The ballroom was an impossibility. Cordelia had known this since she'd walked into it—the chandeliers dripping light like frozen rain, the floor polished to a mirror, the orchestra playing something minor and exquisite from a balcony draped in shadow. The house had given her this dress. The house had given her this night. The house, which had once been a prison and was now something she couldn't name, had given her Louis.
He stood at the bottom of the staircase in a coat the color of midnight, watching her descend with the focused attention of something that had been waiting a very long time and was determined to memorize every detail.
"You're staring," she said.
"You're walking."
"I walk all the time."
"Not in that dress."
He offered his hand. She took it. The orchestra shifted into a waltz, slow and deliberate, and he led her into the center of the ballroom where the light pooled like water.
"I don't know this dance," she said.
"I'll teach you."
"You're two hundred years old. You probably know every dance."
"Most of them." His hand settled at her waist. "Follow me. I won't let you fall."
They turned. The room turned with them. The chandeliers blurred into streaks of gold.
"You're good at this," she said.
"I've had practice."
"I meant the not-letting-me-fall part."
His eyes met hers. "So did I."
The music swelled. The light flickered. Cordelia missed a step—not from clumsiness, from the strange sensation that had just passed through her, a shiver that started at the base of her skull and traveled down her spine.
"Did you feel that," she asked.
Louis's hand tightened on her waist. "Yes."
The chandeliers flickered again. The orchestra hit a wrong note—not a mistake, an impossibility, because the orchestra was not real, the orchestra was the house, the house was Louis's curse, and the curse did not make mistakes. Except it just had. And the ballroom was glitching.
Cordelia stopped dancing. "Louis. What's happening."
He didn't answer. He was looking at his hands—his human hands, the hands the curse had restored to him—and they were flickering between forms. Man. Beast. Man. Claw. Man.
"I remember," he said slowly. "I remember another life. Another version of us. You were a detective. I was a—" He looked at her. His eyes were different now. Knowing. "I was a vampire."
"I know," she said, and meant it. "I was trying to solve your murders."
"You let me get away."
"You were very charming. I was very compromised."
The ballroom was disintegrating. The chandeliers flickered between gold and gaslight. The floor was marble and then cobblestone. The music was an orchestra and then a lone trumpet bending through a Quarter night.
"There are more," Cordelia said. "Other versions. I can feel them."
She could. Her mind was opening like a door, and behind it were rooms she'd never seen but recognized instantly. A parking lot at midnight. A coffee shop. A palace garden where she'd once been a princess and he'd been something that swam in deep water and watched her from the cliffs.
"In every one," she said, "you're something monstrous."
"In every one," he agreed, "you're something I can't stop watching."
The glitch was getting worse. The ballroom was a kaleidoscope now—marble and rain, chandeliers and streetlamps, Louis's face shifting between the beast she'd learned to love and the vampire she'd hunted and the mermaid she'd kissed and a dozen other faces she knew without having seen.
"I'm going to become a monster too," Cordelia said. It wasn't a confession. It was a decision. "In the vampire one. You turn me. We leave New Orleans together. We play chess by candlelight. We argue about locks and personal space and I throw a lamp at your head." She paused. "It's the happiest I've ever been in any life."
Louis looked at her across the fracturing ballroom floor. "You've seen this."
"I'm seeing it now." The glitch was in her voice too—she could hear herself speaking in registers that didn't match, echoes of other selves bleeding through. "The turning hurts. The bond is a chain. But I choose it. In that life, in every life, I choose it."
"Why."
"Because you're the only person in two centuries who looked at me like I was worth paying attention to." She smiled. The smile was hers and also the detective's and also the princess's and also someone else's entirely. "And I like throwing lamps at your head."
The ballroom shattered.
Cordelia woke with a gasp in a bed that was not in a cursed castle. Sunlight streamed through floor-length windows. The sheets were expensive and unfamiliar. Outside, the sea was doing something blue and endless against a cliff.
A hand touched her shoulder. "You were dreaming."
She turned. Louis was propped on one elbow, looking down at her with the expression she'd cataloged across four lifetimes now—the focused stillness, the dark eyes, the mouth that curved slightly at one corner. He was not a beast. He was not a vampire. He was just Louis, in a mansion on the coast of somewhere that wasn't New Orleans, wearing nothing and looking at her like she was the only thing in the room worth watching.
"What a weird daydream," she said.
"Tell me."
She told him. The ballroom. The glitch. The kaleidoscope of lives where he was always a monster and she was always the thing he couldn't stop watching. The confession she'd made— I'm going to become a monster too —and the certainty that had come with it, that in at least one version of their lives she'd chosen him with her eyes open, knowing exactly what it cost.
He listened without interrupting. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.
"In the vampire one," he said finally. "Did I file taxes."
She stared at him. Then she laughed. "That's what you took from that."
"It's an important detail."
"Some people thought you were just French."
"Some people were very stupid."
She laughed again. He smiled—the full expression, the one that rearranged his face into something almost unbearably beautiful. Outside, the sea went on doing what it always did. The sun climbed higher. She didn't need to turn into anything. She didn't need to become a monster. She was just Cordelia, in a bed in a mansion, with a man who had been paying attention for two hundred years and would keep paying attention for as long as she'd let him.
"Are you happy," he asked.
She considered the question. The dream was already fading, the other lives retreating behind the door in her mind. But the feeling remained—the certainty that across every version of herself, across every life where he was something monstrous and she was something stubborn, she'd made the same choice.
"Yes," she said. "In this one and all the others."
"Good." He kissed her forehead. "Now go back to sleep. I want to see if you dream again."
She closed her eyes. The sea was loud and soft against the cliffs. His hand was warm in hers. And somewhere, in a version of the world where she was still a detective and he was still hungry and they were still learning how to be something together, a chess piece sat on a kitchen table, waiting for the next move.