The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

I

New York City

March 12, 2014

Henry Strauss heads back into the shop.

Bea’s taken up residence again in the battered leather chair, the glossy art book open in her lap. “Where did you go?”

He looks back through the open door and frowns. “Nowhere.”

She shrugs, turning through the pages, a guide to neoclassical art that she has no intention of buying.

Not a library. Henry sighs, returning to the till.

“Sorry,” he says to the girl by the counter. “Where were we?”

She bites her lip. Her name is Emily, he thinks. “I was about to ask if you wanted to grab a drink.”

He laughs, a little nervously—a habit he’s beginning to think he’ll never shake. She’s pretty, she really is, but there’s the troublesome shine in her eyes, a familiar milky light, and he’s relieved he doesn’t have to lie about having plans tonight.

“Another time,” she says with a smile.

“Another time,” he echoes as the girl takes her book and goes. The door has barely closed when Bea clears her throat.

“What?” he asks without turning.

“You could have gotten her number.”

“We have plans,” he says, tapping the tickets on the counter.

He hears the soft stretch of leather as she rises from the chair. “You know,” she says, swinging an arm around his shoulder, “the great thing about plans is that you can make them for other days, too.”

He turns, hands rising to her waist, and now they’re locked like kids in the throes of a school dance, limbs making wide circles like nets, or chains.

“Beatrice Helen,” he scolds.

“Henry Samuel.”

They stand there, in the middle of the store, two twenty-somethings in a preteen embrace. And maybe once upon a time Bea would have leaned a little harder, made some speech about finding someone (new), about deserving to be happy (again). But they have a deal: she doesn’t mention Tabitha, and Henry doesn’t mention the Professor. Everyone has their fallen foes, their battle scars.

“Excuse me,” says an older man, sounding genuinely sorry to interrupt. He holds up a book, and Henry smiles and breaks the chain, ducking back behind the counter to ring him up. Bea swipes her ticket from the table and says she’ll meet him at the show, and Henry nods her off and the old man goes on his way, and the rest of the afternoon is a quiet blur of pleasant strangers.

He turns the sign over at five to six, and goes through the motions of closing up the shop. The Last Word isn’t his, but it might as well be. It’s been weeks since he saw the actual owner, Meredith, who’s spending her golden years traveling the world on her late husband’s life insurance. A fall woman indulging in a second spring.

Henry scoops a handful of kibble into the small red dish behind the counter for Book, the shop’s ancient cat, and a moment later, a ratty orange head pokes up over the chapbooks in POETRY. The cat likes to climb behind a stack and sleep for days, his presence marked only by the emptying dish and the occasional gasp of a customer when they come across a pair of unblinking yellow eyes at the back of the shelves.

Book is the only one who’s been at the bookstore longer than Henry.

He’s worked there for the last five years, having started back when he was still a grad student in theology. At first it was just a part-time gig, a way to supplement the university stipend, but then school went away, and the store stayed. Henry knows he should probably get another job, because the pay is shit and he has twenty-one years of expensive formal education, and then of course there’s his brother David’s voice, which sounds exactly like their father’s voice, calmly asking where this job leads, if this is really how he plans to spend his life. But Henry doesn’t know what else to do, and he can’t bring himself to leave; it’s the only thing he hasn’t failed out of yet.

And the truth is, Henry loves the store. Loves the smell of books, and the steady weight of them on shelves, the presence of old titles and the arrival of new ones and the fact that in a city like New York, there will always be readers.

Bea insists that everyone who works in a bookstore wants to be a writer, but Henry’s never fancied himself a novelist. Sure, he’s tried putting pen to paper, but it never really works. He can’t find the words, the story, the voice. Can’t figure out what he could possibly add to so many shelves.

Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.

He turns off the lights and grabs the ticket and his coat, and heads over to Robbie’s show.

Henry didn’t have time to change.

The show starts at seven, and The Last Word closed at six, and anyways he isn’t sure what the dress code is for an off-off-Broadway show about faeries in the Bowery, so he’s still in dark jeans and a tattered sweater. It’s what Bea likes to call Librarian Chic, even though he doesn’t work in a library, a fact she cannot seem to grasp. Bea, on the other hand, looks painfully fashionable, as she always does, with a white blazer rolled up to her elbows, thin silver bands wrapped around her fingers and shining in her ears, thick dreads coiled in a crown atop her head. Henry wonders, as they wait in the queue, if some people have natural style, or if they simply have the discipline to curate themselves every day.

They shuffle forward, presenting their tickets at the door.

The play is one of those strange medleys of theater and modern dance that only exist in a place like New York. According to Robbie, it’s loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if someone had filed Shakespeare’s cadence smooth, and cranked up the saturation.

Bea knocks him in the ribs.

“Did you see the way she looked at you?”

He blinks. “What? Who?”

Bea rolls her eyes. “You are entirely hopeless.”

The lobby bustles around them, and they’re wading through the crowd when another person catches Henry’s arm. A girl, wrapped in a tattered bohemian dress, green paint flourishes like abstract vines on her temples and cheeks, marking her as one of the actors of the show. He’s seen the remnants on Robbie’s skin a dozen times in the last few weeks.

She holds up a paintbrush and a bowl of gold. “You’re not adorned,” she says with sober sincerity, and before he can think to stop her, she paints gold dust on his cheeks, the brush’s touch feather-light. This close, he can see that faint shimmer in the girl’s eyes.

Henry tips his chin.

“How do I look?” he asks, affecting a model’s pout, and even though he’s joking, the girl flashes him an earnest smile and says, “Perfect.”

A shiver rolls through him at the word, and he is somewhere else, a hand holding his in the dark, a thumb brushing his cheek. But he shakes it off.

Bea lets the girl paint a shining stripe down her nose, a dot of gold on her chin, manages to get in a solid thirty seconds of flirting before bells chime through the lobby, and the artistic sprite vanishes back into the crowd as they continue toward the theater doors.

Henry threads his arm through Bea’s. “You don’t think I’m perfect, do you?”

She snorts. “God, no.”

And he smiles, despite himself, as another actor, a dark-skinned man with rose-gold on his cheeks, hands them each a branch, the leaves too green to be real. His gaze lingers on Henry, kind, and sad, and shining.

They show their tickets to an usher—an old woman, white-haired and barely five feet tall—and she holds on to Henry’s arm for balance as she shows them to their row, pats his elbow when she leaves them, murmuring, “Such a good boy” as she toddles up the aisle.

Henry looks at the number on his ticket, and they sidestep over to their seats, a group of three near the middle of the row. Henry sits, Bea on one side, the empty seat on the other. The seat reserved for Tabitha, because of course they’d bought their tickets months ago, when they were still together, when everything was a plural instead of a singular.

A dull ache fills Henry’s chest, and he wishes he’d paid the ten dollars for a drink.

The lights go down, and the curtain goes up on a kingdom of neon and spray-painted steel, and there is Robbie in the middle of it all, lounging on a throne in a pose that is pure goblin king.

His hair curls up in a high wave, streaks of purple and gold carving the lines of his face into something stunning and strange. And when he smiles, it is easy to remember how Henry fell in love, back when they were nineteen, a tangle of lust, and loneliness, and far-off dreams. And when Robbie speaks, his voice is crystal, reflecting across the theater.

“This,” he says, “is a story of gods.”

The stage fills with players, the music begins, and for a while, it is easy.

For a while, the world falls away, and everything quiets around them, and Henry disappears.

Toward the end of the play there is a scene that will press itself into the dark of Henry’s mind, exposed like light on film.

Robbie, the Bowery king, rises from his throne as rain falls in a single sheet across the stage, and even though, moments earlier, it was crowded with people, now, somehow, there is only Robbie. He reaches out, hand skimming the curtain of rain, and it parts around his fingers, his wrist, his arm as he moves forward inch by inch until his whole body is beneath the wave.

He tips his head back, the rain rinsing gold and glitter from his skin, flattening the perfect wave of curls against his skull, erasing all traces of magic, turning him from a languid, arrogant prince into a boy; mortal, vulnerable, alone.

The lights go out, and for a long moment, the only sound in the theater is the rain, fading from a solid wall to the steady rhythm of a downpour, and after, to the soft patter of drops on the stage.

And then, at last, nothing.

The lights come up, and the cast takes the stage, and everyone applauds. Bea cheers, and looks at Henry, the joy bleeding from her face.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “You look like you’re about to faint.”

He swallows, shakes his head.

His hand is throbbing, and when he looks down, he’s dug his nails into the scar along his palm, drawing a fresh line of blood.

“Henry?”

“I’m fine,” he says, wiping his hand on the velvet seat. “It was just. It was good.”

He stands, and follows Bea out.

The crowd thins until it’s mostly friends and family waiting for the actors to reappear. But Henry feels the eyes, attention drifting like a current. Everywhere he looks, he finds a friendly face, a warm smile, and sometimes, more.

Finally Robbie comes bounding into the lobby, and throws his arms around both of them.

“My adoring fans!” he says, in a thespian’s ringing alto.

Henry snorts, and Bea holds out a chocolate rose, a long inside joke since Robbie once bemoaned that you had to choose between chocolates and flowers, and Bea pointed out that that was Valentine’s Day, and that for performances, flowers were typical, and Robbie said he wasn’t typical, and besides, what if he was hungry?

“You were great,” says Henry, and it’s true. Robbie is great—he’s always been great. That trifecta of dance, music, and theater required to get work in New York. He’s still a few streets off Broadway, but Henry has no doubt he’ll get there.

He runs his hand through Robbie’s hair.

Dry, it is the color of burnt sugar, a tawny shade somewhere between brown and red, depending on the light. But right now it’s still wet from the final scene, and for a second, Robbie leans into the touch, resting the weight of his head in Henry’s hand. His chest tightens, and he has to remind his heart it is not real, not anymore.

Henry pats his friend’s back, and Robbie straightens, as if revived, renewed. He holds his rose aloft like a baton and announces, “To the party!”

Henry used to think that after-parties were only for last shows, a way for the cast to say good-bye, but he’s since learned that, for theater kids, every performance is an excuse to celebrate. To come down from the high, or in the case of Robbie’s crowd, to keep it going.

It’s almost midnight, and they’re packed into a third-floor walk-up in SoHo, the lights low and someone’s playlist pumping through a pair of wireless speakers. The cast moves through the center like a vein, their faces still painted but their costumes shed, caught between their onstage characters and their offstage selves.

Henry drinks a lukewarm beer and rubs his thumb along the scar on his palm, in what’s quickly becoming a habit.

For a while, he had Bea to keep him company.

Bea, who much prefers dinner parties to theater ones, place settings and dialogues to plastic cups and lines shouted over stereos. A groaning compatriot, huddled with Henry in the corner, studying the tapestry of actors as if they were in one of her art history books. But then another Bowery sprite whisked her away, and Henry shouted traitor in their wake, even though he was glad to see Bea happy again.

Meanwhile, Robbie is dancing in the middle of the room, always the center of the party.

He gestures for Henry to join him, but Henry shakes his head, ignoring the pull, the easy draw of gravity, the open arms waiting at the end of the fall. At his worst, they were a perfect match, the differences between them purely gravitational. Robbie, who always managed to stay alight, while Henry came crashing down.

“Hey, handsome.”

Henry turns, looking up from his beer, and sees one of the leads from the show, a stunning girl with rust-red lips and a white lily crown, the gold glitter on her cheeks stenciled to look like graffiti. She is looking at him with such open want he should feel wanted, should feel something besides sad, lonely, lost.

“Drink with me.”

Her blue eyes shine as she holds out a little tray, a pair of shots with something small and white dissolving on the bottom. Henry thinks of all the stories about accepting food and drink from the fae, even as he reaches for the glass. He drinks, and at first all he tastes is sweetness, the faint burn of tequila, but then the world begins to fuzz a little at the edges.

He wants to feel lighter, to feel brighter, but the room darkens, and he can feel a storm creeping in.

He was twelve when the first one rolled through. He didn’t see it coming. One day the skies were blue and the next the clouds were low and dense, and the next, the wind was up and it was pouring rain.

It would be years before Henry learned to think of those dark times as storms, to believe that they would pass, if he could simply hold on long enough.

His parents meant well, of course, but they always told him things like Cheer up, or It will get better, or worse, It’s not that bad, which is easy to say when you’ve never had a day of rain. Henry’s oldest brother, David, is a doctor, but he still doesn’t understand. His sister, Muriel, says she does, that all artists suffer through their storms, before offering him a pill from the mint container she keeps in her purse. Her little pink umbrellas, she calls them, playing on his metaphor; as if it’s just a clever turn of phrase and not the only way Henry can try to make them understand what it’s like inside his head.

It is just a storm, he thinks again, even as he pulls away from the scene, makes some excuse about going to find air. The party is too warm, and he wants to be outside, wants to go onto the roof and look up and see there is no bad weather, only stars, but of course, there are no stars, not in SoHo.

He makes it halfway down the hall before he stops, remembering the show, the sight of Robbie in the rain, and shivers, deciding to go down instead of up, deciding to go home.

And he’s almost to the door when she catches his hand. The girl with ivy curling over her skin. The one who painted him gold.

“It’s you,” she says.

“It’s you,” he says.

She reaches out and wipes a fleck of gold from Henry’s cheek, and the contact is like static shock, a spark of energy where skin meets skin.

“Don’t go,” she says, and he’s still trying to think of what to say next when she pulls him close, and he kisses her, quick, searching, breaks off when he hears her gasp.

“Sorry,” he says, the word automatic, like please, like thank you, like I’m fine.

But she reaches up and grabs a handful of his curls.

“What for?” she asks, drawing his mouth back to hers.

“Are you sure?” he murmurs, even though he knows what she will say, because he’s already seen the light in her eyes, the pale clouds sweeping through her vision. “Is this what you want?”

He wants the truth—but there is no truth for him, not anymore, and the girl just smiles, and draws him back against the nearest door.

“This,” she says, “is exactly what I want.”

And then they are in one of the bedrooms, the door clicking shut and blotting out the noises of the party beyond the wall, and her mouth is on his, and he cannot see her eyes now in the dark, so it’s easy to believe that this is real.

And for a while, Henry disappears.

II

New York City

March 12, 2014

Addie makes her way uptown, reading The Odyssey by streetlight. It’s been a while since she read anything in Greek, but the poetic cadence of the epic poem draws her back into the stride of the old language, and by the time the Baxter comes into sight, she is half-lost in the image of the ship at sea, looking forward to a glass of wine and a hot bath.

And destined for neither.

Her timing is either very good, or very bad, depending on how you look at it, because Addie rounds the corner onto Fifty-sixth just as a black sedan pulls up in front of the Baxter and James St. Clair steps out onto the curb. He’s back from his filming, tan and seemingly happy, wearing a pair of sunglasses despite the fact it’s after dark. Addie slows, and stops, hovers across the street as the doorman helps him unload and carry his bags inside.

