The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,132

it now. The bones are too sharp, the shadows too deep, the eyes too bright.

“You forget yourself,” he says, his voice dissolving into woodsmoke. “You forget me.”

Pain lances up through Addie’s feet, sudden and sharp. She looks down, searching for a wound, but the pain lights her from within. A deep, internal ache, the force of every step she’s ever walked.

“Perhaps I have been too merciful.”

The pain climbs through her limbs, infecting knee and hip, wrist and shoulder. Her legs buckle beneath her, and it is all she can do not to scream.

The darkness looks down with a smile.

“I have made this too easy.”

Addie watches in horror as her hands begin to wrinkle and thin, blue veins standing out beneath papery skin.

“You asked only for life. I gave you your health, and youth, as well.”

Her hair comes loose from its bun and hangs lank before her eyes, the strands going dry and brittle and gray.

“It has made you arrogant.”

Her sight weakens, vision blurring until the room is only smudges and vague shapes.

“Perhaps you need to suffer.”

Addie squeezes her eyes shut, heart fluttering with panic.

“No,” she says, and it is the closest she has ever come to pleading.

She can feel him, moving closer. Can feel the shadow of him looming over her.

“I will take away these pains. I will let you rest. I will even raise a tree over your bones. And all you have to do”—the voice seeps through the dark—“is surrender.”

That word, like a tear in the veil. And for all the pain, and terror, of this moment, Addie knows she will not give in.

She has survived worse. She will survive worse. This is nothing but a god’s foul temper.

When she finds the breath to speak, the words come out in a ragged whisper. “Go to Hell.”

She braces herself, wonders if he will rot her all the way through, bend her body into a corpse, and leave her there, a broken husk on the old woman’s floor. But there is only more laughter, low and rumbling, and then nothing, the night stretching into stillness.

Addie is afraid to open her eyes, but when she does, she finds herself alone.

The ache has faded from her bones. Her loose hair has regained its chestnut shade. Her hands, once ruined, are again young, smooth, and strong.

She rises, shaking, and turns toward the hearth.

But the fire, so carefully tended, has gone out.

That night, Addie curls up on the moldering pallet, beneath a threadbare blanket left unclaimed, and thinks of Estele.

She closes her eyes and inhales until she can almost smell the herbs that clung to the old woman’s hair, the garden and sap on her skin. She holds fast to the memory of Estele’s crooked smile, her crow-like laugh, the voice she used when she spoke to gods, and the one she used with Addie. Back when she was young, when Estele taught her not to be afraid of storms, of shadows, of sounds in the night.

New York City

March 19, 2014

II

Addie leans against the window, watching the sun rise over Brooklyn.

She wraps her fingers around a cup of tea, savoring the heat against her palms. The glass fogs with cold, the dregs of winter clinging to the edges of the day. She is wearing one of Henry’s sweatshirts, cotton branded with the Columbia logo. It smells like him. Like old books and fresh coffee.

She pads barefoot back into the bedroom, where Henry lies facedown, arms folded beneath the pillow, his cheek turned away. And in that moment, he looks so much like Luc, and yet nothing like Luc at all. The resemblance between them wavers, like double vision. His curls, spread like black feathers on the white pillow, fading to downy fluff at the nape of his neck. His back rises and falls, steady with the smooth, shallow tread of sleep.

Addie sets the cup down on the bedside table, between Henry’s glasses and a leather watch. She traces her finger along the dark metal rim, the gold numerals set into the black ground. It rocks under her touch, reveals the small inscription on the back.

Live well.

A small shiver runs through her, and she’s about to pick it up when Henry groans into his pillow, a soft protest to morning.

Addie abandons the watch, and climbs back into bed beside him. “Hello.”

He gropes for his glasses, puts them on, and looks at her, and smiles, and this is the part that will never get old. The knowing. The present folding on top of the past instead