9 Elle To Remember
Elle
To Remember
Blakeney Pratterman, moon-eyed holder of my soul’s contract, tastes of char, smoke, and misery. He’s hungry, grabbing me like it’s him drowning instead of the men outside.
I never knew the Devil to feel desperate.
My lips have held the memory of his. Back then I was a na?ve 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 Darkness sounded 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?”
Mr. Pratterman laughed. Higher than I’d have imagined. Light. “Only if hibiscus bleeds. It’s plain tea, I promise. Don’t be afraid. I’m here to help.”
Do not be afraid. The refrain of angels. Did he hide countless eyes and feathers within his suit? Or had they been plucked in his descent?
“I want to save my sister. She’s betrothed to a horrid man,” I say in a rush. “He was meant to wed me. This isn’t an act of jealousy, sir. I swear. Only protection.”
This was usually the part when I’d get cut off. Told to stop acting paranoid. But Mr. Pratterman sipped his tea and nodded to my own cup. I rose it shakily and sipped. It was nearly scalding. When the tart-sweet tea settled in my stomach, my pulse slowed and my tongue loosened.
“No one will listen to me. I fear if I try again, my father will commit me to an asylum. There was a pamphlet—Mount Hope. Girls don’t come back once committed. I have evidence, I promise—”
Mr. Pratterman waved a hand at this. “I believe you, Eleanor.”
Four words I hadn’t been told in years. I took another sip of tea, but I noticed when I set it down that the liquid remained less than a centimeter beneath the cup’s edge.
“Why are your parents allowing this?” he asked. His tone held only polite curiosity.
“My mother doesn’t think it any worse than her own lot.” How much of my mother’s actions had been knowingly cruel, and how much had been formed by my father? “Thomas is crafty. Nothing he does in isolation could be enough to annul the engagement.”
A single muscle pulled on one side of Mr. Pratterman’s lips. “Men such as Mr. Seymour are too cunning for their own good, aren’t they?”
I’d never told him Thomas’s last name. Why wouldn’t the Devil know a sinner, though? I recovered with another sip of tea.
“I came to you because there’s no way out. Especially for Li—my sister.” Despite all I’d said already, it wasn’t right to give him my sister’s name. “The wedding is tomorrow, sir.”
Mr. Pratterman sat back in his chair. He rubbed his thumb across the pads of his other fingers, each with a pointed black talon at the end. My eyes stung with the softness of his voice.
“You’ve been remarkably strong in this, Eleanor.
” He smiled, and his glowing eyes twinkled.
“Such a frightful lot. Trapped by your mother, sold off by your father, and promised a life of misery by this rake. Now to have it thrust on the only person in the world you have a duty to protect? Yet here you sit.”
I swallowed hard. I’d craved understanding for so long. It left an ashy taste in the back of my throat. I looked away from his piercing gaze, down to his teacup. Darkness swirled within.
Mr. Pratterman took a long sip of his tea. A new expression crossed his face when he set the cup down again: hunger. But for what?
“What do you think I can do for you,” he asked, “to help with these monsters?”
“I must escape with my sister. Tonight. No one can know. The families are well connected.”
I should’ve spoken with an attorney’s precision, but desperation doesn’t breed wits.
Mr. Pratterman leaned back until the front two legs of his chair lifted off the black rock. “How would you escape with what I’d grant you?” His tone betrayed a continued curiosity.
“I…” What power did he have? What could I ask for? Despite the heat that dampened my skin with sweat, I froze at the possibilities.
Mr. Pratterman leaned forward. His smile was kind. Concerned. A trap.
“There’s a limit to what I can give you,” he explained. “At least as you are now. And it will require violence, Eleanor. Are you capable of that?”
Two paths. One where I declined and watched my sister decay under Thomas’s foot while I became an unbelieved spinster or worse. Another where I betray my parents, rescue Liney, and lead us into a new life.
The choice hung between us. His power was required, but so was my resolve.
Could I hurt, even kill, the ones who raised me?
Who christened me with their family name?
My mother’s words in that hallway haunted me then.
They hurt us all, darling. She was ready to sacrifice me on the altar of men in the name of our family.
I could become a monster for Liney. Do what needed to be done. Hurt them back, for once.
“I am.”
We devised the plan together. He offered many deadly options, but I chose the kindest, if it could be called so.
A gas leak in the middle of the night. Painless, he promised.
He ensured no evidence would be found that I played a role.
Empty streets at the moment of our escape.
My end of the deal was simple—collect Liney at the right time, find his boat to escape to his island, and keep his lighthouse.
“You’ll tend the light for me,” he instructed, “and tend its darkness too.”
The island was close enough that we could reach it before sunrise, but not so close as to be suspicious in the weeks following our escape.
He never told me about Douglas.
I asked for the chance to kill Thomas myself. If anyone must suffer, it had to be him. Mr. Pratterman refused to add him to the deal. Shouldn’t the Devil want sinners’ souls? He only promised, “There are other machinations at play for Mr. Seymour.”
Mr. Pratterman offered to bestow the power on me in that room of melting wax.
At first I protested. What use was there for dark magic on an island away from the world?
But my use of the island—his island—was not without its own payment.
A few sailors’ souls every month, a handful of fishermen.
Lives that the sea would devour anyway. Why not make use of them?
“You will come to need this power, Eleanor.” My name rolled off his tongue, as he accentuated every other sentence. “For her. Which means you must learn how to wield it.”
It was all I needed to forget about Thomas. This wasn’t about revenge. I would’ve given him the rest of the world if it meant saving her. Liney would never feel the lick of Thomas’s true flames.
The table and chairs melted into the floor. He reached forward and placed his hands on my shoulders. The room chilled around those ash-covered palms. Every muscle pulsed in a molten ripple. Heat became home, and a wick sprouted deep in my chest to his flame.
“You will find the signs you need tonight. Escape, and I’ll do the rest.”
Tonight. My heartbeat flickered. Uproot my sister, destroy my family, but leave the villain who brought me here untouched.
“Thank you—”
“But, Eleanor.” His eyes flashed with fire, leaving their afterglow burned into my retinas.
“I’m strict on payment. While you’re on my island, you’ll fuel the lighthouse and my power within it.
I will collect what is owed, with or against you.
A sister’s love is deep, but no certainty to me. What is your collateral?”
I asked so few questions then, desperate for escape. When I searched Mr. Pratterman’s moonlight eyes, I saw familiar danger. The heady, tart tea dulled my fear, and the sweltering heat left me almost drunk. My mind simmered as much as my skin beneath his fingers.
“You’ll have me, if I fail,” I promised. What did I matter? None of this was for me. And I wouldn’t fail; I was so sure of it.
“I’ll have Miss Forsyth?”
I didn’t wonder how he knew my surname. Had my search been one-sided, or two?
“Yes.”
I took his hands and squeezed harder than I’d ever done before, power coursing through me. Fear turned to freedom as my body absorbed it. I could protect myself, my sister, our future. It was so simple yet intoxicating. How could I ever let that feeling slip once tasted?
“Do we recite Latin or prick my thumb over a candle—”
He cut me off with the simplest closing of a pact there is.
The Devil leaned down and kissed me.