Chapter 7 #2
She turned the constellations brighter, grew a distant star into a moon that waxed and waned.
He listened for a moment, head tilted in concentration, then joined in.
Selene sang the counterpoint, turning her magic into illusion.
She grew a forest around them, trees yearning toward the light.
Already, she mourned the loss of this beauty.
It would all fall away the moment her song ended.
That was the trouble with illusion and tableau. Nothing stayed.
He pulled the stars down, letting them hang from the trees like ripe fruit.
Selene sustained her motif in wonder. He was changing her magic.
She didn’t know it was possible. For all the duets she’d sung, they had to maintain their own motifs and choreograph the magic separately.
This was something else entirely, as if music here yielded a different magic.
She caught his eye and they let the song fade.
The magic stayed. The forest—which outside the mirror would have faded with the final note—stayed lush and full and too close to real.
“That was …” She didn’t have the words. She’d never sung with anyone like this. It was more than a duet; it was two souls crashing together, raw and wretched and open.
“Incredible.” He collapsed against one of the trees, hands splayed against the bark. It held, like it was solid and not an illusion.
Selene pressed her fingertips against one of the trunks. She did not pass through, as she would with an illusion. She reached up and plucked one of the perfect fruits. “It’s real.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
Selene broke it open. A hundred golden seeds gleamed up at her. A pomegranate made of light and song. She crushed one of the seeds against her teeth. It tasted like that last day of summer, a sweetness marked with grief.
Selene offered him the other half. He took it. “Outside the illusion is just an illusion. You can’t make a real tree out of nothing. You need seeds.”
He peeled back the skin of the pomegranate, tearing into the jewels inside. Some of the juice glowed on his fingers. His expression shifted. “Things are different here. The magic is closer.”
Selene leaned forward, eager for some crumb of memory. “You remember?”
“It’s hard to put it to words.”
“Try.”
“I have language and music and magic and pain. The rest—who I am, where I come from, my name—is inside me, under the surface. I have the sense that I deserve this. That I’m being punished for something terrible.
” Those blue eyes were resolved, intensely fixed on Selene.
“Singing with you is like the first breath after drowning. It brings back pieces of who I am—who I think I might have been.”
Selene’s heart skipped, heat rising through her, feeling more than the magic of his voice or the cold blue of his eyes or the darkness that surrounded him.
“Is it the magic in the music?”
He shook his head, wisps of dark hair falling into his eyes. She wished she was brave enough to smooth them away. “It’s you.”
She drew in closer to him, aware of the rise and fall of his chest, the flicker of his pulse along the lines of his throat. Singing with him was a union of souls, so much more than any duet had ever been for her. Maybe that connection could make him whole.
“All I do is sing.” Selene was quiet. “From the moment I wake up until I go to sleep. I dream in treble clef and wake up knowing the key in which the birds trill. Every part of my brain is made for music. But what we did is different from anything else. It’s more.”
“You are music and you do music and you have nothing except music,” he mused. “Are you a prisoner, too?”
Selene did not think about the great doors in the foyer that were forbidden from being opened or the strict curfews or the brilliant summer days that passed with the students of the opera house locked inside.
She thought of her father, bent over his piano with trembling hands and exhaustion so deep it curved his spine.
“No,” Selene said, too quickly. The ghost seemed to take note. “If the music helps you remember, why do you stop singing?”
“Because I’m afraid.” His voice was pianissimo. One of the snakes of shadow reached for him. He dismissed it with a look.
“Afraid of what?” Selene looked around at the opaque, whirling dark.
“You ask too many questions.”
“You give too few answers.”
He laughed again—that rich, musical sound. She wanted to fold herself inside it, let it make her new. That surprised her. Being here, being with him filled her with a headiness like drinking too much wine.
Selene focused on the stars she’d created.
The stars that shouldn’t exist, bright and glowing like living gemstones.
There was music in them. She could feel the brightness of the notes, the motif cut through each facet like it was captured within.
A remarkable experience, something she couldn’t fathom in the light of day.
She felt for the dark. There wasn’t music there. It was magic and something else.
The ghost watched her, waiting.
“This goes against everything I’ve been taught,” Selene said.
“Perhaps you’ve had the wrong teachers.”
She thought of her father. Of Madame Giroux at the piano.
Of the various voice teachers she’d run out of the opera house.
Not on purpose, at first. She was relentless.
They couldn’t challenge her and she’d had no problem correcting them.
After that, Selene had studied exclusively with Madame Giroux, who loved rules.
She wrapped them around Selene like a shield, while still pushing her to be the best. Selene dove deep into the history and the theory of music and magic, filling herself with every possibility.
Once she knew the rules, she could break them.
This was different. Selene could feel the rules fracturing around her, shattering like stained glass. What else could magic do if it could create a place like this?
A tendril of shadow threaded toward her. She could feel the pulse of it, like a beating heart. It called to her, wanted her, needed her. Selene took a step forward, the weight of all these years of magic and music and untapped sorrow heavy on her.
“Can you wield the dark?”
Selene reached out her fingers, like she might touch it.
