Prologue

Charlie McKinnon had been aware of Amy Puck’s eccentricities before they ever began to fall in love. The two of them had met in college, not through any class, but through a sort of on-campus support group for first-generation students. While Amy was the first in her family to attend school because her father worked a blue-collar job and her mother was an immigrant, Charlie was the first to attend because her family were a bunch of bullshit backwoods-ass hicks.

Charlie wasn’t entirely sure at first why Amy had caught her attention, but she’d figured it out the first time she heard Amy explain her dissertation on Irish folklore. For some reason, this girl who had absolutely no Irish blood in her (unlike Charlie, whose great grandfather had come over directly from Dublin,) had a deep obsession with faeries. She wore her socks inside-out, kept a string of dried rowan berries tied around her wrist, and filled the bottoms of her pockets with salt and old screws.

It had taken them a few years of living together after school for Amy to tell Charlie the real reason for her interest, and to say she hadn’t believed it would be an understatement. For half a second after Amy said her brother had been taken by the fae, Charlie was about to let out the most monstrous laugh to have ever left her body. But Amy’s face was still, and her eyes held a measure of dread then unlike any Charlie had ever seen. She’d seen animals die, and the glassy film over Amy’s eyes then was the same as a buck trying to gore you before it bled out. Charlie listened, and tried her best to suspend her disbelief at being told a hazy, fogged up memory from when Amy was no more than four years old.

She’d said she was playing with her brother, Deep, on the floor of their living room, when two men had appeared, the air shimmering across their skin as they simply stepped into the room from nonexistence. The men looked strange, Amy said, like characters from some movie with wonderful effects. She recalled that one of them had a cat’s paws for feet and a long red tail, and the other seemed as though his limbs had been stretched too long. They both had long, pointed ears, though the cat man’s had fur and the long man’s did not.

The long man had called out for Amy’s mother, Hema, and she’d come into the room, afraid. The long man had told her he’d come for his son, and Hema had thrown herself to the floor, grabbed Deep and Amy, and begged the long man to let her keep them. He had said he had no use for Amy, but he’d be taking his blood, the cat man had put a clawed hand on her brother, and the three had disappeared, leaving Amy alone in her mother’s arms, crying together at their loss.

Charlie had wanted to believe her, she truly had, but faeries were a bit much. Charlie had a hard time believing in most things until she saw them.

It had been this morning when she’d received her proof.

A knock at the door of her and Amy’s shared home, her parents’ old farmhouse, long abandoned. She had taken it up as a pet project, convincing Amy to let her turn it into a home they could grow old in. When she’d opened the door, dressed in her pajamas and holding her favorite mug, she hadn’t seen anyone outside. She did, however, hear babies crying.

She’d made her way out onto the porch, looking down the front steps, and at the base she’d seen one of the most terrifying things to probably ever exist. A small wicker basket, covered partially by a thin, shining silk blanket, which held an undulating, bloodied mass of flesh. The crying was coming from the flesh.

Charlie McKinnon was not a sculptor, but she had butchered animals after her father brought them home in his big arms and dumped them onto a plastic folding table in the garage. She had read the note in the basket, written in flowery, looping handwritten ink. ‘Amy. I send in this basket all of your brother’s love. His children, Aindréas and Gwendolynne.’ The ink still smudged when she ran her thumb across it, and smelled like blackberries and honey. The mass of flesh had been swiftly moved, then, basket and all, to the garage, where she knelt over it now with a hunting knife.

It continued to wail in two voices, shifting and shaking in tune with the babies’ whimpers. They had to be in there somehow. She carefully put a gloved hand to the things skin, shushing it quietly. One of the infant voices cooed back at her while the other continued its caterwauling.

She was swift with the knife, trying to ignore the way the thing fought her the whole way as though it was all sinewy tendons, the way it bled some clearish pale milk that smelled of dandelions and ran like mud. When she’d ripped through the skin on the other side of the mass, her ears had nearly given up on trying to ring against the squalling of the two little shapes, wriggling independently now, and she hoped with all of herself that Amy was still in bed with her earplugs in. If she were in the main house she’d be safe from having to see this, trying to study this thing while Charlie tried to find the infants in it all.

As the weeks moved past her, Charlie began to doubt herself on keeping them in the garage, but they weren’t quite babies yet, and so she was hesitant to put them back out front and let Amy find them. She’d seen them shrivel and shrink, sometimes with chunks falling away in the middle of rolling about, sometimes a small hand appearing in the night. They were becoming something. The one eye they had between the two of them now was a hauntingly vibrant green, and did not seem to blink when Charlie watched it back.

She expected more of the same, today, but found instead the misshapen tangle of two lumpy things that nearly resembled human infants. They had the right amount of limbs, though the girl had the smallest of feathered wings on her back and the boy’s feet seemed to be hardening into small hooves. Their eyes were wide and unblinking, and their faces mirrored each other in a toneless way that reminded Charlie of unbaked red clay. They were certainly related to Amy, their curly hair dark and wispy the same way hers was when it grew in at the nape of her neck.

Charlie had nearly finished the work on the house, and Amy had decided she wanted to tend to some of the maple trees to see if she could make syrup. It was the cusp of fall, and the air was beginning to hold a chill in the early mornings when Charlie came out to look at the way these things rotted into the shape of babies. She had to get them just a touch closer, and they could come inside for the winter, and drink milk and honey warm from bottles and be held and sung to and cooed over. But she had to do itsoon, and if she lost her nerve today she feared all of the work she’d put in would be wasted on the first of Vermont’s chillier autumn nights.

