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Seven freckles. One for every love she’d have, that’s what Estele had said, when the girl was still young. One for every life she’d lead. One for every god watching over her.
What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.
After all, the darkness only looked the way he did because of her. She’d given him that shape, chosen what to make of him, what to see.
Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke? Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.
She looks back, and says, “Don’t forget me in the meantime.” An old habit. A superstition. A plea. Toby shakes his head. “How could I?” She smiles, as if it’s just a joke. But Addie knows, as she forces herself down the stairs, that it’s already happening—knows that by the time he closes the door, she’ll be gone.
“Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”
“Is there a spell?” Estele gives her a pointed look. “Spells are for witches, and witches are too often burned.”
“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.”
No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
Black curls. Pale eyes. Strong jaw. Sloping shoulders and a cupid’s bow mouth. A man she’d never meet, a life she’d never know, a world she could only dream of.
Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Adeline thinks again of Isabelle, two small boys clinging to her skirts, a third in a basket by the hearth. They used to dream together, but she has aged ten years in two, it seems. She is always tired, and there are hollows in her face where once her cheeks were red from laughter.
The shadow’s other hand still rests against her cheek. “You assume I want anything,” he says, lifting her chin. “But I take only one coin.” He leans closer still, green eyes impossibly bright, his voice soft as silk. “The deals I make, I make for souls.”
Blink, and half your life is gone.
“I am not some genie, bound to your whim.” He pushes off the tree. “Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”
“I am not in the business of charity. You ask for too much. How many years until you’re sated? How many, until I get my due? No, I make deals with endings, and yours has none.”
“You want an ending,” she says. “Then take my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”
A wooden horse, modeled from Maxime, of course—but here no bigger than a cat. A set of bowls, decorated only by the rings of the trunk from which they were cut. A collection of palm-sized birds, their wings spread, or folded, or stretched mid-flight.
There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.
A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.
The darkness has granted her freedom from death, perhaps, but not from this. Not from suffering.
Henry drinks a lukewarm beer and rubs his thumb along the scar on his palm, in what’s quickly becoming a habit.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
“Ten sols,” she says, and the man lets out a bark of laughter. “What are you, a princess?” “No,” she answers, “a virgin.”
This last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and Addie has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.
sob. “You left me there. You took everything from me, and you left. Do you know how many nights I begged—” “I heard you,” he says, and there is an awful pleasure in the way he says it. Addie sneers with rage. “But you never came.”
“Was it not in my best interest, then, to make your life unpleasant? To press you toward your inevitable surrender?” “You did not have to,” she whispers, hating the waver in her voice. “My dear Adeline,” he says, hand sliding up her neck into her hair. “I am in the business of souls, not mercy.” His fingers tighten, forcing her head back, her gaze up to meet his own, and there is no sweetness in his face, only a kind of feral beauty.
“What would become of me?” Those shoulders—the ones she drew so many times, the ones she conjured into being—give only a dismissive shrug. “You will be nothing, my dear,” he says simply. “But it is a kinder nothing than this. Surrender, and I will set you free.” If some part of her wavered, if some small part wanted to give in, it did not last beyond a moment. There is a defiance in being a dreamer.
I fear the sharp frost and the soaking dew together will do me in—I’m bone-weary, about to breathe my last, and a cold wind blows from a river on toward morning.
“You think it will get easier,” he says. “It will not. You are as good as gone, and every year you live will feel a lifetime, and in every lifetime, you will be forgotten. Your pain is meaningless. Your life is meaningless. The years will be like weights around your ankles. They will crush you, bit by bit, and when you cannot stand it, you will beg me to put you from your misery.”
“I see someone who cares,” she says slowly. “Perhaps too much. Who feels too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world full of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”
It will take Addie years to learn the language of those eyes. To know that amusement renders them the shade of summer ivy, while annoyance lightens them to sour apple, and pleasure, pleasure darkens them to the almost-black of the woods at night, only the edges still discernible as green.
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.
Remy shakes his head. “It is a crime,” he says, “that women are not taught the same as men. Why, a world without reading, I cannot fathom it. A whole long life without poems, or plays, or philosophers. Shakespeare, Socrates, to say nothing of Descartes!”
I would rather see clouds blot out the stars.
Food is one of the best things about being alive.
This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.
She blinks, suddenly confused. “What?” “I believe you,” he says again. Three small words, as rare as I remember you, and it should be enough—but it’s not.
“Why?” And Henry’s hands fall away from his face and he looks up at her, his green eyes fever bright, and says— “Because I made one, too.”
Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.
“No,” he says. “I just want to be alone.” The biggest lie he’s ever told.
“Right now, in this moment,” says the stranger. “What do you want?” “To be happy,” answers Henry. “Ah,” says the stranger, smoke sliding between his lips, “no one can give you that.” Not you.
“You want to be loved.” A small, empty sound, half cough, half sob. “Yes.” “Then be loved.” “You make it sound simple.” “It is,” says the stranger. “If you’re willing to pay.” Henry chokes out a laugh. “I’m not looking for that kind of love.” The dark flicker of a smile plays across the stranger’s face. “And I’m not talking about money.”
“You want to be loved,” says the stranger, “by all of them. You want to be enough for all of them. And I can give that to you, for the price of something you won’t even miss.” The stranger holds out his hand. “Well, Henry? What do you say?”
Outside the window, the day just carries on as if nothing’s changed, but it feels like everything has, because Addie LaRue is immortal, and Henry Strauss is damned.
“You deserve someone who loves you as you are. The good and the bad and the maddening.” You want to be loved. You want to be enough.
But as they move through the carnival of free exhibits, the artists all turn to look at Addie. He may be a sun, but she is a shining comet, dragging their focus like burning meteors in her wake.
“You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”
And then she dips his finger in the paint, and brings it to the pane of glass, and this time, she writes in halting cursive, one letter at a time. Her name. It sits, nested among the many drawings. Addie LaRue
