“Only desire?” she asks coyly. She wonders if she’s made him blush.
“Exactly. If you could do whatever your heart desires, what would you do?”
She’d break free of her curse, but she can’t very well tell him that, even if he is a masked stranger. She chooses something that is less likely to get her thrown into an asylum. “I want to be happy.”
The man slouches in his seat. “That’s not a real answer.”
“Of course it’s a real answer. Don’t you want to be happy?”
He shakes his head. “It’s too easy. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Fine,” Beatrix says. “I want to go to Paris.”
The man shakes his head again. “Too boring.”
“Maybe I’m not that interesting,” Beatrix snaps.
The man leans close again. “Now you’re lying.”
She clenches her jaw. She has half a mind to leave the man to answer his own pointless questions. She doesn’t. He’s managed to get under her skin, a strange sensation when she is used to numbness. If she leaves now, his question will haunt her long after he is gone.
The man offers her the last pastry in the basket. She chews thoughtfully.
Beatrix used to think of herself as a shadow—part of this world, andyet not. She’s built a wall around the memories of her stolen life, armored her heart so she would never feel that pain, that loss, that grief again. She has even learned to live with the loneliness, most days, and deal with it on the days she can’t bear it any longer. But a shadow is still connected to something real and solid and familiar, even as it stretches into a shape of its own. She isn’t connected to anything or anyone, every link to the past severed by time, every new connection she forges limited by it. It has taken her years to realize she isn’t a shadow at all. She is a ghost, an unwelcome spirit moving through a world that has no place for her.
Beatrix meets the man’s waiting gaze. “Live,” she says. It’s as meaningless as her wish to be happy, but the man doesn’t dismiss her answer this time.
He smiles. “If I had champagne, I’d raise a toast to that.”
Beatrix stands. She takes the man’s hand and pulls him from his seat. “Then let’s go find some.” Drinking until she forgets sounds like the best answer of all.
She turns and bumps into a towering man. She steps away, but her apology sticks in her throat. Another man joins him, and another, all clad in long black coats, wide-brimmed hats, and those terrible masks, bone white and shaped like the skull of a bird. She shudders as they pass, a chill crawling down her spine at the memory of them.
The man watches them go. “Plague doctors. They are unnerving, aren’t they?”
Beatrix can’t fathom why anyone would want to haunt a celebration like Carnevale with ghosts of the plague. Then again, no one else here has died of the plague.
She thought her curse would save her from falling ill, but the faerie was crueler than she gave her credit for. She woke in the morning, sore all over, with a chill she couldn’t shake, but she chalked it up to a night spent sleeping in an alley. By afternoon she had lost the little breakfast she’d eaten in the gutter, and by the time the sun set she was collapsed inside St. Paul’s, staring up at the bleeding colors of the rose window, too weak to even lift her head when a priest tried to shoo her away. The rest is a blur of pain and delirium.
It hurt to move. It hurt to lie still. She couldn’t breathe, tore her throat raw with the coughing. She vomited blood until she was sure her bodyhad been emptied of it. Watched as her skin decayed and healed, then turned black and rotted away again. She even thought she saw William once, right before the end. He kneeled over her, took her blackened hand in both of his, and whispered,I’m here. She wanted to cry, but she had no tears—nothing—left in her.
Then he was gone, and the faerie was there.
She looked exactly the same as the night Beatrix died. Sounded the same when she murmured, “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” in her ear.
Of course that was why she’d come. Beatrix wanted to die—desperately—and the faerie sensed her victory, like a wolf catching the scent of a wounded animal. She just needed to say the words and the suffering would end.
Beatrix gathered the last dregs of her strength, breathed in her last rattling breath, and whispered her dying words. “Go to hell.”
When she woke, she was healed, and the faerie was gone.
The man’s voice returns her to the present. “It’s the last night of Carnevale.”
“So?” Beatrix asks, watching as the costumed doctors melt into the crowd.
He sighs. “They’ve come to remind us all good things must end.”
Beatrix meets his gaze. “But not yet?”
