“You know my life as well as I do,” Beatrix says. “Am I?”
The faerie scrutinizes her mismatched eyes and unchanging face. “You haven’t decided.”
She hasn’t. Two hundred and thirty-three years is a long time to wait just to lose Oliver again. The longest she’s ever waited.
“What happens if I say yes?” In almost five hundred years, Beatrix has never asked, because in almost five hundred years, she has never truly considered accepting the faerie’s bargain.
“I will take your soul from your body, and you will simply cease to exist,” the faerie says. “You won’t feel a thing.”
“What about you?” Beatrix asks.
“What about me?” the faerie replies.
Beatrix is sure she’s being difficult on purpose. “You think humans are pathetic and cruel. So why do you want my soul?”
“Because I can?” The faerie says it like a question, like it’s obvious.
“I don’t believe you.” The faerie has spent too long waiting for her to say yes. She has a reason. “I think you’re lonely. I don’t think you want my soul at all. Maybe you did, once. But if you take it now—if I die—you have no one left in this world.”
The faerie looks at Beatrix as if she’s struck her. And then she laughs, cold and cackling. “Oh, my dear Beatrix, do you think our conversations are so riveting? I assure you, I don’t keep you around for the joy of your company.”
Beatrix scowls at her.
“If you don’t believe me, I can prove it.” The faerie’s eyes glitter, more malice than mischief. “Just say the word.”
Beatrix storms past the faerie into the bedroom. The faerie is already there, perched on the end of the bed. Waiting for an answer.
“Where are the others?” Beatrix demands. If the faerie doesn’t need her company, there must be others. “What happened to the faeries on the moor?”
“I imagine they’re on the moor,” the faerie says, “if the moor is still there. Perhaps it’s gone the way of Lancaut.”
If Beatrix didn’t know better, she would swear she hears something familiar in the faerie’s voice. Not sadness, exactly. A yearning for a home that is lost to her. “You left them? Why?”
“When someone tells you to get out, you do.” The faerie says it like it’s logical, but it still twists something inside Beatrix.
She scrutinizes the faerie—the cold glow of her eyes and a face that could be a mask from Carnevale. She has survived longer than Beatrix, has done it all on her own. Maybe she could do the same. She could survive for another 233 years. She could make it back to Oliver. But would he recognize her? Would she recognize herself? “Why did the others banish you?”
“They didn’t take kindly to my questions or my interest in the humans. My mother. My father. My brothers and sisters.”
An entire family that had let her down.
“I spent my days watching them. I thought I had the right to know what the faeries took from me. They thought I should be eternally grateful they saved me at all.”
“You did have the right to know,” Beatrix says. She can’t believe she’s taking her side. “Just like I have the right to know why you want my soul.”
The faerie walks a slow circle around her, as if she were admiring a statue at the Louvre. Beatrix holds her breath. “Because you and I are not so different.”
“You’ve said that before.” The night she answered her from the darkness.
“Some souls are more alike than others. Drawn to each other.”
Beatrix can’t help but think of Oliver, still tugging her toward him.
“They are tricky things. Tenuous yet unyielding. They aren’t made for taking.”
Beatrix’s heart races. “You need permission.”
“I don’tneedanything.”
