Chapter 37
In the moment where misery crossed into despair, Selene knew she’d found the heart of the magic.
She could use this for an endless supply of magie du sang.
There was no place in her that didn’t hurt.
Her father was alive, and she’d wasted all these years.
Her father was alive, and she’d been lied to again and again. Her father was alive.
The air was cold and crisp and cut against her skin. The blood turned shadows held her aloft over the city. There was little regard for the cost. The magie du sang could take all of her. She wasn’t afraid. There was no room for fear. There was only rage.
The roof of the opera house settled beneath her feet.
The shadows rose like steam from her still-bleeding hand.
She wanted the ghost. She needed the ghost. Dante Dumas.
Once he was out, he’d know the magic to piece together a broken mind.
The mirror would let her in. It had to. She had her father’s painting. And his ruined dream.
She kept her bleeding hand aloft, ready to use the flowing blood and a thousand miseries to push anyone out of her way. But the hallways were clean and empty. Selene saw no one, save for King Renard, dusty on his tapestry.
There was no time for the boat. She sang a bridge of ice, running across it with an impending sense of finality.
She didn’t care about L’Opéra du Magician anymore.
She didn’t want to serve a king who had lied and kept her from her father.
The bioluminescent creatures lit the mirror in a dazzling, dreamy blue.
The mirror stood sentinel to it all, the shape of Dante behind the glass.
He was there and he was waiting for her.
She was afraid if she stopped to catch her breath, she’d lose her resolve.
She hit the mirror at full force, bloody hand stretched out.
There was no collision.
Only darkness.
It caught her up in its web, so close to her skin that she was sure it was taking parts from her. She sang the light of a thousand stars. But the shadows didn’t burn away as they had before. They lingered, suffering the light a moment longer to stay close to her before they slithered off.
The ghost stood in a scattering of light, his eyes pale and endless as mountain ice. He looked surprised to see her, and then horrified. Maybe it was all the blood. Standing in the mirror, all her cuts started to heal. If only the mirror worked the same for the wounds inside.
“Dante,” Selene said softly, tasting the magic on her lips. His eyes widened, his perfect mouth forming his own name. “Dante Dumas!”
It was like a flash of lightning. The shadows shrieked and wove around them.
He was all light, his eyes brighter and brighter.
He remembered. She knew, she knew, she knew.
She could see the blue in his eyes blur with the force of it.
He brought his hand up to his cheek. A single, shadowed tear had slipped free.
He was whole.
“Say it again.” His pale blue eyes burned.
“Say what?”
“My name.”
“Dante Dumas,” Selene said. “You’re the whipping boy.”
Dante’s smile was different. There was something darker to it, a hundred years of untold suffering and the life he lived before folded beneath.
“My pain to benefit the crown, always.” He stared into the shadows as if he were reading them. His eyes sparked with some new understanding. “You weren’t supposed to come back.”
“You told me to bring you the death of a dream,” Selene said.
“An impossible task.”
“I’m—”
“Relentless. I remember. There are things at play here more important than promises and games played with shadow. You have to go, Selene. Now.”
Selene’s heart stuttered. She had to tell him about her father, about all that had changed. She couldn’t leave now. She’d crossed the sky to be here on wings made of shadow.
“The prince is putting up mirrors all throughout the opera house. Enough light to banish the dark.”
And set you free. Selene was afraid if she said the words out loud, she’d render them untrue.
“I don’t need the mirrors.” Dante’s eyes went sharp and cold. “There was always another way.”
There was sorrow in the pools of his ice-blue eyes. Something was wrong. Perhaps he had remembered something far too terrible to name. Maybe what she’d seen that first day had been closest to the truth—he was a monster and not a man bound in darkness.
“Do you know what you have done?” He had the oil spill knife in his hands. He was drawing lines down his arm. Cuts so deep. The blood slid into shadows almost as soon as the knife cut into the skin.
“I don’t care.” Desperation clung to the edge of her words. “Ask me what I want.”
“Selene—”
“Ask me who killed my father.”
Dante breathed out slowly.
“Ask me!”
“Who killed—”
“He’s not dead. I have my father again. That’s what I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
There were tears running down her cheeks. Rage still simmered inside her. All those wasted years. The lies that had been watered and fed, grown up from the ground to create a poisonous garden. She thought she could forgive that, eventually. As long as she had her father.
She waited for Dante’s uproarious joy. For him to smile and tell her that everything was finally the way it should be. But he just stood there cutting moons into his skin. He looked like she’d told him that the stars had winked out of existence. Like she’d told him that he’d never be free.
“Say something,” she said desperately.
“This isn’t the way it was supposed to be,” he whispered. He did not stop cutting into his flesh. Healing and splitting and bleeding and healing again. “Magic has a price.”
Selene took a step toward him. “You have your name. I have Father. And I’m going to get you out.”
“What have you brought me, Selene?” Dante said.
The question startled her. All she had was her father’s painting. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the paper. It didn’t hurt her in the same way it had to give up his watch. He could paint her a thousand pictures. He could paint the whole world and she’d be there with him.
“The death of a dream,” Selene said.
He brought the knife to his chest and cut above his heart. He drew sigils in the blood, shapes that almost looked like music. “Whose dream, Selene?”
“Mine.” She waited for him to take the paper. “I don’t need L’Opéra du Magician anymore. My dream has changed. All is new.”