She gripped the knife in her gloved hand again, steeling herself. It had been easier when it looked like a water balloon made of flesh, but these two slow-moving things babbled at her with accented tones that almost sounded familiar, and their limbs did not give the way they used to. She flipped the girl onto her stomach and held her palm flat against her neck and shoulders, pinching the fluffy black and white down feathers on the small wings and beginning to saw at the thin skin over the bones connecting them to her shoulder blades. She gasped and withdrew the knife in shock as a thin rivulet of real, scarlet blood ran down the screaming baby’s back. The wing twitched against her fingertips and she took a slow breath. They were so close. She moved the knife back and pulled the wings taut, slicing with more force.

When the small wings came away in her hand, she dropped them and the knife in the lid of a nearby open first aid kit, from which she pulled gauze. She dabbed at the baby’s shoulders and turned her around slowly in her hands. She was smooth across the back. Hopefully her shape would solidify in a way that didn’t indicate the wings at all. A perfect taxidermy of a child. Now, her brother.

Splitting the baby some extra toes was simple enough, but carving away at the soft new keratin until the flesh beneath was exposed was a little more difficult. It was harder and harder now to think of these things as anything other than Amy’s niece and nephew, though she supposed that was the point. She wasn’t sure if raising the things themselves would be safer or if it would be better for everyone to put them in the foster system and hope for the best. Maybe Hema would want to raise them in memory of their father. She’d raised a fairy baby before, maybe Deep had been like this.

When she finished wrapping them up and putting them back into their basket, she cleared her mind of any doubt. It had to be her and Amy. There wasn’t any other choice. They slept now, and as the tears and redness fled from their small faces, she felt something she was certain would be dangerous.

It was late, but she’d risen from her bed and been unable to sleep for fear of what was happening to them. She’d laced and tied her boots, sitting on the lowest stair in the case that connected the upper floor of the house to what Charlie was turning into a shop. The light at the top of the stairs flicked on, and Charlie watched her shadow as it was swallowed up by the approach of Amy’s. She felt her eyes water, and it was over. She was out of her depth, and had absolutely no way she could lie to get out of this.

“Char. It’s three in the goddamn morning. You are not unlocking those doors during the month of October at three in the goddamn morning.” Amy marched down the steps, the smell of rowan and holly drifting from the pockets of her robe, always inside-out.

“Baby, I-” Charlie’s voice shook the way it only did when she was crying, and Amy’s hand on her shoulder made the tension snap. “I have to show you, but you can’t leave. I can’t do it by myself anymore.” She looked up at Amy, and wiped the salt from her bleary eyes. Her lover’s face was like stone.

She led Amy to the shed through gentle, shaking pleas for forgiveness before her transgression was seen, and the salt clutched tight in Amy’s fisted hands was enough to make her put herself between her wife and the entrance.

“I found a note, and a basket. And they look like you, Amy, they do.” She opened the door slowly to reveal the babies, sleeping peacefully. They were so good, now, so smooth and sleepy. She’d come out here the last few nights to feed them bottles of milk from the fridge, the refuse of which she’d left in a trash bag strung over the back of a wooden chair. Her tools were put away cleanly, and there was nothing within the reach of the infants that could hurt them.

Amy’s face was a terrible mask of shock, horror, and betrayal. She threw the salt, but Charlie caught most of it across the front of herself, shielding the basket. She couldn’t know what the salt would do, but Amy did. Charlie made a sound not unlike the anguished and terrified cry of a rabbit caught between the jaws of a lynx when Amy grabbed the small shears off the wall. The babies had seen those blades more than once, but not since their first few weeks. They were done now, they were ready, Amy could only mean to use those to hurt them. Charlie felt herself trying to beat her way out of the back corners of her own mind as the fear took her over, the need to protect these things.

Amy had not calmed down, but she had put the shears down, gotten Charlie and the babies into the kitchen, and was now speaking animatedly in Bengali over the phone to her mother, who had not taken kindly to being awoken at this hour, and was even more angry when Amy told her the news.

Charlie had, it seems, been under the effect of the babies’ magic. Hema said Deep was the same, and that her and Amy’s father, Thomas, had experienced that same delusional love when he’d been born.

Charlie had never felt this confused or divided from who she knew herself to be. She was certain that the babies couldn’t do anything to her on purpose, because if they could, frankly, she deserved much worse.

She was catching words and phrases she knew from either side of the phone call, but noted that she needed to make a better effort on those Rosetta Stone CDs her mother in law had gotten her.

Amy was apologizing for Charlie’s mistake in taking up a knife against faerie children. Hema was sobbing over her son being alive. The babies were cooing happily at each other, green eyes taking in far more than they should be able to at just a few weeks old. Charlie was sat in her father’s old wooden seat at the head of the dining table, watching her life become someone else’s.

Amy hung up quietly, soothing her mother and telling her to sleep and they could see the twins in the morning. Reassuring her of love and charms and strategies of safety that had been the practice of the two of their lives forever. A life Charlie hadn’t ever understood, not for their entire relationship.

Charlie McKinnon helped her wife put the changelings to bed. She helped Hema and Amy pick their names, after she had told them the names from the note.

She had written checks and notes to doctors who found irregular organs and dentists who found sharp teeth and teachers who wanted to know what language they were speaking to each other under their breath. Charlie knew the answers were better unknown to her, and so she followed the rules Amy and Hema taught her, and she led with as much love for these monsters as she could.

She’d helped Edwin bury the small animals he’d caught with his tiny hands, after he’d pulled out their insides to see what they looked like. She’d helped Gwen untwist the twigs and briars from her hair when she woke Charlie in the middle of the night covered in bruises and blood and refused to answer questions.

She loved them, true and genuine. After a while, they really did start to feel human, and Charlie could almost ignore the things about her children that scared her.

Almost.