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Only three years between them, his thirteen to her ten, but he’s taken to acting like it’s an uncrossable distance, as if he’s full grown and she is still a child, even though he still cries when he gets sad or hurt, and she has not cried since before their father died.
“Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”
But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.
That kiss. Rose-petal soft and deep as a well, and then teeth skim her lower lip and her knees threaten to go, and she’s thankful for the door at her back and the girl who now tastes like rain, and honey, and hunger.
And Lottie ambles on, thinking If I wanted to, I could.
“No. I did have a husband. Once.” There it is again, that flash of teeth. A smile so slight and yet so dazzling that when María sees it, the ground seems to pitch downhill. She finds herself leaning forward, the urge to follow, or to fall. “How did he die?” she asks. The widow’s smile widens. “Slowly.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”
She reaches out and runs her fingers through the ash. Knows she should feel horrified. But as she rises to her feet, all she feels is hungry.
He is twice her size, but it doesn’t matter now. In the intervening night, he has grown soft, and she has turned to stone. And now, in her hand, he is bruising.
The night splits around them, giving way like skin beneath a blade.
Sabine might have killed him faster, if he hadn’t been so rude.
Her fingers tense around the heart, as if willing it to beat. But her grip is too strong, and it emits only a trickle of blood before collapsing inward. Fragile.
She does not feel the words wrap around her heart like chains until the next time, when her bed is empty, and she tries to leave, and learns the hard way that, among their kind, promises are binding. And so she has no choice. She stays.
And here’s the thing—Alice probably wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t been looking at her first. Staring, really, that way some men do, as if looking is fair game, because in their minds, all girls are just asking to be looked at.
“It may not show in the luster of our hair, the smoothness of our skin, the strength of our bones. But do not be mistaken. All things are touched by time, and we are no exception.”
The hunger lives inside us all. To some it is an empty bucket. To others, a yawning pit. And yet, no matter how shallow or how deep it feels, here is a truth that will either drive you mad, or bring you peace.” He sits forward. “There is no filling it. You will never be sated. It does not matter whether you drink a carafe or drain a city. The hunger will not ease.”
Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you’re a girl. And it isn’t fair. Because the night is when the world is quiet. The night is when the air is clear. The night is wild and welcoming and Alice lets her head fall back, until all she sees is the sky, not black, as it should be, given the time, but a twisting tapestry of blue.
What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose?
From that moment on, she insisted, she would read only romance. As if love and horror could not go hand in hand.
Sabine. That name. Charlotte does not know, then, how many times over the years it will spill out of her, as a longing, or a plea, or a curse. In that moment, all she knows is that she finds it strange and beautiful and fitting.
“But you cannot have what you want until you know what you want. And once you do know,” she adds, “it’s only a matter of what you’re willing to do to get it.”
Perhaps that is what makes them monsters—the fact their love is marked by violence, and death, and yet. And yet. She would not change a thing.
