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Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.
Born restless, her father used to say. Which was fine for a son, but bad for a daughter.
Maria
“And how is a miracle different from a spell? Who is to say the saint was not a witch?”
“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.
Santo Domingo
“You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”
“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil,” he begins, infusing the words with the air of theater. “Plant them shallow and water them deep. And in my place will grow a feral rose.” He leans down to Renata and cups her face, running a thumb across her bottom lip. “Soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”
“The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.”
“Why should I care about an old love story, Lottie? I want to know why you did what you did to me, not—”
Lottie clears her throat, and looks down at the fingers knotted in her lap. “I know you’re mad,” she says. “I know you want me to skip ahead.” She swallows, and looks up at Alice, small red tears clinging to her lashes. “But to understand what happened to you,” she says, “you need to know what happened to me first.”
if Charlotte cannot bring herself to take much pleasure in the kill, at least Sabine never lets her wallow in the aftermath.
Sabine was right. Everything gets easier with time. Even killing. And if the horror of it never truly disappears—every time Charlotte takes a life, the guilt is there to greet her—then at least it is mercifully brief, fading almost as quickly as the heartbeat in her chest.
Charlotte nods. Sabine is always telling her to look forward, never back, but these last few years she has been longing for just that.
By night, they’re gone. Charlotte feeling rested, and Sabine seemingly restored, so much her old self that Charlotte is convinced that what she saw the night before was nothing but an awful dream. Some kind of fit, or perhaps even a possession. The stranger that replaced Sabine a foul spirit, bound up with the house.
Years pass, and for the most part, the two of them are happy. Charlotte, who loves so hard it shakes her bones. And Sabine, who answers her every whim,
“The world is so dark,” whispers Charlotte. “So full of death. There must be something we can do.” Sabine brings her fingertips to Charlotte’s chin, and lifts her face. “Yes,” she says, “we can live.”
It is easy, isn’t it, in retrospect? To spot the cracks. To see them spread. But in the moment, there is only the urge to mend each one. To smooth the lines. And keep the surface whole.
“Happy anniversary, my love.” Charlotte is standing on the terrace, watching the night settle over London, when Sabine comes up behind her and whispers the words in her ear. They have been together now one hundred years.
Why does Charlotte stay? That is like asking—why stay inside a house on fire? Easy to say when you are standing on the street, a safe distance from the flames. Harder when you are still inside, convinced you can douse the blaze before it spreads, or rushing room to room, trying to save what you love before it burns.
Before this new war broke out, she spent whole evenings wandering the empty aisles of Covent Garden’s flower stalls, surrounded by the heady scent of peonies and roses. But Jubilee Hall was commandeered, like so much of London. Put to better use. Everything is worse this time. The wailing sirens, the shaking ground, the constant haze of fear.
Charlotte is Orpheus, Sabine, Eurydice. And she does not look back.
surprise. Sixteen years, and yet it’s clear, they’ve been expecting her. Antonia brings her a shawl, more for comfort than for cold, or perhaps simply for modesty, and Jack sets down a glass, but as Charlotte reaches for it she’s met by a ghoulish reflection in the polished surface of the table—her curls wild, cheeks streaked with bloody tears. How lucky that she met no one on the road.
Jack vows to stay on the platform until the train has pulled away. Charlotte boards. For the first time in so long, alone. It is a lie, she tells herself as the train rumbles to life, that you only get one story.
“Stories matter, Alice. When you live long enough, they’re all you have.” “I had a story, too,” she seethes. “Before you ended it. I had a life. I had a—a chance to—” Her voice cracks. “I had a future. And now—” Lottie looks up. “You still do.”
It wasn’t me, she said when Alice first walked in. It wasn’t me. Now she takes a deep breath one last time, and then forces herself back toward the hotel. To find out how the story ends.
cities rarely sleep, but there is an hour when they doze.
“I’d love to draw you.” “Ah!” Giada breaks into a grin. “So Carlotta is an artist, too.” Charlotte blushes at the nickname, the glee in Giada’s eyes, the sunlight in her voice when she bobs her head. “All right,” she says. “Your place or mine?”
