Chapter 9
When Selene stood in front of the mirror again—clean and dressed in a lapis lazuli gown—she knew exactly what she wanted. She clutched a shard of glass in her hand and pressed it onto the pad of her thumb. The ghost had made such a little cut—merely a drop of blood.
She slid into the mirror. This time, she knew where she was going and what she wanted. The dark was just as disorienting, but it had a purpose.
She sang for light the moment she felt something solid beneath her feet.
He was crouched in the dark, head bowed against his chest. So lovely, he looked like he could be gilded and placed in this opera house.
Perhaps it was the sharpness of his cheekbones or the cut of his jaw, the width of his shoulders or the curl of his fingers.
Her breath caught in her throat, made a mockery of all her years of training.
The tendrils of darkness scattered from him.
Some of the shadows were still in his eyes, breaking up the clear blue.
He blinked, and his eyes were back to winter skies, as if they’d never been touched by the dark.
“You came back.” He looked as if he had hoped for this but couldn’t believe it would come true, like she was the North Star on a cloudy night, enough to guide him home. No one had ever looked at Selene like that before. “Aren’t you afraid of me?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“But you saw what I am. What I become.” There was a tremor to his voice.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
She’d never been less afraid of anything in her life. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything. She reached for him, fingers close enough to touch. They both stood perfectly still, as if waiting for the other to pull away or push forward.
“You became something new.”
“A monster.”
How like Selene he was, and yet she could see all the wonder in him that she forgot in herself. He was pure magic—an impossible, lovely thing.
“It was incredible.”
He looked at her strangely then. “Magie du sang is an art unto itself.”
“Magic of blood?” Selene shivered.
“Magic of pain. Blood is a small necessity.”
“If I had known I could bleed magic, I would have saved myself a lot of time in the practice rooms.”
He cocked his head. “What kind of magic do you have in your world now, after all of this time?”
“There is only one,” she said, tasting the soured truth on her tongue. She knew now that was a lie; she just wasn’t sure how big of one. The shadows whirled around her with a magic of their own, different from what the ghost had performed. “Music.”
The ghost made a small cut into his arm. The blood became shadow and the shadow swirled around him, forming a chair. “Someone has been lying to you, Selene.”
“It could have been forgotten,” she said.
“It seems a lot to forget in a hundred years.”
“They forgot you.” Selene swallowed. It had only taken a single act for the world to forget Giuseppe Dreshé, for them to replace him with a madman. But the ghost wasn’t wrong.
“And what of the Council of Mages? Surely they could not let all other magics be lost.”
“If you can’t remember your name, how can you remember a council?”
He closed his eyes. “I remember things with you.”
Selene considered what she had said to spark this memory, how she could repeat the process. “There is no council.”
“Who governs the magics?” Distress crossed his beautiful face. It should have made him less, but somehow it deepened his loveliness.
“No one.” Selene brought her hands up in supplication. “Magic is art. There’s nothing to govern.”
He turned his palms up. She watched him curl his fingers into fists and open them again. They were strong and calloused. Not the hands of useless wealth. Who had he been a hundred years ago and what did she need to do to help him remember?
“Who governed you?” she said at last.
“I don’t remember the names or the faces, just the feeling,” he said, as if it didn’t bother him in the slightest. He was distracted, focused on something else. “What is the purpose of your art, Selene?”
“To entertain.” She shivered at the sound of her name on his lips.
“That’s it? That’s all it is to you?”
“As if that’s not enough?” Fury rose in Selene. “I’ve spent the last seven years studying to compete in L’Opéra du Magician. To win and be the King’s Mage.”
He flinched and tried to hide it with the sweep of his arm up and into his hair. “To be a servant of the king is something you truly wish?”
“It’s the highest honor.”
He pressed his head into his hands. It was more than the grief of a hundred years’ captivity. There was a depth to this Selene did not understand.
Selene wanted to change the timbre between them, to change the key into something brighter. He was too beautiful for this profundity of sorrow. Perhaps if she asked the right question, he would have an answer, a memory.
Selene lit the space with her most dazzling smile. “Did they have horses when you were young?”
“Horses,” the ghost said. There was a twinkle in his eyes. His smile was haunting; he’d play this game with her. “As big as elephants.”
“Oh?” Selene was coy. “They’re much smaller now, the size of teacups.”
“Our teacups were the size of soup bowls.”
“Then they’re the size of thimbles,” Selene said. “And what of cakes, did you have those?”
“Alas, no cakes,” the ghost said. “Merely cubes of sugar stacked high, sometimes spun into webs.”
“To catch flies?”
“To catch boys who want things above their station.”
There was something chilling about that assertion, something too close to home. “And what of the moon?”
“It was close enough to touch,” the ghost said, his musical voice taking her in for a story. “And every night the hungriest of us would bite along the edges, little by little, until there was nothing left. And then we’d wait for it to grow again to something big and round and full.”
Selene leaned into him. “What does the moon taste like?”
“The same sugar they catch us with.”
A chill traced up Selene’s spine like a finger. The playfulness of the mood had turned and the ghost’s pale eyes were downcast and stormy.
“Why did you come back?” he said.
“I couldn’t leave you,” Selene said. “Alone in the dark.”
“Surely there is more reason than that?”
There was so much she could say. She’d run possible questions and answers through so many times it almost felt like she had lived them. She knew exactly how to appease the papers or a crowd, to garner adoration or sympathy. It was harder to find words for the truth.
