My lips have held the memory of his. Back then I was a naïve girl, my head spinning with demons, dripping candles, and hibiscus tea. Now I take pleasure in that kiss. It’s necessary, but also a moment of hateful want. His flames kiss back instead of singe. Twin flames, cursed with the pain of always needing more.
This all started so simply. Not with eyes on fire or raging storms. A suggestion my mother made that she could never have imagined would lead to her own end. When I asked too many questions about Thomas’s family, our business, or anything she didn’t want to answer, she’d say, “Keep knocking on doors, Mary Eleanor, and eventually the Devil will answer.”
Is it her fault that I found him?
I waited until the rest of the house was gone for the day’s errands. My father left first for the shipyards, then my mother to her weekly choir practice. I could sense Liney’s presence in her room beside mine. She’d knocked on my door the night before, but I never answered. Her note under my door nearly broke my resolve.
I don’t regret searching for Mr. Pratterman. I was a creature caught between a predator’s maw and the asylum’s cage. The hare isn’t to blame for its methods of escaping from the fox. I wish blocking Liney out hadn’t been necessary, but she’d have tried to talk me out of it. Might have succeeded. I couldn’t risk it.
Liney’s door opened around noon. Her footsteps tapped down the stairs in a familiar cadence. Every third step was a semiskip. Like she could barely contain a dance.
The last sound I heard before irrevocably changing our lives was Liney walking away.
I pressed my forehead against my door. I wouldn’t be allowed alone with Liney before the ceremony, when the house would be bursting with activity. This was my only opportunity.
I bashed my lock open with an ash shovel—I was careful to reorient the doorknob to seem normal from the outside—then turned to the hallway. I held an item from Thomas in one hand, one of his poems to represent my problem. In the other, I held a handful of salt. I ran a careful line of it down the hallway in front of each door. I’d always heard salt could be a barrier from evil. Now in this cursed, salt-encrusted lighthouse, I can’t stand by that belief.
I didn’t know the words to say or the offerings to give. I didn’t prepare branches of wild hazel or slaughter a newborn goat. No bloodstones in my pockets, no extra candles. I knew only my own desperation and how tempting I might be to malevolent beings.
I knocked on the doors, opening each in turn before moving to the next. I didn’t know what to say—Good afternoon, Lord of Darknesssounded ridiculous even in my head—so instead I wished furiously. I infused each wrap of my knuckles with a dark prayer.Grant me the strength to escape. The power to stop Thomas.The means to save my sister from a marriage to this man, or any man thereafter.
Our salvation had to be threefold and beyond the scope of society’s reach. Freedom from our parents, safety from Thomas, and security so Liney could never again be used as a pawn. I didn’t know what chance at happiness she might find, given her sole attraction to women, but I had to at least keep a man from marrying her. While we were of an eligible age with a sizable dowry, no one could be trusted with our best interests. No one but a being I knew to be a fallen angel, eager to bargain.
I walked three rounds around the hallway. Nothing. Then a change in the atmosphere, like lightning’s crackle, fell over me as I reached to touch the wood of my door.
“Knock,” he said from the other side of the door, “and the door will open.”
I had called on the Devil, and he was here to answer. As though he’d been waiting for me.
I knocked. Before I could reach for the knob, it opened into what I now call the dark dream.
I entered but kept a hand on the edge of the door in case it closed. The warmth was stifling, stinging at my eyes. Instead of the pale-blue wallpaper and oak floors of my room, I stepped into a dark expanse. Each wall was coated in crimson candles that bubbled wax as though boiling.
He stood in the middle of the room, wearing a black suit, simple and crisply tailored. His hands were neatly folded before him, and his slicked-back blond hair looked rosy in the red light. His clean-shaven face made his sharp features almost boyish, delicate. His white-gold eyes reflected the light like rubies.
The hot air stuck to the back of my throat. Tears welled from the smoke, and I fought not to cough. I searched his face, my palms clammy and my heartbeat fluttering.
Our similarity scared me. Not the dripping wax. Not the expansive room in which I couldn’t see the edges. Not the floor of polished black rock. It was how much of myself I saw in him that grounded me in my most core instinct. The hunger in me knew the hunger in him. He held an unabashed ambition that I’d never been allowed to own, as apparent as the glint of silver threads in his suit. I swept my hands across the wrinkled cotton of my shut-in dress. I’d worn the same one for days. Hadn’t considered changing. I stood before the Devil, the dowdiest, most girlish version of myself.
“Blakeney Pratterman.” He bowed sharp and quick. “A pleasure, Miss…?”
He paused, raising his brows. I couldn’t be meek. Every other authority searched only for compliance and poise. Never potential. I stood to my full height, shoulders back and voice firm.
“Eleanor. Mary Eleanor.”
He flourished his hand. A pair of chairs appeared between us on either side of a tea table. Two teacups sat daintily at each place, already filled with a dark liquid.
It was at once a spectacle of magic and the simplest logic. I stood, entranced, as he sat down.
“What are you looking for tonight, Eleanor?”
It was freeing not to be Miss Forsyth to a stranger. But I knew charms. Thomas had been the perfect gentleman. Wasn’t that the Devil’s specialty?
I sat across from him. “Isn’t your name Lucifer?”
Mr. Pratterman took a sip of his drink before he answered. When he set it down, his thin lips were coated darker. “You use your middle name. I can’t have my own alternatives?”
I stared down at my own teacup. The contents glistened in the firelight. “Is this blood?”
