63. August 18, 1969 New York City, New York
Beatrix drives a hundred miles to the largest, dirtiest, loudest city she can find, determined to drown herself in a sea of people.
She leaves her car in a Manhattan parking garage and walks a few blocks with her suitcase until she finds a cheap hotel with a vacancy.
She’d like nothing more than to collapse into bed, but the mud of Woodstock is still under her nails, her hair still tangled from the rain.
She runs a hot bath and starts scrubbing.
She can’t wash it all away. The memory of sitting in the rain, of realizing Oliver hadn’t come.
And the idea that crawled into her mind as she drove: She could forget him with someone new.
It would be easy. She could have an hour, a night of peace, and disappear into the city.
It worked before Oliver. It can work again.
She can be that Beatrix, the one who survived the plague and the Great Fire and the cruelty of people who didn’t understand her.
But she knows as soon as she thinks it that it won’t work. She isn’t that Beatrix anymore.
She watches her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she braids her damp hair into a crown around her head.
Still no threads of silver, still no wrinkles.
She could be in a London tavern or in the servants’ quarters of a grand manor, if she doesn’t look too closely at the uncanny eyes staring back at her, far, far too old for a face so young.
“Hello, Beatrix,” the faerie says behind her in the glass.
“Hello,” Beatrix replies, unsurprised. The faerie always returns when she thinks she can get what she wants.
“Are you ready to end this?”
Beatrix turns from the mirror. The faerie hasn’t changed at all, as if she’s stepped from Beatrix’s memory into the dingy hotel bathroom.
She leans against the doorframe, her shining red hair too bright against the nicotine-stained walls.
Her shimmering dress is far less ethereal than that night in the clearing, surrounded now by mildewed grout and mismatched tiles instead of ancient forest. She looks absurd, so utterly out of place that Beatrix might laugh if the weight of the creature’s glowing gaze didn’t steal her breath away, still.
“You know my life as well as I do,” Beatrix says. “Am I?”
The faerie scrutinizes her mismatched eyes and unchanging face. “You haven’t decided.”
She hasn’t. Two hundred and thirty-three years is a long time to wait just to lose Oliver again. The longest she’s ever waited.
“What happens if I say yes?” In almost five hundred years, Beatrix has never asked, because in almost five hundred years, she has never truly considered accepting the faerie’s bargain.
“I will take your soul from your body, and you will simply cease to exist,” the faerie says. “You won’t feel a thing.”
“What about you?” Beatrix asks.
“What about me?” the faerie replies.
Beatrix is sure she’s being difficult on purpose. “You think humans are pathetic and cruel. So why do you want my soul?”
“Because I can?” The faerie says it like a question, like it’s obvious.
“I don’t believe you.” The faerie has spent too long waiting for her to say yes. She has a reason. “I think you’re lonely. I don’t think you want my soul at all. Maybe you did, once. But if you take it now—if I die—you have no one left in this world.”
The faerie looks at Beatrix as if she’s struck her. And then she laughs, cold and cackling. “Oh, my dear Beatrix, do you think our conversations are so riveting? I assure you, I don’t keep you around for the joy of your company.”
Beatrix scowls at her.
“If you don’t believe me, I can prove it.” The faerie’s eyes glitter, more malice than mischief. “Just say the word.”
Beatrix storms past the faerie into the bedroom. The faerie is already there, perched on the end of the bed. Waiting for an answer.
“Where are the others?” Beatrix demands. If the faerie doesn’t need her company, there must be others. “What happened to the faeries on the moor?”
“I imagine they’re on the moor,” the faerie says, “if the moor is still there. Perhaps it’s gone the way of Lancaut.”
If Beatrix didn’t know better, she would swear she hears something familiar in the faerie’s voice. Not sadness, exactly. A yearning for a home that is lost to her. “You left them? Why?”
“When someone tells you to get out, you do.” The faerie says it like it’s logical, but it still twists something inside Beatrix.
She scrutinizes the faerie—the cold glow of her eyes and a face that could be a mask from Carnevale.
She has survived longer than Beatrix, has done it all on her own.
Maybe she could do the same. She could survive for another 233 years.
She could make it back to Oliver. But would he recognize her?
Would she recognize herself? “Why did the others banish you?”
“They didn’t take kindly to my questions or my interest in the humans. My mother. My father. My brothers and sisters.”
An entire family that had let her down.
“I spent my days watching them. I thought I had the right to know what the faeries took from me. They thought I should be eternally grateful they saved me at all.”
“You did have the right to know,” Beatrix says. She can’t believe she’s taking her side. “Just like I have the right to know why you want my soul.”
The faerie walks a slow circle around her, as if she were admiring a statue at the Louvre. Beatrix holds her breath. “Because you and I are not so different.”
“You’ve said that before.” The night she answered her from the darkness.
“Some souls are more alike than others. Drawn to each other.”
Beatrix can’t help but think of Oliver, still tugging her toward him.
“They are tricky things. Tenuous yet unyielding. They aren’t made for taking.”
Beatrix’s heart races. “You need permission.”
“I don’t need anything.”
Beatrix yelps at the sudden, sharp pull inside her chest.
The faerie smiles. “But if I grow impatient and rip your soul away, it will tear out of you like paper, all tattered edges.” She shrugs. “It will be useless.”
“Useless for what?” Beatrix demands. “What do you want it for?”
The faerie sneers. “You haven’t been paying attention.”
