The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, page 44
The door swings open onto a house with high ceilings, and wooden floors, with furniture, and closets, and spaces to be filled. She steps out onto the balcony, the layered sounds of the Quarter rising to meet her on the humid air. Jazz spills through the streets, crashing, overlapping, a chaotic melody, changing and alive.
“It is yours,” says Luc, “a home,” and the old warning sounds, deep in the marrow of her bones.
But these days, it is a shrinking beacon, a lighthouse viewed too far from port.
He pulls her back against him, and Addie notices again the perfect way they fit together.
As if he was made for her.
Which, of course, he was. This body, this face, these features, made to make her feel at ease.
“Let’s go out,” he says.
Addie wants to stay in, to christen the house, but he says there will be time, there will always be time. And for once, she doesn’t dread the idea of forever. For once, the days and nights don’t drag, but race ahead.
She knows that, whatever this is, it will not last.
It cannot last.
Nothing ever does.
But in the moment, she is happy.
They make their way through the Quarter, arm in arm, and Luc lights a cigarette, and when she tells him it’s bad for his health, he lets out a breathy, noiseless laugh, smoke pouring between his lips.
Her steps slow before a shop window.
The store is closed, of course, but even through the darkened glass, she can see the leather jacket, black with silver buckles, draped over a mannequin.
Luc’s reflection shimmers behind her as he follows her gaze.
“It is summer,” he says.
“It won’t always be.”
Luc smooths his hands over her shoulders and she feels the soft leather settling against her skin, the mannequin in the window now bare, and tries not to think of all the years she went without, forced to suffer through the cold, of all the times she had to hide, and fight, and steal. She tries not to think of them, but she does.
They are halfway back to the yellow house when Luc peels away.
“I have work to do,” he says. “Go on home.”
Home—the word rattles through her chest as he walks away.
But she does not go.
She watches Luc round the corner, and cross the street, and then she lingers in the shadow as he approaches a shop with a luminescent palm painted on the door.
An older woman stands on the sidewalk, closing up, her frame bent over a ring of keys, a large bag drooping from one elbow.
She must hear him coming, because she murmurs something to the dark, something about closing, something about another day. And then she turns, and sees him.
In the glass of the shop window, Addie sees Luc, too, not as he is to her, but as he must appear to the woman in the doorway. He has kept those dark curls, but his face is leaner, sharper in a wolfish way, his eyes deep-set, his limbs too thin to be human.
“A deal is a deal,” he says, the words bending on the air. “And it is done.”
Addie watches, expecting the woman to beg, to run.
But she sets her bag down on the ground, and lifts her chin.
“A deal is a deal,” she says. “And I am tired.”
And somehow, this is worse.
Because Addie understands.
Because she is tired, too.
And as she watches, the darkness comes undone again.
It has been more than a hundred years since Addie last saw the truth of him, the roiling night, with all its teeth. Only this time, there is no rending, no tearing, no horror.
The darkness simply folds around the old woman like a storm, blotting out the light.
Addie turns away.
She goes back to the yellow house on Bourbon Street, and pours herself a glass of wine, crisp and cold and white. It is blisteringly hot; the balcony doors are flung open to ease the summer night. She is leaning on the iron rail when she hears him arrive, not on the street below, as a courting lover might, but in the room behind her.
And when his arms drift around her shoulders, Addie remembers the way he held the woman in the doorway, the way he folded around her, swallowing her whole.
New York City
July 30, 2014
XIII
Luc’s mood lifts a little as they walk.
The night is warm, the moon barely a crescent overhead. His head falls back, and he inhales, breathing in the air as if it were not ripe with summer heat, too many people in too little space.
“How long have you been here?” she asks.
“I come and go,” he says, but she has learned to read the space between his words, and guesses he has been in New York almost as long as she has, lurking like a shadow at her back.
She doesn’t know where they are going, and for the first time, she wonders if Luc does either, or if he is simply walking, trying to put space between them and the end of their meal.
But as they make their way uptown, she feels time folding around them, and she does not know if it’s his magic or her memory, but with each passing block, she is storming from him down the Seine. He is leading her away from the sea. She is following him in Florence. They are side by side in Boston, and arm in arm on Bourbon Street.
They are here, together, in New York. And she wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t said the word. If he hadn’t tipped his hand. If he hadn’t ruined everything.
“The night is ours,” he says, turning toward her, and his eyes are bright again. “Where shall we go?”
Home, she thinks, though she cannot say it.
She looks up at the skyscrapers, surging to either side.
“Which one,” she wonders, “has the best view?”
After a moment, Luc smiles, flashing teeth, and says, “Follow me.”
* * *
Over the years, Addie has learned many of the city’s secrets.
But here is one she did not know.
It resides not underground, but on a roof.
