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…”