Chapter 24
Selene held up the seashell, pressing it to her ear one last time.
It whispered the music of the sea, transporting her to that moment last night, with Victor by her side.
His presence was a complication. As much as she’d missed him, as much as she wanted to fall back into old habits, she knew she was borrowing trouble.
He’d always had a gift for distraction. He wanted her to go and she needed to stay.
The mirror soaked up her blood.
Selene stepped through the glass, closing her eyes to ride the wave of disorientation. The coils of darkness shivered with pleasure, inching closer and closer still. She sang the light and cast a halo around herself. They buzzed around her impatiently, as if waiting to have her.
No matter how many times she saw the ghost, his beauty still overwhelmed her.
He faced away from her. He reached up, his thin linen shirt pulling up to reveal the low dimples at the base of his spine.
The skin on his back was marked with the silver strips of long-healed scars.
He was singing softly to himself, making patterns with light.
Selene saw this for what it really was: keeping the darkness at bay.
She understood that need. She wished she was better at it.
“Back so soon?” He looked at her over his shoulder, eyes bright with the false light.
There was a shadow to his smile, a worry Selene did not understand. She was afraid to ask. She knew what the darkness would do to him if she said the wrong thing. Instead, she held up the shell.
“A nautilus.” His brows furrowed. “Unusual for these parts. You really are a girl of impossible things.”
She smiled and dropped it into his palm. She didn’t tell him that the shell was not hers. Didn’t tell him that Victor had scooped it from the shore. Where it came from didn’t matter as long as it worked.
The ghost held the seashell up to his ear.
For a moment, Selene worried that the resonance wouldn’t exist in the mirror.
Seashells, after all, were only echoes. But he must have heard something.
His face turned to rapture. The light played on his cut-glass cheekbones and broken nose, highlighting the scar above his eye and the stubble on his chin.
Selene held her breath, not wanting to change the sound. Not wanting to move, lest she trigger the tendrils of darkness that were pressing against the light. The ghost did not heed them. He was enraptured by the music of the shell. When he opened his eyes, they were like a clear summer day.
“This I have asked and you have answered. Thank you. It has been too long since I heard the sea.” He held out the seashell with more reluctance than she’d ever seen from him. The darkness did not hesitate. He pulled his hand away right before the shadows touched his skin. “What is it you want?”
“To be the King’s Mage.” A bubble of excitement rose within her. Here in the dark, she could finally let herself be happy. “I made it. I’m in.”
The ghost’s smile was bright and genuine. He took a step toward her, as if to embrace her. Selene leaned closer, wishing that he could. “Congratulations. It is well deserved.”
“It was at the king’s insistence.”
“Who killed your father, Selene?”
“When will you stop asking me that?”
“When you give me the right answer.”
She pressed her fingers to her temple and massaged. The migraine still pounded behind her eye. “I killed him.”
The ghost took the oil spill knife from his pocket.
He peeled open his shirt and cut the space above his heart.
The cut was deep. The blood soaked his shirt, his pants, and then the floor.
There was so much blood. An unreasonable amount, far more than the pinpricks Selene had offered with tiny beads of blood like precious jewels.
This was a travesty, a waste. She wanted to press her hands against his chest and hold the wound closed.
“What are you doing?” Selene cried.
The blood congealed into shadow, lifting from the floor. It shifted, rising, and then burst into a dark red mist. The mist surrounded her, filling her mouth and nose and eyes.
She gasped and thrashed, drowning in shadow.
She’d been waiting for this moment for so long, for the sins of her past to catch and consume her.
There was a stark relief to this penance.
Father killer, breaker of rules, betrayer of friends.
She’d been a fool to think that her life was worth anything more than the waiting dark.
She had known he was a monster when she’d stepped into the glass and she deserved whatever terrible thing happened to her.
All at once, the shadows left.
And with it, the throbbing pain in her head.
Selene wasn’t sure whether to express gratitude or regret or horror—none of them seemed like the right emotion.
“My migraine is gone.”
“I know.” His smile was polite, tired.
“How?”
The ghost lifted his shoulders. The cut above his heart had healed into a thin line. The blood that had soaked his clothes had been spun into shadow and away. “Magic.”
“Magic doesn’t work like that.”
“Of course it does.”
The ghost ran his finger over the pink scar on his chest. She longed to do the same.
He was tall and strong and looked a hundred years younger than he was.
Standing here with him was like standing out in a thunderstorm, the air damp and electric.
Like that first sip of sweet wine. Like trying to hold on to a moment before it slipped into memory.
Familiar and true. “Healing takes more. Blood, pain, and wanting. More of each is required.”
“Could magic like that heal those who’ve gone mad?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know your madness or its cause.”
“But I could try.”
