Chapter 8
eight
. . .
His shoulders cut a clean line through the vanilla snow.
Phoebe stood at the bakery window and watched Thorne walk away the next morning.
She watched his stride eat up the cobblestones, his dark uniform stark against the white-dusted market lane, the morning light catching the silver in his hair.
His breath fogged crystalline and fine in the cold air, and she tracked the rhythm of it until he turned the corner past Ivy’s candle-maker stall and disappeared.
When she turned back to the counter, Ember was flour-dusted and grinning at her.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face is saying it."
Ember's grin widened.
Kaelor set a warm pastry and coffee in front of Phoebe. Cinnamon-apple, her favorite, the plate still radiated the impossible Cinnamite warmth that kept the bakery windows fogged at the edges. He murmured something to Ember as he passed, and Ember swatted his arm and laughed.
"What did he say?"
"Nothing."
"Em?"
"He said you were staring so hard you fogged up his clean window.
" Ember wiped her hands on her apron already dusted with flour at seven in the morning and leaned her elbows on the counter.
"Pheebs. When are you going to stop pretending the man who memorized your tea order and walks you home every night is just doing his job? "
The pastry was perfect. Flaky, warm, the cinnamon-sugar crust shattering under her fork. Phoebe focused on it.
"He was assigned to me, Em. It's literally his job."
Her own voice came back flat. She heard it. She knew Ember heard it too.
Ember didn't push. She picked up a piping bag, started a meticulous border on a row of sugar cookies, and said, without looking up, "Kaelor looked at me like that once, too. And I almost missed it because I was too busy telling myself it didn't count."
At the oven behind her, Kaelor's bronze markings pulsed faintly gold. He said nothing.
That night, Phoebe sang about want.
Not the polished kind. Not the radio-friendly ache that moved units and filled seats. She sang about the genuine kind. The kind that sits in your body like a low-grade fever.
She'd pulled the song from the back of her setlist, an old one she'd written years ago and never quite had the guts to perform. Tonight she embraced it and stood alone in the light, singing about wanting someone she was afraid to reach for.
At the end, the audience did something she'd never experienced.
A low harmonic hum moved through the amphitheater like a tide.
Hundreds of voices joined together in a single resonant note beneath hers.
Not competing, not imitating, just completing.
The sound rose from the seats and met her voice in the air above the stage, merging into something she had no experience for.
This was participation. The audience was finishing the song with her.
Her eyes burned. She kept her face still because that was what years of performing bought. Composure that held even when the sound was breaking you open from the inside.
At the front-of-house security post, Thorne's hand was white-knuckled on the rail.
Frost spread visibly along the metal under his grip, lacing outward in delicate crystalline patterns that caught the stage light and glittered. He wasn't watching the crowd. His ice-blue eyes were fixed on her, and his expression was not that of a man watching a performer.
Ember's words from this morning came back. I almost missed it because I was too busy telling myself it didn't count.
The hum faded. The audience released her. She walked offstage on shaking legs.
The choir rehearsal the following afternoon was joyful chaos.
Word about the choir had spread like wildfire, and now a dozen species crammed into the practice room at the back of the Cultural Pavilion, chairs shoved against the walls to make space.
The sound of the festival market drifted through the open windows.
Someone selling roasted sugarroot was in the corridor outside, the sweet caramelized smell mixing with the evergreen.
Bioluminescent lights strung along the ceiling cast warm, shifting patterns across the walls and floor, green-gold and blue, and taken all together, the whole room smelled like sugar and pine and the particular warmth of too many bodies in a space designed for half as many.
Phoebe had arranged an Earth carol for voices that didn't share a tonal range. The results were glorious and terrible in equal parts.
"No, Tal'vex, that's a third too high. You're harmonizing with yourself."
The Cinnamite baritone boomed an apology and tried again, his massive frame hunched over the sheet music, bronze markings flaring every time he hit the wrong interval.
Beside him, a Zingiberite soprano's glow brightened on every crescendo until the woman beside her had to shield her eyes.
Ivy was gamely attempting the Mentharian bridge Phoebe had transcribed from Thorne's harmony, and the sound that came out was somewhere between a whistle and a hiccup.
Ivy clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide above her fingers, and dissolved into laughter. Phoebe dissolved right along with her.
"I sound like a teakettle having a crisis," Ivy said, still laughing.