Eighty-four stories up, reached by a pair of elevators, the first one nondescript and rising only to the eighty-first floor. The second, a direct replica of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, with its writhing bodies, clawing to escape, takes you the rest of the way.
If you have a key.
Luc draws the black card from his shirt pocket and slides it into a yawning mouth along the elevator’s frame.
“Is this one of yours?” she asks as the doors slide open.
“Nothing is really mine,” he says by way of answer as they step inside.
It is a short ascent, three brief floors, and when it stops, the doors open onto an uninterrupted view of the city.
The bar’s name winds in black letters at her feet.
THE LOW ROAD.
Addie rolls her eyes. “Was Perdition taken?”
“Perdition,” he says, eyes sparkling with mischief, “is a different kind of club.”
The floors are bronze, the railings glass, and the ceiling open to the sky, and people mill on velvet sofas and dip their feet in shallow pools, and linger along the balconies that ring the roof, admiring the city.
“Mr. Green,” says the hostess. “Welcome back.”
“Thank you, Renee,” he says smoothly. “This is Adeline. Give her anything she wants.”
The hostess looks to her, but there is no compulsion in her eyes, no sense that she has been enchanted, only the cooperation of an employee, one very good at her job. Addie asks for the most expensive drink, and Renee grins at Luc. “You’ve found yourself a match.”
“I have,” he says, resting his hand on the small of Addie’s back as he guides her forward. She quickens her step until it falls away, and weaves through the milling crowd to the glass rail, looking out over Manhattan. There are no stars visible, of course, but New York rolls away to every side, its own galaxy of light.
Up here, at least, she can breathe.
It is the easy laughter of the crowd. The ambient noise of people enjoying themselves, so much nicer than the stifled quiet of the empty restaurant, the cloistered silence of the car. It is the sky opening above her. The beauty of the city to every side, and the fact they are not alone.
Renee returns with a bottle of Champagne, a visible film of dust coating the glass.
“Dom Perignon, 1959,” she explains, holding the bottle out for inspection. “From your private case, Mr. Green.”
Luc waves his hand, and she opens the bottle, pouring two flutes, the bubbles so small they look like flecks of diamond in the glass.
Addie sips, savors the way it sparkles on her tongue.
She scans the crowd, filled with the kinds of faces you would recognize, even though you’re not sure where you’ve seen them. Luc points them out to her, those senators, and actors, authors and critics, and she wonders if any of them have sold their soul. If any of them are about to.
Addie looks down into her glass, the bubbles still rising smoothly to the surface, and when she speaks, the words are barely more than a whisper, the sound stolen by the chattering crowd. But she knows he is listening, knows he can hear her.
“Let him go, Luc.”
His mouth tightens a fraction. “Adeline,” he warns.
“You told me you would listen.”
“Fine.” He leans back against the rail and spreads his arms. “Tell me. What do you see in him, this latest human lover?”
Henry Strauss is thoughtful, and kind, she wants to say. He is clever, and bright, gentle, and warm.
He is everything you’re not,
But Addie knows she must tread lightly.
“What do I see in him?” she says. “I see myself. Not who I am now, perhaps, but who I was, the night you came to rescue me.”
Luc scowls. “Henry Strauss wanted to die. You wanted to live. You are nothing alike.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it?”
Addie shakes her head. “You see only flaws and faults, weaknesses to be exploited. But humans are messy, Luc. That is the wonder of them. They live and love and make mistakes, and they feel so much. And maybe—maybe I am no longer one of them.”
The words tear through her as she says them, because she knows this much is true. For better or worse.
“But I remember,” she presses on. “I remember what it’s like, and Henry is—”
“Lost.”
“He is searching,” she counters. “And he will find his way, if you let him.”
“If I let him,” says Luc, “he would have leapt off a roof.”
“You don’t know that,” she says. “You never will, because you intervened.”
“I am in the business of souls, Adeline, not second chances.”
“And I am begging you to let him go. You will not give me mine, so give me his, instead.”
Luc exhales, and sweeps his hand across the roof. “Choose someone,” he says.
“What?”
He turns her to face the crowd. “Choose a soul to take his place. Pick a stranger. Damn one of them instead.” His voice is low and smooth and certain. “There is always a cost,” he says gently. “A price must be paid. Henry Strauss bartered his own soul. Would you sell someone else’s to have it back?”
Addie stares out at the crowded roof, the faces she recognizes and the ones she doesn’t. Young and old, together and alone.
Are any innocent?
Are any cruel?
Addie does not know if she can do it—until her hand drifts up. Until she points to a man in the crowd, heart plunging through her stomach as she waits for Luc to let go of her, to step forward, and claim his price.
But Luc doesn’t move.
He only laughs.
“My Adeline,” he says, kissing her hair. “You have changed more than you think.”
She feels dizzy and ill as she twists to face him.
