the same old groove.
She licks her lips, expecting to taste blood, but the mark left by the stranger’s teeth is gone, swept away with every other trace of him.
How does one know if a spell has worked? She asked for time, for life—will she have to wait a year, or three, or five, to see if age leaves any mark? Or take up a knife and cut into her skin, to see if and how it heals? But no, she had asked for life, not a life unscathed, and if Adeline is being honest, she is afraid to test it, afraid to find her skin still too yielding, afraid to learn that the shadow’s promise was a dream, or worse, a lie.
But she knows one thing—whether or not the deal was real, she will not heed the ringing church bells, will not marry Roger. She will defy her family. She will leave Villon, if she must. She knows she will do whatever it takes now, because she was willing in the dark, and one way or another, from this moment forward, her life will be her own.
The thought is thrilling. Terrifying, but thrilling, as she leaves the forest.
She is halfway across the field before she realizes how quiet the village is.
How dark.
The festive lanterns have been put out, the bells have stopped ringing, there are no voices calling her name.
Adeline makes her way home, the dull dread growing a little sharper with every step. By the time she gets there, her mind is buzzing with worry. The front door hangs open, spilling light onto the path, and she can hear her mother humming in the kitchen, her father chopping wood around the side of the house. A normal night, made wrong by the fact it was not meant to be a normal night.
“Maman!” she says, stepping inside.
A plate shatters to the floor, and her mother yelps, not in pain, but surprise, her face contorted.
“What are you doing here?” she demands, and here is the anger Addie expected. Here is the dismay.
“I’m sorry,” she starts. “I know you must be mad, but I couldn’t—”
“Who are you?”
The words are a hiss, and she realizes then, that fearsome look on her mother’s face is not the anger of a mother scorned, but that of a woman scared.
“Maman—”
Her mother cringes away from the very word. “Get out of my house.”
But Adeline crosses the room, grabs her by the shoulders. “Don’t be absurd. It’s me, A—”
She is about to say Adeline.
Indeed, she tries. Three syllables should not be such a mountain to climb, but she is breathless by the end of the first, unable to manage the second. The air turns to stone inside her throat, and she is left stifled, silent. She tries again, this time attempting Addie, then at last their family name, LaRue, but it is no use. The words meet an impasse between her mind and tongue. And yet, the second she draws breath to say another word, any other word, it is there, lungs filled and throat loose.
“Let go,” pleads her mother.
“What’s this?” demands a voice, low and deep. The voice that soothed Adeline on sick nights, that told her stories as she sat on the floor of his shop.
Her father stands in the doorway, his arms full of wood.
“Papa,” she says, and he draws back, as if the word were sharp.
“The woman is mad,” sobs her mother. “Or cursed.”
“I am your daughter,” she says again.
Her father grimaces. “We have no child.”
Those words, a duller knife. A deeper cut.
“No,” says Adeline, shaking her head at the absurdity. She is three and twenty, has lived every day and every night beneath this roof. “You know me.”
How can they not? The resemblance between them has always been so keen, her father’s eyes, her mother’s chin, one’s brow and the other’s lips, each piece clearly copied from its source.
They see it, too, they must.
But to them, it is only proof of devilry.
Her mother crosses herself, and her father’s hands close around her, and she wants to sink into the strength of his embrace, but there is not warmth in it as he drags her to the door.
“No,” she begs.
Her mother is crying now, one hand to her mouth and the other clutching the wooden cross around her neck, as she calls her own daughter a demon, a monster, a demented thing, and her father says nothing, only grips her arm tighter as he pulls her from the house.
“Be gone,” he says, the words