Chapter 7
It was like falling into water. The absence of air, the loss of gravity, her limbs heavy and weak. It was like slipping into a dreamscape. There was shadow and movement and her sense of self but nothing else. She was dead or she was dying or she had never been alive at all.
All at once, up was up, and down was down, and dark was dark.
The inky shadows were living, moving, all-consuming.
They roiled at the edges of her vision like knots of snakes.
It was a wonder she could see anything at all.
The place she stood—not earth or stone but something flat and supple, like the stage—was a shade lighter.
Like her mere presence brought in light.
Not light exactly, something that had been light once and wasn’t anymore.
An echo of light. A memory of what light should be.
But that wasn’t what felt so strange about this place. It wasn’t the colors or the shift of shadow. It was the absence of sound. No drip of water or whisper of breath. No wind or creak of wood. No swish of skirts or tap of boots. Not even the beating of her heart.
This place was wrong.
Just behind her, she could see the whirl of the bioluminescence before it stilled into watery dark. Tarnished, like she was seeing it through a dusty window, or from the inside of a mirror.
“Hello?” Selene said.
“Hello.”
There was a person at the edge of her vision. He was half in darkness, like he was being formed from it.
There and not.
The ghost stepped toward her. His movements were disjointed, like his limbs were a little too long. Like he’d forgotten how to be human.
Wake up, she begged herself.
Selene sang for light.
It was blinding, penetrating the darkness. The ghost threw up his hand to shield his eyes.
Selene was sure this was a dream. She’d fallen asleep below the opera house.
There was no door, no underground lake, no secret mirror or creature trapped inside.
Her subconscious had taken all her burdens and spun them into a vicious web.
This was a culmination of the pressure of the competition, exhaustion, and Madame’s words ringing through her head.
Some stars burn bright, some stars burn out.
He came into the light.
Not completely, not at first. Half of his face was still cloaked in shadow.
But it was enough for her to see him. There was a wildness to him, an unchecked beauty and power that was too familiar to be made up.
She’d seen artist renderings of faces like his, carved-out angles and thick-drawn lashes, like some monument of youth and pulchritude and the insatiable mystery of the unknown that must be discovered.
His linen shirt was wrinkled and thin, torn in places.
There were stains on the sleeves. If the colors had been right, she might have guessed it was blood.
The trousers had been black, now a faded gray.
It was more than his unearthly beauty, more than the siren song of his voice, more than the impossibility of the moment. This was someone her soul knew.
She reminded herself how to breathe, steeling herself for a sudden influx of darkness without an instrument to help her sustain the motif. Preparing for what might happen in the dark.
The light stayed. It was not snuffed by breath, or the end of her song.
The sphere of light was strong and unbreaking.
She pulled her hand back like it might burn her.
It hovered in the space before her. This was not the way the magic behaved.
This was something different, something more, like a full moon on a cloudless night.
The edge of the light hardened and rose, no longer a glowing orb.
It transformed into a tiny moon. The magic worked without song or concentration, living solely on intent.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Magic needed more than just wanting, didn’t it?
Selene measured all her years of training, of spending countless hours in practice rooms curating her talent, memorizing motifs, learning how to twine them together to form a song.
She was sure she understood it, sure she could hold it inside her and transform it with her will and the direction of a motif.
And yet.
Curious, she willed the light apart, scattered it into constellations. The darkness shattered into a cluster of stars.
“Clever.” Half of the ghost’s mouth lifted into a smile.
Selene caught her breath at his expression. It was like being sliced by moonlight on the darkest night, that smile.
“How is this possible?” Selene lifted her hand and the stars danced. Magic was not for everyone. It required talent and study, a willingness to lose everything for the sake of a song. It couldn’t be this easy.
“Everything is different here.” His voice was a rumble of thunder dipped in honey. It was a timpani roll, an articulation of the cello.
“Where are we?” She tracked the shadowy edges of the light. They looked sketched, smudgy graphite marks that fed into a greater darkness.
