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“Put your hand over mine,” he says, and she hesitates only a moment before pressing her palm to the back of his hand, ghosting her fingers over his own. “There,” he says, “now we can draw.”
The images spill out of her, and through him, and onto the wall with a clumsy, frenzied need. And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.
Something changes in her, then. It rolls over her, the way storms roll over him, but this is different, this is not dark, but dazzling, a sudden, piercing sharpness.
Staring down at her father’s grave, Addie feels the heavy sadness of finality, the weight of an object coming to rest. The grief has come and gone—she lost this man fifty years ago, she has already mourned, and though it hurts, the pain isn’t fresh. It has long dulled to an ache, the wound given way to scar.
Estele Magritte, reads her tombstone. 1642–1719. The dates are carved over a simple cross, and Addie can almost hear the old woman hissing through her teeth. Estele, buried in the shadow of a house she did not worship.
Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse. She cannot make a thing, but she can use it. She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it. She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.
She has survived worse. She will survive worse. This is nothing but a god’s foul temper.
Luc spreads his arms. “Behold, the house of God.”
Less a house of worship and more a tomb.
How does a ceiling bring you closer to heaven? If God is so large, why build walls to hold Him in?
She wanted to believe. She listened, and waited to hear His voice, to feel His presence, the way she might feel sun on her shoulders, or wheat beneath her hands. The way she felt the presence of the old gods Estele so favored. But there, in the cold stone house, she never felt anything.
But as for me,” he says, rising, “well—the devil is simply a new word for a very old idea. And as for God, well, if all it takes is a flair for drama and a bit of golden trim…”
Addie has always wondered what a soul would look like. It is such a grand word, soul. Like god, like time, like space, and when she’s tried to picture it, she’s conjured images of lightning, or sunbeams through dust, of storms in the shapes of human forms, of vast and edgeless white.
There it is again. One time salt, and the next honey, and each designed to cover poison.
It is early, and Henry’s buzzing with a restless energy. It seems to worsen around dusk, sunset a steady marker of one day gone, time passing with the loss of light.
“Are you not a god of chaos?” His expression sours. “I am a god of promise, Adeline, and wars make terrible patrons.”
This is the problem with a life like Addie’s. She has gone so long without roots, she doesn’t know how to grow them anymore. So used to losing things, she isn’t sure how to hold them. How to make space in a world the size of herself.
The world rocks, re-steadies … and somewhere between one step and the next, the anger evaporates, and she just feels tired, and sad.
He doesn’t say anything, only walks, half a step behind, and this is a new kind of silence. The silent aftermath of storms, the damage not yet tallied.
There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.
But when she lifts her hand away, her thumb is stained, and the line is clean. She has not left a mark. And yet, she has.
“I must go,” she says, leaning in to kiss him one last time. “Try to remember me.” He laughs, the sound breezy and light as he pulls her close, leaves ghosts of charcoal fingers on her skin. “How could I possibly forget?”
“You told me you were a talent scout.” “Yes, well, it was easier than telling you I was a three-hundred-and-twenty-three-year-old ghost whose only hobby is inspiring artists.”
Henry is like bottled lightning, unable to sit still for long, full of nervous energy, but every moment there’s a lull, a sliver of peace and quiet, he grabs the latest notebook, and a pen, and even though she always thrills at the sight of the words—her words—spilling across the page, she teases him for the urgency with which he writes them. “We have time,” she reminds him, smoothing his hair.
It is the last thing he says, before Luc unfolds. That is the only way to think of it. The black hair rises from his face, climbing through the air like weeds, and his skin ripples and splits, and what spills out is not a man. It is a monster. It is a god. It is the night itself, and something else, something she has never seen, something she cannot bear to look at. Something older than the dark.
In the cemetery, the tree Addie transplanted has taken root. It looms over Estele’s grave, bathing her bones in a pool of shade.
Everything changes, foolish girl. It is the nature of the world. Nothing stays the same. Except for me, she thinks, but Estele answers, dry as kindling. Not even you.
“Who are you?” he demands. And this time she is not content to be a ghost. “I am a witch.”
She doesn’t feel bad for scaring the child; she does not expect him to remember. And yet, tomorrow, he will come again, and she will stand hidden at the edge of the woods and watch him begin to climb the ruins, only to hesitate, a nervous shadow in his eyes. She will watch him back away, and wonder if he is thinking of witches and half-buried bones. If the idea has grown like a weed in his head.
She imagines rebuilding the old woman’s house, even kneels to stack a few small stones. But by the fourth, the pile crumbles, the rocks landing in the weedy grass exactly as they were before she lifted them. The ink unwrites. The wound uncuts.
It is easy to see, now, how she lost track of time that day. How the line between dusk and dark became so blurred. And she wonders, would she have called out, had she known the hour? Would she have prayed, knowing which god would answer? She does not answer herself.
“Tired?” she says, summoning a smile. “I am just waking up.”
The only way Addie knows how to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.
And she wants to be honest, to say that of course she does. She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.
The smile splits, showing teeth. “Well, perhaps I let her believe I was a little more … angelic? But deep down, I think she knew. Greatness requires sacrifice. Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for. And in the end, she became what she wanted to be.” “A martyr?” “A legend.”
“I am nothing like you,” she says, but there is not much venom in the words. “I am a muse, and you are a thief.” He shrugs. “Give and take,” he says, and nothing more.
Addie has lived long enough to recognize a lie. Lying is its own language, like the language of seasons, or gestures, or the shade of Luc’s eyes.
“I think he wanted to erase me. To make sure I felt unseen, unheard, unreal. You don’t really realize the power of a name until it’s gone. Before you, he was the only one who could say it.”
Addie lets out an audible gasp, sinking to her knees, runs her hands over the dead and splintered wood. No. No, not this. She has lost so much, and mourned it all before, but for the first time in years, she is struck with a loss so sharp it steals her breath, her strength, her will.
But I suppose in some ways you were right. I suppose,” he goes on slowly, “there is something to the idea of company.”
It is a sign, when even gods and devils dread a fight.
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vecu.
“I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.
It would be a fall, but it is not so great a height.
Now it all makes sense. He makes sense. This boy, who could never sit still, never waste time, never put off a single thing. This boy, who writes down every word she says, so she’ll have something when he’s gone, who doesn’t want to lose even a single day, because he doesn’t have that many more. This boy she’s falling in love with. This boy, who will soon be gone.
The soul is the easiest thing to trade. It’s the time no one considers.”
“How do you walk to the end of the world?” He looks up at her. “I wanted to hold on to every step.”
“Even if everyone you met remembered,” Luc says, “I would still know you best.” She searches his face. “Do I know you?” He bows his head over hers. “You are the only one who does.”
“I have no power over promised souls. Their will is their own.”
She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat.
