Chapter 29
It could have been hours or seconds or years.
Time was a tide that ebbed and flowed with a fickle moon.
Everything was melody and heartache and the impossible beauty at their intersection.
Selene bled the tips of her fingers to mark the page.
The ghost left smudges of blood on the keys and on the edges of the sheet music.
She watched him from the corner of her eye, the cut of his jaw and the passion in his icy blue eyes.
He was in love with art the same way she was.
Music was more than bleeding and wanting.
Each note was pulled from the ether and pressed into sound.
Sung and played and felt down to the soul.
“Like this?” Selene sang the line. The ghost played the same notes on the piano. Selene ran it through a few times to solidify the rhythm before she wrote it down.
“What if the music is more, Selene?” He moved with the music. “What if instead of magic, it told a story?”
Her father had changed the world by giving magic a story. Could she do the same by adding story to the song?
Selene considered it, feeling electricity beneath her skin.
She’d seen the operas, heard the sounds made popular by singers, watched every form of sung magic she could find.
The tableaux were the story, every essence of entertainment focused on the magic and the loveliness of the vocals.
For the most part, the songs were simple and repetitive.
They had to be, for the vocalist to balance the magic and the music.
Even Selene’s arias were like that. She’d focused on what magic could do, instead of what music could be.
“What story?” Selene tapped her fingers against the glossy black keys.
“The only one that matters.”
He played the counterpoint on the piano, the magical motif starting in the voice and then breaking and spreading between each of the parts.
Selene had only ever written music with the motif contained to a single instrument.
She’d start it in the voice and then let the cello or the clarinet continue the melody while she sang in the second element.
Simple, easy ways to maintain the motifs.
This was brilliant, using the combination of the voice and the orchestra to channel the same magics, but with a careful subtlety that allowed for endless variation.
It had the power of the motif but none of the repetition.
It told a story, but not just with the magic.
The song was the story. It was art made new.
“Yes.” The ghost’s smile was a rising moon. He wrote it in his blood.
“The aria will sound like an aria.” Selene suppressed a shiver. “I always wanted to push the boundaries of magic. I never considered doing it with the music.”
“Anything can be magic if you make it so.”
The intensity of his gaze shifted from Selene back to the piano.
His fingers danced through the first movement.
She hummed along, writing the notes and flourishes he added when he played.
She’d always considered writing a solitary act.
Others hired coaches, worked with their friends and teachers.
Besides Gigi, she’d never dared collaborate.
Writing was personal, private. She didn’t want anyone to hear the wrong notes or see the mess on the page.
Selene traced her fingers over the bars. The piece was lovely, nearly perfect. But she could see the gaps in what they were writing. What this piece begged for was a second voice.
“Sing with me?” Selene said.
“It would be better practice if you sing it alone.”
The ghost’s breath warmed her shoulder. She couldn’t be this close to him without touching him. She stood up, moving to the other side of the piano. Close enough that she could still see the music but far enough that she wasn’t tempted to lean into him.
“Just this once,” Selene said.
“All right.”
The ghost played the first chord. His voice rose like a promise, meeting hers.
The languidness of the line drew her closer to him.
She watched his hands fly over the keys, listened to the purr of his voice and how easily it fit with hers.
Did he know how exquisite he was? From the shape of his shoulders, to the movement of his hands, to the way his lip trembled with vibrato.
She’d never seen a man more lovely than music.
When she could no longer bear the sight of him in such rapturous beauty, she closed her eyes.
They could be anywhere, singing like this.
She could practically feel the rush of the ocean, the sand beneath her toes.
She could taste the salt air and feel the sun on her face.
And he was there with her, outside the mirror.
They were free from all of it. From the mirror, from L’Opéra du Magician, free from their lives.
She wanted nothing more than to touch him, to be touched.
She imagined taking his hand and pressing it over her heart so he could feel the vivace rush of her heart, those full lips on hers.