“Shit,” she mutters under her breath as her night dissolves. No bubble baths, no bottles of merlot.

She sighs and retreats to the intersection, trying to decide what to do next.

To her left, Central Park unravels like a dark green cloth in the center of the city.

To her right, Manhattan rises in jagged lines, block after block of crowded buildings from Midtown down to the Financial District.

She goes right, making her way down toward the East Village.

Her stomach begins to growl, and on Second, she catches sight of dinner. A young man on a bicycle dismounts on the curb, unpacks an order from the zippered case behind the seat, and jogs the plastic bag up to the building. Addie drifts up to the bike and reaches in. It’s Chinese, she guesses, going by the size and shape of the containers, the paper edges folded and bound with thin metal handles. She plucks out a carton, and a pair of disposable chopsticks, and slips away before the man at the door has even paid.

There was a time she felt guilty about stealing.

But the guilt, like so many things, has worn away, and even though the hunger can’t kill her, it still hurts as though it will.

Addie makes her way toward Avenue C, scooping lo mein into her mouth as her legs carry her through the Village to a brick building with a green door. She dumps the empty carton in a trash can on the corner and reaches the building entrance just as a man is coming out. She smiles at him, and he smiles back and holds the door.

Inside, she climbs four flights of narrow steps to a steel door at the top, reaches up, and feels along the dusty frame for the small silver key, discovered last fall, when she and a lover stumbled home, the two a tangle of limbs on the stairs. Sam’s lips pressed beneath her jaw, paint-streaked fingers sliding beneath the waistband of her jeans.

It was, for Sam, a rare impulsive moment.

It was, for Addie, the second month of an affair.

A passionate affair, to be sure, but only because time is a luxury she can’t afford. Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing. There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.

Her fingers close around the key, the metal scraping softly as she drags it from its hiding spot. It takes three tries in the rusted old lock, just like it did that first night, but then the door swings open, and she steps out onto the building’s roof. A breeze kicks up, and she shoves her hands in the pocket of her leather jacket as she crosses the roof.

It’s empty, save for a trio of lawn chairs, each of them imperfect in its own way—seats warped, stuck in different poses of recline, one arm hanging at a broken angle. A stained cooler sits nearby, and a string of fairy lights hangs between laundry posts, transforming the roof into a shabby, weather-worn oasis.

It’s quiet up here—not silent, that is a thing she’s yet to find in a city, a thing she is beginning to think lost amid the weeds of the old world—but as quiet as it gets in this part of Manhattan. And yet, it is not the same kind of quiet that stifled her at James’s place, not the empty, internal quiet of places too big for one. It is a living quiet, full of distant shouts and car horns and stereo bass reduced to an ambient static.

A low brick wall surrounds the roof, and Addie lets herself lean forward against it, resting her elbows and looking out until the building falls away, and all she can see is the lights of Manhattan, tracing patterns against the vast and starless sky.

Addie misses stars.

She met a boy, back in ’65, and when she told him that, he drove her an hour outside of L.A., just to see them. The way his face glowed with pride when he pulled over in the dark and pointed up. Addie had craned her head and looked at the meager offering, the spare string of lights across the sky, and felt something in her sag. A heavy sadness, like loss. And for the first time in a century, she longed for Villon. For home. For a place where the stars were so bright they formed a river, a stream of silver and purple light against the dark.

She looks up now, over the rooftops, and wonders if, after all this time, the darkness is still watching. Even though it has been so long. Even though he told her once that he doesn’t keep track of every life, pointed out that the world was big and full of souls, and he had far more to occupy himself than thoughts of her.

The rooftop door crashes open behind her, and a handful of people stumble out.

Two guys. Two girls.

And Sam.

Wrapped in a white sweater and pale gray jeans, her body like a brushstroke, long and lean and bright against the backdrop of the darkened roof. Her hair is longer now, wild blond curls escaping a messy bun. Streaks of red paint dab her forearms where the sleeves are pushed up, and Addie wonders, almost absently, what she’s working on. She is a painter. Abstracts, mostly. Her place, already small, made smaller by the stacks of canvas propped against the walls. Her name, crisp and easy, only Samantha on her finished work, or when traced across a spine in the middle of the night.

The other four move in a huddle of noise across the roof, one of the guys in the middle of a story, but Sam lags behind a step, head tipped back to savor the crisp night air, and Addie wishes she had something else to stare at. An anchor to keep her from falling into the easy gravity of the other girl’s orbit.

She does, of course.

The Odyssey.

Addie is about to bury her gaze in the book, when Sam’s blue eyes dip down from the sky and find her own. The painter smiles, and for an instant, it is August again, and they are laughing over beers on a bar patio, Addie lifting the hair off her neck to calm the flush of summer heat. Sam leaning in to blow on her skin. It is September, and they are in her unmade bed, their fingers tangled in the sheets and with each other as Addie’s mouth traces the dark warmth between Sam’s legs.

Addie’s heart slams in her chest as the girl peels away from her group and casually wanders over. “Sorry for crashing your peace.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” says Addie, forcing her gaze out, as if studying the city, even though Sam always made her feel like a sunflower, unconsciously angling toward the other girl’s light.

“These days, everyone’s looking down,” muses Sam. “It’s nice to see someone looking up.”

Time slides. It’s the same thing Sam said the first time they met. And the sixth. And the tenth. But it’s not just a line. Sam has an artist’s eye, present, searching, the kind that studies their subject and sees something more than shapes.

Addie turns away, waits for the sound of retreating steps, but instead, she hears the snap of a lighter, and then Sam is beside her, a white-blond curl dancing at the edge of her sight. She gives in, glances over.

“Could I steal one of those?” she asks, nodding at the cigarette.

Sam smiles. “You could. But you don’t need to.” She draws another from the box and hands it over, along with a neon blue lighter. Addie takes them, tucks the cigarette between her lips and drags her thumb along the starter. Luckily the breeze is up, and she has an excuse, watching the flame as it goes out.

Goes out. Goes out. Goes out.

“Here.”

Sam steps closer, her shoulder brushing Addie’s as she steps in to block the wind. She smells like the chocolate-chip cookies that her neighbor bakes whenever he’s stressed, like the lavender soap she uses to scrub paint from her fingers, the coconut conditioner she leaves in her curls at night.

Addie has never loved the taste of tobacco, but the smoke warms her chest, and it gives her something to do with her hands, a thing to focus on besides Sam. They are so close, breaths fogging the same bit of air, and then Sam reaches out and touches one of the freckles on Addie’s right cheek, the way she did the first time they met, a gesture so simple and still so intimate.

“You have stars,” she says, and Addie’s chest tightens, twists again.

Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vecu.

She has to fight the urge to close the gap, to run her palm along the long slope of Sam’s neck, to let it rest against the nape, where Addie knows it fits so well. They stand in silence, blowing out clouds of pale smoke, the other four laughing and shouting at their backs, until one of the guys—Eric? Aaron?—calls Sam over, and just like that, she is slipping away, back across the roof. Addie fights the urge to tighten her grip, instead of letting go—again.

But she does.

Leans against the low brick wall and listens to them talk, about life, about getting old, about bucket lists and bad decisions, and then one of the girls says, “Shit, we’re gonna be late.” And just like that, beers get finished, cigarettes put out, and the group of them drifts back toward the rooftop door, all five retreating like a tide.

Sam is the last to go.

She slows, glances over her shoulder, flashing a last smile at Addie before she ducks inside, and Addie knows she could catch her if she runs, could beat the closing door.

She doesn’t move.

The metal bangs shut.

Addie sags against the brick wall.

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?

Addie stubs the cigarette out on the brick ledge, and turns her back on the skyline, makes her way to the broken chairs and the cooler wedged between them. She finds a single beer floating amid the half-frozen melt and twists off the cap, sinking onto the least-damaged lawn chair.

It is not so cold tonight, and she is too tired to go looking for another bed.

The glow of the fairy lights is just enough to see by, and Addie stretches out in the lawn chair, and opens The Odyssey, and reads of strange lands, and monsters, and men who can’t ever go home, until the cold lulls her to sleep.

III

Paris, France

August 9, 1714

Heat hangs like a low roof over Paris.

The August air is heavy, made heavier still by the sprawl of stone buildings, the reek of rotting food and human refuse, the sheer number of bodies living shoulder to shoulder.

In a hundred and fifty years, Haussman will set his mark upon the city, raise a uniform facade and paint the buildings in the same pale palette, creating a testament to art, and evenness, and beauty.

That is the kind of Paris Addie dreamed of, and one she will certainly live to see.

But right now, the poor pile themselves in ragged heaps while silk-finished nobles stroll through gardens. The streets are crowded with horse-drawn carts, the squares thick with people, and here and there spires thrust up through the woolen fabric of the city. Wealth parades down avenues, and rises with the peaks of each palace and estate, while hovels cluster in narrow roads, the stones stained dark with grime and smoke.

Addie is too overwhelmed to notice any of it.

She skirts the edge of a square, watching as men dismantle market stalls, and kick out at the ragged children who duck and weave between them, searching for scraps. As she walks, her hand slips into the hem pocket of her skirts, past the little wooden bird to the four copper sols she found in the lining of the stolen coat. Four sols, to make a life.

It is getting late, and threatening to rain, and she must find a place to sleep. It should be easy enough—there is, it seems, a lodging house on every street—but she is hardly across the threshold of the first when she is turned away.

“This is no brothel,” chides the owner, glaring down his nose.

“And I’m no whore,” she answers, but he only sneers, and flicks his fingers as if casting off some unwanted residue.

The second house is full, the third too costly, the fourth harbors only men. By the time she steps through the doors of the fifth the sun has set, and her spirits with it, and she is already braced for the rebuke, some excuse as to why she is unfit to stay beneath the roof.

But she isn’t turned away.

An older woman meets her in the entry, thin, and stiff, with a long nose and the small, sharp eyes of a hawk. She takes one look at Addie and leads her down the hall. The rooms are small, and dingy, but they have walls and doors, a window and a bed.

“A week’s pay,” demands the woman, “in advance.”

Addie’s heart sinks. A week seems an impossible stretch when memories only seem to last a moment, an hour, a day.

“Well?” snaps the woman.

Addie’s hand closes around the copper coins. She is careful to draw out only three, and the woman snatches them as fast as a crow stealing crusts of bread. They vanish into the pouch at her waist.

“Can you give me a bill?” asks Addie. “Some proof, to show I’ve paid?”

The woman scowls, clearly insulted. “I run an honest house.”

“I’m sure you do,” fumbles Addie, “but you have so many rooms to keep. It would be easy to forget which ones have—”

“Thirty-four years I’ve run this lodge,” she cuts in, “and never yet forgotten a face.”

It is a cruel joke, thinks Addie, as the woman turns and shuffles away, leaving her to her rented room.

A week she paid for, but she knows that she will be lucky to have a day. Knows that in the morning she will be evicted, the matron three crowns richer, while she herself will be out on the street.

A little bronze key rests in the lock, and Addie turns it, relishes the solid sound, like a stone dropped into a stream. She has nothing to unpack, no change of clothes; she casts off the traveling coat, draws the little wooden bird from her skirts and sets it on the windowsill. A talisman against the dark.

She looks out, expecting to see Paris’s grand rooftops and dazzling buildings, the tall spires, or at least the Seine. But she has walked too far from the river, and the little window looks out only onto a narrow alleyway, and the stone wall of another house that could be anywhere.

Addie’s father told her so many stories of Paris. Made it sound like a place of glamour and gold, rich with magic and dreams waiting to be uncovered. Now she wonders if he ever saw it, or if the city was nothing but a name, an easy backdrop for princes and knights, adventurers and queens.

They have bled together in her mind, those stories, become less a picture than a palette, a tone. Perhaps the city was less splendid. Perhaps there were shadows mixed in with the light.

It is a gray and humid night, the sounds of merchants and horse-carts muted by the soft rain beginning to fall, and Addie curls up on the narrow bed and tries to sleep.

She thought at least she’d have the night, but the rain hasn’t even stopped, the darkness barely settled when the woman bangs upon her door, and a key is thrust into the lock, and the tiny room is plunged into noise. Rough hands haul Addie from the bed. A man grips her arm as the woman sneers and says, “Who let you in?”

Addie fights to wipe away the dregs of sleep.

“You did,” she says, wishing the woman had only swallowed her pride and given a receipt, but all Addie has is the key, and before she can show it, the woman’s bony hand cuts hard across her cheek.

“Don’t lie, girl,” she says, sucking her teeth. “This isn’t a charity house.”

“I paid,” says Addie, cupping her face, but it is no use. The three sols in the pouch at the woman’s waist will not serve as proof. “We spoke, you and I. Thirty-four years you said you’ve run this house—”

For an instant, uncertainty flashes across the woman’s face. But it is too brief, too fleeting. Addie will one day learn to ask for secrets, details only a friend or intimate would know, but even then it will not always gain their favor. She will be called a trickster, a witch, a spirit, and a madwoman. Will be cast out for a dozen different reasons, when in truth, there is only one.

They don’t remember.

“Out,” orders the woman, and Addie barely has time to grab her coat before she’s forced from the room. Halfway down the hall, she remembers the wooden bird still resting on the windowsill, and tries to twist free, to go back for it, but the man’s grip is firm.

She’s cast out onto the street, shaking from the sudden violence of it all, the only consolation that before the door swings shut, the little wooden bird is tossed out, too. It lands on the stones beside her, one wing cracking with the force.

Though this time, the bird doesn’t mend itself.

It lies there, beside her, a sliver of wood chipped off like a fallen feather as the woman vanishes back inside the house. And Addie stifles the horrible urge to laugh, not at the humor but the madness of it, the absurd, inevitable ending to her night.

It is very late, or very early, the city quieted and the sky a cloudy, rain-slicked gray, but she knows the dark is watching as she scoops up the carving, buries it in her pocket with the last copper coin. Gets to her feet, drawing the coat tight around her shoulders, the hem of her skirts already damp.

Exhausted, Addie makes her way down the narrow street and takes shelter beneath the wooden lip of an awning, sinking down into the stone crook between buildings to wait for dawn.

She slips into a feverish almost-sleep, and feels her mother’s hand against her brow, the faint rise and fall of her voice as she hums, smoothing a blanket over Addie’s shoulders. And she knows she must be ill; that is the only time she saw her mother gentle. Addie lingers there, holding fast to the memory even as it fades, the harsh clop of hooves and strain of wooden carts encroaching on her mother’s whispering song, burying it note by note until she jerks forward out of the haze.

Her skirts are stiff with grime, stained and wrinkled from the brief but restless sleep.

The rain has stopped, but the city looks just as dirty as it did on her arrival.

Back home, a good storm would wash the world clean, leave it smelling crisp and new.

