Chapter 14
The boat was still there, still whole, and still carried her across the underground lake.
She drifted on the water, imagining how the ghost might look at her when she made her triumphant return.
Stepping in front of the mirror was like stepping into a tangle of moonlight.
Selene leaned into its glow, hoping she’d see the shape of him on the glass.
She sang the opening lines to the melody they had shared.
He didn’t come. Had she failed to answer what he had asked?
Be enough, she thought desperately. Please.
She took the pin from her pocket, her fingernails ringing against the crystal.
Something struck her. Cradling the goblet, she caught its reflection, hoping against hope that this might work.
She rapped her fingernails from glass to glass.
The mirror’s pitch was the same. Excitement welled in her, quick as blood to the newest pinprick on her finger.
With each passing moment, Selene could feel her heart beat accelerando, punctuated with doubt.
The feather wouldn’t be enough. She traced the deep circles beneath her eyes and the tangled curls of her hair.
What was she doing here? There were no guarantees that she would make it back in. She was wasting time, chasing a ghost.
The mirror soaked up the blood, hungry for her offering, washing away her uncertainty. She pushed through the shimmering surface and into the dark.
The relief was cut by the dizzying effect of going from one world to the next. It was a thousand pirouettes while being tossed beneath the churning waves and the space between dreaming and waking all at once.
She gasped, desperate for purchase. It should have been easier to adjust, knowing what to expect.
But it was a little worse. She breathed in the shadow.
The light she’d placed the night before was gone.
There was a flicker, just beyond her. A candle guttering in a storm.
Selene moved toward it, but it seemed more distant with each step.
The darkness roiled around her, coiling in like snakes, closer than before.
She sang the melody for light, letting the magic flood through her.
The darkness rushed away. She changed the light into a chandelier, like the one that hung in the theater.
It was too big for the space, twinkling and blinding and suffocating her.
She shrank it down until she was no longer overwhelmed by its glow.
“Samuel?” If she found the right name he might remember. “Gaston? Theodore?”
“Names.” He came from nowhere, extinguishing the wish of light he held in his palm. “None of them mine.”
Selene felt a fleeting slice of terror. She wasn’t afraid of him, but how could she contend with the years of warnings against the ghost? His beauty grounded her, his dynamic presence pulling her closer and closer, treading a dangerous line between touch and not touch.
Selene put on a smile. “Here I am.”
“Have you brought me what I asked?”
Selene took the feather from her pocket and held it as an offering on her open palm. “A piece of sky.”
“That will do.” The ghost took the feather gingerly between his fingers, a smile playing on his lips. Not enough to reach his eyes. But enough to set her teeth on edge. “This I have asked and you have answered.”
He brushed the fringe of the feather against his skin. Eyes closed, like he was waiting to remember something. Or maybe he was imagining her fingers, too.
He dropped the feather and watched it spin down and down.
A tendril of inky darkness crossed into the light.
Then another. Then another. Until a wave of liquid black moved around the ghost. Violent and vicious, this was the predator she had grown up to fear.
Not the man, but the blackness that contained him.
The feather was consumed before it even hit the ground. Swallowed into the merciless dark.
The tendrils crept back, sated. The dark seemed to hum with pleasure, like a cat after a kill.
“My gods,” Selene said.
“Don’t let it see your fear.” The ghost rolled his shoulders back. “As long as you’re in the light and don’t let it in, the dark can’t hurt you.”
“Let it in?” Selene centered herself in the light.
“With fear, with doubt, with curiosity. The dark will find any crack.” He shrugged as if it was a mundane inconvenience like a spider or misplaced key. “What is it you want?”
“To win L’Opéra du Magician.”
“This I have asked and you have answered.”
“What would have happened to you if I didn’t come back?”
“Something terrible, I’m sure,” the ghost said. “And I could not fulfill my vow to teach you.”
Selene held the crystal goblet aloft. “I think I know a way to free you.”
He leaned in, a hunger crawling up into his face. She remembered him to be monstrous, then. Something beyond human. Her breath caught, but she released it quickly.
