Tithe by Holly Black

her knuckles, she started to run.
    Corny squinted. A girl in green makeup ran across the street and under the awning of the gas station. She looked up, and he thought he recognized her, but when she got closer, he wasn’t so sure.
    “I was going to Janet’s,” she said, sounding just like Kaye. “But I just remembered she’s at school.”
    Up close the girl didn’t look anything like Kaye. She didn’t look anything like anybody. Her upturned eyes were black as oil spills. She was too thin. Tall ears parted her tangled hair on either side of her head. Her skin seemed to be flaking, showing patches of green underneath.
    “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 hadworked 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.
    “Oh, God,” Corny said. “You have wings.”
    The damp things moved feebly.
    The sight of it sent a thrill through him, despite the fear. This was the real thing.
    “C’mon,” he said. “My house.”

6
    “Down the hill I went, and then,
I forgot the ways of men
For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool
Wakened ecstasy in me.”
    —SARA TEASDALE “August Moonrise,” Flame and Shadow
    Kaye sat down gingerly at the edge of the