But it seems nothing can rinse the grime from the streets of Paris.

If anything, that storm has only made things worse, the world wet and dull, puddles brown with mud and filth.

And then, amid the muck, she smells something sweet.

She follows the scent until she finds a market in full swing, the vendors shouting prices from tables and stalls, chickens still squawking as they’re hauled off the backs of carts.

Addie is famished, cannot even remember the last time she ate. Her dress doesn’t fit, but it never did—she’d stolen it from a washing line two days outside of Paris, tired of the one she’d worn the day of her wedding. Still, it hangs no looser now, despite the days without food or drink. She supposes she does not need to eat, will not perish from hunger—but tell that to her cramping stomach, her shaking legs.

She scans the busy square, thumbs the last coin in her pocket, loath to spend it. Perhaps she does not need to. With so many people in the market, it should be easy to steal what she needs. Or so she thinks, but the merchants of Paris are as cunning as its thieves, and they keep twice as tight a grip on every ware. Addie learns this the hard way; it will be weeks before she learns to palm an apple, longer still to master it without the faintest tell.

Today, she makes a clumsy effort, tries to swipe a seeded roll from a bread-baker’s cart, and is rewarded with a meaty hand vised around her wrist.

“Thief!”

She catches a glimpse of men-at-arms weaving through the crowd, and is flooded with the fear of landing in a cell, or stock. She is still flesh and bone, has not learned yet to pick locks, or charm men out of charges, to free herself from shackles as easily as her face slips from their minds.

So she pleads hastily, handing over her last coin.

He plucks it from her, waves the men away as the sol vanishes into his purse. Far too much for a roll, but he gives her nothing back. Payment, he says, for trying to steal.

“Lucky I don’t take your fingers,” he growls, pushing her away.

And that is how Addie comes to be in Paris, with a crust of bread and a broken bird, and nothing else.

She hurries from the market, slowing only when she reaches the bank of the Seine. And then, breathless, she tears into the roll, tries to make it last, but in moments it is gone, like a drop of water down an empty well, her hunger barely touched.

She thinks of Estele.

The year before, the old woman developed a ringing in her ears.

It was always there, she said, day and night, and when Addie asked her how she could bear the constant noise, she shrugged.

“With time,” she said, “you can get used to anything.”

But Addie does not think she will ever get used to this.

She stares out at the boats on the river, the cathedral rising through the curtain of mist. The glimpses of beauty that shine like gems against the dingy setting of the blocks, too far away and flat to be real.

She stands there until she realizes she is waiting. Waiting for someone to help. To come and fix the mess she’s in. But no one is coming. No one remembers, and if she resigns herself to waiting, she will wait forever.

So she walks.

And as she walks, she studies Paris. Makes a note of this house, and that road, of bridges, and carriage horses, and the gates of a garden. Glimpses roses beyond the wall, beauty in the cracks.

It will take years for her to learn the workings of this city. To memorize the clockwork of arrondissements, step by step, chart the course of every vendor, shop, and street. To study the nuances of the neighborhoods and find the strongholds and the cracks, learn to survive, and thrive, in the spaces between other people’s lives, make a place for herself among them.

Eventually, Addie will master Paris.

She will become a flawless thief, uncatchable and quick.

She will slip through fine houses like a filigreed ghost, move through salons, and steal up onto rooftops at night and drink pilfered wine beneath the open sky.

She will smile and laugh at every stolen victory.

Eventually—but not today.

Today, she is simply trying to distract herself from her gnawing hunger and her stifling fear. Today she is alone in a strange city, with no money, and no past, and no future.

Someone dumps a bucket from a second-floor window, without warning, and thick brown water splashes onto the cobbles at her feet. Addie jumps back, trying to avoid the worst of the splash, only to collide with a pair of women in fine dress, who look at her as if she were a stain.

Addie retreats, sinking onto a nearby step, but moments later a woman comes out and shakes a broom, accuses her of trying to steal away her customers.

“Go to the docks if you plan to sell your wares,” she scolds.

And at first, Addie doesn’t know what the woman means. Her pockets are empty. She’s nothing to sell. But when she says as much, the woman gives her such a look, and says, “You’ve got a body, don’t you?”

Her face flushes as she understands.

“I’m not a whore,” she says, and the woman flashes a cold smirk.

“Aren’t we proud?” she says, as Addie rises, turns to go. “Well,” the woman calls after in a crow-like caw, “that pride won’t fill your belly.”

Addie pulls the coat tight about her shoulders and forces her legs forward down the road, feeling as if they’re about to fold, when she sees the open doors of a church. Not the grand, imposing towers of Notre-Dame, but a small, stone thing, squeezed between buildings on a narrow street.

She has never been religious, not like her parents. She has always felt caught between the old gods and the new—but meeting the devil in the woods has got her thinking. For every shadow, there must be light. Perhaps the darkness has an equal, and Addie could balance her wish. Estele would sneer, but one god gave her nothing but a curse, so the woman cannot fault her for seeking shelter with the other.

The heavy door scrapes open, and she shuffles in, blinking in the sudden dark until her eyes adjust, and she sees the panels of stained glass.

Addie inhales, struck by the quiet beauty of the space, the vaulted ceiling, the red and blue and green light painting patterns on the walls. It is a kind of art, she thinks, starting forward, when a man steps into her path.

He opens his arms, but there is no welcome in the gesture.

The priest is there to bar her way. He shakes his head at her arrival.

“I’m sorry,” he says, coaxing her like a stray bird back up the aisle. “There is no room here. We’re full.”

And then she is back out on the steps of the church, the heavy grind of the bolt sliding home, and somewhere in Addie’s mind, Estele begins to cackle.

“You see,” she says, in her rasping way, “only new gods have locks.”

Addie never decides to go to the docks.

Her feet choose for her, carry her along the Seine as the sun sinks over the river, lead her down the steps, stolen boots thudding on the wooden planks. It’s darker there, in the shadow of the ships, a landscape of crates and barrels, ropes and rocking boats. Eyes follow her. Men glance over from their work, and women look on, lounging like cats in the shade. They have a sickly look about them, their color too high, their mouths painted a violent gash of red. Their dresses tattered and dirty, and still finer than Addie’s own.

She has not decided what she means to do, even when she slips the coat from her shoulders. Even when a man comes up to her, one hand already roving, as if testing fruit.

“How much?” he asks in a gruff voice.

And she has no idea what a body is worth, or if she is willing to sell it. When she does not answer, his hands grow rough, his grip grows firm.

“Ten sols,” she says, and the man lets out a bark of laughter.

“What are you, a princess?”

“No,” she answers, “a virgin.”

There were nights, back home, when Addie dreamed of pleasure, when she conjured the stranger beside her in the dark, felt his lips against her breasts, imagined her hand was his as it slipped between her legs.

“My love,” the stranger said, pressing her down into the bed, black curls tumbling into gem-green eyes.

“My love,” she breathed as he entered her, her body parting around his solid strength. He pushed deeper, and she gasped, biting her hand to keep from sighing too loud. Her mother would say that a woman’s pleasure was a mortal sin, but in those moments, Addie didn’t care. In those moments, there was only the longing and the want and the stranger, whispering against her skin as the tension deepened, the heat building like a storm in the bowl of her hips, and then in her mind, Adeline would pull his body down on hers, drawing him deeper and deeper until the storm broke, and thunder rolled through her.

But this is nothing like that.

There is no poetry to this unknown man’s grunts, no melody or harmony, save the steady noise of thrusting as he pushes himself against her. No rolling pleasure, only pressure, and pain, the tightness of one thing being forced inside another, and Addie looks up at the night sky so she won’t have to look at his body moving, and she feels the darkness looking back.

Then they are in the woods again, and his mouth is on hers, blood bubbling up on her lips as he whispers.

“Done.”

The man finishes with a final thrust, and slumps against her, leaden, and this cannot be it, this cannot be the life Addie traded everything for, this cannot be the future that erased her past. Panic grips her chest but this stranger doesn’t seem to care, or even notice. He simply straightens up, and tosses a handful of coins onto the cobbles at her feet. He trundles off and Addie sinks to her knees to collect her reward, and then empties her stomach into the Seine.

When asked about her first memories of Paris, those terrible few months, she will say it was a season of grief blurred into a fog. She will say she can’t remember.

But, of course, Addie remembers.

She remembers the stench of rotten food, and waste, the brackish waters of the Seine, the figures on the docks. Remembers moments of kindness erased by a doorway or a dawn, remembers mourning her home with its fresh bread and warm hearth, her family’s quiet melody, and Estele’s strong beat. The life she had, the one she gave up for the one she thought she wanted, stolen and replaced by this.

And yet, she remembers, too, how she marveled at the city, the way the light swept through in the mornings and evenings, the grandeur carved out between the unhewn blocks; how, despite all the grime, and grief, and disappointment, Paris was full of surprises. Beauty glimpsed through cracks.

Addie remembers the brief respite of that first fall, the brilliant turning of leaves over footpaths, going from green to gold like a jeweler’s showcase, before the short, sharp plunge into winter.

Remembers the cold that gnawed at her fingers and toes before swallowing them whole. Cold, and hunger. They had lean months in Villon, of course, when the cold snap stole the last of a harvest, or a late freeze ruined new growth—but this is a new kind of hunger. It rakes at her from the inside, drags its nails along her ribs. It wears her down, and while Addie knows it cannot kill her, the knowing does nothing to dull the urgent ache, the fear. She has not lost an ounce of flesh, but her stomach twists, gnawing on itself, and just as her feet refuse to callus, so her nerves refuse to learn. There is no numbing, none of the ease that comes with a habit. This pain is always fresh, brittle and bright, the feeling as sharp as her memory.

And she remembers the worst, too.

Remembers the sudden freeze, the brutal chill that stole upon the city, and the wave of sickness that blew in behind it like a late-fall breeze, scattering mounds of dead and dying leaves. The sound and sight of the carts rattling past, carrying grim cargo. Addie, turning her face away, trying not to look at the bony shapes piled carelessly in the back. She pulls a stolen coat close around her as she stumbles down the road, and dreams of summer heat, while the cold climbs down into her bones.

She does not think she will ever be warm again. Twice more she has gone to the docks, but the cold has forced the callers in, to the warm shelters of brothels, and around her, the cold snap has turned Paris cruel. The rich board themselves up inside their homes, cling to their hearth fires, while out in the streets, the poor are whittled down by winter. There is nowhere to hide from it—or rather, the only spots have all been claimed.

That first year, Addie is too tired to fight for space.

Too tired to search for shelter.

Another gust whips through, and Addie folds herself against it, eyes blurring. She shuffles sideways, onto a narrow street, just to escape the violent wind, and the sudden quiet, the breezeless peace, of the alley is like down, soft and warm. Her knees fold. She slumps into a corner against a set of steps, and watches her fingers turn blue, thinks she can see frost spreading over her skin, and marvels quietly, sleepily, at her own transformation. Her breath fogs the air in front of her, each exhale briefly blotting out the world beyond until the gray city fades to white, to white, to white. Strange, how it seems to linger now, a little more with every breath, as if she’s fogging up a pane of glass. She wonders how many breaths until the world is hidden. Erased, like her.

Perhaps it is her vision blurring.

She does not care.

She is tired.

She is so tired.

Addie cannot stay awake, and why should she try?

Sleep is such a mercy.

Perhaps she will wake again in spring, like the princess in one of her father’s stories, and find herself lying in the grassy bank along the Sarthe, Estele nudging her with a worn shoe and teasing her for dreaming again.

This is death.

At least, for an instant, Addie thinks it must be death.

The world is dark, the cold unable to hold back the reek of rot, and she cannot move. But then, she remembers, she cannot die. There is her stubborn pulse, fighting to beat, and her stubborn lungs, fighting to fill, and Addie realizes her limbs aren’t lifeless at all, but weighted down on every side. Heavy sacks above, below, and panic flutters through her, but her mind is still sluggish with sleep. She twists, and the sacks shift a little on top of her. The dark splits, and a sliver of gray light shines through.

Addie writhes and wriggles until she frees one arm and then the other, drawing them in against her body. She begins to push up through the sacks, and only then does she feel bones beneath the cloth, only then does her hand meet waxy skin, only then do her fingers tangle in the strands of someone else’s hair, and now she is awake, so awake, scrambling, tearing, desperate to get free.

She claws her way up, and out, hands splayed across the bony mound of a dead man’s back. Nearby, milky eyes stare up at her. A jaw hangs open, and Addie stumbles out of the cart and collapses to the ground, retching, sobbing, alive.

A horrible sound tears free from her chest, a harsh cough, something snagged halfway between a sob and a laugh.

Then, a scream, and it takes a moment for her to realize it is not coming from her own cracked lips. A ragged woman stands across the road, hands to her mouth in horror, and Addie cannot even blame her.

What a shock it must be, to see a corpse drag itself free from the cart.

The woman crosses herself, and Addie calls out in a hoarse and broken voice, “I am not dead.” But the woman only shuffles away and Addie turns her fury on the cart. “I am not dead!” she says again, kicking at the wooden wheel.

“Hey!” shouts a man, holding the legs of a frail and twisted corpse.

“Stay back,” shouts a second, gripping its shoulders.

Of course, they do not remember throwing her in. Addie backs away as they swing the newest body up into the cart. It lands with a sickening thud atop the others, and her stomach churns to think she was among them, even briefly.

A whip cracks, the horses shuffle forward, the wheels turn on the cobbled stones, and it is not until the cart has gone, not until Addie thrusts her trembling hands into the pockets of her stolen coat, that she realizes they are empty.

The little wooden bird is gone.

The last of her past life, carried away with the dead.

For months, she will keep reaching for the bird, hand drifting to her pocket the way it might to a stubborn curl, a motion born of so much habit. She cannot seem to remind her fingers it is gone, cannot seem to remind her heart, which stutters a little every time she finds the pocket empty. But, there, blooming amid the sorrow, is a terrible relief. Every moment since she left Villon, she has feared the loss of this last token.

Now that it is gone, there is a guilty gladness tucked among the grief.

This last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and Addie has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.

IV

Paris, France

July 29, 1715

Dreamer is too soft a word.

It conjures thoughts of silken sleep, of lazy days in fields of tall grass, of charcoal smudges on soft parchment.

Addie still holds on to dreams, but she is learning to be sharper. Less the artist’s hand, and more the knife, honing the pencil’s edge.

“Pour me a drink,” she says, holding out the bottle of wine, and the man pries out the cork and fills two glasses from the low shelf of the rented room. He hands her one, and she doesn’t touch it as he throws his back in a single swallow, downs a second before abandoning the glass and reaching for her dress.

“Where’s the rush?” she says, guiding him back. “You’ve paid for the room. We have all night.”

