Sing Me Forgotten

by Jessica S. Olson

  Screams echo all around me. People stampede for the exits.

  But all I see is Emeric.

  He stares, his face blank, his eyes glassy. Though the symphony has long stopped playing, my power holds him bound to his music, and he continues to sing without pause.

  As I leap over fractured wood and careen past broken glass and licks of flame, Cyril’s voice cuts through the air.

  “It’s the gravoir! Stop it before it kills us all!”

  I’m almost to Emeric now. If I can pull him away from the stage, get him somewhere safe, I can take all of this elixir gathering around me and push it into him to restore what was taken. And then we can run.

  A pistol fires, and the bullet rips through my injured shoulder, throwing me headfirst into the stage. I clamp down on the scream in my throat and push myself up with my right hand.

  My whole body quivers, and fuzzy spots take over my vision once more.

  I’ve already lost too much blood.

  I suck in the droplets of elixir hovering around my face. When the honey taste hits my tongue, I moan.

  Why does it taste so good?

  My limbs quiver with desire. I need more.

  I need all of it.

  As I gulp it down, my body fills with life and strength. The pain recedes. My vision clears.

  Emeric is only yards away, still staring, still singing.

  I charge for him, only to be knocked sideways by one of Cyril’s opera house guards as he barrels in from the right.

  Roaring, I channel the coursing elixir into my good arm and shove him violently off. But before I can get to my feet, another guard appears. And another. A dozen men in tuxedos rush forward, swinging umbrellas and baring their teeth.

  A second gun fires.

  One of my attackers yanks me by the hair, and another drags on my dress. A boot slams into my stomach.

  I focus on the way Emeric’s voice has brought the symbols on my palms to life, on how every person in the room’s elixir is beckoning to me, taunting me, begging me to drink it all down.

  A pistol is jammed into my face.

  I grin down its barrel.

  And undam every single memory river in the room at once.

  Elixir floods toward me, wrapping me in light.

  The gun drops. People collapse to their knees.

  Pulling on Emeric’s song, I turn to face my audience, raising my arms to the stars beyond the broken ceiling above.

  After years of dreaming of performing on this stage, I am finally the finale of the performance. I inhale deeply and join in with Emeric’s song, filling the world with the sound of me.

  The rivulets of elixir trail up my body and into my mouth as I sing. Ecstasy rolls through my every nerve.

  Thousands upon thousands of memories engulf me. Memories of love, laughter, sorrow, forgiveness...

  I am surrounded, consumed.

  The opera house glows, not with sparkling lights or candelabras, but with the blaze of a thousand memories.

  I turn my gaze to the balconies and laugh as patrons topple from them, as eyes grow dim, as bodies go limp.

  Now this stage belongs to me.

  Now the music is mine.

  Now the world pays for its cruelty.

  This is what I’m capable of.

  Fire roars nearby, and my dress ripples against my legs. My hair flies around my face.

  The people who did not make it out of the theater crumple one after the other as I suck them dry.

  The monster in my chest smacks its lips.

  The more I drink, the more I want, and soon I stop my singing to gulp down whole mouthfuls at once. Faster and faster and faster I swallow. Elixir spatters down the front of my dress, dribbles down my chin, drips from the ends of my hair.

  I never want to stop. I could drain the whole city and still it would not be enough.

  I beckon the ribbons of light, twirl them around my fingers, devour them with relish.

  All at once, my own memories are nothing but shadows in a world of light and sound. No longer am I the girl locked away in a crypt writing music that no one will ever hear. No longer am I the monster hiding among the dead, where none but the shadows love me.

  As Emeric’s music opens all of their minds, I become the girl playing with a doll at her mother’s feet, the boy teaching his brother to play cards, the woman dancing at her wedding with flowers woven in her hair. I am the teacher, the baker, the musician, the jeweler.

  I have lived a thousand lives, seen a thousand sights, sighed a thousand sighs.

  I’ve done it. I am as powerful as Rose, as fearsome as Les Trois. I found the catalyseur, and I will keep him forever.

  The catalyseur.

  I pause midswallow.

  Emeric.

  His name snaps through the delighted roar of the beast in my chest, and my vision clears as worry floods me. How much time does he have? Minutes?

  I whirl, peering through the haze of magic and smoke.