It’s a nice enough apartment, more lived-in than lavish, but then, Sabine was the one who sought out luxury. Charlotte would rather feel at home. Sabine—creeping in like a shadow even now.
Charlotte hesitates, not because she doesn’t want this—she does—simply because it is new. Sabine—she doesn’t want to think about Sabine, not now, not ever, but she can’t help it—Sabine always led and never followed. She saw pleasure as a thing to control, to give, not take, so Charlotte learned only to receive.
for the first time in years—so many years—Charlotte knows what it feels like to be happy. For the first time, she doesn’t even dream about Sabine.
It is an easy thing to bend a mind the way it wants to lean. Far harder to push it the other way.
only thing worth saving is already dead. She leaves the front door open, so someone will come. And then, once again, Charlotte runs.
lives in constant motion, never stopping long enough to learn the layout of a place, let alone put down any roots, beyond the nightly wards that keep her safe. And yet no matter where she goes—Oslo, Prague, Berlin—she is certain she can feel Sabine trailing in her wake. Silly Charlotte. Let me in.
Charlotte pauses there, staring into the dark. “What if the ocean wasn’t enough?” she whispers, as if saying it too loud will make it real. “What if she follows me?”
Sixty minutes to an hour. Twenty-four hours to a day. These are mortal measurements, for mortal lives. But when you live forever, time is something far less constant. When you are happy, a decade rushes by. When you are sad, a minute crawls. When you are lonely and afraid, time seems to lose all meaning. Blink, and a year is gone. Blink, and it has only been a night. Only, it is not a life at all. It is a prison sentence.
by the end of that wretched, lonely decade, Charlotte finally begins to think, to hope, that Sabine has lost interest in their game. That she has run far enough. That she is free.
Charlotte buys herself a yellow Beetle. She is tired of holding herself captive, bound to Boston, as if by keeping the water in her sight, she will know if danger comes across it. And so, she packs up, and points the car west, and drives.
Charlotte thinks, they’ve gotten it wrong. Time doesn’t heal. It just wears you down. Tricks you into thinking, as the present slips into the past, that it will stay there. Safely buried in your wake.
Charlotte doesn’t want to fall for her—for anyone again—but she won’t deny how nice it is to be the object of affection, how lonely she has been. And perhaps, if she is being honest, some part of her thinks that she deserves it, after all those years of vigilance.
“DO YOU HEAR ME, SABINE?” she screams into the dark. “I SAID ENOUGH.” A light goes on nearby. A window opens. A neighbor yells at her to Knock it off. Charlotte doubles over, lets out a final, guttural scream. It echoes. And dies. And no one comes.
“Did I do the wrong thing?” she asks, knowing Ezra will not coddle her. And he doesn’t. “By killing her or loving her?” he counters. Charlotte flinches. “You told me I was being paranoid.”
loneliness is just like us,” says Ezra. “It has to be invited in.”
learns the difference between lonely and alone.
So please, believe her when she says— “I’m sorry, Alice. I really thought you would be safe.”
Alice is sitting there, trying to process the fact that her death wasn’t part of some big picture, some elaborate design. It wasn’t even an act of careless hunger on Lottie’s part. It wasn’t about need, or even want, and the question that’s been beating like a drum in Alice’s head—Why me? Why me? Why me?—doesn’t have an answer, other than Why not? Because it wasn’t about her at all. It was a shot fired by a jealous ex.
Alice drinks and knows the moment the blood hits her tongue that she was right, and it is wrong, but she doesn’t care, if it will make the pain stop.
returns, and tells Catty to grow up or get out. The next day, Catty blows out the candles on her seventeenth birthday cake. And the next day, she is gone. She doesn’t leave a note, doesn’t turn on her phone, and she’s too old to be considered a runaway, so there’s nothing to do but wait and hope.
decides, right then and there, that they won’t be the last record of her life. The sum total of her story. Alice looks up at Lottie, searches her face, but all she sees is hope, and it’s like a mirror, catching the sun, reflecting the light. Alice feels herself begin to warm. “All right,” she says, “what do I have to do?”