She is careful not to push him away, careful to keep the pressure of her resistance coy. Some men, she’s found, take pleasure in disregarding the wishes of a woman. Instead, Addie lifts her own glass to his hungry mouth, tips the rust-red contents between his lips, tries to pass the gesture off as seduction instead of force.

He drinks deep, then knocks the glass away. Clumsy hands paw at her front, fighting with the laces and the stays.

“I cannot wait to…” he slurs, but the drug in the wine is already taking hold, and soon he trails off, his tongue going heavy in his mouth.

He sags back onto the bed, still grasping at her dress, and a moment later his eyes roll back and he slumps sideways, lost to sleep before his head strikes the thin pillow.

Addie leans over and pushes until he rolls off the bed, hitting the floor like a sack of grain. The man lets out a muted groan, but does not wake.

She finishes his work, loosening the laces of her dress until she can breathe again. Paris fashion—twice as tight as country clothes, and half as practical.

She stretches out on the bed, grateful to have it to herself, at least for the night. She does not want to think about tomorrow, when she is forced to start again.

That is the madness of it. Every day is amber, and she is the fly trapped inside. No way to think in days or weeks when she lives in moments. Time begins to lose its meaning—and yet, she has not lost track of time. She cannot seem to misplace it (no matter how she tries) and so Addie knows what month it is, what day, what night, and so she knows it has been a year.

A year since she ran from her own wedding.

A year since she fled into the woods.

A year since she sold her soul for this. For freedom. For time.

A year, and she has spent it learning the boundaries of this new life.

Walking the edges of her curse like a lion in its cage. (She has seen lions now. They came to Paris in the spring as part of an exhibit. They were nothing like the beasts of her imagination. So much grander, and so much less, their majesty diminished by the dimensions of their cells. Addie went a dozen times to see them, studied their mournful gazes, looking past the visitors to the gap in the tent, the single sliver of freedom.)

A year she’s spent bound within the prism of this deal, forced to suffer but not die, starve but not waste, want but not wither. Every moment pressed into her own memory, while she herself slips from the minds of others with the slightest push, erased by a closing door, an instant out of sight, a moment of sleep. Unable to leave a mark on anyone, or anything.

Even the man slumped on the floor.

She draws the stoppered bottle of laudanum from her skirts, and holds it to the meager light. Three tries, and two bottles of the precious medicine wasted before she realized she could not drug the drinks herself, could not be the hand that did the harm. But mix it in the bottle of wine, reset the cork, and let them pour their own glass, and the action is no longer hers.

See?

She is learning.

It is a lonely education.

She tips the bottle, the last of the milky substance shifting inside the glass, and wonders if it might buy her a night of dreamless sleep, a deep and drugged peace.

“How disappointing.”

At the sound of the voice, Addie nearly drops the laudanum. She twists around in the small room, scouring the dark, but cannot find its source.

“I confess, my dear, I expected more.”

The voice seems to come from every shadow—then, from one. It gathers in the darkest corner of the room, like smoke. And then he steps forward into the circle cast by the candle flame. Black curls tumble across his brow. Shadows land in the hollows of his face, and green eyes glitter with their own internal light.

And for a traitorous instant, her heart lurches at the familiar sight of her stranger, before she remembers it is only him.

The darkness from the woods.

A year she’s lived this curse, and in that time, she’s called for him. She’s pleaded with the night, sunk coins she could not spare into the banks of the Seine, begged for him to answer just so she could ask why, why, why.

Now, she throws the bottle of laudanum straight at his head.

The shadow does not move to catch it, does not need to. It passes straight through, shatters against the wall behind him. He gives her a pitying smile.

“Hello, Adeline.”

Adeline. A name she thought she’d never hear again. A name that aches like a bruise, even as her heart skips to hear it.

“You,” she snarls.

The barest incline of his head. The curl of his smile. “Have you missed me?”

She hurtles toward him like the stoppered bottle, throws herself against his front, half expecting to fall through and shatter as it did. But her hands meet flesh and bone, or at least, the illusion of it. She pounds against his chest, and it is like striking a tree, just as hard and just as pointless.

He looks down at her, amused. “I see you have.”

She tears herself away, wants to scream, to rage, to 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.”

The darkness spreads his arms, as if to say, I am here now. And she wants to strike him, useless as it is, wants to banish him, cast him from this room like a curse, but she must ask. She must know. “Why? Why did you do this to me?”

His dark brows knit with false worry, mock concern. “I granted your wish.”

“I asked only for more time, for a life of freedom—”

“I have given you both.” His fingers trail along the bedpost. “This past year has taken no toll—” A stifled sound escapes her throat, but he continues. “You are whole, are you not? And uninjured. You do not age. You do not wither. And as for freedom, is there any keener liberation than what I’ve gifted you? A life with no one to answer to.”

“You know this isn’t what I wanted.”

“You did not know what you wanted,” he says sharply, stepping toward her. “And if you did, then you should have been more careful.”

“You deceived—”

“You erred,” says the darkness, closing the last space between them. “Don’t you remember, Adeline?” His voices drops to a whisper. “You were so brash, so brazen, tripping over your words as if they were roots. Rambling on about all the things you did not want.”

He is so close to her now, one hand drifting up her arm, and she wills herself not to give him the satisfaction of retreat, not to let him play the wolf, and force her into the part of sheep. But it is hard. For all that he is painted as her stranger, he is not a man. Not even human. It is only a mask, and it does not fit. She can see the thing beneath, as it was in the woods, shapeless and boundless, monstrous, and menacing. The darkness shimmers behind that green-eyed gaze.

“You asked for an eternity and I said no. You begged, and pleaded, and then, do you remember what you said?” When he speaks again, his voice is still his voice, but she can hear her own, echoing through it.

“You can have my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”

She draws back, from the words, from him, or tries to, but this time he does not let her. The hand on her arm tightens; the other rests like a lover’s touch behind her neck.

“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.

“Come,” he says, “give me what I want, and the deal will be done, this misery ended.”

A soul, for a single year of grief and madness.

A soul, for copper coins on a Paris dock.

A soul, for nothing more than this.

And yet, it would be a lie to say she does not waver. To say that no part of her wants to give up, give in, if only for a moment. Perhaps it is that part that asks.

“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 decline,” she growls.

The shadow scowls, those green eyes darkening like cloth soaked wet.

His hands fall away.

“You will give in,” he says. “Soon enough.”

He does not step back, does not turn to go. He is simply gone. Swallowed by the dark.

V

New York City

March 13, 2014

Henry Strauss has never been a morning person.

He wants to be one, has dreamed of rising with the sun, sipping his first cup of coffee while the city is still waking, the whole day ahead and full of promise.

He’s tried to be a morning person, and on the rare occasion he’s managed to get up before dawn, it was a thrill: to watch the day begin, to feel, at least for a little while, like he was ahead instead of behind. But then a night would go long, and a day would start late, and now he feels like there’s no time at all. Like he is always late for something.

Today, it is breakfast with his younger sister, Muriel.

Henry hurries down the block, his head still ringing faintly from the night before, and he would have canceled, should have canceled. But he’s canceled three times in the last month alone, and he doesn’t want to be a shitty brother; she just wants to be a good sister and that’s nice. That’s new.

He’s never been to this place before. It’s not one of his local haunts—though the truth is, Henry’s running out of coffee shops in his vicinity. Vanessa ruined the first. Milo the second. The espresso at the third tasted like charcoal. So he let Muriel pick one, and she chose a “quaint little hole in the wall” called Sunflower that apparently doesn’t have a sign or an address or any way to find it except by some hipster radar that Henry obviously lacks.

At last he spots a single sunflower stenciled on a wall across the street. He jogs to make the light, bumping into a guy on the corner, mumbles apologies (even as the other man says it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s totally fine). When Henry finally finds the entrance, the hostess is halfway through telling him there’s no space, but then she looks up from the podium, and smiles, and says she’ll make it work.

Henry looks around for Muriel, but she’s always considered time a flexible concept, so even though he’s late, she’s definitely later. And he’s secretly glad, for once, because it gives him a moment to breathe, to smooth his hair and wrest himself free of the scarf that’s trying to strangle him, even order a coffee. He tries to make himself look presentable, even if it doesn’t matter what he does; it won’t change what she sees. But it still matters. It has to.

Five minutes later, Muriel sweeps in. She is, as usual, a tornado of dark curls and unshakable confidence.

Muriel Strauss, who at twenty-four only ever talks about the world in terms of conceptual authenticity and creative truth, who’s been a darling of the New York art scene since her first semester at Tisch, where she quickly realized she was better at critiquing art than creating it.

Henry loves his sister, he does. But Muriel’s always been like strong perfume.

Better in small doses. And at a distance.

“Henry!” she shouts, shedding her coat and dropping into the seat with a dramatic flourish.

“You look great,” she says, which isn’t true, but he simply says, “You too, Mur.”

She beams, and orders a flat white, and Henry braces for an awkward silence, because the truth is, he has no idea how to talk to her. But if Muriel’s good at anything, it’s holding up a conversation. So he drinks his black coffee and settles in while she rolls through the latest pop-up gallery drama, then her schedule for Passover, raves about an experiential art festival on the High Line, even though it isn’t open yet. It isn’t until after she finishes a rant on a piece of street art that was definitely not a pile of trash, but in fact a commentary on capitalist waste, to the echo of Henry’s mhm’s, and nods, that Muriel brings up their older brother.

“He’s been asking about you.”

This is a thing Muriel has never said. Not about David; never to Henry.

So he cannot help himself. “Why?”

His sister rolls her eyes. “I imagine it’s because he cares.”

Henry nearly chokes on his drink.

David Strauss cares about a lot of things. He cares about his status as the youngest head surgeon at Sinai. He cares, presumably, about his patients. He cares about making time for Midrash, even if it means he has to do it in the middle of a Wednesday night. He cares about his parents, and how proud they are of what he’s done. David Strauss does not care about his younger brother, except for the myriad ways in which he’s ruining the family reputation.

Henry looks down at his watch, even though it doesn’t tell the time, or any time, for that matter.

“Sorry, sis,” he says, scraping back his chair. “I’ve got to open the store.”

She cuts herself off—something she never used to do—and rises from the chair to wrap her arms around his waist, squeezing him tight. It feels like an apology, like affection, like love. Muriel is a good five inches shorter than Henry, enough that he could rest his chin on her head, if they were that kind of close, which they’re not.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she says, and Henry promises he won’t.

VI

New York City

March 13, 2014

Addie wakes to someone touching her cheek.

The gesture is so gentle, at first she thinks she must be dreaming, but then she opens her eyes, and sees the fairy lights on the roof, sees Sam crouched beside the lawn chair, a worried crease across her forehead. Her hair has been set free, a mane of wild blond curls around her face.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” she says, tucking a cigarette back into its box, unlit.

Addie shivers and sits up, pulling the jacket tight around her. It’s a cold, cloudy morning, the sky a stretch of sunless white. She didn’t mean to sleep this long, this late. Not that she has anywhere to be, but it certainly seemed like a better idea last night, when she could feel her fingers.

The Odyssey has fallen off her lap. It lies facedown on the ground, the cover slick with morning dew. She reaches to pick it up, does her best to dust the jacket off, smooth the pages where they got bent, or smudged.

“It’s freezing out here,” says Sam, pulling Addie to her feet. “Come on.”

Sam always talks like that, statements in place of questions, imperatives that sound like invitations. She pulls Addie toward the rooftop door, and Addie is too cold to protest, simply trails Sam down the stairs to her apartment, pretending she doesn’t know the way.

The door swings open onto madness.

The hall, the bedroom, the kitchen are all stuffed full of art and artifact. Only the living room—at the back of the apartment—is spacious and bare. No sofa or tables there, nothing but two large windows, an easel, and a stool.

“This is where I do my living,” she said, when she first brought Addie home.

And Addie answered, “I can tell.”

She’s crammed everything she owns into three-quarters of the space, just to preserve the peace and quiet of the fourth. Her friend offered her a studio space at an insane deal, but it felt cold, she said, and she needs warmth to paint.

“Sorry,” says Sam, stepping around a canvas, over a box. “It’s a bit cluttered right now.”

Addie has never seen it any other way. She would love to see what Sam is working on, what put the white paint under her nails and led to the smudge of pink just below her jaw. But instead Addie forces herself to follow the girl around and over and through the mess into the kitchen. Sam snaps on the coffeemaker, and Addie’s eyes slide over the space, marking the changes. A new purple vase. A stack of half-read books, a postcard from Italy. The collection of mugs, some sprouting clean brushes, and always growing.

“You paint,” she says, nodding at the stack of canvases leaning against the stove.

“I do,” says Sam, a smile breaking over her face. “Abstracts, mostly. Nonsense art, my friend Jake calls it. But it’s not really nonsense, it’s just—other people paint what they see. I paint what I feel. Maybe it’s confusing, swapping one sense for another, but there’s beauty in the transmutation.”

Sam pours two cups of coffee, one mug green, as shallow and wide as a bowl, the other tall and blue. “Cats or dogs?” she asks, instead of “green or blue,” even though there are no dogs or cats on either of them, and Addie says, “cats,” and Sam hands her the tall blue cup without any explanation.

Their fingers brush, and they are standing closer than she realized, close enough for Addie to see the streaks of silver in the blue of Sam’s eyes, close enough for Sam to count the freckles on her face.

“You have stars,” she says.

Déjà vu, thinks Addie, again. She wills herself to pull away, to leave, to spare herself the insanity of repetition and reflection. Instead, Addie wraps her hands around the cup and takes a long sip. The first note is strong and bitter, but the second is rich and sweet.

She sighs with pleasure, and Sam flashes her a brilliant grin. “Good, right?” she says. “The secret is—”

Cacao nibs, thinks Addie.

“Cacao nibs,” says Sam, taking a long sip from her cup, which Addie is convinced now is really a bowl. She drapes herself over the counter, head bowed over the coffee as if it were an offering.

“You look like a wilted flower,” teases Addie.

Sam winks and lifts her cup. “Water me, and watch me bloom.”

Addie has never seen Sam like this, in the morning. Of course, she’s woken up beside her, but those days were tinged with apologies, unease. The aftermath of the absence of memory. It is never fun to linger in those moments. Now, though. This is new. A memory made for the first time.

Sam shakes her head. “Sorry. I never asked your name.”

This is one of the things she loves about Sam, one of the first things she ever noticed. Sam lives and loves with such an open heart, shares the kind of warmth most reserve only for the closest people in their lives. Reasons come second to needs. She took her in, she warmed her up, before she thought to ask her name.

“Madeline,” says Addie, because it is the closest she can get.

“Mmm,” says Sam, “my favorite kind of cookie. I’m Sam.”

“Hello, Sam,” she says, as if tasting the name for the first time.

“So,” says the other girl, as if the question only just occurred to her. “What were you doing up there on the roof?”

