Chapter 26 – Elise
Chapter Twenty-Six
Elise
Elise rushed offstage right, applause still chasing her heels, and stepped straight into the storm.
The quick-change team closed around her.
Hands moved everywhere at once—unfastening, lifting, tugging, smoothing.
Gina caught the dress before it pooled at Elise’s feed.
Marcie had the final wig ready. Someone pressed a towel briefly to the rain of sweat at the back of her neck, then vanished.
Someone else was already pulling the last costume up over her hips.
For years, Elise had been the hands behind the illusion.
Now she was the illusion.
And she forced herself to stand still while the world spun around her.
“Arms,” Gina said. Elise lifted them.
“Chin.” She tipped it up.
“Breathe,” Marcie added, quieter. That one was harder.
Every snap sounded like a countdown. Every hood felt like a second disappearing. Beyond the wing, the stage waited—lit, fogged, dressed for romance. The audience waited for Elizabeth and Darcy. The Specter waited for Elise.
And somehow, all of those things were about to happen in the same place.
Lark waited nearby with her injured ankle propped up on a road case, Cici’s face glowing from the phone in her lap. A corner of spellbook nestled in the frame, its pages fluttering in a draft Elise couldn’t feel.
Cici was already chanting underneath her breath. It was starting.
Lark reached for Elise without a word and slipped the pocket watch into her hand.
Kevin’s talisman.
The chain was cool. The watch was hot.
It burned with stored heat, as if it had been pressed against someone’s living heart.
Elise threaded it over her head and tucked it down into the bodice of her dress, where the metal landed against her sternum, hot enough to make her flinch.
Good.
Let it hurt.
Let it remind her what she was carrying.
Then Lark handed her the photograph. Elise tucked it into her neckline, where it would stay hidden until she needed it.
Then her fingers brushed the seam of her skirt and found the hidden straight pin.
Still there.
Waiting.
A whisper curled through the air, almost too thin to be real:
“Almost there.”
Kevin.
Elise shut her eyes for half a breath.
She wanted to ask if he was scared. She wanted to ask if he was still whole. She wanted to tell him that if this worked, she was going to yell at him for every reckless, self-sacrificing, impossible thing he had done.
But there was no time.
There was never time backstage. Only cues.
Earlier that day, in the deceptive calm before the house opened, Elise had stood behind Lark in the wig closet, pinning her lace front in place while Cici recited the final steps from the phone propped against a box of bobby pins.
The room had smelled like lavender setting spray, hot tools, and old velvet. Ordinary things. Work things. Safe things.
Cici’s voice had been steady.
“You summon. We banish.”
Lark had nodded in the mirror. Elise had watched her throat bob as she swallowed.
“Just remember: step, turn, prick, summon,” Cici said. “That’s all. Step, turn, prick, summon,”
At the time, Elise had filed the words away under “not my job.”
Now, the words returned to her.
Step.
Turn.
Prick.
Summon.
Cici had leaned closer to the camera then, voice softening. “Once the summoning is complete, your job is to finish the scene. Let us carry the rest.”
Let us carry the rest.
Elise opened her eyes.
Backstage was crowded.
More than usual. Everyone who could be spared had come, tucked into the wings, behind flats, beside road cases, in every narrow gap the theatre would allow.
Candles glowed in careful hands. Crystals and herb bundles caught the light. Strips of paper marked with symbols trembled between fingers. A line of salt ran pale and thin along the orchestra pit, connecting the wings in a rough, imperfect look.
Nothing about it was elegant.
Everything about it was holy.
It was a circle made of backstage scraps and human stubbornness. Candle wax. Gaffer’s tape. Salt. Sharpie ink. Borrowed courage.
And choice.
That was the part that nearly broke her.
No one had been trapped into this. No one had been duped. No one had been forced to believe her.
They knew what she was.
They knew what waited in the dark.
And still, they had come.
And Elise was the bait.
Casper clutched a candle in one hand and a whole handful of crystals in the other, tears already spilling freely down his face.
Jasper stood beside him with a lighter in his fist like he was prepared to fight the afterlife personally.
Bex mouthed “You can do this,” while trying very hard not to cry.
Mila and Romy, shoulder to shoulder, each gripped the same taper candle.
Devon had his eyes closed, lips moving in prayer.
Nick stood at the far wing with Marco’s face on a phone in his hand, both looking terrified but smiling anyways.
Jen, sharp-eyed and serious, lifted three fingers from her headset.
Three seconds.
Elise’s throat tightened.
Two seconds.
She was not alone.
One second.
These were her people.