  There, crumpled among the ashes, lies Emeric. His mouth is open with the trailing remains of the song I’m still pulling from him. His body is bent, and his eyes stare up, wide and somehow, impossibly, emptier than they were before. Empty as a Memoryless’s.

  Empty as a corpse’s.

  I’ve extracted the rest of his elixir with everyone else’s.

  I relinquish my hold on his music, and his voice creaks to a stop. He twitches and goes still.

  “No,” I breathe. “No!” I claw past the flames, leap over fallen bodies, and crash to his side. Smoke burns in my nose. Heat whips my clothes and sears my skin. I grasp his face between my hands.

  Please, no.

  “Emeric!” I shout. Somewhere nearby a beam collapses, and the fire roars.

  But Emeric does not move.

  I press my ear to his chest. Tears spill down my cheeks and soak into his shirt.

  His heartbeat is a faint, pattering thing, nothing more than the wingbeats of a moth.

  “Wake up,” I plead.

  Even in the smoke, I catch a whiff of caramel on his skin, and I cry harder, remembering the night I tried and failed at making a batch of it with him in his apartment. The time he opened my locket and taught me its song. The time his mouth burned across mine, so forbidden and so undeserved and so impossibly right.

  The time he looked at my unmasked face and called me a masterpiece.

  Each memory strikes me as though made of the same bullets that ripped through my shoulder.

  I wrench the bag from my hip, yanking out cork after cork and dumping the vials’ contents onto his tongue.

  “Come on, Emeric. Swallow.” My voice trembles in spite of the strength pounding in my veins. “This world needs you. Arlette needs you. I need you. Please.”

  Still his eyes do not open.

  When we are surrounded by discarded vials and my bag is empty, I press my head to his chest once more.

  His heartbeat has grown even fainter.

  “No!” I scream, wrenching the nearest vial from the floor and hurling it into a corner where it shatters against a closet doorframe.

  Something jolts away in the shadows of the closet. A sliver of white hair catches the firelight just before the door jerks shut.

  I rise, fury boiling through every part of my body.

  Incinerating me.

  Igniting me.

  “Cyril!” I scream, stomping across the stage and ripping open the door—the flimsy bit of wood that must have been all that protected him from my power before.

  He scuttles away from me, his broken legs twitching uselessly behind him as he squeezes behind piles of costumes and broken set pieces.

  But there is nowhere he can go. Nowhere he can hide.

  “Look what you’ve done!” I wrench him by the shoulder an
d shove him against the wall.

  “Isda, I—” He trembles. Soot sticks to the sweat on his face, and his hair glistens with blood. “I’m sorry...”

  “You’re sorry?” I shout, spittle flying in his face. “You said I ruined what we built?” I shove my face so close to his that I can taste his fear. “We didn’t build a thing together. I built this opera house. I built your success. I built this city. And I will burn it all down.”

  He gags on smoke, and I ram him so violently into the wall he mewls.

  “All my life I’ve watched other people stand on this stage, playing music and performing roles that were meant for me. Now, it is finally my turn.” I toss him to the ground and poise the heel of my boot over his throat. “Sing with me, chéri.”

  He licks his lips, eyes wide and bloodshot.

  “I said SING!”

  He whimpers, then begins to blubber through “La Chanson des Rêves.”

  And for the first time, Cyril’s memories flood my mind.

  I paw through the tide toward his earliest memories, my hands quivering with the desire to see every single thing he’s kept from me all these years. When I drop in, the first thing I find is a kind-faced, golden-haired fawn of a woman with soft hands and a warm embrace. She has a tiny smile, one that makes her cheeks turn rosy when she laughs, and eyes that are as brilliant and blue as Cyril’s.

  His mother.

  Moments swirl by. Cyril watches from corners, chewing his fingernails to bloody stubs as she scours the house for coins. He sifts flour while she bakes extra loaves of bread to sell for spare change. He helps her sort out which of her beloved trinkets could pay the rent.

  Then one day she doesn’t come home until very late, and when she does, she stumbles inside. The lights in her eyes have faded to stone.

  She sees Cyril sitting curled up on her couch, and she freezes. “Who are you?” she asks, her voice uncertain. “How did you get into my house?”

  “Maman?” Cyril’s heart skips to double time.

  The woman raises an eyebrow. “You’d better run along, dear. Your parents are probably worried sick.”

  But the longer he tries to explain that he’s her son, the more frantic she becomes.

