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My chest felt tight. The weight of his words was suffocating, and perhaps it was the lack of oxygen that made my face feel so hot.
“You used to come out here and feed your fairies,” he said. “You believed in something you couldn’t see, something you couldn’t grasp. I did too, once.Boulevard du Temple,Paris. 1755. There was a young man with a violin and fire in his heart. I believed, with such certainty, he would be mine. And I was young. So much imagination.” He shook his head. “Humans grow old so quickly. Your lives are the blink of an eye when you see all eternity stretched out before you. Yet I kept bringing honey to something I couldn’t hold, I couldn’t possess. He died.” He nodded, as if to remind himself that it was true. “His fire was gone. Soeasily. And then my name was called by strangers, to Cairo. By the time I’d freed myself, and went back to France…” He fluttered his hand. “I never found his grave. I searched. I haunted the cemeteries so long they began to tell stories of me. Zane found me there.” He shook his head. “He dragged me back to Hell. Told me I was mad. Mad for a human whose soul I could never possess.”
“Leon…” I didn’t know what to say. It had been centuries, but his voice was still rough with pain. So many years, and a single human death haunted him.
Ironic that a killer would be tortured by a death.
“I’ve spent enough time haunting graveyards,” he said. “If you gave me your soul, neither gods nor men could take you from me. And that frightens you.”
“Of course it does.” I was surprised to hear my voice break. It was frightening because it didn’t feel real. It felt impossible.
Breakups were easy, too easy. Because they needed space, because it just wasn’t working, because I was moving, because I was too much. But commitment? To belong? To be really and truly wanted? That was hard.
Humans weren’t good at forever. We weren’t built for forever.
“Raelynn. Come here.”
I went to him without hesitation, and I stood in front of him feeling so small, somewhere between frightened and hopeful, as if there was anything he could possibly say that would make all this make sense.
His fingers brushed over my face, and I leaned into his palm. For a moment, the whole world was the touch of his hand. The warmth in him. The citrus-smoke smell of him. For a moment, I thought of eternity.
“I’m leaving.”
I opened my eyes. “What?”
“I need to find the grimoire. Then my time on Earth is done. I’ve been here long enough.”
It felt like cold water dripping down my ribs. I didn’t want to hear him say that, but I couldn’t prevent it. I couldn’t say the words that would make him stay. I couldn’t say anything at all. I could only let the decisions I couldn’t bear to make form a stranglehold around my lungs and squeeze until it hurt.
Maybe he thought I would say something. The silence stretched out between us, and he pulled his hand away from my face. It was cold. So cold. He leaned his face down, the gap between our mouths so small, but somehow it was a chasm.
“Go inside,” he said softly. Such a simple dismissal. He’d taken all that passion, all that desperation, folded it up and tucked it away as neatly as if it was never there. My stomach twisted, tighter and tighter. My lungs squeezed, smaller and smaller.
“I don’t want you to go,” I said. He frowned.
“Then make me stay. Properly. Not with petty magic tricks.”
Give up your soul.
Terrifying, alluring. Everything I wanted and was terrified of having. A weight so heavy it crushed the words inside me.
Leon smirked.
“Go inside, doll. For tonight, I’ll watch. In the morning, I’ll go.”
“That’s not fair.” My voice sounded petulant. Desperate.
He shook his head. “No. It’s not. I’ve yet to find fairness anywhere on Earth.”
I had to walk away. Had to. So I turned and trudged back through the trees, refusing to look back. Why look to see if he was following or if he’d vanished already? Why pretend he was some mortal man whom I could convince to stay forjust a little longer, until things got too serious and everything was too stifling and I wasn’t worth the effort?
Why pretend he hadn’t offered exactly what I wanted, and I’d refused it?
The days rapidly grew colder as Halloween approached. One day it started raining, and simply didn’t stop. The downpour went on for hours, and even when it lessened, heavy droplets still tapped against the windows and created a tiny river system across campus. Inaya and I would eat lunch together indoors, huddled close on the wooden benches in the big dining hall, laughing and sipping hot coffee to warm our hands.
Victoria and Jeremiah frequently joined us.
I’d been able to make friends in my classes, and Inaya had introduced me to more of her own group, so I tried to make a point of inviting other people, but the Hadleighs turned up even when I least wanted them there. It was almost like they knew I was trying to get some distance from them, so they were drawing closer than ever.
