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On the night before Lizzie will die, Josie does her hair.
Pins it up, twists it around, carefully decorates it with glittering diamond shards.
It matches her dress, white and flowing, the silver sheen catching in the light of the candles and sparkling like icicles.
It could be a wedding dress, but Elizabeth Saltzman will never have the good fortune to marry.
Tomorrow, she will slide out of existence.
“Where’s my mask?” she bites out, her words sticking in her mouth like quicksand and feels the pang of regret.
Josie carries no responsibility for their fate.
Neither of them can escape who they are meant to be.
They’ve thought about it.
Running away, leaving Paris, escaping to the New World on a rickety ship that doesn’t even guarantee freedom.
But two siphoners would be easily found.
And in the parts of the world unconnected to the supernatural, cut off from any source of magical power, they would still be the hunted.
Josie’s hand lingers on her shoulder, just as her other one reaches for the silver mask.
She holds it out like an offering.
Lizzie accepts it.
“You need to get ready,” she says, rises from the chair in front of the mirror, watches Josie take her place.
She’s heard many ways to describe tomorrow. An honour. A duty. Fate.
She knows the unspoken truth.
It’s a death sentence.
“Go ahead,” Josie says, and her voice sounds quiet.
She’s spent a lifetime in Lizzie’s shadow.
Tomorrow, she will have to step out of it.
But for tonight, they can pretend.
Lizzie walks through the empty halls, follows the lights, brighter and brighter, until they are nearly blinding.
The girl is wearing red.
A dark, deep red, glittering in the light of the candles, matching her hair, auburn, and when she looks up, she meets Lizzie’s eyes, and for a moment, she almost stumbles, transfixed by ocean eyes.
The girl disappears into the crowd and Lizzie waits next to her father as Josie descends the stairs.
He looks pale, drawn, tired, despite the mask covering half his face.
She’s hated him and loved him and knows, on the night before her untimely death, that he fought as hard as he could to prevent it.
But at the end of the day, there is no loophole to this magic.
No trickery for a fate she must endure.
She dances the night away, men and women in her arms, twirling and tossing her around the room. If this is her last chance to dance, she will dance, and she will dance, and she will live.
For tonight.
The music roars, shifts, lowers, another waltz.
And the girl, the woman in red, is suddenly at her side, appearing almost out of thin air.
She holds out her hand, not a word spoken.
And despite knowing better, despite alarm bells ringing, Lizzie takes it.
Electricity curses through her as soon as she does, because the power emanating from this woman is sizzling through the air. Stronger and more powerful than Lizzie has ever felt in her short life.
She’s always been better than Josie at sensing magic, even if her sister might be the more powerful witch.
Tomorrow will prove that.
And the woman she’s hand is holding, she is more powerful than anything Lizzie has ever felt.
They don’t speak.
Not for this dance. Or the next.
Instead, she lets the woman swirl her around the room.
Lizzie has never seen her before.
She would remember her.
She would remember this power.
And these eyes, glittering ocean blue, wild and kind, through the ornate mask.
They dance together, effortlessly, one intricate move after the next, and Lizzie thinks that she might have known this girl for less than an hour, but feels like she’s known her for her entire life.
Like they were meant to be here.
Destined to meet.
Fate is cruel, she ponders, spinning out of the girl’s arms, to arrange for this kind of encounter in the last hours of her life.
Her grandfather, imposing and tall, clears his throat at the other end of the room, and he fills the hall with empty words, about his beautiful granddaughters and how they will lead the coven into a bright and promising future.
And they won’t, Lizzie thinks. They won’t.
Josie will.
By the time he’s finished with his careful phrases and his carefully crafted speech, Lizzie is alone again, standing in the middle of the ballroom.
And seconds later, there’s another man, bowing down in front of her, and she dances.
It’s past midnight when she catches her breath on the balcony, and is barely surprised to see the woman behind her again.
“Why are you out here?”
“The celebration of my execution was getting tiring,” she admits truthfully. Nothing like a little gallows humor to scare away the mysterious woman.
“Want to get out of here, then?” The girl doesn’t miss a beat with her question and Lizzie’s heart screams yes and her mind knows that she can’t take one step out of the castle.
“I’m pretty sure that that’s against the rules,” Lizzie sighs.
The girl laughs, bright and beautiful. “What are they going to do, Elizabeth?” Her name drops from the woman’s lips like a promise, and she has a point.
What are they going to do?
Lock her up for the last fifteen minutes of her life?
There’s no threat emanating from her coven anymore, now that she has accepted her fate.
And so she takes the hand held out to her, and they run.
This is how she spends the last night of her life:
Running the streets, barefoot, her shoes in her hand, a bottle of champagne they stole in the other one.
Sitting on the edge of the Seine. She watches the lights glitter on the water, the beautiful pictures of her hometown illuminated in sparkling flecks of gold.
“We used to come here,” she says, “when we were children. When my mother still lived here, and we would play here along the shore.”
Her mother disappeared years and years ago, after the coven had disclosed to their parents the sacrificed asked of them.
Sometimes, sometimes, Lizzie dreams that she would return.
That she would storm in and take them away, save them and bring justice raining down on her grandfather and all the other members of the inner circle, so, so set in their ways.
So, so willing to let Lizzie die.
Next to her, the girl reaches out, intertwines their fingers. “Tell me about your city,” she says, “I’ve never been here before.”
They talk, and they talk, and they talk all tonight long.
At dawn, they find silence. The sun’s rays over the horizon steals their words away.
“Can I kiss you?” the girl asks, when they’re almost back, back at Lizzie’s home.
And Lizzie nods, and kisses her.
The first rays of the sun illuminate Paris and Lizzie kisses a girl she doesn’t know, all the desperation of a girl who just wants to live.
She wants to live, and live and live.
But she can’t.
And so she kisses this mysterious, kind, wonderful girl on the streets leading her back home, wanting and wanting, bites down on her lip hard enough that she can taste blood on her tongue.
Pushes her up against buildings that have stood for hundreds of years, soaking up the history with every touch.
She’s about to apologise, but the girl laughs, and kisses Lizzie again, light and soft, like they have all the time in the world, like they have an eternity and not mere moments. “This will make things a lot easier,” she says wryly, and shakes her head.
Lizzie walks to her death with the memory of a kiss that felt like fireworks on her lips.
It’s easier than she thought.
“It’s okay,” she promises Josie, “it’s okay.”
And then, she dies.
When she opens her eyes again, she is not faced with what she was expecting.
Whiteness, maybe, blackness, something in between.
Heaven or hell or purgatory.
Not a pretty girl, auburn hair, sparkling blue eyes. “Hello Lizzie,” she whispers, and her voice is full of promise.
Certainly not her mother, rushing to hug her. “I am so sorry, darling, but we didn’t know how much they were watching. And we couldn’t take any chances.”
Lizzie looks between her mother and the girl. “This was a plan?”
“Not all of it,” the girl says, “we just wanted to get you away from the party and slip you some of my blood. I improvised the details.”
And somehow, as the seconds pass, as she realizes that she may not be the same, but that she’s here, and alive, and as she meets her mother’s gaze, soft and comforting.
And then, she looks back at the girl, at the way her smile wavers between cautious and kind.
“You should tell me your name now,” she requests, and earns herself the kind of laughter she could listen to forever. Hopes to listen to forever.
“Hope,” the girl says, getting to her feet, holding out her hand to Lizzie. “My name is Hope.”