“Oh,” says Addie with a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep up there. I don’t even remember sitting down on the lawn chair. I must have been more tired than I thought. I just moved in, 2F, and I don’t think I’m used to all the noise. I couldn’t sleep, finally gave up and went up there to get some fresh air and watch the sun rise over the city.”

The lie rolls out so easily, the way paved with practice.

“We’re neighbors!” says Sam. “You know,” she adds, setting her empty cup aside, “I’d love to paint you sometime.”

And Addie fights the urge to say, You already have.

“I mean, it wouldn’t look like you,” Sam rambles on, heading into the hall. Addie follows, watches her stop and run her fingers over a stack of canvases, turning through them as if they were records in a vinyl shop.

“I’ve got this whole series I’m working on,” she says, “of people as skies.”

A dull pang echoes through Addie’s chest, and it’s six months ago, and they are lying in bed, Sam’s fingers tracing the freckles on her cheeks, her touch as light and steady as a brush.

“You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”

“And what kind of sky am I?” Addie had asked then, and Sam had stared at her, unblinking, and then brightened, and it was the kind of brightening she had seen with a hundred artists, a hundred times, the glow of inspiration, as if someone switched on a light beneath their skin. And Sam, suddenly animated, wound to life, sprang from the bed, taking Addie with her into the living room.

An hour of sitting on the hardwood floor, wrapped in only a blanket, listening to the murmur and scrape of Sam mixing paint, the hiss of the brush on the canvas, and then it was done, and when Addie came around to look at it, what she saw was the night sky. Not the night sky as anyone else would have painted it. Bold streaks of charcoal, and black, and thin slashes of middle gray, the paint so thick it rose up from the canvas. And flecked across the surface, a handful of silver dots. They looked almost accidental, like spatter from a brush, but there were exactly seven of them, small and distant and wide apart as stars.

Sam’s voice draws her back to the kitchen.

“I wish I could show you my favorite piece,” she’s saying now. “It was the first in the series. One Forgotten Night. I sold it to this collector on the Lower East Side. It was my first major sale, paid my rent for three months, got me into a gallery. Still, it’s hard, letting go of the art. I know I have to—that whole starving artist thing is overrated—but I miss it every day.”

Her voice dips softer.

“The crazy thing is, every one of the pieces in that series is modeled after someone. Friends, people here in the building, strangers I found on the street. I remember all of them. But I can’t for the life of me remember who she was.”

Addie swallows. “You think it was a girl?”

“Yeah. I do. It just had this energy.”

“Maybe you dreamed her.”

“Maybe,” says Sam. “I’ve never been good at remembering dreams. But you know…” She trails off, staring at Addie the way she did that night in bed, beginning to glow. “You remind me of that piece.” She puts a hand over her face. “God, that sounds like the worst pickup line in the world. I’m sorry. I’m going to take a shower.”

“I should get going,” says Addie. “Thanks for the coffee.”

Sam bites her lip. “Do you have to?”

No, she doesn’t. Addie knows she could follow Sam right into the shower, wrap herself in a towel, and sit on the living room floor and see what kind of painting Sam would make of her today. She could. She could. She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it. Only an infinite number of presents, and she has lived as many of those with Sam as she can bear.

“Sorry,” she says, chest aching, but Sam only shrugs.

“We’ll see each other again,” she says with so much faith. “After all, we’re neighbors now.”

Addie manages a pale shadow of a smile. “That’s right.”

Sam walks her to the door, and with every step, Addie resists the urge to look back.

“Don’t be a stranger,” says Sam.

“I won’t,” promises Addie, as the door swings shut. She sighs, leaning back against it, listens to Sam’s footsteps retreating down the cluttered hall, before she forces herself up, and forward, and away.

Outside, the white marble sky has cracked, letting through thin bands of blue.

The cold has burned off, and Addie finds a café with sidewalk seating, busy enough that the waiter only has time to make a pass of the outside tables every ten minutes or so. She counts the beats like a prisoner marking the pace of guards, orders a coffee—it isn’t as good as Sam’s, all bitter, no sweet, but it’s warm enough to keep the chill at bay. She puts up the collar of her leather coat, and opens The Odyssey again, and tries to read.

Here, Odysseus thinks he is heading home, to finally be reunited with Penelope after the horrors of war, but she has read the story enough times to know how far the journey is from done.

She skims, translating from Greek to modern English.

The waiter ducks back outside, and she glances up from the book, watches him frown a little at the sight of the drink already ordered and delivered, the gap in his memory where a customer should be. But she looks like she belongs, and that’s half the battle, really, and a moment later he turns his attention to the couple in the doorway, waiting for a seat.

She returns to her book, but it’s no use. She’s not in the mood for old men lost at sea, for parables of lonely lives. She wants to be stolen away, wants to forget. A fantasy, or perhaps a romance.

The coffee is cold now, anyway, and Addie stands up, book in hand, and sets off for The Last Word to find something new.

VII

Paris, France

July 29, 1716

She stands in the shade of a silk merchant.

Across the way, the tailor’s shop bustles, the pace of business brisk even as the day wears on. Sweat drips down her neck as she unties and reties the bonnet, salvaged from a gust of wind, hoping the cloth cap will be enough to pass her off as a lady’s maid, to grant her the kind of invisibility reserved for help. If he thinks her a maid, Bertin will not look too close. If he thinks her a maid, he might not notice Addie’s dress, which is simple but fine, slipped from a tailor’s model a week before, in a similar shop across the Seine. It was a pretty thing at first, until she snagged the skirts on an errant nail, and someone cast a bucket of soot too near her feet, and red wine somehow got onto one of the sleeves.

She wishes her clothes were as resistant to change as she appears to be. Especially because she has only the one dress—there’s no point collecting a wardrobe, or anything else, when you’ve nowhere to put it. (She will try, in later years, to gather trinkets, hide them away like a magpie with its nest, but something will always conspire to steal them back. Like the wooden bird, lost among the bodies in the cart. She cannot seem to hold on to much of anything for long.)

At last, the final customer steps out—a valet, one beribboned box beneath each arm—and before anyone else can beat her to the door, Addie darts across the street and steps inside the tailor’s shop.

It is a narrow space: a table piled high with rolls of fabric; a pair of dress forms modeling the latest fashions. The kind of gowns that take at least four hands to get on, and just as many to take off—all bolstered hips and ruffled sleeves and bosoms cinched too tight to breathe. These days the fine society of Paris is wrapped like parcels, clearly not meant to be opened.

A small bell on the door announces her arrival, and the tailor, Monsieur Bertin, looks up at her through brows as thick as brambles, and makes a sour face.

“I am closing,” he says curtly.

Addie ducks her head, the picture of discretion. “I am here on behalf of Madame Lautrec.”

It is a name plucked from the breeze, overheard on a handful of her walks, but it is the right answer. The tailor straightens, suddenly keen. “For the Lautrecs, anything.” He takes up a small pad, a charcoal pencil, and Addie’s own fingers twitch, a moment of grief, a longing to draw as she so often did.

“It is strange, though,” he is saying, shaking the stiffness from his hands, “that she would send a lady’s maid in place of her valet.”

“He’s ill,” Addie answers swiftly. She is learning to lie, to bend with the current of the conversation, follow its course. “So she sent her lady’s maid instead. Madame wishes to throw a dance, and is in need of a new dress.”

“But of course,” he says. “You have her measurements?”

“I do.”

He stares, waiting for her to produce a slip of paper.

“No,” she explains. “I have her measurements—they are the same as mine. That’s why she sent me.”

She thinks it is a rather clever lie, but the tailor only frowns, and turns toward a curtain at the back of the shop. “I will get my tape.”

She catches a brief glimpse of the room beyond, a dozen dress forms, a mountain of silks, before the curtain falls again. But as Bertin slips away, so does she, vanishing between the dress forms and the rolls of muslin and cotton propped against the wall. It is not her first visit to the shop, and she has learned well its crevices and crooks, all the corners large enough to hide in. Addie folds into one such space, and by the time Bertin returns to the front of the shop, the tape in one hand, he has forgotten all about Madame Lautrec and her peculiar maid.

It is stuffy among the rolls of cloth, and she’s grateful when she hears the rattle of the bell, the shuffling sound of Bertin closing up his shop. He will go upstairs, to the room he keeps above, will have some soup, and soak his aching hands, and go to bed before it is full night. She waits, letting the quiet settle around her, waits until she can hear the groan of his steps overhead.

And then she is free to wander, and peruse.

A weak gray light seeps through the front window as she crosses the shop, pulls aside the heavy curtain, and steps through.

The fading light slides in through a single window, just enough to see by. Along the back wall there are cloaks, half-finished, and she makes a mental note to return when summer gives way to fall, and the cold sweeps through. But her focus falls on the center of the room, where a dozen dress forms stand like dancers taking up their marks, their narrow waists wrapped in shades of green and gray, a navy gown piped white, another pale blue with yellow trim.

Addie smiles, and casts the bonnet off onto a table, shaking loose her hair.

She runs her hand over skeins of patterned silk and richly dyed cotton, savoring the textures of linen and twill. Touches the boning of the corsets, the bustles at the hips, imagining herself in each. She passes the muslin and wool, simple and sturdy, lingers instead on worsted pleats and layered satin, finer than anything she saw back home.

Home—it is a hard word to let go of, even now, when there is nothing left to bind her to it.

She plucks at the stays of a bodice, the blue of summer, and stops, breath held, when she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. But it is only a mirror, leaning against the wall. She turns, studies herself in the silvered surface, as if she were a portrait of someone else, though the truth is, she looks entirely herself.

These last two years have felt like ten, and yet, they do not show. She should have long been whittled down to skin and bone, hardened, hewn, but her face is just as full as it was the summer she left home. Her skin, unlined by time and trial, untouched in any way, save for the familiar freckles on the smooth palette of her cheeks. Only her eyes mark the change—an edge of shadow threaded through the brown and gold.

Addie blinks, forces her gaze away from herself, and the dresses.

Across the room, a trio of dark shapes—men’s forms, in trousers and waistcoats and jackets. In the low light, their headless forms seem alive, leaning into one another as they study her. She considers the cut of their clothes, the absence of bone stays or bustled skirts, and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.

And then, she is reaching for the nearest form, sliding off its coat. Unfastening the buttons down its front. There is a strange intimacy to the undressing, and she enjoys it all the more for the fact that the man beneath her fingers is not real, and therefore cannot grope, or paw, or push.

She frees herself from the laces of her own dress, and finds her way into the trousers, fastening them below her knee. She pulls on the tunic and buttons the waistcoat, shrugs the striped coat over her shoulders, fastens the lace cravat at her throat.

She feels safe in the armor of their fashion, but when she turns to the mirror, her spirits sink. Her chest is too full, her waist too narrow, her hips flaring to fill the trousers in the wrong place. The jacket helps, a little, but nothing can disguise her face. The bow of her lips, the line of her cheek, the smoothness of her brow, all too soft and round to pass for anything but female.

She takes up a pair of shears, tries to trim the loose coil of her hair to her shoulders, but seconds later, it is back, the locks on the floor swept away by some invisible hand. No mark made, even on herself. She finds a pin and fastens the light brown waves back in the style she has seen men wear, plucks a tricorne hat from one of the forms and rests it above her brow.

At a distance, perhaps; at a passing glance, perhaps; at night, perhaps, when the darkness is thick enough to smudge the details; but even by lamplight, the illusion does not hold.

The men in Paris are soft, even pretty, but they are still men.

She sighs, and casts off the disguise, and passes the next hour trying on dress after dress, already longing for the freedom of those trousers, the stayless comfort of that tunic. But the dresses are fine, and lush. Her favorite among them is a lovely green and white—but it isn’t finished yet. The collar and hem lie open, waiting for lace. She’ll have to check back in a week or two, hope that she catches the dress before it’s gone, wrapped in paper and sent on to the home of some baroness.

In the end, Addie chooses a dark sapphire dress, its edges trimmed in gray. It reminds her of a storm at night, the clouds blotting out the sky. The silk kisses her skin, the fabric crisp and new and utterly unblemished. It is too fine for her needs, a dress for banquets, for balls, but she does not care. And if it draws strange looks, what of it? They will forget before they have the chance to gossip.

Addie leaves her own dress draped around the naked form, does not bother with the bonnet, lifted from a line of clothes that morning. She slips back through the curtain and across the shop, skirts rustling around her, finds the spare key Bertin keeps in the table’s top drawer, and unlocks the door, careful to still the bell with her fingers. She pulls the door shut behind her, crouching to slip the iron key back through the gap beneath the door, then rises and turns, only to collide with a man standing on the street.

It is no wonder she didn’t see him; dressed in black, from his shoes to his collar, he blends right into the dark. She is already murmuring apologies, already backing away when her gaze lifts, and she sees the line of his jaw, the raven curls, the eyes, so green despite the lack of light.

He smiles down at her.

“Adeline.”

That name, it strikes like flint on his tongue, sparks an answering light behind her ribs. His gaze drifts over her new dress. “You’re looking well.”

“I look the same.”

“The prize of immortality. As you wanted.”

This time she does not rise to take the bait. Does not scream or swear or point out all the ways he’s damned her, but he must see the struggle on her face, because he laughs, soft and airy as a breeze.

“Come,” says the shadow, offering his arm. “I will walk you.”

He does not say that he will walk her home. And if it were midday, she would scorn the offer just to spite him. (Of course, if it were midday, the darkness would not be there.) But it is late, and only one kind of woman walks alone at night.

Addie has learned that women—at least, women of a certain class—never venture forth alone, even during the day. They are kept inside like potted plants, tucked behind the curtains of their homes. And when they do go out, they go in groups, safe within the cages of each other’s company, and always in the light of day.

To walk alone in the morning is a scandal, but to walk alone at night, that is something else. Addie knows. She has felt their looks, their judgment, from every side. The women scorn her from their windows, the men try to buy her on the streets, and the devout, they try to save her soul, as if she hasn’t already sold it. She has said yes to the church, on more than one occasion, but only for the shelter, and never the salvation.

“Well?” asks the shadow, holding out his arm.

Perhaps she is lonelier than she would say.

Perhaps an enemy’s company is still better than none.

Addie does not take his arm, but she does start walking, and she does not need to look to know that he has fallen in step beside her. His shoes echo softly on the cobblestones, and a faint breeze presses like a palm against her back.

They walk in silence, until she cannot bear it. Until her resolve slips, and she looks over, and sees him, head tipped slightly back, dark lashes brushing fair cheeks as he breathes in the night, fetid though it is. A faint smile on those lips, as if he’s perfectly at ease. His very image mocks her, even as his edges blur, dark into dark, smoke on shadow, a reminder of what he is, and what he isn’t.

Her silence cracks, the words spill out.

“You can take any shape you please, isn’t that right?”

