The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,14
shape, no god to be found—only that voice, close as a breath against her cheek.
“Adeline, Adeline,” it says, mocking, “… they are calling for you.”
She turns again, finding nothing but deep shadow. “Show yourself,” she orders, her own voice sharp and brittle as a stick.
Something brushes her shoulder, grazes her wrist, drapes itself around her like a lover. Adeline swallows. “What are you?”
The shadow’s touch withdraws. “What am I?” it asks, an edge of humor in that velvet tone. “That depends on what you believe.”
The voice splits, doubles, rattling through tree limbs and snaking over moss, folding over on itself until it is everywhere.
“So tell me—tell me—tell me,” it echoes. “Am I the devil—the devil—or the dark—dark—dark? Am I a monster—monster—or a god—god—god—or…”
The shadows in the woods begin to pull together, drawn like storm clouds. But when they settle, the edges are no longer wisps of smoke, but hard lines, the shape of a man, made firm by the light of the village lanterns at his back.
“Or am I this?”
The voice spills from a perfect pair of lips, a shadow revealing emerald eyes that dance below black brows, black hair that curls across his forehead, framing a face Adeline knows too well. One that she has conjured up a thousand times, in pencil and charcoal and dream.
It is the stranger.
Her stranger.
She knows it is a trick, a shadow parading as a man, but the sight of him still robs her breath. The darkness looks down at his shape, seeing himself as if for the first time, and seems to approve. “Ah, so the girl believes in something after all.” Those green eyes lift. “Well now,” he says, “you have called, and I have come.”
Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
Adeline knows—she knows—but this is the only one who answered. The only one who would help.
“Are you prepared to pay?”
Pay.
The price.
The ring.
Adeline drops to her knees, scours the ground until she finds the leather cord, and frees her father’s ring from the soil.
She holds it out to the god, its pale wood now stained with dirt, and he draws closer. He may look like flesh and blood, but he still moves like shadow. A single step, and he is there, filling her vision, folding one hand around the ring, and resting the other on Adeline’s cheek. His thumb brushes the freckle beneath her eye, the edge of her stars.
“My dear,” says the darkness, taking the ring, “I do not deal in trinkets.”
The wooden band crumbles in his hand, and falls away, nothing more than smoke. A strangled sound escapes her lips—it hurt enough to lose the ring, hurts more to see it wiped from the world like a smudge on skin. But if the ring is not enough, then what?
“Please,” she says, “I will give anything.”
The shadow’s other hand still rests against her cheek. “You assume I want anything,” he says, lifting her chin. “But I take only one coin.” He leans closer still, green eyes impossibly bright, his voice soft as silk. “The deals I make, I make for souls.”
Adeline’s heart lurches in her chest.
In her mind, she sees her mother on her knees in church, speaking of God and Heaven, hears her father talking, telling stories of wishes and riddles. She thinks of Estele, who believes in nothing but a tree over her bones. Who would say that a soul is nothing more than a seed returned to soil—though she’s the one who warned against the dark.
“Adeline,” says the darkness, her name sliding like moss between his teeth. “I am here. Now tell me why.”
She has waited so long to be met—to be answered, to be asked—that at first the words all fail her.
“I do not want to marry.”
She feels so small when she says it. Her whole life feels small, and she sees that judgment reflected in the god’s gaze, as if to say, Is that all?
And no, it is more than that. Of course it is more.
“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence. The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want