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“I’ll bite him if he tries,” she counters, flashing teeth.
The wooden crate sits beside her in the grass, its lid thrown back, contents winking in the light. She’s disappointed to see it holds only small, stoppered bottles and none of them look to have blood or feathers or bones.
“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.
“You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”
And it turns out there’s no magic threshold, no fresh start, and Alice is still Alice,
No, she smells like wet earth and wrought iron and raw sugar.
and the girl who now tastes like rain, and honey, and hunger.
(She is used to wanting plenty, but it is another thing to be wanted.)
(Tomorrow morning Alice will find purple stains on the cheap rug, like drops of blood.)
and the freedom is dizzying, and it scares the shit out of her as well—but fear and fun could be neighbors, right?
Alice is a square of chocolate melting in the sun, edges soft enough to smudge,
She is Orpheus, she tells herself. She won’t look back. And this time, she almost makes it. Her back is to the bed, her hand is on the doorknob, but then she hears the girl sigh, and turn over in her sleep. Lottie looks over her shoulder and falters at the sight of Alice, pale limbs tangled in the sheets, one arm out, palm up and fingers curled as if to say Come back.
At some point, María looks up into Ysabel’s face, studying the freckles in her eyes, the bow of her lips, her gaze lingering so long the maid asks what she is thinking. And María wants to say that Andrés’s hands have never stirred such heat in her. Wants to say she is still hungry, though her stomach is full. That she could stay here for a hundred years. So long as Ysabel stayed, too.
She turns, and the widow withdraws a step, into the deeper shadow of the counter.
The smile breaks free at last, revealing a wolfish point to her longest teeth as she adds, “But you may call me Sabine.”
“How did he die?” she asks. The widow’s smile widens. “Slowly.”
Sabine’s mouth splits into a shallow smile. “Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”
“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”
She is a small flame, smothered before it has a chance to burn.
A ghost of a kiss, carrying the taste of blood, the air of promise.
Love. As terrible and bottomless as hunger.
Charlotte has read enough romance to know the way she should feel in their presence, and yet, while more than once the heroes in those books stirred her, reality does not.
“Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you,” she went on, turning back toward Charlotte, “you have always worn it like a second skin.” She ran a hand down her daughter’s arm. “Open to the world. You feel it all. The love and pain. The joy and hope and sorrow.” She pulled Charlotte close, carrying the scent of the garden. Of home. “It will make your life harder,” she said into her daughter’s hair. “But it will also make it beautiful.”
“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.”
“I did not attend those balls for him. I did not dance each night hoping he was watching. I did not lie awake and hunger for his company.
“I want you,” she says, the light rekindling behind her hazel eyes. “I have wanted you in ballrooms and in parlors, in crowds and behind closed doors. I have wanted you since before we ever met.”
“Death comes, and sometimes it is kind, and often it is cruel, and very rarely it is welcome. But it comes, all the same.”
“How cruel,” says Joss, the words little more than breath, “some nights you feel so real.”
How easy to forget the way time wears on other people when she is with Sabine, the two of them preserved like insects inside amber. How easy, and then how hard, to see the proof of it, that life races on, relentless in its pace. Sabine was right. This is why the past is left behind. Why they can only move forward, like Eurydice and Orpheus, never glancing back, lest they be trapped among the dead.
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.
Charlotte is Orpheus, Sabine, Eurydice. And she does not look back.
You learn how heavy some feelings weigh, how much they’ll drag you down. Anger and resentment are the worst. They’re like rocks in your pockets. Too many, and you’ll drown.”
After all, loneliness is just like us,” says Ezra. “It has to be invited in.”