"You sound like a teakettle having a crisis beautifully."
Ruby clapped on the offbeat with such cheerful, unwavering confidence that Phoebe couldn't bring herself to correct it. Ruby's whole body moved when she clapped, her dark curls bouncing, her rings catching the light, her grin enormous and genuine.
"Mia sent a comm," Ruby said, noticing Phoebe’s eyes on her. "Vendor coordination is eating her alive, but she wants a full recording. Also, she says, and I quote, 'Tell Phoebe if she doesn't save me a spot in the alto section, I will mix up all the clothes in her color-coded closet as revenge.'"
"She's a soprano."
"She doesn't know that."
The room cracked up. The Cinnamite baritone missed his entrance again.
The Zingiberite lit up like a lantern. Ivy tried the Mentharian bridge one more time and produced a sound that made three people in the back row cover their ears, and the laughter that followed was the communal, tears-streaming kind.
Phoebe caught Ivy's eye across the tangle of bodies and music stands. They both cracked up again, harder, and the laugh was coming from deep enough to hurt.
Phoebe hadn’t thought about covering her accent for more than an hour. She wasn't performing for a single person in this room. Thorne’s idea for creating a choir was officially the best part of Frostfall.
Vanilla snow fell slow and steady on the walk home that evening, the flakes catching the lights.
The festival market was shutting down behind them for the night.
Vendors pulled tarps over their displays; the last strains of someone's music were fading, the bioluminescent lights dimming to their overnight glow.
The cobblestones were dusted white, and the air smelled like pine and sugar and the particular mineral cleanness of Thorne walking beside her.
His cold radiated through the sleeve of her coat where their arms almost brushed. He'd shortened his stride to match hers without being asked, as he always did, and she'd stopped pretending she didn't notice.
When they reached her apartment, she unlocked the door but turned around before she crossed the threshold.
She hadn’t planned it. But before she knew it, she had stepped into his space.
She tilted her face up. The peppermint-cold scent of him flooded her senses as she lifted her chin, her weight shifting forward onto her toes.
Frost formed at his collar. The cold rolling off him raised every hair on her forearms and settled against her flushed cheeks and her parted mouth like a touch that hadn't landed yet. His eyes dropped to her mouth, and the full weight of what she was doing hit her.
If she kissed this man, she would not be able to unkiss him.
The taste of him would live in her mouth the way his scent already lived in her coat.
The last time she'd leaned into a man and let her body lead, David Sterling had held it over her for a decade.
Had watched her want closeness and used that wanting as leverage.
Had taught her that the need was a door she opened and other people walked through to take things.
She stepped back and replaced the distance between them.
"Goodnight, Thorne."
She watched something quick, sharp, and immediately controlled move behind his eyes. His jaw tightened. The frost at his collar spread half an inch. He said nothing. He didn't need to. His body had been leaning toward hers, and now it wasn't.
“Goodnight, Miss Calloway,” he said as she closed the door between them.
She leaned back against the door.
What are you doing, Phoebe? You almost kissed him.
She couldn’t give an answer. She had no idea what she was doing.
You still want to.
She couldn't blame Thorne for the gap anymore. She'd built it.
“Just because you want something doesn’t mean you should have it,” she told herself aloud. “You did the right thing. Kissing him would be a very bad idea.”
She covered her face with her hands and willed herself to believe that.
When she nearly had herself convinced, she took a deep breath and stepped out of the foyer and into her apartment, hanging up her coat and getting ready to settle in for the night.
She was still arguing with herself when she walked into her bedroom and saw the card and frostlily on her vanity table.
She picked up the card. When she opened it, a sound chip activated, and her own voice filled the room.
She was going through her warm-up hums. Scales and lip trills she ran alone backstage when her nerves were bad. Sounds no audience member could hear from the seats.
The note inside was written in the same careful handwriting as the note in her dressing room.
Phoebe,
I know the difference between the voice you give them and the one you keep for yourself. The private one is better. I've been listening.
Your Truest Listener.
Her hands turned to ice.
Someone had been close enough to hear her when she thought she was alone and had recorded her. And then that same someone had been inside her quarters and placed this note in her bedroom.
She pulled the security comm Thorne had given her from her pocket. She ignored the tremor in her hands and pressed the emergency button.
Her voice continued to fill the air over and over in a loop.