“No more games,” she says.
“All right,” he says, just before he pulls her into the dark.
The roof drops away, and the void surges up around her, swallowing everything but a starless sky, an infinite, violent black. And when it withdraws again an instant later, the world is silent, and the city is gone, and she is alone in the woods.
New Orleans, Louisiana
May 1, 1984
XIV
This is how it ends.
With candles burning on the sill, unsteady light casting long shadows across the bed. With the blackest part of night stretching beyond the open window, and the first blush of summer on the air, and Addie in Luc’s arms, the darkness draped around her like a sheet.
And this, she thinks, is home.
This, perhaps, is love.
And that is the worst part. She has finally forgotten something. Only it is the wrong thing. It is the one thing she was supposed to remember. That the man in the bed is not a man. That the life is not a life. That there are games, and battles, but in the end, it is all a kind of war.
A touch like teeth along her jaw.
The darkness whispering against her skin. “My Adeline.”
“I am not yours,” she says, but his mouth only smiles against her throat.
“And yet,” he says, “we are together. We belong together.”
You belong to me.
“Do you love me?” she asks.
His fingers trail along her hips. “You know I do.”
“Then let me go.”
“I am not holding you here.”
“That isn’t what I mean,” she says, rising on one arm. “Set me free.”
He draws back, just enough to meet her gaze. “I cannot break the deal.” His head falls, black curls brushing her cheek. “But perhaps,” he whispers against her collar, “I could bend it.”
Addie’s heart thuds inside her chest.
“Perhaps I could change the terms.”
She holds her breath as Luc’s words play along her skin.
“I can make it better,” he murmurs. “All you have to do is surrender.”
The word is a cold shock.
A curtain falling on a play: the lovely sets, the stagings, the trained actors all vanish behind the darkened cloth.
Surrender.
An order whispered in the dark.
A warning given to a broken man.
A demand made over and over and over for years—until it stopped. How long ago did he stop asking? But of course, she knows—it was when his method changed, when his temper toward her softened.
And she is a fool. She is a fool for thinking it meant peace instead of war.
Surrender.
“What is it?” he asks, feigning confusion, until she throws the word back in his face.
“Surrender?” she snarls.
“It is just a word,” he says. But he taught her the power of a word. A word is everything, and his word is a serpent, a coiled trick, a curse.
“It is the nature of things,” he says.
“In order to change the deal,” he says.
But Addie pulls back, pulls away, pulls free. “And I am meant to trust you? To give in, and believe that you will give me back?”
So many years, so many different ways of asking the same thing.
Do you yield?
“You must think me an idiot, Luc.” Her face burns with anger. “I’m amazed you had the patience. But then, you’ve always been fond of the chase.”
His green eyes narrow in the dark. “Adeline.”
“Don’t you dare say my name.” She is on her feet now, singing with rage. “I knew you were a monster, Luc. I saw it often enough. And yet, I still thought—somehow I thought—after all this time—but of course, it wasn’t love, was it? It wasn’t even kindness. It was just another game.”
There is an instant when she thinks she might be wrong.
A fraction of a moment when Luc looks wounded and confused, and she wonders if he meant only what he said, if, if—
But then, it is over.
The hurt falls from his face and it passes into shadow, the effect as smooth as a cloud across the sun. A grim smile plays across his lips.
“And what a tiresome game it’s been.”
She knows she drew it out, but the truth still crashes through her.
If she was cracked before, now she is breaking.
“You cannot fault me for trying a different hand.”
“I fault you for everything.”
Luc rises, the darkness drawing into silk around him. “I have given you everything.”
“None of it was real!”
She will not cry.
She will not give him the satisfaction of seeing her suffer.
She will not give him anything, ever again.
This is how the fight begins.
Or rather, this is how it ends.
Most fights, after all, are not the work of an instant. They build over days, or weeks, each side gathering their kindling, stoking their flames.
But this is a fight forged over centuries.
As old and inevitable as the turning of the world, the passing of an era, the collision of a girl and the dark.
She should have known it would happen.
Perhaps she did.
But to this day, Addie doesn’t know how the fire started. If it was the candles she swept from the table, or the lamp she tore from the wall, if it was the lights Luc shattered, or if it was simply a last act of spite.
She knows she doesn’t have the strength to ruin anything, and yet she did. They did. Perhaps he let her start the fire. Perhaps he simply let it burn.
It does not matter, in the end.
Addie stands on Bourbon Street and watches the house go up in flames, and by the time the firefighters come, there is nothing left to save. It is only ashes.
Another life gone up in smoke.
Addie has nothing, not even the key in her pocket. It was there, but when she reaches for it, it is gone. Her hand goes to the wooden ring still at her throat.
She tears it free, hurls the band into the smoking ruins of her home, and walks away.
