Page 11 of Good Golly Miss Molly

She gets a puzzled expression on her face as she sees the bracelet. Yeah. It’s weird. I know. But not nearly as weird as having it melt without burning either of us.

Puzzlement shifts to panic, and she reaches for her neck.

“My necklace!”

In the dark last night, I didn’t really notice the one she had on. And she’s not wearing one now. Did the two get tangled together and have some kind of strange chemical reaction?

I see a glimmer behind her, and I slide my hand toward it, not exactly avoiding brushing against her hip while I do. I fish it out from behind her and trace my free fingers up her back on the way back up. She shudders and there’s a hint of a smile. She holds her hand out, and I place the necklace in it.

And that’s when I notice something familiar. Very familiar. The necklace is made of steel wire, almost identical to my bracelet, and it — like my bracelet — is melted in half at the spot where a charm is attached. Yes, an actual charm, because the triskele hanging from it is identical to my own.

“What?” “How?” the two of us ask simultaneously.

“Rónan…” she breathes. “What have you done?”

“You know him?”

“I did. Not for very long. I’d only been here a brief while when he left us. And you?”

“Since I was a baby. He gave me a home, a start in life, and… this…”

She looks at the charm, the broken — melted — bracelet, and then up at my face. She traces the scar over my brow, but her exploration doesn’t stop there. She finds the smaller scar across my nose, the tracing of lines across the corner of my mouth, the raised mark along the side of my jaw, the little snip out of my ear.

The thingsIsee when I look in the mirror. The things no one except Rónan and the smith had ever seen. Until now.

The things I had gladly hidden from every woman who’d ever had the experience of touching me in this bed, their senses muddled by the charm so that they didn’t perceive the deeper scars and the odd texture in a few spots on my back and chest.

But Molly, she’s touched them all!

“What’s going on here?” she asks.

That’s my question, too.

“It was a charm — my bracelet. To hide my disfigurement.”

“What disfigurement?”

Her tone is direct, sincere, and I start to wonder if I’ve taken leave of my own senses.

“The scars… the mess of my skin.” I gesture to what should be obvious.

“You are a changeling, are you not?”

It’s like a bolt of lightning. She knows what I am. She knows Rónan, and she recognizes a changeling on sight.

I nod slowly.

“Then you are as you should be. It is the way of things. It would be sad if you were other than who you genuinely are. Has no one told you this? Not even Rónan?”

“He knew what I was when I was first abandoned. But I was the only changeling he’d ever seen with his own eyes. I’m not sure what he thought. But he knew that I wouldn’t thrive in this world looking as I do.”

“Humans are short-sighted. As are many of the sidhe. Which clearly included your birth parents.”

Wait. Humans? She speaks as if she is not one of them…

“What are you?”

She looks deeply troubled as she runs her fingers over the broken necklace.

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