Darklands by Nancy Holzner Page B

still in her room.
    “Maria?” I knocked again. “Maria, it’s Aunt Vicky. Can I come in?”
    I heard a thump on the other side of the door, but it stayed closed. “What are you doing here?” Maria’s muffled voice asked. “I thought you go to bed in the morning.”
    “Usually I do. Not always. Your mom said you weren’t feeling so great and thought maybe I could help.”
    “I told her not to call you.” A pause. “Nobody can help.”
    “Let’s talk about it and see. It’ll be easier, though, if you open the door. Now that I’ve driven all the way out here, I’d hate to go back home without seeing my favorite niece.”
    “You want to see me?
Fine.
” The lock clicked and the door flew open as though an explosion had blasted it off its hinges. Maria stood there, one hand on the door, her chin jutting out defiantly. “Okay, now you can see me. Happy?”
    “Yeah, I am. Although I’d rather see a smile on that pretty face.”
    Maria’s eyes were red and puffy. Her lips quivered as shedrew in a shaky breath. “Don’t tease me, Aunt Vicky. I can’t take it right now.”
    Gently, I put a hand on her hair. She flinched but didn’t pull away. I stroked her hair, then put a finger under her chin and tilted her head upward. “Tell me what’s going on. Why do you think I’m teasing you?”
    “Look at my face!” Her voice caught on a sob. “Will it stay like this?”
    “Well, it’s a little blotchy from crying. Otherwise, you’re as gorgeous as always.”
    “Really? I don’t look different to you? But—” She frowned and touched her cheek.
    I was pretty sure now I knew what was going on. “When you woke up this morning, I bet you felt strange, not like yourself.” She nodded. “Tell me what you saw when you looked in the mirror.”
    “This!”
    “Tell me.”
    “A cat’s face. But not like a real cat. It was me, with my hair and eyes. But I had pointy ears and my nose and mouth were like a cat’s. And gray fur. And whiskers.” She ran over to the full-length mirror that hung on the wall. “It’s still there! Why did you tell me it was gone?”
    I leaned against the doorframe and watched her. “It’s an illusion.”
    She peered into the mirror, her hands moving over her face. Then she shook her head. “It’s not! It’s real. I can feel it.”
    “I’ll show you. Do you have a camera?”
    She picked up her phone from the nightstand and handed it to me. I used its camera to snap a picture, then handed her the result. She stared at the image, mouth open. Along her cheeks, her fingers traced whiskers that weren’t there.
    “See?” I said. “The same Maria we all know and love.”
    “But I can
feel
the whiskers,” she said. She looked in the mirror, frowned, and looked at the photo again.
    “Like I said, it’s an illusion, one you can see and feel. But only you can. It’s called a false face. It’ll pass, and you’ll feel normal again. And the next time it happens, you’ll know what’s going on.”
    Maria held up the phone and took another picture of herself.She studied it, then looked up. “Why didn’t anyone tell me I’d get a false face?”
    Good question. I’d promised Gwen that I’d help Maria make the transition to shapeshifting, but walking the line between helping and taking over was tricky. I didn’t want to muscle in on Gwen’s parenting, but at the same time Maria had a right to know what was going to happen to her.
    “We should have told you. I guess neither your mom nor I expected you to start experiencing false faces yet. They usually show up six, maybe eight months after the first shapeshifting dreams, and those only started a month ago, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So you’re ahead of schedule. We would have told you if we’d known it would happen so fast—honest.”
    “I was scared.” Tears welled but didn’t spill over. “I thought I was going to stay like that, like some kind of freak. You know, because mom’s Ker…Kerth…like you