Edge of Oblivion

much. His hand stroked her face, he turned her back to him with gentle fingers beneath her chin.

“Don’t hide from me. You don’t ever have to hide when you’re with me.”

That horrible tightness in her chest again, the welling in her eyes. He kissed the tear that slid over her cheek, caught another with his fingertip and brushed it away. She wanted to turn away again but didn’t, and he saw it, and then there was moisture in his eyes, too.

“Tu es o amor da minha vida,” he murmured, his voice breaking. He kissed her with a desperation that took her breath away, a desperation that was matched only by her own. She clung to him, and he moved between her legs and pushed inside her.

“Say it again,” she begged, not knowing what he’d said but knowing, feeling as if she would drown. “Say everything. Tell me everything, Xander, tell me now, before it’s too late.”

And he did. His lips on hers, his body moving inside hers, his heartbeat thudding strong and erratic against her chest, he let the words pour out. Soft and broken and in a language she did not understand, it poured out of him and over her and burned her soul to cinders.

Later, much later, as dawn crept pink and lavender over the hills of the Aventine, Xander woke alone.

27

Once upon a time, when she was a little girl no taller than the weathered brick lip of the Drowning Well, Morgan’s mother had told her a story.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” she announced with that faraway look in her eye that sometimes made Morgan slightly afraid for a reason she didn’t understand. The song she’d been singing died on her lips as if the wood fairies had snatched it right out of her mouth.

They were walking hand in hand through hazy morning sunshine, knee-deep in the drifts of wild heather that grew like weeds on the brink of the New Forest, watching tiny white butterflies flit with bumpy grace around bluebells and buttercups, listening to the sweet symphony of birdsong and breezes whisper through pines.

“A thtory,” Morgan whispered, enthralled, with the baby-girl lisp she hadn’t shed until she was six, watching her mother’s coffin being lowered into a rime of hard winter ground. She looked up at her mother—alive still on that verdant spring morning—and saw what she always saw: a fairy-tale princess with skin white as milk and a bittersweet smile and a galaxy of sorrow in her leaf-green eyes.

Even as a small child, Morgan recognized that her mother was beautiful, and very, very sad.

“There once lived a girl named Kalamazoo,” her mother began, and here Morgan giggled, liking the sound of the name. Her mother’s pale gaze slanted down to hers, and she began again, her lips tilted up at the corners. “Kalamazoo,” she said, “was a headstrong girl, ahead of her time, very smart and strong and independent. She was pretty, too—some even said she was blessed by angels on the day she was born, so pretty she was—and curious, and kind.”

Her mother’s voice took on a darker tone. As if the sky itself knew what was coming, a cloud passed over the sun. “But Kalamazoo had one...fatal...flaw.”

They slowed and then stopped beside the huge, rotting trunk of an ancient pine, overgrown with lichen and ivy, felled by some long-ago storm. Her mother lifted her up, set her teetering on its edge so they were almost at eye level with one another, held her hands around her waist to steady her until her little bare feet found their balance over the rough bark. Her mother’s feet were bare too; none of them ever wore shoes in the woods.

“She wanted,” her mother said with deep solemnity, gazing into Morgan’s eyes. “She had everything, but she wanted other things, anything she didn’t have. Her hair was dark and she wanted it to be gold, the sky was clear and she wanted it to rain, her home was in the woods and she wanted—

she so badly wanted—to live in the city. She wanted to be a girl who spoke exotic languages and danced the Argentine tango with a handsome stranger in a smoky bar and was able to say blithe, self-

possessed things like, ‘Oh, thank you for the lovely invitation, but I’m jetting off to Cannes this weekend for the festival.’ Kalamazoo dreamed of all the things she didn’t have and went around all the time with her soul lusting so badly after all those unhad things that it hung out from her body like an untucked shirt.

“And that,” said her mother ominously, “is why the goblins were able to get her.”

Morgan’s eyes widened. “Goblinth?” she whispered.

Her mother nodded. “Goblins, you see, aren’t like us. They don’t eat regular food. They have no use for meat and milk and sweets. What they eat...”

Morgan’s little heart pounded in her chest.

Her mother leaned closer. “...are souls.”

Though it was warm, Morgan shivered, wishing she could tuck her soul down somewhere safer inside her where the goblins couldn’t get it.

“But they can’t just take our souls. Oh, no, that’s not how it works at all! They have to make us give our souls away, freely. And do you know how they do that?”

Morgan stuck her thumb in her mouth and furiously sucked on it.

In an empty, leaden voice, her mother said, “Hope. They prey on our hope. Sweeter than honey and more heady than wine, hope is the lure they use. They whisper in our ears that all those things we so desperately want we can someday have, and so we go around lusting and dreaming and letting our souls drag us around with want until finally we’re so tormented we don’t notice our soul has slid right out of our body like a snail slides out of its shell and we’ve been carved hollow.

“And that’s what happened to the lovely Kalamazoo. Inch by inch, day by day, hope by hope, her soul slipped away and the goblins devoured every last morsel of it. Without her soul, the poor girl quickly wasted away and died, and when they buried her, nothing would grow around her grave, not even a milkweed, because anyone who dies without a soul is cursed forever.”

Imagining the goblins and the grave and the barren ground, Morgan squeaked in terror.

Her mother lifted her up. Morgan nestled trembling against her chest, hid her face in her mother’s soft hair. They began the long walk back to Sommerley.

“Hope is a drug, my love,” her mother murmured gently in her ear. “Hope is a tragedy. It will haunt you with its bittersweet perfume and addle your senses and ultimately drive you mad. Creatures like us cannot afford the insanity of hope, because everything we are and ever will be can be found within fifty miles of where we stand now. There can be no more for us. So watch your soul carefully, sweet girl. Watch that you don’t give the goblins what they hunger for. Watch for hope within yourself and don’t be afraid to do what Kalamazoo didn’t: crush it.”

Morgan had been hardly more than a baby then, but she remembered the story of Kalamazoo as vivid as fireworks against the night sky, and now—sitting cross-legged on the dewy back lawn of the safe house, wretched with Fever and heartbreak, watching the sun rise in a fiery orange ball over the eastern horizon—she knew why her mother had told it.

Because, like her, Morgan wanted. Maybe it was a genetic thing, passed down in her DNA, maybe it was just bad luck. But Morgan had been haunted by that old bitch Want all her life, and though her mother had tried to warn her that her very soul was in danger, she hadn’t listened.

Want had done its worst. It had driven her to make the greatest mistake of her life, one with the costliest toll. And now Want’s evil cousin Hope had hatched inside her like a dragon’s egg and she would be devoured from the inside, her soul driven out to the goblins’ feast.

Xander was the warmth that had incubated this terrible egg of hope. With his hands, his lips, the poetry of his words, and the glowing dark burn of his eyes, he had grown hope inside her until she could barely breathe with possibility.

What. If.

The two words by themselves were harmless. But put them together—what if?—and harmless grew fangs and sucked out all your blood.

She couldn’t afford another costly mistake. She knew now what she had to do.

She heard pounding footfalls in the house, echoing through empty rooms. Her name was frantically called,