Beatrix yelps at the sudden, sharp pull inside her chest.
The faerie smiles. “But if I grow impatient and rip your soul away, it will tear out of you like paper, all tattered edges.” She shrugs. “It will be useless.”
“Useless for what?” Beatrix demands. “What do you want it for?”
The faerie sneers. “You haven’t been paying attention.”
Beatrix racks her brain. She’s missing something.
The faerie leans in close. “Just how, exactly, does a baby willingly give up her soul?”
Beatrix’s heart sinks into her guts. “She can’t.”
“It gets torn out of her in ribbons, shredded beyond recognition. Beyond use. Leaves just enough behind to remind her of what she no longer has.”
A shiver crawls down Beatrix’s spine. “You want to replace your soul with mine?”
“I don’t want to replace it,” the faerie snaps. “I want to repair it. And you can’t repair one ruined thing with another.”
So she waits for Beatrix to say yes.
“The moment your father carried you into that clearing, I was given a choice,” the faerie says. “I couldn’t do what the others did to me, but I couldn’t let you die, either. I couldn’t let them win.”
“Who?” Beatrix asks.
“Everyone else.”
That, Beatrix can understand. But there’s still one thing she doesn’t. “Why do you want to be human?”
“I don’t know if I do,” the faerie says. “How can I? I want what was taken from me. I want to make the choice that was made for me.”
It’s the most human thing Beatrix has ever heard her say.
Beatrix doesn’t know how long the faerie has walked the earth, only that it is longer than she has walked it. Standing in front of the creature, looking into eyes of moonlight and sunlight, the grim reality is impossible to ignore. The faerie cursed her, but it was one hundred years alone that turned her into a ghost. What if she hadn’t met Oliver in Venice, hadn’t seen his face on that bridge, hadn’t arranged to meet him again? What would three hundred years have made her, or four, without him?
She glimpsed it in Paris, when Oliver begged her not to go back to that existence. She told him she would be a different person without him. But that isn’t true.
Without Oliver, Beatrix wouldn’t be a person at all. She would have spent centuries building walls of stone around her heart, until her heart was impenetrable and her humanity had withered away. Until all that was left of her was a hollow shell of who she had once been: an immortal being with mismatched eyes and a ruined soul.
For the first time in her life, Beatrix pities the faerie.
“You’ve decided.”
Beatrix meets the faerie’s gaze. “I refuse you.”
The faerie’s eyes flare bright. “If I leave here, who do you have left in the world? No one.” Her own words, twisted against her again.
“I had no one when I left Lancaut. I survived.”
The faerie gives her a wicked grin. “Surviving isn’t living, Beatrix.”
Beatrix’s heartbeat falters. So does her conviction. It sounds like something Oliver would say. “I’ll manage.”
“I won’t return until you ask,” the faerie says. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? For me to leave you in peace?”
Beatrix stays silent, sure the question is a trick.
The faerie steps closer. “Think about everything you’ve lived through. All the pain and terror and sorrow you could have ended with a word. But you stayed silent.”