His head tips down. “It is.”

“Then change,” she says. “I cannot bear to look at you.”

A rueful smile. “I rather like this form. I think you do as well.”

“I did once,” she says. “But you have ruined it for me.”

It is an opening, she sees too late, a crack in her own armor.

Now he will never change.

Addie stops on a narrow, winding street, before a house, if it can be called that. A slumping wooden structure, like a pile of kindling, deserted, abandoned, but not empty.

When he is gone, she will climb through the gap in the boards, trying not to ruin the hem of her new skirts, will cross the uneven floor and go up a set of broken stairs to the attic, and hope that no one else has found it first.

She will climb out of her storm-cloud dress, and fold it carefully within a piece of tissue paper, and then she will lie down on a pallet of burlap and board, and stare up through the split planks of the ceiling two feet over her head, and hope it does not rain, while the lost souls creep through the body of the house below.

Tomorrow, the little room will be taken, and in a month, the building will burn down, but there is no sense worrying about the future now.

The darkness shifts like a curtain at her back.

“How long will you carry on?” he muses. “What is the point of dragging yourself through another day, when there is no reprieve?”

Questions she has asked herself in the dead of night, moments of weakness when winter sank its teeth into her skin, or hunger clawed against her bones, when a space was taken, a day’s work undone, a night’s peace lost, and she could not bear the thought of rising to do it all again. And yet, hearing the words parroted back like this, in his voice instead of hers, they lose a measure of their venom.

“Don’t you see?” he says, green eyes sharp as broken glass. “There is no end besides the one I offer. All you have to do is yiel—”

“I saw an elephant,” says Addie, and the words are like cold water on coals. The darkness stills beside her, and she continues, gaze fixed on the ramshackle house, and the broken roof, and the open sky above. “Two, in fact. They were in the palace grounds, as part of some display. I didn’t know animals could be so large. And there was a fiddler in the square the other day,” she presses on, her voice steady, “and his music made me cry. It was the prettiest song I’d ever heard. I had Champagne, drank it straight from the bottle, and watched the sun set over the Seine while the bells rang out from Notre-Dame, and none of it would have happened back in Villon.” She turns to look at him. “It has only been two years,” she says. “Think of all the time I have, and all the things I’ll see.”

Addie grins at the shadow then, a small, feral smile, all teeth, feasting on the way the humor falls from his face.

It is a small victory, and yet so sweet, to see him falter, even for an instant.

And then, suddenly, he is too close, the air between them snuffed like a candle. He smells of summer nights, of earth, and moss, and tall grass waving beneath stars. And of something darker. Of blood on rocks, and wolves loose in the woods.

He leans in until his cheek brushes against hers, and when he speaks again, the words are little more than whispers over skin.

“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.”

Addie pulls back to face the darkness, but he is already gone.

She stands alone on the narrow road. Inhales a low, unsteady breath, forces it out again, and then straightens, and smooths her skirts, and makes her way into the broken house that, tonight at least, is home.

VIII

New York City

March 13, 2014

The bookshop is busier today.

A kid plays hide-and-seek with his imaginary friend while his father turns through a military history. A college student crouches, scanning the different editions of Blake, and the boy she met yesterday stands behind the counter.

She studies him, the habit like thumbing through a book.

His black hair tumbles forward into his eyes, unruly, untamable. He pushes it back, but in seconds it has fallen forward again, making him look younger than he is.

He has the kind of face, she thinks, that can’t keep secrets well.

There is a short queue, so Addie hangs back between POETRY and MEMOIR. She raps her nails along a shelf, and a few moments later an orange head pokes itself out from the dark above the spines. She pets Book absently, and waits for the queue to thin from three, to two, to one.

The boy—Henry—notices her, lingering nearby, and something crosses his face, too fast for even her to read, before his attention flicks back to the woman at the counter.

“Yes, Ms. Kline,” he’s saying. “No, that’s fine. And if it’s not what he wants, just bring it back.”

The woman toddles off, clutching her store bag, and Addie steps up. “Hi there,” she says brightly.

“Hello,” Henry says, an edge of caution in his voice. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” she says, all practiced charm. She sets The Odyssey on the counter between them. “My friend bought me this book, but I already have it. I was hoping I could exchange it for something else.”

He studies her. A dark brow lifts behind his glasses. “Are you serious?”

“I know,” she says with a laugh, “hard to believe I already own this one in Greek but—”

He rocks back on his heels. “You are serious.”

Addie falters, thrown off by the edge in his voice. “I just thought it was worth asking…”

“This isn’t a library,” he chides. “You can’t just trade one book for another.”

Addie straightens. “Obviously,” she says, a little indignant. “But like I said, I didn’t buy it. My friend did, and I just heard you tell Ms. Kline that—”

His face hardens, the flat regard of a door slammed shut. “Word of advice. Next time you try to return a book, don’t return it to the same person you stole it from the first time.”

A rock drops inside her chest. “What?”

He shakes his head. “You were just in here yesterday.”

“I wasn’t—”

“I remember you.”

Three words, large enough to tip the world.

I remember you.

Addie lurches as if struck, about to fall. She tries to right herself. “No you don’t,” she says firmly.

His green eyes narrow. “Yes. I do. You came in here yesterday, green sweater, black jeans. You stole this used copy of The Odyssey, which I gave back to you, because who steals a used copy of The Odyssey in Greek anyways, and then you have the nerve to come back in here and try to trade it out for something else? When you didn’t even buy the first one…”

Addie closes her eyes, vision swimming.

She doesn’t understand.

She can’t—

“Now look,” he says, “I think you better go.”

She opens her eyes, and sees him pointing to the door. Her feet won’t move. They refuse to carry her away from those three words.

I remember you.

Three hundred years.

Three hundred years, and no one has said those words, no one has ever, ever remembered. She wants to grab him by the sleeve, wants to pull him forward, wants to know why, how, what is so special about a boy in a bookstore—but the man with the military history is waiting to pay, the kid clinging to his leg, and the boy with the glasses is glaring at her, and this is all wrong. She grips the counter, feels like she might faint. His eyes soften, just a fraction.

“Please,” he says under his breath. “Just go.”

She tries.

She can’t.

Addie gets as far as the open door, the four short steps from the shop to the street, before something in her gives.

She slumps onto the lip at the top of the stairs, puts her head in her hands, feels like she might cry, or laugh, but instead, she stares back through the beveled glass insert of the shop door. She watches the boy every time he comes into the frame. She cannot tear her eyes away.

I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. I remember—

“What are you doing?”

She blinks, and sees him standing in the open doorway, arms crossed. The sun has shifted lower in the sky, the light going thin.

“Waiting for you,” she says, cringing as soon as she says it. “I wanted to apologize,” she continues. “For the whole book thing.”

“It’s fine,” he says curtly.

“No, it’s not,” she says, rising to her feet. “Let me buy you a coffee.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I insist. As an apology.”

“I’m working.”

“Please.”

And it must be something in the way she says it, the sheer mix of hope and need, the obvious fact it means more than a book, more than a sorry, that makes the boy look her in the eyes, makes her realize that he hadn’t really, not until now. There’s something strange, searching in his gaze, but whatever he sees when he looks at her, it changes his mind.

“One coffee,” he says. “And you’re still banned from the shop.”

Addie feels the air rush back into her lungs. “Deal.”

IX

New York City

March 13, 2014

Addie lingers on the bookstore steps for an hour until it closes.

Henry locks up, and turns to see her sitting there, and Addie braces again for the blankness in his gaze, the confirmation that their earlier encounter was only some strange glitch, a slipped stitch in the centuries of her curse.

But when he looks at her, he knows her. She is certain he knows her.

His brows go up beneath his tangled curls, as if he’s surprised that she’s still there. But his annoyance has given way to something else—something that confuses her even more. It’s less hostile than suspicion, more guarded than relief, and it is still wonderful, because of the knowing in it. Not a first meeting, but a second—or rather, a third—and for once she is not the only one who knows.

“Well?” he says, holding out his hand, not for her to take, but for her to lead the way, and she does. They walk a few blocks in awkward silence, Addie stealing glances that tell her nothing but the line of his nose, the angle of his jaw.

He has a starved look, wolfish and lean, and even though he’s not unnaturally tall, he hunches his shoulders as if to make himself shorter, smaller, less obtrusive. Perhaps, in the right clothes, perhaps, with the right air, perhaps, perhaps; but the longer she looks at him, the weaker the resemblance to that other stranger.

And yet.

There is something about him that keeps catching her attention, snagging it the way a nail snags a sweater.

Twice he catches her looking at him, and frowns.

Once she catches him stealing his own glance, and smiles.

At the coffee shop, she tells him to grab a table while she buys the drinks, and he hesitates, as if torn between the urge to pay and the fear of being poisoned, before retreating to a corner booth. She orders him a latte.

“Three eighty,” says the girl behind the counter.

Addie cringes at the cost. She pulls a few bills from her pocket, the last of what she took from James St. Clair. She doesn’t have the cash for two drinks, and she can’t just walk out with them, because there’s a boy waiting. And he remembers.

Addie glances toward the table, where he sits, arms folded, staring out the window.

“Eve!” calls the barista.

“Eve!”

Addie startles, realizing that means her.

“So,” says the boy when she sits down. “Eve?”

No, she thinks. “Yeah,” she says. “And you’re…”

Henry, she thinks just before he says it.

“Henry.” It fits him, like a coat. Henry: soft, poetic. Henry: quiet, strong. The black curls, the pale eyes behind their heavy frames. She has known a dozen Henrys, in London, Paris, Boston, and L.A., but he is not like any of them.

His gaze drops to the table, his cup, her empty hands. “You didn’t get anything.”

She waves it away. “I’m not really thirsty,” she lies.

“It feels weird.”

“Why?” She shrugs. “I said I’d buy you a coffee. Besides,” she hesitates, “I lost my wallet. I didn’t have enough for two.”

Henry frowns. “Is that why you stole the book?”

“I didn’t steal it. I wanted to trade. And I said sorry.”

“Did you?”

“With the coffee.”

“Speaking of,” he says, standing. “How do you take it?”

“What?”

“The coffee. I can’t sit here and drink alone, it makes me feel like an asshole.”

She smiles. “Hot chocolate. Dark.”

Those brows quirk up again. He walks away to order, says something that makes the barista laugh and lean forward, like a flower to the sun. He returns with a second cup and a croissant, and sets them both in front of her before taking his seat, and now they are uneven again. Balance tipped, restored, and tipped again, and it is the kind of game she’s played a hundred times, a sparring match made of small gestures, the stranger smiling across the table.

But this is not her stranger, and he is not smiling.

“So,” says Henry, “what was all that today, with the book?”

“Honestly?” Addie wraps her hands around the coffee cup. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”

The question rattles like loose change in her chest, like pebbles in a porcelain bowl; it shakes inside her, threatening to spill out.

How did you remember? How? How?

“The Last Word doesn’t get that many customers,” Henry says. “And even fewer try to leave without paying. I guess you made an impression.”

An impression.

An impression is like a mark.

Addie runs her fingers through the foam on her hot chocolate, watches the milk smooth again in her wake. Henry doesn’t notice, but he noticed her, he remembered.

What is happening?

“So,” he says, but the sentence goes nowhere.

“So,” she echoes, because she cannot say what she wants. “Tell me about yourself.”

Who are you? Why are you? What is happening?

Henry bites his lip and says, “Not much to tell.”

“Did you always want to work in a bookshop?”

Henry’s face turns wistful. “I’m not sure it’s the job that people dream of, but I like it.” He’s lifting the latte to his mouth when someone shuffles past, knocking against his chair. Henry rights the cup in time, but the man begins to apologize. And doesn’t stop.

“Hey, I’m so sorry.” His face twists with guilt.

“It’s fine.”

“Did I make you spill?” asks the man with genuine concern.

“Nope,” says Henry. “You’re good.”

If he registers the man’s intensity, he gives no sign. His focus stays firmly on Addie, as if he can will the man away.

“That was weird,” she says, when he’s finally gone.

Henry only shrugs. “Accidents happen.”

That isn’t what she meant. But the thoughts are passing trains, and she can’t afford to be derailed.

“So,” she says, “the bookshop. Is it yours?”

Henry shakes his head. “No. I mean, it might as well be, I’m the only employee, but it belongs to a woman named Meredith, who spends most of her time on cruises. I just work there. What about you? What do you do when you’re not stealing books?”

Addie weighs the question, the many possible answers, all of them lies, and settles for something closer to the truth.

“I’m a talent scout,” she says. “Music, mostly, but also art.”

Henry’s face hardens. “You should meet my sister.”

“Oh?” asks Addie, wishing she’d lied. “Is she an artist?”

“I think she’d say she fosters art, that it’s a type of artist, maybe. She likes to”—he makes a flourish—“nurture the raw potential, shape the narrative of the creative future.”

Addie thinks she would like to meet his sister, but she doesn’t say it.

“Do you have siblings?” he asks.

She shakes her head, tearing a corner off the croissant because he hasn’t touched it, and her stomach’s growling.

“Lucky,” he says.

“Lonely,” she counters.

“Well, you’re welcome to mine. There’s David, who’s a doctor, a scholar, and a pretentious asshole, and Muriel who’s, well—Muriel.”

He looks at her, and there it is again, that strange intensity, and maybe it’s just that so few people make eye contact in the city, but she can’t shake the feeling he’s looking for something in her face.

“What is it?” she asks, and he starts to say one thing, but changes course.

“Your freckles look like stars.”

Addie smiles. “I’ve heard. My own little constellation. It’s the first thing everyone sees.”

Henry shifts in his seat. “What do you see,” he says, “when you look at me?”

His voice is light enough, but there is something in the question, a weight, like a stone buried in a snowball. He’s been waiting to ask. The answer matters.

“I see a boy with dark hair and kind eyes and an open face.”

He frowns a little. “Is that all?”

“Of course not,” she says. “But I don’t know you yet.”

“Yet,” he echoes, and there’s something like a smile in his voice.

She purses her lips, considers him again.

For a moment, they are the only silent spot in the bustling café.

Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.

Addie scans his face, the slight furrow where his brows go in and up, the set of his lips, the way he rubs one palm as if working out an ache, even as he leans forward, and in, his attention wholly on her.

“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.”

Henry stares at her, all the humor gone out of his face, and she knows she’s gotten too close to the truth.

Addie laughs nervously, and the sound rushes back in around them. “Sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “Too deep. I probably should have just said you were good-looking.”

Henry’s mouth quirks, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “At least you think I’m good-looking.”

“What about me?” she asks, trying to break the sudden tension.

But for the first time, Henry won’t look her in the eyes. “I’ve never been good at reading people.” He nudges the cup away, and stands, and Addie thinks she’s ruined it. He’s leaving.

But then he looks down at her and says, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

And the air rushes back into her lungs.

