The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,51
your life unpleasant? To press you toward your inevitable surrender?”
“You did not have to,” she whispers, hating the waver in her voice.
“My dear Adeline,” he says, hand sliding up her neck into her hair. “I am in the business of souls, not mercy.” His fingers tighten, forcing her head back, her gaze up to meet his own, and there is no sweetness in his face, only a kind of feral beauty.
“Come,” he says, “give me what I want, and the deal will be done, this misery ended.”
A soul, for a single year of grief and madness.
A soul, for copper coins on a Paris dock.
A soul, for nothing more than this.
And yet, it would be a lie to say she does not waver. To say that no part of her wants to give up, give in, if only for a moment. Perhaps it is that part that asks.
“What would become of me?”
Those shoulders—the ones she drew so many times, the ones she conjured into being—give only a dismissive shrug.
“You will be nothing, my dear,” he says simply. “But it is a kinder nothing than this. Surrender, and I will set you free.”
If some part of her wavered, if some small part wanted to give in, it did not last beyond a moment. There is a defiance in being a dreamer.
“I decline,” she growls.
The shadow scowls, those green eyes darkening like cloth soaked wet.
His hands fall away.
“You will give in,” he says. “Soon enough.”
He does not step back, does not turn to go. He is simply gone. Swallowed by the dark.
New York City
March 13, 2014
V
Henry Strauss has never been a morning person.
He wants to be one, has dreamed of rising with the sun, sipping his first cup of coffee while the city is still waking, the whole day ahead and full of promise.
He’s tried to be a morning person, and on the rare occasion he’s managed to get up before dawn, it was a thrill: to watch the day begin, to feel, at least for a little while, like he was ahead instead of behind. But then a night would go long, and a day would start late, and now he feels like there’s no time at all. Like he is always late for something.
Today, it is breakfast with his younger sister, Muriel.
Henry hurries down the block, his head still ringing faintly from the night before, and he would have canceled, should have canceled. But he’s canceled three times in the last month alone, and he doesn’t want to be a shitty brother; she just wants to be a good sister and that’s nice. That’s new.
He’s never been to this place before. It’s not one of his local haunts—though the truth is, Henry’s running out of coffee shops in his vicinity. Vanessa ruined the first. Milo the second. The espresso at the third tasted like charcoal. So he let Muriel pick one, and she chose a “quaint little hole in the wall” called Sunflower that apparently doesn’t have a sign or an address or any way to find it except by some hipster radar that Henry obviously lacks.
At last he spots a single sunflower stenciled on a wall across the street. He jogs to make the light, bumping into a guy on the corner, mumbles apologies (even as the other man says it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s totally fine). When Henry finally finds the entrance, the hostess is halfway through telling him there’s no space, but then she looks up from the podium, and smiles, and says she’ll make it work.
Henry looks around for Muriel, but she’s always considered time a flexible concept, so even though he’s late, she’s definitely later. And he’s secretly glad, for once, because it gives him a moment to breathe, to smooth his hair and wrest himself free of the scarf that’s trying to strangle him, even order a coffee. He tries to make himself look presentable, even if it doesn’t matter what he does; it won’t change what she sees. But it still matters. It has to.
Five minutes later, Muriel sweeps in. She is, as usual, a tornado of dark curls and unshakable confidence.
Muriel Strauss, who at twenty-four only ever talks about the world in terms of conceptual authenticity and creative truth, who’s been a darling of the New York art scene since her first semester at Tisch, where she quickly realized she was better at critiquing art than creating it.
Henry loves his sister, he does. But Muriel’s always been like strong perfume.