Free The Iron Witch by Karen Mahoney Page B

that … ” Donna swallowed and stirred her tea. “I was planning to visit Mom this evening.” Okay, so it was an excuse, but she really should go see her mother. It was long past time.
    Her aunt’s tone softened. “Really? That’s wonderful news—she’ll be so happy to see you.”
    Donna doubted that. For the most part, Rachel Underwood didn’t recognize her own daughter when Donna visited her at the exclusive and very private Institute. The residents were mainly elderly, but there were a handful of younger patients, her mother among them. Nobody quite knew what to do with her—she wasn’t exactly crazy, but she certainly wasn’t … well . It was more like there was a void where once a person had existed. A beautiful, vibrant person, who was now an empty shell who rarely spoke.
    All of that vitality, snuffed out after one night of terror in the forest.
    “Well,” Donna said, “I haven’t been for weeks.”
    “All the more reason to go, then.”
    Aunt Paige nodded firmly, as if the matter was already settled. In her mind, it probably was.

Donna Underwood’s Journal:
Visiting Mom is always difficult. “Difficult”: that word doesn’t even begin to describe it, but if I tried to write what I really felt I’d just start crying. And I promised myself, a long time ago, that I would never cry over my mom again.
Even while I waited to be admitted—standing in the familiar spacious entry hall of the medical facility, with its smell of pine, lavender, and the strongest bleach you can get—I felt a mixture of hope and despair. I can’t help hoping, even after all this time, that Mom will somehow get better.
As if by magic. Yeah, wouldn’t that be something to see.
So it turned out that I lost both my parents after Dad rescued me from the dark elves—after the Wood Monster ruined my hands and forever marked me as different. Mom was in the group of alchemists following behind, the ones who tried to stop Dad from getting himself killed. That’s what Aunt Paige has told me; I hardly remember anything that happened that night. I was very young, and it’s almost as though there’s a gray cloud over the whole thing in my mind.
And then there are the dreams. But I don’t even know which parts are real and which I made up.
We do know that the elves did something to Mom—worked their mojo on her while she was in their territory—but nobody knows quite what they did. Which means it can’t be undone. Quentin says if the alchemists could be certain of what actually happened, they would have a better chance of fixing it. Of fixing her.
Maker’s best guess was that they took a lock of her hair during the fight. An elflock is a particularly powerful kind of magic; dark fey can use a lock of human hair to invade the victim’s dreams and slowly drive them mad. Seems pretty obvious to me that’s what happened, but, even if that is the case, we’d need to know where that lock of hair is in order to have any chance of healing her.
So until then, she has to stay in this halfway state, here at the Institute. Most of the time she sits and stares out the window. She likes to see the sky, I think. Sometimes she’s completely comatose, while other times you can at least have a conversation with her. You never know if she’ll remember who you are, though.
It was good to see her today, despite everything. I was surprised at how relieved I was just to be able to sit with her. To hold her hand and look into her eyes. Her lovely eyes that are still that unusual silver-gray—my eyes do a poor imitation of them, though I remember that Dad used to compare us and say that it was our eyes that made us look like sisters. She would laugh at that.
Memories are stupid things. Why is it that I can only remember the useless stuff?
Mom’s beautiful red hair has faded, and the streak of white in the front had spread since the last time I was here. I picked up the heavy brush on the old-fashioned dresser and began to run it through her