“Damn it, Selene.” He pushed his dark hair from his eyes. Smearing blood on his face. “You are the death of a dream. Not that paper. What I asked for, you have brought inside yourself.”
The realization settled over Selene. The shadows around her rippled, pressing against the circle of light Dante cast with his blood. “But that means—”
“The magic will take you.” The ghost carved the knife into his abdomen. “I am doing all I can to keep it at bay. But I cannot stop it.”
“What can I do?” she cried. Desperate. She’d found her father again. She’d promised she’d be back. She’d found the ghost’s name and a way to free him.
And now, all was lost.
“Nothing,” the ghost said. The shadows crawled from his skin. There was not enough blood in his body to keep the darkness at bay. He stopped, a light going on in his eyes. “I can’t break this magic.”
“I don’t understand how this happened.”
“It was always supposed to be this way,” Dante said. “I didn’t know it, but the magic did. The things you brought were pieces. But you were always the final piece, Selene. The magic needs someone. You’re meant to take my place.”
Selene inhaled sharply. Her throat was thick with emotion. “All this time you’ve been helping me. You were going to betray me.”
“I didn’t mean it—or maybe I did. I don’t know. There’s so much of me lost. But I don’t mean it now. I know you, Selene. I could never hurt you.” He kept cutting. More blood, more shadow. It wouldn’t be enough.
She shouldn’t believe him, but she did.
“What do we do now?”
He searched the space between them, like there could be anything there but the dark. His eyes lit with something. But it didn’t matter. Selene could feel the pull of the shadows like a rip current, meant to drag her into the dark.
Dante started to sing. The feather, the seed, the shell, the watch, all pulled from the inky walls of the prison.
His voice and blood carried them aloft. He made one final cut, so deep Selene was sure she could see bone.
He held out the knife. The feather shifted to shadow, folding into the hilt.
The seed burst into bloom, tendrils of new life shimmering into darkness and wrapping up the blade.
The nautilus shell nestled into the pommel.
The nightingale broke free from the watch, spreading its wings and taking its place at the cross guard.
It was breathtaking, like nothing Selene had ever seen before.
Still, she wished it wasn’t the last thing she would behold.
There was no escape, no hope. This was the end. She’d seen the magic and knew what it could do. Selene held her breath and looked at Dante’s beautiful face. At least she wouldn’t die alone.
“When you get out,” Selene said. “Find my father. Heal him, I know you can. Tell him I love him and that it’s okay.”
The darkness moved in closer, swallowing the light.
“Not like this.” Dante stepped toward her, closer than he’d ever allowed. Selene could feel the heat of him.
“Wait, what are you doing?”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her.
Selene had not dared to dream of a moment like this, of the revelation of his touch.
It lit her up like a thousand little fires.
This was true magic. His lips were soft, his teeth sharp beneath.
She sighed into him. Breathing the wintergreen scent of him, holding on to this final thing.
A kiss, a kiss at last. It unfolded in her like a piece of music. A shared symphony between them.
The shadows swirled around them, magic and misery and not enough light. Closer and closer, until Selene was sure they would take her. But they surrounded Dante like a shroud, greedy and impetuous, ready to take him, instead.
He pressed her leather sheaf into her hand. “You are the magic and you are the music, Selene. Be it all.”
Inky shadows rose between them in gossamer tendrils.
And then she was torn from him.
Cast out into the dark.
It enveloped her, sucking her into a breathless nothing.
Except it wasn’t the impenetrable black of the mirror space. This was a familiar darkness. Cold and tangible and wet.
Selene’s lungs burned. Her feet scraped a bottom and she propelled herself upward, lighting the water silver-blue with bioluminescence.
And burst into the air of the cavern.
Her cloak was heavy with water, pulling her back down again. She unbuttoned it, kicking free and swimming to the stone platform where the mirror stood.
Where it used to stand.
The great beveled frame was empty, save for shards that clung to the edge. There was no backing, just jagged teeth in a gaping maw. She wished it would devour her.
Silver glittered up from the stone. She took one of the larger pieces, curved like a sickle moon. She saw only her own reflection. She was bleeding, bits of the mirror caught up in her hair.
“Dante,” she cried.
She sang his name and listened for the response.
Her voice echoed around the cave and ended in soul-crushing silence.
He couldn’t be gone. She could still taste the copper and wintergreen on her lips.
She sang for him the song they’d written together, all the words slipping from her tongue like desperate pleas.
She waited for his voice to rise out of the darkness. All she heard was the gasping of her own breath and the shudder of things deep within the water.
He’d betrayed her and he’d saved her and it wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. He should live. He’d never gotten the chance to live.
Neither have you.
She’d wanted to watch him in the sun. She’d wanted to hear the resonance of his voice outside of the mirror. She’d wanted to set him free.
And now it was over. Dante Dumas was gone.
She still held his final gift in her hands. Her sheaf of music. She opened it up. The pages remained dry. The song was perfect. She saw all the things she had forgotten. He’d written her name at the top, as the composer. And next to it, he’d signed his own: the opera ghost.
There was something else inside. The oil slick blade he’d remade with magic caught in real light.
It was even more beautiful outside the mirror.
The iridescences of soap bubbles and the sweetest dreams folded into the blade.
She drew it across the tip of her ring finger and let the blood drip on the sliver of mirror. Nothing happened.
The memory of his mouth on hers was as sharp as the cut on her hand. He’d broken his own rules. Traded his life for hers. He’d saved her from the dark.
And now Dante was lost to her forever.