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“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure.
“Your freckles look like stars.” Addie smiles. “I’ve heard. My own little constellation. It’s the first thing everyone sees.”
The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.
A crack of thunder, and seconds later, the rain comes down. Not a drizzle—not even the sparse warning drops that soon give way to a steady rain—but the sudden sheet fall of a downpour. The kind of rain that hits you like a wall, soaks you through in seconds.
Four years of holding her breath, and though she will never admit it, the sight of him is like coming up for air. A terrible, chest-opening relief. As much as she hates this shadow, this god, this monster in his stolen flesh, he is still the only one who remembers her at all.
His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.
“Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.”
“My little storm cloud,” she says. “Don’t let it get too dark in there.”
There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying. But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world.
“You belong to me.” There is a sound like thunder in the back of his throat. “With me.”
His voice, molded to the hollow places in her as he says, “I want you.” And then, again, “I have always wanted you.”
He tastes like the forest, and somehow, impossibly, like home.
“The wonder in your eyes, at the sight of something new. I knew then I’d never win.”
“This is need. And need is painful but patient. Do you hear me, Adeline? I need you. As you need me. I love you, as you love me.”