“Always,” she says.

And this time, when he holds out his hand, she knows he’s inviting her to take it.

X

Paris, France

July 29, 1719

Addie has discovered chocolate.

Harder to come by than salt, or Champagne, or silver, and yet the marchioness keeps an entire tin of the dark, sweet flakes beside her bed. Addie wonders, as she holds a melting sliver on her tongue, if the woman counts the pieces every night, or if she only notices when her fingers skim the empty bottom of the tin. She is not home to ask. If she were, Addie wouldn’t be sprawled atop her down duvet.

But Addie and the lady of the house have never met.

Hopefully, they never will.

The marquis and his wife keep quite a social calendar, after all, and over the last few years their city house has become one of her favorite haunts.

Haunt—it is the right word, for someone living like a ghost.

Twice a week they have friends to dinner in their city house, and every fortnight they host a grander party there, and once a month, which happens to be tonight, they take a carriage across Paris to play cards with other noble families, and do not return until the early morning.

By now, the servants have retreated to their own quarters, no doubt to drink and savor their small measure of freedom. They will take shifts, so that at any given time, a single sentinel stands watch at the base of the stairs, while the rest enjoy their peace. Perhaps they play cards, too. Or perhaps they simply relish the quiet of an empty house.

Addie rests another bit of chocolate on her tongue and sinks back onto the marchioness’s bed, into the cloud of airy down. There are more cushions here than in all of Villon, she is certain, and each is twice as full of feathers. Apparently nobles are made of glass, designed to break if laid upon too rough a surface. Addie spreads her arms, like a child making angels in the snow, and sighs with pleasure.

She spent an hour or so combing over and through the marchioness’s many dresses, but she doesn’t have enough hands to climb into any of them, so she has wrapped herself in a blue silk dressing gown finer than anything she’s ever owned. Her own dress, a rust-colored thing with a cream lace trim, lies abandoned on the chaise, and when she looks at it she remembers the wedding gown, cast-off in the grass along the Sarthe, the pale white linen shed like a skin beside her.

The memory clings like spider silk.

Addie pulls the dressing gown close, inhales the scent of roses on the hem, closes her eyes, and imagines this is her bed, her life, and for a few minutes, it is pleasant enough. But the room is too warm, too still, and she’s afraid if she lingers in the bed, it might swallow her. Or worse, she might fall asleep, and find herself shaken awake by the lady of the house, and what a pain that would be, since the bedroom is on the second floor.

It takes a full minute to climb out of the bed, hands and knees sinking into the down as she scrambles toward the edge, tumbles gracelessly onto the rug. She steadies herself against a wooden post, delicate branches carved into the oak, thinks of trees as she surveys the room, deciding how to occupy herself. A glass door leads out onto the balcony, a wooden one leads into the hall. A chest of drawers. A chaise. A dressing table, topped by a polished mirror.

Addie sinks onto a cushioned stool before the vanity, her fingers dancing over the bottles of perfume and pots of cream, the soft plume of a powder puff, a bowl of silver hairpins.

Of these last, she takes a handful, and begins to twist up locks of hair, fastening the coils back and up around her face as if she has the faintest idea what she is doing. The current style is reminiscent of a sparrow’s nest, a bundle of curls. At least she is not yet expected to wear a wig, one of those monstrous, powdered things like towers of meringue that will come into fashion fifty years from now.

Her nest of curls is set, but needs a final touch. Addie lifts a pearl comb in the shape of a feather and slides the teeth into the locks just behind her ear.

Strange, the way small differences add up.

Perched there on the pillowed seat, surrounded by luxury, in her borrowed blue silk robe with her hair pinned up in curls, Addie could almost forget herself, could almost be someone else. A young mistress, the lady of the house, able to move freely with the safeguard of her reputation.

Only the freckles on her cheeks stand out, a reminder of who Addie was, is, will always be.

But freckles are easily covered.

She takes up the powder puff, the bloom halfway to her cheek when a faint breeze stirs the air, carrying the scent not of Paris, but open fields, and a low voice says, “I would rather see clouds blot out the stars.”

Addie’s gaze cuts to the mirror, and the reflection of the room behind her. The balcony doors are still shut fast, but the chamber is no longer empty. The shadow leans against the wall with all the ease of someone who has been there for a while. She is not surprised to see him—he has come, year after year—but she is unsettled. She will always be unsettled.

“Hello, Adeline,” says the darkness, and though he is across the room, the words brush like leaves against her skin.

She turns in her seat, free hand rising to the open collar of her robe. “Go away.”

He clicks his tongue. “A year apart, and that is all you have to say?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I mean no,” she says again. “That is my answer, to your question. The only reason you’re here. You’ve come to ask if I will yield, and the answer is no.”

His smile ripples, shifts. Gone is the gentleman; again, the wolf.

“My Adeline, you’ve grown some teeth.”

“I am not yours,” she says.

A flash of warning white, and then the wolf retreats, pretends to be a man again as he steps into the light. And yet, the shadows cling to him, smudging edges into the dark. “I grant you immortality. And you spend your evenings eating bonbons in other people’s beds. I imagined more for you than this.”

“And yet, you condemned me to less. Come to gloat?”

He runs a hand along the wooden post, tracing the branches. “Such venom on our anniversary. And here I came only to offer you dinner.”

“I see no food. And I do not want your company.”

He moves like smoke, one moment across the room and the next beside her. “I would not be so quick to scorn,” he says, one long finger grazing the pearl comb in her hair. “It is the only company you’ll ever have.”

Before she can pull away, the air is empty; he is across the room again, hand resting on the tassel beside the door.

“Stop,” she says, lunging to her feet, but it’s too late. He pulls, and a moment later the bell rings, splitting the silence of the house.

“Damn you,” she hisses as footsteps sound on the stairs.

Addie is already turning to take up her dress, to snag what little she can before she flees—but the darkness catches her arm. He forces her to stay there at his side like some misbehaving child as a lady’s maid opens the door.

She should startle at the sight of them, two strangers in her master’s home, but there is no shock in the woman’s face. No surprise, anger, or fear. There is nothing at all. Only a kind of vacancy, a calm unique to the dreaming and the dazed. The maid stands, head bowed and hands laced, waiting for instruction, and Addie realizes with dawning horror and relief that the woman is bewitched.

“We will dine in the salon tonight,” says the darkness, as if the house were his. There is a new timbre to his voice, a film, like gossamer drawn over stone. It ripples in the air, wraps itself around the maid, and Addie can feel it sliding along her own skin, even as it fails to hold.

“Yes, sir,” says the maid with a small bow.

She turns to lead them down the stairs, and the darkness looks to Addie and smiles.

“Come,” he says, eyes gone emerald with arrogant glee. “I heard the marquis’s chef is one of the best in Paris.”

He offers her his arm, but she does not take it.

“You don’t really expect me to dine with you.”

He lifts his chin. “You would waste such a meal, simply because I’m at the table? I think your stomach is louder than your pride. But suit yourself, my dear. Stay here in your borrowed room, and glut yourself on stolen sweets. I’ll eat without you.”

With that, he strides away, and she is torn between the urge to slam the door behind him and the knowledge that her night is ruined, whether she eats with him or not, that even if she stays here in this room, her mind will follow him down the stairs to dinner.

And so she goes.

Seven years from now, Addie will see a puppet show being put on in a Paris square. A curtained cart, with a man behind, hands raised to hold aloft the little wooden figures, their limbs dancing up and down with twine.

And she will think of this night.

This dinner.

The servants of the house move around them as if on strings, smooth and silent, every gesture done with that same, sleepy ease. Chairs pulled back, linens smoothed, bottles of Champagne uncorked and poured into waiting crystal flutes.

But the food comes out too quickly, the first course arriving as the glasses are filled. Whatever hold the darkness has on the servants of this house, it began before his entrance in her stolen room. It began before he rang the bell, and called the maid, and summoned her to dinner.

He should seem so out of place in the filigreed room. He is, after all, a wild thing, a god of forest nights, a demon bounded by the dark, and yet he sits with the poise and grace of a nobleman enjoying his dinner.

Addie fingers the silver cutlery, the gilt trim of the plates.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?”

The darkness looks at her across the table. “Are you not?” he asks as the servants bow, and draw back against the walls.

The truth is, she is scared. Unsettled by the display. She knows his power—at least, she thought she did—but it’s one thing to make a deal, and another to be the witness of such control. What could he make them do? How far could he make them go? Is it as easy for him as pulling strings?

The first course is placed before her, a cream soup the pale orange of dawn. It smells wonderful, and the Champagne sparkles in its glass, but she does not let herself reach for either.

The darkness reads the caution in her face.

“Come, Adeline,” he says, “I am no fae thing, here to trap you with food and drink.”

“And yet, everything seems to have a price.”

He exhales, eyes flashing a paler shade of green.

“Suit yourself,” he says, taking up his glass and drinking deeply.

After a long moment, Addie gives in, and lifts the crystal to her lips, taking her first sip of Champagne. It is unlike anything she’s ever tasted; a thousand fragile bubbles race across her tongue, sweet and sharp, and she would melt with pleasure, if it were any other table, any other man, any other night.

Instead of savoring each sip, she immediately empties her glass, and by the time she sets it on the table, her head is fizzing slightly, and the servant is already at her elbow, pouring her a second drink.

The darkness sips his own, and watches, saying nothing as she eats. The silence in the room grows heavy, but she does not break it.

Instead she focuses first on the soup, and then on fish, and then on a round of pastry-crusted beef. It is more than she has eaten in months, in years, and she feels full in a way that goes beyond her stomach. And as she slows, she studies the man, who is not a man, across the table, the way the shadows bend in the room at his back.

This is the longest they have ever spent together.

Before, there were only those mere moments in the woods, the minutes in a shoddy room, half an hour along the Seine. But now, for the first time, he does not loom behind her like a shadow, does not linger like a phantom at the edges of her sight. Now, he sits across from her, on full display, and though she knows the static details of his face, having drawn them a hundred times, still she cannot help but study him in motion.

And he lets her.

There is no shyness in his manner.

He seems, if anything, to relish her attention.

As his knife slices across the plate, as he lifts a bite of meat to his lips, his black brows lift, his mouth tugs at the corner. Less a man than a collection of features, drawn by a careful hand.

In time, that will change. He will inflate, expand to fill the gaps between the lines of her drawing, wrest the image from her grip until she cannot fathom that it was ever hers.

But for now, the only aspect that is his—entirely his—are those eyes.

She imagined them a hundred times, and yes, they were always green, but in her dreams they were a single shade: the steady green of summer leaves.

His are different.

Startling, inconstant, the slightest change in humor, in temper, reflected there, and only there.

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.

Tonight, they are the slippery color of weeds caught in the current of a stream.

By the end of dinner, they will be another shade entirely.

There is something languid in his posture. He sits there, one elbow on the tablecloth, his attention drifting, head tipped ever so slightly as if listening to a far-off sound, while his elegant fingers trace the line of his chin as if amused by his own form, and before she knows it, she has broken the silence again.

“What is your name?”

His eyes slide from a corner of the room back to her. “Why must I have one?”

“All things have names,” she says. “Names have purpose. Names have power.” She tips her glass his way. “You know that, or else you wouldn’t have stolen mine.”

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, wolfish, amused. “If it is true,” he says, “that names have power, then why would I hand you mine?”

“Because I must call you something, to your face and in my head. And right now I have only curses.”

The darkness does not seem to care. “Call me whatever you like, it makes no difference. What did you call the stranger in your journals? The man after whom you fashioned me?”

“You fashioned yourself to mock me, and I would rather you take any other form.”

“You see violence in every gesture,” he muses, running a thumb over his glass. “I fashioned myself to suit you. To put you at ease.”

Anger rises in her chest. “You have ruined the one thing I still had.”

“How sad, that you had only dreams.”

She resists the urge to fling the crystal at him, knowing it will do no good. Instead, she looks to the servant by the wall, holds out the glass for him to fill it. But the servant doesn’t move—none of them do. They are bound to his will, not hers. And so she rises, and takes the bottle up herself.

“What was his name, your stranger?”

She returns to her seat, refills her glass, focuses on the thousand shining bubbles that rise through the center. “He had no name,” she says.

But it is a lie, of course, and the darkness looks at her as if he knows it.

The truth is, she’d tried on a dozen names over the years—Michel, and Jean, Nicolas, Henri, Vincent—and none of them had fit. And then, one night, there it was, tripping off her tongue, when she was curled in bed, wrapped in the image of him beside her, long fingers trailing through her hair. The name had passed her lips, simple as breath, natural as air.

Luc.

In her mind it stood for Lucien, but now, sitting across from this shadow, this charade, the irony is like a too-hot drink, an ember burning in her chest.

Luc.

As in Lucifer.

The words echo through her, carried like a breeze.

Am I the devil, or the darkness?

And she does not know, will never know, but the name is already ruined. Let him have it.

“Luc,” she murmurs.

The shadow smiles, a dazzling, cruel imitation of joy, and lifts his drink as if to toast.

“Then Luc it is.”

Addie drains her glass again, clinging to the lightheadedness it brings. The effects won’t last, of course, she can feel her senses fighting back with every empty glass, but she presses on, determined to best them, at least for a while.

“I hate you,” she says.

“Oh, Adeline,” he says, setting down his glass. “Without me, where would you be?” As he speaks, he turns the crystal stem between his fingers, and in its faceted reflection, she sees another life—her own, and not her own—a version where Adeline didn’t run to the woods as the sun went down and the wedding party gathered, didn’t summon the darkness to set her free.

In the glass, she sees herself—her old self, the one she might have been, Roger’s children at her side and a new baby on her hip and her familiar face gone sallow with fatigue. Addie sees herself beside him in the bed, the space cold between their bodies, sees herself bent over the hearth the way her mother always was, the same frown lines, too, fingers aching too much to stitch the tears in clothes, far too much to hold her old drawing pencils; sees herself wither on the vine of life, and walk the short steps so familiar to every person in Villon, the narrow road from cradle to grave—the little church waiting, still and gray as a tombstone.

Addie sees it, and she is grateful he doesn’t ask if she would go back, trade this for that, because for all the grief and the madness, the loss, the hunger, and the pain, she still recoils from the image in the glass.

The meal is done, and the servants of the house stand in the shadows, waiting for their master’s next instruction. And though their heads are bowed, and their faces are blank, she cannot help but think of them as hostages.

“I wish you would send them away.”

“You are out of wishes,” he says. But Addie meets his eyes, and holds them—it is easier, now that he has a name, to think of him as a man, and men can be challenged—and after a moment, the darkness sighs, and turns to the nearest servant, and tells them to open a bottle for themselves, and go.

And now they are alone, and the room seems smaller than it was before.

“There,” says Luc.

“When the marquis and his wife come home and find their servants drunk, they will suffer for it.”