If Selene could undo what was done to Benson, to all the mages trapped in the Asylum, what would the world be? What would magic be if there was no more threat of being lost to madness?
“Be careful.” His voice was low. “Whatever this madness is, it is something we could not have imagined a hundred years ago.”
Selene thought of her father’s feral eyes. The color of that day had left with the pain. Selene was unnerved by the sepia-toned memory. Was this the cost of the magic?
It wasn’t forgetting, not quite. It was something else. Something she’d have to worry about another day.
With her head clear and without the sharp stab, she remembered what she’d wanted to ask.
“Do you remember a time when you weren’t alone?”
“Pieces. A little before, and a little after. For a time, I could see out into the world. Instead of all this black, there were windows in all shapes and sizes. I can’t remember, exactly, but I think there was something more to them.”
“Mirrors.” Selene knew every ghost story, every hint of the unusual. There had been sightings of a ghost in the mirrors. That’s why they’d been banned. Because the ghost was real. “Do you remember someone else coming inside the mirror?”
The ghost stood very still. “Tell me what comes next for you and your tournament of mages.”
Selene took out the sheaf she’d tucked into her dress.
She opened it up to the first page. It was a mess of phrases and half-finished thoughts.
Each of them written with the same intent: capturing the devastation of grief and ambition and the terrible cost of it all.
The ghost shook his head. Selene pulled out a blank page.
Just the clef and the staves and requiem written in fine, black ink.
“Set it in D minor.” The ghost cut the tip of his finger and used the blood to mark the key on the page. “It is the most melancholy key.”
Selene hummed the first note, the beginning of an aria taking shape in her mind. She pricked her finger with the pin. She didn’t bother pressing it to the page. She merely wanted the blood to be there.
“This will not do.”
The ghost dragged the tip of his knife against his pale skin.
The blood swirled into shadow and then took form.
Solid wood and familiar keys, all of them black.
It was an inkwell of a grand piano, cool beneath her fingers.
A bench—long enough for them to sit beside one another without touching—spread between them.
The ghost took his seat. “What if you went up to A here.” She sang the note. He met her voice and carried it down in steps. “And brought down the bass?”
“Yes,” Selene said. Her heart beat pressando. The ghost seemed to know what the song needed just as she did. Their shared minds stitched together an aria. There was something intimissimo about sharing breath to sing the same note.
Each one was carved out of her soul. All the darkness, a little of the light.
She needed both. It wasn’t enough for her to sing every dissonant and melancholy note.
Even the minor scale was dappled with major chords.
The ghost concentrated on the keys. His long fingers traced the black and the black with such tenderness.
When he sang with her in anticipation of a line, it was as if her very essence had been extended to another person. Their voices lifted, entangled. They were like two hands on the keys working in tandem to create something greater than themselves.
Selene could trace the history of him in the way he stacked the chords and the way he wrote the rhythms. She met him, note for note, and brought in a hundred years of growth and knowledge.
He lit up as she showed him something new.
What could he have done, if he had lived outside the mirror?
What greatness could this man have achieved?
Perhaps if she unraveled his crime, she could free him. What had he done to deserve this? What had she done to deserve him and his magic? She was lucky to be here. In his prison. In his tomb. She took that feeling and wrote it down. There was a melody for all types of sorrow.
“Sing for me,” he said.
Selene looked at what they had written, committing the notes to memory. She wove them together into a mournful melody, leaving out the magic. She needed the music first.
And oh, this aria. She glanced down at the sheet music—written in their combined blood—and let her voice caress the line.
It was gentle and wanting, like a bandaged-up broken heart, a thin scar on a once-open chest. She wanted to carve this music into her skin and keep it there.
She wanted to sing it until her throat was filled with blood.
She wanted to stay here in the dark and forget, forget, forget.
Selene shivered and focused on the music.
It was only twelve measures. Not quite a song. But a start. It highlighted the strengths of her voice, pushing it into perfect clarity. This piece was the best of her.
When she was finished, she looked at the ghost. This piece was the best of him, too. He made her better. He made her want to be more.
There’s nothing else for me, she thought. But she wasn’t sure she believed it.
“I will hold on to the memory of your voice long after I’ve forgotten every other part of me.”
“You’ll remember everything,” Selene said, “when you step into the light.”
“You are the light.”
For a moment, she thought he might kiss her. They were close enough for it, a sixteenth note of space between them. They couldn’t touch; they were never supposed to touch. That didn’t change this want, this need.
“Selene.” His eyes were wide and wet and so very blue. Not as cold as she once thought. The heart of a flame could be as blue as ice.
She knew this part was coming and hated it.
“Bring me a fragment of what once was.”
And for the first time tonight, Selene was sure. She would complete this task and come back to him. She would be here again with this beautiful man and listen to the warm lull of his voice. More than a vow. She wanted to set him free, like she wanted to win.