“But,” the Shadow continues, “he couldn’t lie to himselfentirely. He kept delaying Alanna when she asked for an answer. Until the day she holed up in the castle library and happened to read about the Elixir of Life.”
I blink. “The what?”
“The Elixir of Life. It’s a way for humans to gain immortality, through the fae. But it’s something we can only grant in our goblin forms, not our fae ones.”
Shock steals my voice, and I have to wait a few breaths before finding it again. “You…you can make a human live forever?”
“Yes.” A beat of silence. “If you ever wanted to stay in Velindra, Princess…you would live as long as I do.”
The enormity of that stuns me into silence. Even the many-eyed monsters fade from my awareness. “But how? You’d just hand me this Elixir? And I’d drink it?”
A strange sound emanates from him, a choking sort of laugh. “It’s not something I can hand to you. It doesn’t come in a bottle.”
“Then where does it come from?”
He doesn’t respond. Not in the next moment, or the next, or the next. I lift my head, perching my hands on his chest as I peer down into his face.
His yellow eyes gleam. “There’s only one way I can give it to you. But you’ve already made it abundantly clear that you don’t want that from me.”
His words are like a hairpin wedged between the teeth of smoothly spinning gears. My mind grinds and crunches as I strain to understand.
Surely he can’t mean what it sounds like.
“You’re not talking about…” Heat sizzles in my throat, incinerating the rest.
He searches my face. “I am. If you ever let me chase you, if you ever let mecatchyou, you wouldn’t age, afterward. Not for a month or so. The effect doesn’t last forever, but as long as I could have you every few weeks, you’d never get any older than you are right now.”
I try to cram that into my head and fail. That… That…
What?
“I…had no idea,” I manage.
A thin smile flits across his mouth. “No, because Alanna kept that knowledge for herself. Which is probably for the best.”
My thoughts spin as I try to reorient myself. “And Amriel can’t give me thisElixir? Only you?”
“Yes,” he says. “Only my goblin form. But IamAmriel. It’d still be him, granting you life. Us. Me.”
I swallow hard. He and Amriel are one—I understand that now. When I look at this Shadow, I see a wish given life, one a white-haired fae boy once made on a shooting star. This is just another side of Amriel, carrying me through the dark. His beating heart, stripped of all the logic and lies and defense mechanisms.
But…living forever? Letting him grant me immortality? The concept of eternal life has always frightened me, and even more so since Ravenna told me about the Cloisters, about the fae who’ve endured a loss that will never heal.
And yet theoption, the fact that I could stay in Velindra without Amriel having to watch me die, the idea that I could have all the time inthe world to dig past his walls, that at any point, I could walk away and continue to age…
Just thinking about it plants something bright and breathless in my chest, something I have no name for.
The Shadow watches my face, no doubt listening as the thoughts roll through my mind. I can’t hide them, so I tuck my face against his shoulder, claiming as much privacy as I can.
How did we get on this topic, anyhow?
Oh. Alanna. That’s right.
“So Alanna found out you could make her live forever,” I say, steering the conversation back onto its rightful course. “And…what? She wanted that?”
The Shadow sighs, as if reluctant to return to his story. “Yes. She came to my room that same night. To Amriel’s. Wearing hardly anything at all. She said that if he was going to marry her, he might as well start giving her the Elixir. Between her beauty and what she’d learned of the fae, I don’t think it occurred to her that he might say no.”
Every muscle in my body tightens around a core that has suddenly gone cold. “But he didn’t touch her, right? Please tell me he didn’t.” Not my own great-great-great-grandmother.