If she let the darkness have her—just for a moment—she might finally feel at peace.
The darkness purred, drawing her in and blurring her thoughts.
Wasn’t this everything she wanted? Wasn’t the lure of the dark sweeter than the promise of prestige?
Selene could have that. She could finally rest. She could forget all the terrible things she’d done.
“Don’t.” There was power in his command.
Selene pulled her hand back, suddenly aware of where she was and what she was doing. The darkness slipped back into the void. Selene turned sharply to the ghost. His hand was stretched as if to pull her from her reverie, long fingers curling into a fist to fall to his side.
The ghost’s chest heaved. His eyes were weighted with memory. “The dark takes things from you.”
Selene traced the edges of the prison. There was no reprieve here, no place that offered the barest hint of shelter. “How do you fight it?”
His smile was half-mad. “Sometimes I let it have me.”
“You remember?”
“When you speak the words, it’s like waking up from a dark dream to the fresh light of morning and feeling unworthy of the sun.”
He turned his face up as if remembering what that was like, as if the existence of the sun had just returned to him.
He was so beautiful, impossibly lovely. She could sing a tableau of this moment and no one would believe it was real.
She understood what it was to emerge from dark into light.
The familiarity of that web tangled her, guilt and grief and ambition coalescing, only ebbing when she disappeared into music.
“I know that feeling.”
“We are alike, then. Prisoners, in our own way.” The ghost’s cold eyes softened. “You haven’t told me your name.”
“Selene Dreshé.”
“Selene.” He said her name like a prayer, a plea, a song. “How did you find me?”
“I heard your voice and followed it into the dark.”
“Hasn’t anyone told you not to talk to strangers?” There was humor in his voice. “And not to walk into places when you don’t know the way out?”
“Relentless.” She didn’t tell him that there was something about him, a deep knowing in her that made him unstrange. “There’s never been a door that can keep me out. Even doors that do not exist.”
“There was a door?” The ghost leaned in, hopeful and intrigued.
Selene shook her head. “I saw you in the mirror and put my hand against the glass. And then I was here.”
“A mirror.” The ghost closed his eyes, as if he was drawing something from the darkest recesses of his mind.
Selene ran her teeth over her lip. If she kept talking, maybe she’d trigger another memory for him. “It’s the only mirror inside the whole opera house. Deep below, in a cavern of water and stone.”
His eyes snapped open. “The Palais Renard is finished?”
He spat out the name Renard like it was a poison. Selene could feel the anxiety build around him, buzzing with the electric energy of a thunderstorm. Even the trees around him seemed to quake.
“That name never stuck.” Selene tried to lighten his tension with a smile. “We call it the Opera Magique. Home, to me. It was built a century ago.”
The air changed the moment she said it. Everything colder and cold. The look on the ghost’s face was that of absolute devastation. What little color had been in his face drained away. Selene wished she could take it back, wished it could be different, somehow.
He pressed his hands to his forehead, then through his hair. “I’ve been here for more than a hundred years.”
A single, dark tear—like ink—slipped from the ghost’s eye and down his cheek. He sank to his knees. There was something terrible about it: to weep darkness, like something out of a nightmare. Selene took a step back. She should run. Go back to a place with a little more light.
But he was so beautiful and broken. A hundred years had passed with him trapped in a mirror. How could she let one more day go by? She knelt before him. Her fingers were close enough to feel the heat of his skin. Flesh and blood and more real than anyone she’d known. Not a ghost at all.
He looked up at her with wild eyes, flinching away from her. “You can’t touch me.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Never touch me.”
He had a knife in his hand. The blade swirled like an oil slick, the most color contained in this place. He pressed the blade to the inside of his forearm. Selene reached forward to stop him.
Blood, then shadow, unfurled from his wound. It ran up his arms, gathering swirls of black around his back like thunderclouds. He shot her an anguished glance, those inky tears still on his cheeks.
The darkness spread like wings made of black spider’s silk and tendrils of poisonous vines.
The rush of those wings, the force and violence of their exit, pushed her back.
It was all she could do to keep from falling out of the light.
His wings shuddered and lifted him up until he hovered above the ground, crowned by the stars Selene had created.
She should have been afraid. She should have found the way back through the mirror and never returned. But he was so hauntingly beautiful. His sorrow so close to the skin that it hurt her to witness. She couldn’t live with herself, knowing she’d left him here.
He hovered there—winged in darkness and haloed by false stars—like a vengeful god. There was no music to this magic. This wasn’t controlled by breath or voice. This magic was wild, living. It had taken his blood and made him monstrous and lovely.
Something sparked, feral and hungry inside Selene.
Whatever he was doing, whatever dark magic this was, she needed it.
If she could harness this, she would have magic like never before.
They’d have no choice but to crown her the King’s Mage.
To write the Dreshé name down in all the books. She would be unstoppable.
“Selene.” His voice was all the thunder but none of the honey, dissonant and dark and somehow still a siren’s song.
He flapped his great, dark wings. The force of it shattered the air, pushing Selene back, back, back. The ground slid from beneath her feet and she was floating, falling into the shapeless nothing that was the dark.