Singing with him was like breathing. Singing with him was like dreaming. Singing with him was everything, all at once.
He lifted his hands from the keys, their voices swallowed in the dark. He looked at her with a happiness she had yet to see on his haunted face.
“Thank you, Selene.”
She pushed a damp curl from out of her face. “I should be thanking you.”
“All I’ve brought you is a way to shape pain.”
Selene shook her head. “You’ve changed everything.”
“That final note.” The ghost played the chords leading up to it. “What if you took it up to the sixth. A little dissonance, and then resolve.”
Selene sang it over the piano and wrote it down. She could see the magic, rising in her mind like it would on the stage. She indicated the places where she needed pain with a breath mark.
She tried to focus on that, and not the elegant way the ghost’s hands moved over the keys. Not the way it felt to sing with him, like it was the last song. Like it was the only song. Like it was her whole heart. She reached the end of a measure and realized what she’d done.
Carefully, she wrote the word fine in delicate script.
The aria was finished. And it was brilliant.
Far beyond what she could do on her own.
She’d have two sung elements, and numerous places where the melody was written in, but the magic would come by blood.
Two types of magic and endless possibilities.
A spectacle of ingenuity. No one else would come close to what she had created.
And the music carried the story.
“Sing once again with me,” the ghost said.
She sang. The ghost played with her for a little while.
Then he dropped his hands, taking out his little knife.
He bled for her a quartet of shining black instruments.
They took on their parts, playing each note perfectly.
Selene sang louder, her voice rising above the orchestration.
The ghost focused on her, hand moving from time to time to conduct.
What they’d written held the continuum of the magical motifs and played so perfectly against hers.
She imagined what it would be like to sing this song, with a full orchestra and an audience and the ghost out onstage with her.
It would be like living a dream. The resonance and the response of the audience, the glow of the stage lights and the feel of his hand in hers as they moved to the coda.
She knew each curve and line of these notes.
When she was finished, she rested her hand against the lid of the grand piano.
The open lid slammed shut. The wretched cacophony of discordant sound reverberated through the soundboard before deadening in the dark.
The ghost pressed his hands to his eyes, eyebrows drawn down. His hands trembled with memory. She could see it in the way his shoulders curved, hear it in the raggedness of his breath. She splayed her fingers against the black wood of the piano until they turned white.
“What is it?”
“There’s a scrap: my hands aching and blood and teeth in new green grass. A feeling of knowing I’d done something I couldn’t come back from. But nothing whole or damning.” He breathed in sharply. “Not enough to warrant this hell.”
“But you remembered something.”
“I didn’t tell you,” the ghost said. “For the first time, I remembered something without you here. I remembered my mother.”
The way he said it, it was like a curse.
“Was it awful?”
“She was beautiful.” There was a bitterness to his voice. He put his hands on the onyx keys but did not play. “She taught me how to play the piano.”
Selene sat on the bench beside him, keeping enough space between them. She played the first chord in their song. He picked out the melody while she moved through the different progressions. Already knew the memories she’d pull from. “What else do you remember?”
“One morning,” the ghost said, “she dressed me up in my finest shirt and trousers and took me out near the road by the house. The sun was warm and I wanted to climb trees. She kept my hand firmly in hers. There were hoofbeats on the road. A man gave her a sack and then she kissed my cheek and sent me away. The after is hazy. But I remember being afraid. I remember knowing that my mother had traded me for whatever was in that sack. Gold or grain or wool. Whatever it was, it measured my worth.”
“No one deserves that.” Selene didn’t know what else to say. She kept playing the next chord and the next. Music as a balm to the soul.
The ghost struck his hands against the keys. Playing out of tune and out of sync with her. A discordant, terrible melody.
“Wish I knew the rest to this tragic backstory.” He kept his voice even, but she could hear the emotion that wanted to break through. “And the crime I can’t remember or escape.”
“I wish I knew how to help.” Her voice was barely audible over the music. She had to do more. He deserved more.