“My prison.” The ghost brushed the dark hair from his eyes, face still cupped in shadow. “My tomb.”
Panic crawled up Selene’s spine.
“Is there a way out?”
His eyes unfocused. “I didn’t know there was a way in.”
What had he done to deserve a place like this? There was blood on his sleeves, that knife’s edge of a smile.
“Who are you?” Selene whispered.
Silence. Selene counted breaths until the quiet stretched so long that her skin rippled and crawled. She’d made a terrible mistake stepping into nowhere, this nothing. She ran arpeggios through her head, trying to calm her frantic heart, then took a step back. Looking for the way out.
There was nothing but shadow and shadow and shadow and him.
“I am a thing best forgotten.”
Selene swallowed the sharp side of a scream.
He turned his head, catching all the light and shadows. His cheekbones were high and sharp like the cut crystal of the chandelier. His jaw was strong and straight. There was a scar nicked into his eyebrow. That full mouth quirked up as to smile with a secret.
How could someone so beautiful be bad? There was some intangible quality to him that drew her in like the soft part of a song.
She could see a light in his eyes, marred by a well of sorrow.
It wasn’t like looking into the dead eyes on the tapestry of Renard or Prince Henri.
The prince’s mere presence had made her skin crawl.
She didn’t feel like that with this lovely, haunted stranger.
There was something so familiar about him. Against all odds, something safe.
“A name, then,” she said.
He regarded her through his thick, dark lashes. “You are used to getting what you want.”
Selene’s stomach tightened. She was no worthless dilettante, with her space in the opera house bought and paid for, like Priya. “I’m used to working until what I want is mine.”
“Relentless.” He raised and lowered his wide, strong shoulders. “And perhaps foolish.”
There was a shape and sound to his words that was foreign to her. He spoke like most people sang. Each consonant crisp, each vowel pure, no laziness or carelessness.
“A gentleman would honor the request of a lady.”
“I am no gentleman.” He brushed a hand over his shoulder. “And you, my lady, are in a place far from polite society.”
“You’re deflecting.” Selene quelled the brittle fear inside her. She didn’t know where she was or what he was or who he was. And she needed to. She needed more of him the way she needed music and magic and air. “Your name, sir.”
“Will you stop at nothing to have it?”
Selene put on her best performer’s smile. “Better tell me now and save yourself the trouble.”
The laugh rolled from deep within him, like distant thunder. And that’s when Selene was sure. He was real. However stars burn, Selene knew the difference between real and dreams.
“I have no name.”
He was toying with her. Selene could play this game—and part of her wanted to—but she was unsettled by the way the darkness pressed in.
“Everyone has a name.”
His brow furrowed with concentration, then broke with mourning. “I have forgotten.”
Selene prepared a rebuttal, until she saw his face.
The sorrow in his eyes was a beacon of truth.
There was something so honest and tragic about him, as eerie as a worn stone statue guarding a forgotten grave.
She thought of a riddle, a callback to childhood.
Victor loved to try and catch anyone he could in riddles and word games.
What belongs to you but is used more by others?
A name, a name. She wondered if names, like the voice, were lost from disuse.
Like the door that led her here, rusted shut.
“What can you remember?”
He closed his eyes. His hands laced and folded in front of him.
She counted the scars overlapping his forearms, following them until they disappeared beneath his sleeves.
There were too many. She imagined what it would be like to trace those scars with the lightest touch.
She reached for her own scars, the familiar grooves soft against her fingertips.
It was another sharp reminder of the difference between her and her peers. Selene knew pain.
So did he.
When the ghost opened his eyes, he looked bewildered. Afraid.
“Nothing.”
But that couldn’t be true. A person couldn’t just be lost entirely. Even the dead remained, clinging to the edges of memory, kept until the last person forgot, until every book and story rotted into dust. But this man wasn’t a fading memory. He was speaking to her. He had sung her here.
Music.
He remembered music.
Selene sang the light doloroso. All the melancholy in the world: for want of a name, for the loss of it. For the stranger inside the mirror who had lost so much of himself.