars waving. Carefully he stood and reached for the necklace. “It feels … funny,” he said. “Like a friend.”

“Don’t trust it,” said Helen.

Tam grasped the chain and carefully lifted it from around Helen’s neck. Instantly Helen felt the compulsion to keep it on lessen. She could see it as just a pretty necklace. “It likes me,” Tam said. He stroked the copper heads. “It likes Jane. Mostly it just wants to go home.”

“What are you, the fey whisperer?” said Stephen. He looked at Helen with disgust. “Did you know you’d been walking around with that on?”

“Of course not,” said Helen. Although she should have known. She had been able to do more with it, hadn’t she? “Give it here,” she said suddenly to Tam.

Obediently he handed it to her, and she cradled the little piece of copper in her hand. It was hard to believe it had a piece of fey captured inside. And yet … “It likes Jane, you say?” Helen looked at Jane. “Like should call to like, I think,” she murmured.

“What are you— oh, ” said Jane. She put her hands to her face.

“Come here,” Helen crooned. “Come here.”

Jane’s face lit up a strange fey-blue for a moment, then faded away.

“Did you see that?” Helen said.

Tam put a hand to Jane’s face. “It wants to come,” he said. “It wants to join the one in the necklace.”

Helen cupped her hands around the necklace and tried again. “Come here,” she said. “Come here.”

Again the blue rose to the surface. It started to spin out toward Helen, blue smoke tendrils curling through the air.

“Come here,” Helen told it, and she could see it trying.

“Stop it,” Stephen said suddenly. “You’re hurting Jane.”

Helen looked and saw that Jane’s face was dead white where the blue had left it, pink around the edges like a curling ribbon. Like her face was lifting away.

“Her face,” Helen said.

“Don’t they all have fey in their faces?” said Stephen. “The Hundred?”

“Oh no, oh no,” said Helen, and she tried to reverse the command, tell the bit of fey to return to Jane. “It’s the bit of fey that animates the clay on her face,” she said. “Without it it wouldn’t act like skin.”

“She wouldn’t have a face,” said Tam.

“Or anything,” said Stephen, for Jane was having trouble breathing now. She gasped for air, her skin dead white.

“Go back, go back,” crooned Helen as fervently as she had bid it come to her. But the fey in Jane’s face had tasted freedom, felt its bit of fellow fey in the necklace. Helen grasped the necklace tightly, enclosed the fey in her hand. “Go back to Jane.”

Tam reached over and grabbed Helen’s fist in his two little hands. “Go back,” he told the fey, along with Helen. “Go back.”

Slowly, slowly, the blue returned to Jane. It sank in and disappeared, and as it did, pink life returned to her cheeks, and she started to breathe normally again.

Helen seized Jane in her arms and hugged her close, patting the dark hair. “Well, that didn’t work,” Helen said, with a touch of hysteria at the understatement.

“What were you trying to do?” said Stephen.

“I thought there was fey in her. Like a whole fey. I thought I could make it come out. But I guess all the fey is only that little bit it’s always been. How can that be a problem? We all have that, and Jane knows how to deal with it.”

Under her arms, Jane stirred. “Because it’s the same fey that’s in your necklace,” she croaked. “It belongs to the same entity.”

“Jane!” shouted Helen. She seized her sister’s hands and sank down next to her. “It’s you! It is. Tell me what just happened.”