Darling nodded. “I worried that it was already too late. You were so quiet, too quiet.”
Sure enough, the baby was still and silent and scarlet in the woman’s arms. “Is she asleep?” younger Darling asked.
“After a fashion.” The woman looked down at the infant with a terrifying indifference. “I hated all that noise, so I made her stop.”
Darling stretched out her arms a quarter of a century ago. “Give her to me, child. I just want to see if she’s hurt.”
A calculating edge slid into the woman’s eyes. “What will you give me in return?” she asked, and Darling froze.
Galilee drew in a breath as she watched. “She wanted to cut a deal.”
“Yes,” Darling replied. “And that was when I knew she was telling the truth about being unnatural, because sheknew. She knew enough to step into the creek on Kincaid land, to find me, and then to offer a barter.”
The Devil glanced at Galilee with a question in his eyes, and Celestial answered for her cousin. “Kincaid barters are... different,” she explained. “More power, more consequence. Lifelines can change, so we don’t make them easily.” She shot Galilee a look with her last words, and Galilee rolled her eyes in response but left it at that.
“Ah,” said the Devil. “I see.”
Darling looked at Galilee, her little honeyed child. “The consequencesof our barters can shift worlds,” she said. “But what could I do? There was a newborn who needed a mother who wouldn’t drown her, and I had a daughter at home who needed a child’s love to stitch her back together.”
“The woods gave us a gift,” Celestial said to Galilee. Then, conversationally: “Also, it reallydidlook like she was going to kill you.”
In the memory, Darling’s face drew up cold. “Whatareyou?” she asked the woman. “You can quit pretending now.”
A sharp smile cut through the woman’s face, and she stood up straight, still holding the baby a little too carelessly in her arms. Her belly protruded under the shift, curved and full. “I’m just a mother, like you,” she said. “You don’t think my only child is worth a bargain?”
Darling bared her teeth back and took a step to shield Celestial from view. “What do you want?”
The woman laughed. “I don’t want your human brat, rest assured.” She pushed her wet hair out of her face, and her skin was a soft brown underneath. “I’m happy to give you this child, the blood of my blood, for a fair barter.”
“Name your price,”Darling hissed.
The woman’s smile dropped, but she answered immediately. “A memory, Darling Kincaid. I’ll give you my daughter for a memory.”
Collette squeezed Darling’s hand in the garden, horrified. “Ma, you never told me this!”
“I always said the cost was high.” Even though Darling knew how the scene would play out, it still hurt so much to watch it happen: the shock coursing over her own face, the cruel amusement in the woman’s. Memories were whatmadeDarling Kincaid. Her younger self took a horrified step back, then braced herself. The woods were watching and silent around them.
“You came ready for blood, I see,” she said to the woman, who shrugged easily in response.
“I’m not asking for a life or a soul, or for all your hope or your joy,or for any of the many things you’d give me in exchange for this small creature I hold. I hardly think a memory is such a high price, if you consider.”
“What will you do with it?”
This time, the woman paused before answering, and there was something softer in her words. “I will try to understand, I think.”
Darling nodded and began to close her eyes, but the woman stopped her, snapping her long fingers loudly.
“No, no. I choose which memory you give.”
Darling clenched her fists. “Which do you want?”
The woman tilted her head, and her wet hair fell to one side. “There was a man once, yes? The one you loved, the one you couldn’t keep because your land doesn’t allow them.” Color leached out of Darling’s face, and the woman nodded sympathetically. “Yes, that’s the memory I’ll take. Everything of him, please.”
“I can give you others.” Darling’s voice was hoarse with pain, but the woman smiled, as if it was exactly what she’d expected.
“No, thank you. I’ll take those alone, and you’d better hurry. This child grows colder and colder in my arms.”
With a sobbed curse, Darling shut her eyes in the woods and wept in the creek as her memories fled from her head, their faint tendrils floating over the water to the woman, who received them with rapt interest on her face. When it was done, Darling cried out and doubled over, gasping in pain.
