The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,103

his balance when the man’s hand falls away.

“Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.”

“But I don’t want to be in pain,” says Henry hoarsely. “I want—”

“You want to be loved.”

A small, empty sound, half cough, half sob. “Yes.”

“Then be loved.”

“You make it sound simple.”

“It is,” says the stranger. “If you’re willing to pay.”

Henry chokes out a laugh. “I’m not looking for that kind of love.”

The dark flicker of a smile plays across the stranger’s face. “And I’m not talking about money.”

“What else is there?”

The stranger reaches out and rests his hand against Henry’s sternum.

“The one thing every human has to give.”

For an instant, Henry thinks the stranger wants his heart, as broken as it is—and then he understands. He works at a bookstore, has read enough epics, devoured the allegories and myths. Hell, Henry spent the first two-thirds of his life studying scripture, and he grew up on a steady diet of Blake, Milton, and Faust. But it has been a long time since any of them felt like more than stories.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I am the one who sees kindling and coaxes it to flame. The nurturer of all human potential.”

He stares at the stranger, still dry despite the storm, a devil’s beauty in a familiar face, and those eyes, suddenly more serpentine, and Henry knows this for what it is: a waking dream. He’s had them once or twice before, a consequence of aggressive self-medication.

“I don’t believe in devils,” he says, rising to his feet. “And I don’t believe in souls.”

The stranger cranes his head. “Then you have nothing to lose.”

The bone-deep sadness, kept at bay the last few minutes by the stranger’s easy company, now rushes back. Pressure against cracking glass. He sways a little, but the stranger steadies him.

Henry doesn’t remember seeing the other man stand, but now they’re eye to eye. And when the devil speaks again, there’s a new depth to his voice, a steady warmth, like a blanket drawn around his shoulders. Henry feels himself lean into it.

“You want to be loved,” says the stranger, “by all of them. You want to be enough for all of them. And I can give that to you, for the price of something you won’t even miss.” The stranger holds out his hand. “Well, Henry? What do you say?”

And he doesn’t think any of this is real.

So it doesn’t matter.

Or perhaps the man in the rain is right.

He just has nothing left to lose.

In the end, it’s easy.

As easy as stepping off the edge.

And falling.

Henry takes his hand, and the stranger squeezes, hard enough to reopen the cuts along his palm. But at last, he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel anything, as the darkness smiles, and says a single word.

“Deal.”

New York City

March 17, 2014

III

There are a hundred kinds of silence.

There’s the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying.

There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves.

There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start.

Henry doesn’t know what kind of silence this is, but it is killing him.

He began to talk outside the corner shop, and kept talking as they walked, because it was easier for him to speak when he had somewhere to look besides her face. The words spilled out of him as they reached the blue door of his building, as they climbed the stairs, as they moved through the apartment, and now the truth fills the air between them, heavy as smoke, and Addie isn’t saying anything.

She sits on the sofa, her chin in her hand.

Outside the window, the day just carries on as if nothing’s changed, but it feels like everything has, because Addie LaRue is immortal, and Henry Strauss is damned.

“Addie,” he says, when he cannot stand it anymore. “Please say something.”

And she looks up at him, eyes shining, not with some spell, but tears, and he does not know at first if she is heartbroken or happy.

“I couldn’t understand,” she says. “No one has ever remembered. I thought it was an accident. I thought it was a trap. But you’re not