“My father was the greatest magician that ever was,” Selene said. “And when he died, people seemed to forget. If I win, I have a chance to right history. To give my father the legacy he deserves.”
The ghost held up the knife, watching the colors change in the light. Selene couldn’t look away from the set of his jaw or the shadows cast by his long eyelashes. He was the kind of beautiful that seemed like a lie. “And this is truly what you want?”
“More than anything.” She didn’t know who she was without this. Losing her chance was like losing herself. “It’s been every part of me for longer than I can remember. Haven’t you ever wanted something so badly you’d do anything to have it?”
“I want to see the sky.” He tilted his head up to an imaginary sun. “I want to breathe the salt air. I want my name, and everything else that was stolen from me.”
Selene sucked in her bottom lip. With all that she knew, with all the resources at her disposal, there had to be something she could do. “I can help you.”
The ghost’s dark brow furrowed. “Why would you do that?”
“Because.” Selene stood a little straighter, channeling her best Madame Giroux. “You’re going to teach me your magic.”
He held out his hands, showing his scars in their fullness. He pressed his fingers against the line on his arm. A silver scar where there had once been a wound. It matched a hundred other marks. She wondered if he remembered each one, or if they’d been stolen like his name.
“Why would you want this?”
“I need to win.”
“That’s not enough.”
The dark slithered like a quiver of snakes. It frightened and calmed her. How could she tell this next part of the story without betraying her heart?
“Then what is? I am here, in this impossible place, asking, begging you to change my life. This is all I want. This is all I have.”
He regarded her. She let him assess her, as she’d been weighed and measured by so many teachers, and waited for him to somehow know. She was worthy. She would fight for this.
He must have sensed that in her.
“Magic has a price.” His voice was soft and low, sweet and soothing, as if she were a wild thing.
“Of course it has a price.” She swallowed, aware of the movement of her collar on silvered scars around her throat. “I’ve been paying my whole life.”
“I need to know that you are sure.”
The memories came to her in a terrible rush of blood red and sky blue.
She swallowed them down like sickness and licked her lips.
Slowly, she undid the buttons around her throat.
Her pulse fluttered beneath her fingertips.
She’d gone to such great lengths to conceal this part of herself.
Everyone knew how it happened, but few knew the reality.
“When my father went mad, he tried to rip my throat out. This is my only chance to clear his name, to remind people who he was. Not the madman, but the mage.”
The ghost took a step closer. Brought his hand up, as if to trace the network of scars that circled her throat. He never touched her but was close enough that Selene could feel the heat rising off his skin. There was a spark of something in his eyes. He knew what it was to bleed.
Selene fastened the buttons around her collar.
The ghost ran his thumb against his forefinger, warring with the idea.
She watched him, tried to keep herself from falling to her knees and begging.
She needed whatever would give her an edge.
Madame Giroux wouldn’t be able to say no to this kind of power.
No one would.
“Please.” Selene let the desperation creep into her voice, real and raw. She had to have this.
His exhalation came so softly, but this close, she could feel warmth and the resignation. “You have to promise me that you won’t teach anyone else.”
That was easy. Selene wouldn’t give any more fuel to her competitors. “I promise.”
“There is a price.”
Selene didn’t even try to count the beats of her heart. She’d worked for years to be good enough with music, and even then, it wasn’t enough. This magic came as easily as breathing. She didn’t care what it cost. “I’ll pay it.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.” He turned away from her.
For a moment, Selene was sure she’d seen a glint of something dark in his eyes that made her wonder.
She’d fallen through the mirror with this beautiful, monstrous man who could teach her impossible magic.
It was all too strange, too convenient, too right.
She should be questioning it, fighting against the ease with which this bargain appeared.
But Selene was decided.
“Then tell me.”
“The magie du sang requires your pain.”
Selene laughed. “It can have it.”
“More than that.” The ghost smoothed his dark hair.
She counted the scars on his hands, wondered if she’d soon share in that tapestry.
“If I am to teach you, there are things you must agree to. There is a magic older than pain. I’m bound to it; I don’t know why or how.
I just know what must be done.” All these magics secreted away.
There was a part of her that doubted him, doubted the realness of the magie du sang and whatever this older magic was.
In her world, there was only music. But how much of her world had she actually seen?
Selene could count the cities she’d been in on one hand.
She could count the days she’d spent out of the opera house in the last seven years on two. What did she know?
“I’m not afraid.”
He regarded her thoughtfully. His eyes were so blue, they seemed to glow, like gems caught in the light. “Every day I will ask of you three things. One for the magic. One for you. And one for me. If you cannot answer these three things, you cannot come back.”
Selene took a breath. “How do I know that you won’t ask me something impossible?”
His smile coiled like a serpent. “You don’t.”
“All right,” Selene said. “I’ll do it.”
The ghost took out the little knife. Selene was drawn to the kaleidoscope of colors, comforted by the vibrancy. At least there was color in this place, some proof that he might have been real.
“We must swear to it.” He made a shallow cut down the palm of his hand and then offered the knife to her, hilt first, careful to keep his fingers from touching hers. “Swear on something that matters.”
His blood still warmed the knife’s edge. Proof that this wasn’t a dream, proven again when the blade sliced into her skin. The pain was nothing compared to the elation. “I swear on the soul of my father that I will do all you ask of me.”
“I swear on my name that I will teach you magie du sang.”
His name.
The drops of blood that ran down her hand onto the ground stopped their descent. They lifted to the space between them, mingling with the ghost’s blood. They twisted and twisted together until they evanesced into shadow.
“Let us begin.”