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.