Beatrix racks her brain. She’s missing something.
The faerie leans in close. “Just how, exactly, does a baby willingly give up her soul?”
Beatrix’s heart sinks into her guts. “She can’t.”
“It gets torn out of her in ribbons, shredded beyond recognition. Beyond use. Leaves just enough behind to remind her of what she no longer has.”
A shiver crawls down Beatrix’s spine. “You want to replace your soul with mine?”
“I don’t want to replace it,” the faerie snaps. “I want to repair it. And you can’t repair one ruined thing with another.”
So she waits for Beatrix to say yes.
“The moment your father carried you into that clearing, I was given a choice,” the faerie says. “I couldn’t do what the others did to me, but I couldn’t let you die, either. I couldn’t let them win.”
“Who?” Beatrix asks.
“Everyone else.”
That, Beatrix can understand. But there’s still one thing she doesn’t. “Why do you want to be human?”
“I don’t know if I do,” the faerie says. “How can I? I want what was taken from me. I want to make the choice that was made for me.”
It’s the most human thing Beatrix has ever heard her say.
Beatrix doesn’t know how long the faerie has walked the earth, only that it is longer than she has walked it.
Standing in front of the creature, looking into eyes of moonlight and sunlight, the grim reality is impossible to ignore.
The faerie cursed her, but it was one hundred years alone that turned her into a ghost. What if she hadn’t met Oliver in Venice, hadn’t seen his face on that bridge, hadn’t arranged to meet him again?
What would three hundred years have made her, or four, without him?
She glimpsed it in Paris, when Oliver begged her not to go back to that existence. She told him she would be a different person without him. But that isn’t true.
Without Oliver, Beatrix wouldn’t be a person at all.
She would have spent centuries building walls of stone around her heart, until her heart was impenetrable and her humanity had withered away.
Until all that was left of her was a hollow shell of who she had once been: an immortal being with mismatched eyes and a ruined soul.
For the first time in her life, Beatrix pities the faerie.
“You’ve decided.”
Beatrix meets the faerie’s gaze. “I refuse you.”
The faerie’s eyes flare bright. “If I leave here, who do you have left in the world? No one.” Her own words, twisted against her again.
“I had no one when I left Lancaut. I survived.”
The faerie gives her a wicked grin. “Surviving isn’t living, Beatrix.”
Beatrix’s heartbeat falters. So does her conviction. It sounds like something Oliver would say. “I’ll manage.”
“I won’t return until you ask,” the faerie says. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? For me to leave you in peace?”
Beatrix stays silent, sure the question is a trick.
The faerie steps closer. “Think about everything you’ve lived through. All the pain and terror and sorrow you could have ended with a word. But you stayed silent.”
Beatrix’s heart thuds against her ribs.
“Do you want to survive to see the moment you are so broken, so desperate, that you call out to me for salvation?”
“Yes,” Beatrix says, even as she wonders if she does.
The faerie is gone in a blink, and Beatrix is alone. She grabs her book bag from the foot of the bed and flees the hotel room, gripped by a sudden urge to be with people.
Beatrix steps out onto the street and slips on a pair of sunglasses, hiding her eyes behind dark, round lenses. She walks to Central Park, to the familiar comfort of the woods.
It is strange to find a forest inside a city. A wild, stubborn piece of the past that refuses to let go. She follows an asphalt path to a swooping stone bridge with an ornate railing, this one made of gray stone instead of white. It still feels like she is stepping back in time as she crosses it.
She sits on an empty park bench and pulls Oliver’s journal out of her book bag.
She flips past his entries until she finds the blank page she is looking for.
Woodstock. She doesn’t know what Oliver would have written about if he had been there, so she writes about what Woodstock was to her. An ending.
She looks up from the page and notices a woman has sat on the other end of her bench, reading a book. The woman glances at Beatrix and offers her a polite smile. Beatrix returns the gesture. Her eyes snag on the book’s title. A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
The woman glances at the cover. “Yeah, have you read it?”
Beatrix shakes her head. “No, but I saw a performance a long time ago.”
“I heard it’s a movie now.”
Beatrix laughs. She can’t help it. “What would Shakespeare think of that?”
“He’d probably love it,” the woman says.
Beatrix nods. In a way, he has survived as long as she has.
The woman returns to her book, and Beatrix returns to hers.
She puts Woodstock in the past with Shakespeare and Carnevale and Paris.
She reads the words written across the top of the next page in Oliver’s handwriting—a place and a time and a promise of adventure.
The rest of it is empty, waiting for her to choose.
Beatrix closes the notebook and tucks it into her bag. She retraces her steps and crosses the bridge again. She stops at the center, as if it were the Rialto Bridge, as if New York were Venice, as if Oliver had just uttered her name. Changed her life.
She’ll have to start over.
She brushes her thumb along the smooth edge of her iron ring, a habit born 464 years ago.
Oliver is gone. The faerie is gone. She can only swear an oath to herself now.
She pulls the ring from her finger, clutches it so fiercely it digs into her palm. Her left hand feels naked without it.
She won’t be that other Beatrix.
She won’t become a ghost.
She won’t lose herself like the faerie.
She opens her hand and lets the ring slide into the water flowing beneath the bridge, watches as it sinks into the murky depths. It had served as a reminder of her humanity, even when she was on the brink of losing it. Now, its absence will remind her of her promise.
The faerie cursed her to survive, but she will live.