“Hold the glass”—she gestured to the narrow window through the mirror’s face—“and stand there.”
“As you say.”
She took a step back to give him space to move, their paths crossing as if this were some sort of dance.
“Ready?”
He held up the goblet.
Selene sang her highest note. It rang, sharp and clear, piercing in its clarity. The glass trembled. For a moment, Selene was sure she could feel the floor shift.
The ghost’s eyebrows went up, and then settled into understanding.
“No!” he cried. The glass shattered in his hand, shards spraying across his face.
“If the mirror shatters, there’ll be no way out.
There’ll be nothing—for either of us.” Freckles of blood formed over his cheeks and began to weep.
“The mirror is the window. It is the anchor. Without it, there is nothing.”
Selene went cold. She hadn’t considered what would happen if the glass broke. She’d be trapped in here forever, or worse. “How can you be sure?”
“There are things I seem to know.” Blood ran down his face. The broken glass fell.
And so much he did not know. Selene caught a tremor in her hand, fighting the urge to wash the blood from him.
Somehow, the brutality of it didn’t make him less lovely.
There was something wrong about all of this that she had yet to unpuzzle, some sense of uncertainty that plagued her.
Perhaps it was the door painted to look like nothing, or the steps someone had carved from stone.
“Has this happened before?”
“I don’t know for certain.” All levity was replaced by dark consternation. “Of this I am sure: I could never forget you, Selene.”
If there had been darkness in his eyes, it was gone now. They were bright as twin moons, looking at her with an audience’s admiration. Countless people had looked at her father like that. No one had ever looked at her this way. She felt all at once undeserving of his adulation.
Selene had been forgotten. And the ghost had, too. He’d been abandoned here for a hundred years, his life and his mind stolen from him, because he had slipped from the consciousness of the world.
“I won’t forget you,” Selene said softly. Her heart beat con ardore, the disparate longing to close the space between them and brush fingertips almost too much. “Do you already know the way to escape the mirror, somewhere, down deep?”
“It is certainly forgotten. I would have used it.”
“I used blood to escape the mirror before,” she said. “Can you try?”
His cold blue eyes cut to her soul. He exhaled and the cuts on his face and hands—some of which had healed and some of which still bled—shifted from red into black, blood into shadow. Selene marked the tempo of her heart. This was the simplest solution, the easiest way out.
The magie du sang stuttered.
The shadows that had lifted into the air twisted, as if strangled. The rest of the ever-present dark churned with a sudden violence Selene did not expect.
And the ghost was not freed.
Selene was almost embarrassed by her disappointment. “I’ll keep looking.”
“I know you will.” He waved his hand. “Has the magie du sang proved its worth?”
“I love it. I love getting what I want.”
“And will it get you into the competition?”
“I have a plan.”
She sang the opening of the tempest aria, the illusion forming easily around her.
She didn’t need the orchestra to hold the motif like she would on the stage.
It stayed easily. The waves lapped at her feet.
The tableau was a shade off the ghost’s eyes, near enough that the undulation of the waves was close to distraction.
Selene focused on the next motif. The water’s soft spray turned harsher as the music picked up.
Selene pricked her finger with a pin and let the blood fall.
She used the same memory from this morning—her father by the sea.
The memory was still there, although it felt like there was a veil over it, colors muted.
Still, the air around them crackled with heat.
A sprig of lightning danced weakly across the water.
Selene stopped singing. The sea’s illusion stayed, the air thick with sung moisture.
The ghost stood in the midst of her half magic, enraptured by the sea. “I remember this.”
“It’s supposed to turn into a storm.”
He ran his fingers through one of the waves. There was a gentleness to his touch that filled Selene with an impossible sense of longing.
“What went wrong?”
She looked up at him, frustrated. “I don’t understand. I used this memory earlier and the magic worked.”
His brows knit together, like they had before.
He was remembering. She watched his expression shift, his eyes still closed.
She couldn’t have dreamed him more beautiful.
The strength of his jaw and the height of his cheekbones and the little cut below his chin.
He was a study in the way flaws made perfection, from his broken nose to the scar in his left brow to the shadow of a beard.