“And who will be blamed, I wonder, for the missing chocolates in the lady’s room? Or the blue silk robe? Do you think no one suffers when you steal?”

Addie bristles, heat rising to her cheeks.

“You gave me no choice.”

“I gave you what you asked for, Adeline. Time, without constraint. Life without restriction.”

“You cursed me to be forgotten.”

“You asked for freedom. There is no greater freedom than that. You can move through the world unhindered. Untethered. Unbound.”

“Stop pretending you did me a kindness instead of a cruelty.”

“I did you a deal.”

His hand comes down hard on the table as he says it, annoyance flashing yellow in his eyes, brief as lightning. “You came to me. You pleaded. You begged. You chose the words. I chose the terms. There is no going back. But if you have already tired of going forward, you need only say the words.”

And there it is again, the hatred, so much easier to hold on to.

“It was a mistake to curse me.” Her tongue is coming loose, and she doesn’t know if it’s the Champagne, or simply the duration of his presence, the acclimation that comes with time, like a body adjusting to a too-hot bath. “If you had only given me what I asked for, I would have burned out in time, would have had my fill of living, and we would, both of us, have won. But now, no matter how tired I am, I will never give you this soul.”

He smiles. “You are a stubborn thing. But even rocks wear away to nothing.”

Addie sits forward. “You think yourself a cat, playing with its catch. But I am not a mouse, and I will not be a meal.”

“I do hope not.” He spreads his hands. “It’s been so long since I had a challenge.”

A game. To him, everything is a game.

“You underestimate me.”

“Do I?” One black brow lifts as he sips his drink. “I suppose we’ll see.”

“Yes,” says Addie, taking up her own. “We will.”

He has given her a gift tonight, though she doubts he knows it. Time has no face, no form, nothing to fight against. But in his mocking smile, his toying words, the darkness has given her the one thing she truly needs: an enemy.

It is here the battle lines are drawn.

The first shot may have been fired back in Villon, when he stole her life along with her soul, but this, this, is the beginning of the war.

XI

New York City

March 13, 2014

She follows Henry to a bar that’s too crowded, too loud.

All the bars in Brooklyn are like that, too little space for too many bodies, and the Merchant is apparently no exception, even on a Thursday. Addie and Henry are crammed into a narrow patio out back, bundled together under an awning, but she still has to lean in to hear his voice over the noise.

“Where are you from?” she starts.

“Upstate. Newburgh. You?”

“Villon-sur-Sarthe,” she says. The words ache a little in her throat.

“France? You don’t have an accent.”

“I moved around.”

They are sharing an order of fries and a pair of happy-hour beers because, he explains, a bookstore job doesn’t pay that well. Addie wishes she could go back in and fetch them some proper drinks, but she’s already told him the lie about the wallet, and she doesn’t want to pull any more tricks, not after The Odyssey.

Plus, she’s afraid.

Afraid to let him walk away.

Afraid to let him out of sight.

Whatever this is, a blip, a mistake, a beautiful dream, or a piece of impossible luck, she’s afraid to let it go. Let him go.

One wrong step, and she’ll wake up. One wrong step, and the thread will snap, the curse will shudder back into place, and it will be over, and Henry will be gone, and she will be alone again.

She forces herself back into the present. Enjoy it while it lasts. It cannot last. But right here, right now—

“Penny for your thoughts,” he calls over the crowd.

She smiles. “I can’t wait for summer.” It’s not a lie. It has been a long, damp spring, and she is tired of being cold. Summer means hot days, and nights where the light lingers. Summer means another year alive. Another year without—

“If you could have one thing,” cuts in Henry, “what would it be?”

He studies her, squinting at her as if she’s a book, not a person; something to be read. She stares back at him like he’s a ghost. A miracle. An impossible thing.

This, she thinks, but she lifts her empty glass and says, “Another beer.”

XII

Addie can account for every second of her life, but that night, with Henry, the moments seem to bleed together. Time slides by as they bounce from bar to bar, happy hour giving way to dinner and then to late-night drinks, and every time they hit the point where the evening splits, and one road leads their separate ways and the other carries on ahead, they choose the second road.

They stay together, each waiting for the other to say “It’s getting late” or “I should be going,” or “See you around.” There is some unspoken pact, an unwillingness to sever whatever this is, and she knows why she’s afraid to break the thread, but she wonders about Henry. Wonders at the loneliness she sees behind his eyes. Wonders at the way the waiters and the bartenders and the other patrons look at him, the warmth he doesn’t seem to notice.

And then it is almost midnight, and they are eating cheap pizza, walking side by side through the first warm night of spring, as the clouds stretch overhead, low and lit by the moon.

She looks up, and so does Henry, and for a moment, only a moment, he looks overwhelmingly, unbearably sad.

“I miss the stars,” he says.

“So do I,” she says, and his gaze drops back to her, and he smiles.

“Who are you?”

His eyes have gone glassy, and the way he says who almost sounds like how, less a question of how she’s doing and more a question of how she’s here, and she wants to ask him the same thing, but she has a good reason, and he’s just a little drunk.

And simply, perfectly, normal.

But he can’t be normal.

Because normal people don’t remember her.

They’ve reached the subway. Henry stops.

“This is me.”

His hand slips free of hers, and there it is, that old familiar fear, of endings, of something giving way to nothing, of moments unwritten and memories erased. She doesn’t want the night to end.

Doesn’t want the spell to break. Doesn’t—

“I want to see you again,” says Henry.

The hope fills her chest until it hurts. She’s heard those words a hundred times, but for the first time, they feel real. Possible. “I want you to see me again, too.”

Henry smiles, the kind of smile that takes over an entire face.

He pulls out his cell, and Addie’s heart sinks. She tells him that her phone is broken, when the truth is, she’s never needed one before. Even if she had someone to call, she could not call them. Her fingers would slip uselessly over the screen. She has no e-mail, either, no way to send a message of any kind, thanks to the whole thou-shalt-not-write part of her curse.

“I didn’t know you could exist these days without one.”

“Old-fashioned,” she says.

He offers to come by her place the next day. Where does she live? And it feels as if the universe is mocking her now.

“I’m staying at a friend’s while they’re out of town,” she says. “Why don’t I meet you at the store?”

Henry nods. “The store, then,” he says, backing away.

“Saturday?”

“Saturday.”

“Don’t go disappearing.”

Addie laughs, a small, brittle thing. And then he’s walking away, he’s got a foot down the first step, and the panic grips her.

“Wait,” she says, calling him back. “I need to tell you something.”

“Oh god,” Henry groans. “You’re with someone.”

The ring burns in her pocket. “No.”

“You’re in the CIA and you leave for a top-secret mission tomorrow.”

Addie laughs. “No.”

“You’re—”

“My real name isn’t Eve.”

He pulls back, confused. “… okay.”

She doesn’t know if she can say it, if the curse will let her, but she has to try. “I didn’t tell you my real name because, well—it’s complicated. But I like you, and I want you to know—to hear it from me.”

Henry straightens, sobering. “Well then, what is it?”

“It’s A—” The sound lodges, for just a second, the stiffness of a muscle long since fallen to disuse. A rusty cog. And then—it scrapes free.

“Addie.” She swallows, hard. “My name’s Addie.”

It hangs in the air between them.

And then Henry smiles. “Well, okay,” he says. “Goodnight, Addie.”

As simple as that.

Two syllables falling from a tongue.

And it’s the best sound she’s ever heard. She wants to throw her arms around him, wants to hear it again, and again, the impossible word filling her like air, making her feel solid.

Real.

“Goodnight, Henry,” Addie says, willing him to turn and go, because she doesn’t think she can bring herself to turn away from him.

She stands there, rooted to the spot at the top of the subway steps until he’s out of sight, holds her breath and waits to feel the thread snap, the world shudder back into shape, waits for the fear and the loss and the knowledge that it was just a fluke, a cosmic error, a mistake, that it is over now, that it will never happen again.

But she doesn’t feel any of those things.

All she feels is joy, and hope.

Her boot heels tap out a rhythm on the street, and even after all these years, she half expects a second pair of shoes to fall in step beside her own. To hear the rolling fog of his voice, soft, and sweet, and mocking. But there is no shadow at her side, not tonight.

The evening is quiet, and she is alone, but for once it is not the same as being lonely.

Goodnight, Addie, Henry said, and Addie cannot help but wonder if he has somehow broken the spell.

She smiles, and whispers to herself. “Goodnight, Ad—”

But the curse closes around her throat, the name lodging there, as it always has.

And yet.

And yet.

Goodnight, Addie.

Three hundred years she’s tested the confines of her deal, found the places where it gives, the subtle bend and flex around the bars, but never a way out.

And yet.

Somehow, impossibly, Henry has found a way in.

Somehow, he remembers her.

How? How? The question thuds with the drum of her heart, but in this moment, Addie does not care.

In this moment, she is holding to the sound of her name, her real name, on someone else’s tongue, and it is enough, it is enough, it is enough.

XIII

Paris, France

July 29, 1720

The stage is set, the places ready.

Addie smooths the linen on the table, arranges the porcelain plates, the cups—not crystal, but still glass—and draws the dinner from its hamper. It is no five-course meal, served by glamoured hands, but it is fresh and hearty fare. A loaf of bread, still warm. A wedge of cheese. A pork terrine. A bottle of red wine. She is proud of her collection, prouder still of the fact she had no magic, save the curse, by which to gather it, could not simply cut her gaze, say a word, and will it so.

It is not only the table.

It is the room. No stolen chamber. No beggar’s hovel. A place, for now at least, to call her own. It took two months to find, a fortnight to fix up, but it was worth it. From the outside it is nothing: cracked glass and warping wood. And it’s true, the lower floors have fallen into disrepair, home now only to rodents and the occasional stray cats—and, in winter, crowded with bodies seeking any form of shelter—but it is the height of summer now, and the city’s poor have taken to the streets, and Addie has claimed the top floor for herself. Boarded up the stairs and carved a way in and out through an upper window, like a child in a wooden fort. It is an unconventional entrance, but it is worth it for the room beyond, where she has made herself a home.

A bed, piled high with blankets. A chest, filled with stolen clothes. The windowsill brims with trinkets, glass and porcelain and bone, gathered and assembled like a line of makeshift birds.

In the middle of the narrow room, a pair of chairs set before a table covered in pale linen. And in its center, a bundle of flowers, picked in the night from a royal garden and smuggled out in the folds of her skirt. And Addie knows none of it will last, it never does—a breeze will somehow steal away the totems on her mantel; there will be a fire, or a flood; the floor will give way or the secret home will be found and claimed by someone else.

But she has guarded the pieces this past month, gathered and arranged them one by one to make a semblance of a life, and if she’s being honest, it is not only for herself.

It is for the darkness.

It is for Luc.

Or rather, it is to spite him, to prove that she is living, she is free. That Addie will give him no hold, no way to mock her with his charity.

The first round was his, but the second will be hers.

And so she has made her home, and readied it for company, fastened up her hair and dressed herself in russet silk, the color of fall leaves, even cinched herself into a corset despite her loathing of bone stays.

She has had a year to plan, to design the posture she will strike, and as she straightens up the room she turns barbs over in her mind, sharpening the weapons of their discourse. She imagines his thrusts, and her parries, the way his eyes will lighten or darken as the conversation turns.

You have grown teeth, he said, and Addie will show him how sharp they have become.

The sun has gone down now, and all that’s left to do is wait. An hour passes, and her stomach growls with want as the bread goes cold in its cloth, but she doesn’t allow herself to eat. Instead, she leans out the window and watches the city, the shifting lights of lanterns being lit.

And he doesn’t come.

She pours herself a glass of wine, and paces, as the stolen candles drip, and wax pools on the table linen, and the night grows heavy, the hours first late, and then early.

And still he doesn’t come.

The candles gutter and snuff themselves out, and Addie sits in the dark as the knowledge settles over her.

The night has passed, the first threads of daylight creeping into the sky, and it is tomorrow now, and their anniversary is over, and five years have become six without his presence, without his face, without his asking if she’s had enough, and the world slips, because it is unfair, it is cheating, it is wrong.

He was supposed to come, that was the nature of their dance. She did not want him there, has never wanted it, but she expected it, he has made her expect it. Has given her a single threshold on which to balance, a narrow precipice of hope, because he is a hated thing, but a hated thing is still something. The only thing she has.

And that is the point, of course.

That is the reason for the empty glass, the barren plate, the unused chair.

She gazes out the window, and remembers the look in his eyes when they toasted, the curve of his lips when they declared war, and realizes what a fool she is, how easily baited.

And suddenly, the whole tableau seems gruesome and pathetic, and Addie can’t bear to look at it, can’t breathe in her red silk. She tears at the laces of the corset, pulls the pins from her hair, frees herself from the confines of the dress, sweeps the settings from the table, and dashes the now empty bottle against the wall.

Glass bites into her hand, and the pain is sharp, and real, the sudden scald of a burn without the lasting scar, and she does not care. In moments, her cuts have already closed. The glasses and bottle lie whole. Once she thought it was a blessing, this inability to break, but now, the impotence is maddening.

She ruins everything, only to watch it shudder, mocking, back together, return like a set to the beginning of the show.

And Addie screams.

Anger flares inside her, hot and bright, anger at Luc, and at herself, but it is giving way to fear, and grief, and terror, because she must face another year alone, a year without hearing her name, without seeing herself reflected in anyone’s eyes, without a night’s respite from this curse, a year, or five, or ten, and she realizes then how much she’s leaned on it, the promise of his presence, because without it, she is falling.

She sinks to the floor among the ruins of her night.

It will be years before she sees the sea, the waves crashing against the jagged white cliffs, and then she will remember Luc’s goading words.

Even rocks wear away to nothing.

Addie falls asleep just after dawn, but it is fitful, and brief, and full of nightmares, and when she wakes to see the sun high over Paris, she cannot bring herself to rise. She sleeps all the day and half the night, and when she wakes the shattered thing in her has set again, like a badly broken bone, some softness hardened.

“Enough,” she tells herself, rising to her feet.

“Enough,” she repeats, feasting on the bread, now stale, the cheese, wilted from the heat.

Enough.

There will be other dark nights, of course, other wretched dawns, and her resolve will always weaken a little as the days grow long, and the anniversary draws near, and treacherous hope slips in like a draft. But the sorrow has faded, replaced by stubborn rage, and she resolves to kindle it, to shield and nurture the flame until it takes far more than a single breath to blow it out.

XIV

New York City

March 13, 2014

Henry Strauss walks home alone through the dark.

Addie, he thinks, turning the name over in his mouth.

Addie, who looked at him and saw a boy with dark hair, kind eyes, an open face.

Nothing more. And nothing else.

A cold gust blows, and he pulls his coat close, and looks up at the starless sky.

And smiles.