And cue.
Elise took one breath.
Then she stepped into the light.
Fog swirled low across the stage, wrapping around her. Low mist curled around the stones of the bridge set, soft enough to look romantic from the house. The lights caught in silver edges. Somewhere above her, the rain cue waited.
Across the stage, Graham stood in position.
Darcy, to the audience.
Graham, to her.
His eyes found hers, and the chaos inside her stilled.
Not because he was unafraid. She could see the fear in him, tucked beneath the polish of his posture and the controlled line of his mouth.
He was afraid.
He stayed anyway.
The scene began.
His first line landed exactly where it should, full of restrained longing. Elise answered. Her voice did not shake.
They crossed toward each other with the careful gravity of two people pretending this was only a love scene, exactly as Lark had rehearsed.
Step.
She turned away from the audience, just enough to make the movement read as blocking.
Turn.
Her hand rose to her collarbone. To the house, perhaps it looked like Elizabeth gathering herself before a confession. To Elise, it was the last ordinary gesture before the world broke open. She drew the pocket watch from beneath her bodice. The weight of it swung gently as it fell into her palm.
Kevin’s voice brushed her ear, barely there.
“You can do this.”
With her free hand, Elise found the pin in the folds of her skirt.
Prick.
The sting was sharp. Clean. Chosen.
A bead of blood welled on her fingertip.
Not taken. Given.
She folded the photograph, the watch, and her blood together between her palms.
And last: Summon.
“Come to me,” Elise said—to Darcy, to the Specter, to the audience. It was off-script, but they needed an invocation. Jen had shut down Lark’s idea of Elizabeth saying, “Come and get me, motherfucker,” in the show’s climactic love scene, so they’d settled on this instead.
For one suspended breath, nothing happened.
Then the air changed. Her tattoos ignited. Pain flashed through her arms and collarbone, white-hot under the make-up. She gasped, but she did not step back.
The fog at her feet thickened, curdling from white to gray to something nearly black. It moved with purpose now, dragging itself toward her ankles in slow, hungry ribbons.
Beneath the smell of stage fog and damp wood came something else.
Cologne.
Faint. Familiar. Cruel in its ordinariness.
Elise’s body knew it before her mind formed the thought. Her shoulders wanted to fold inward. Her chin wanted to drop. Her voice wanted to vanish back into the safest corner of her chest.
There he was.
Not fully formed. Not yet. But present.
The old pressure of someone standing too close. The certainty that love could become a room with no exits. The old command, relayed without needing words:
Smaller.
Elise lifted her chin.
No.
She had called him here.
She looked at Graham.
He saw the change in her face. Saw the fog. Maybe even saw the way the past had reached for her. His hand twitched, like every instinct in him wanted to pull her behind him.
He didn’t.
He trusted her.
The fog surged, angrily. A low rumble moved through the stage, too deep to be thunder, too wrong to be sound design. Somewhere in the house, someone gave a soft, delighted gasp, probably assuming the production team had sold their souls for an excellent opening-night effect.
Elise reached for Graham’s hand—not as Elise, not as Elizabeth, but as both. Together, they began the climb toward the bridge.
The blocking held them in elegance: joined hands, measured steps, lifted faces. Romance in silhouette. Beneath it, terror dragged at Elise’s bones.
Downstage, the black fog pressed against the salt boundary. Tendrils stretched toward the orchestra pit and recoiled, searching for a seam.
Then she saw the footprints.
One disturbance in the mist.
Then another.
Pacing, trailing after where she just stood.
Following her.
The Specter was inside the circle.
And so was she.
Finally, the rain began.
At first, a delicate patter. Then steadier. Cool droplets struck Elise’s face, her shoulders, her arms. Makeup loosened beneath it. Concealer thinned.
Her tattoos emerged line by line.
Pentacles. Moons. Protective marks. The private language of survival written across her skin.
Visible.
She did not move to hide them.
In the wings, the chant began to rise.
Cici first, steady through the phone speaker. Lark beneath her, shaky but determined. Then Romy. Bex. Devon. More voices joined from both sides of the stage, soft enough for the orchestra to cover, strong enough for Elise to feel.
Let us carry the rest.
The stage pause stretched one heartbeat too long.
Elise prayed the audience read it as longing.
Then Graham gave the smallest pressure against her hand.
Now.
She spoke her next line.
He answered.
The scene held.
They climbed higher, step after step, until they reached the center of the bridge. From there, Elise could see everything.
The audience, hidden beyond the blinding lights.
The wings, alive with candlelight.
The black fog coiling below.