  I cringe as Cyril slaps frozen hands against his own front door. “Maman! Maman, please!”

  She yanks the door open a crack. “I said get off my porch, child, or I’ll call the police!” Her blue eyes film wet, but they hold no love, no recognition. Only fear. She locks the door, leaving him alone and sobbing in the snow.

  His tears steam in the winter air as he stumbles down the street begging for food. For shelter. For love.

  And every time he passes a Maison des Souvenirs, he presses his nose against the glass, peering at the fendoir inside, wondering if that one was the monster who took his mother away from him.

  Years whirl past, full of fear and betrayal and pain.

  And then one night he fishes a baby from a well and gasps at the sight of its face.

  He tortures a hundred gravoirs. Mutilates them. Executes them one by one.

  Piles of gold grow in a bank vault.

  Stacks of Council record books march two-by-two on his shelves, preparing to fight the war that’s been battling in his heart since he was six.

  A quiet cemetery with a pale marble gravestone appears. Cyril’s gloved fingers brush snow away from a name. Claire Bardin.

  I see him grapple with me on the roof, feel the snapping of his bones when he hit the stage, hear the chaos as he crawled away to hide. The shock of terror when I turned his way cleaves me to my core.

  With tears streaming down my cheeks, I rip every drop of elixir from his soul and send it straight to Emeric’s crumpled, dying form.

  And then Cyril is nothing but a corpse, lying gray and cold on the stage.

  I collapse to my knees next to him. He wears a quiet, gentle expression as he stares up at the stars.

  Ash billows around us, fluttering tufts of white hair across his face.

  “I’m sorry.” The words are garbled, and they trip over each other on their way across my tongue. I push the hair away from his forehead and then press his eyes gently closed.

  If it weren’t for all the blood, he could be sleeping.

  How many times have I seen him doze off at his desk, working late on records for the Council or tallying finances for the opera house? How many times did he nod off reading fairy tales to me when I was little?

  “You may not have loved me,” I whisper, my tears dropping onto his face and trailing down the smile lines around his mouth. “But I loved you, and my love was never a lie.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  It takes me longer than I’d like to pull away from Cyril.

  I shouldn’t care that he’s dead. I should be happy he got what he deserved. I should feel powerful.

  But his memories and his emotions slice through me, a torture of pain and hatred and regret.

  Heaving a shaking breath and forcing myself upright, I turn and rush to Emeric’s side. He coughs on the smoke, and relief surges through me.

  He’s alive.

  The Le Berger set cracks and then crashes to the floor. Fire licks up the curtains to the ceiling. Shouts echo from the lobby.

  I need to get Emeric out of here.

  With hundreds of lifetimes’ worth of elixir pulsing through my body, I pull him onto my uninjured shoulder and make my way out into the hallway, trying to ignore the glassy stares of all of the people I killed. Keeping away from the front lobby, I speed toward the back exit and into the night.

  Channeling all of the power and elixir I have, I sprint through the snow, dodging past onlookers so consumed with watching the opera house burn they don’t notice my face.

  I head for the western boundary of Channe, and I keep running until I’ve crested the hill that overlooks the city. When I reach the edge of a small copse of trees, I ease Emeric to the ground and check the pulse in his neck.

  It beats, strong and warm, under my fingertips.

  I collapse back against the trunk of a tree with a weak laugh.

  “You’re alive,” I whisper, trailing my hands down the ruffled, soot-stained sleeves of his costume. “Thank Memory.”

  Emeric slumbers on, his lashes fluttering as his eyes twitch back and forth under his eyelids.

  I wipe away the smudges of makeup and ash on his dimples, then grasp his hand in mine and turn to look out over Channe.

  Black smoke balloons upward into the sky, spreading fat fingers to strangle the stars. The opera house burns red and orange and yellow.

  A part of me aches as the only home I’ve ever known withers. I imagine my organ deep in the belly of the earth and wonder if it’ll be safe from the flames. Glancing at my swollen, bloody hand, I blink away the ache in my eyes. Even if the instrument survives, I’ll never be able to play it again. Not like before, anyway. Cyril made sure of that.

  But the phantom inside of me thrills at the sight of its former prison crumpling to ash and soot.

  No longer will I be locked away in the dark.

  Emeric coughs again, and I turn my gaze on him.

  The beautiful boy with the voice to shake the heavens. My catalyseur. I stroke the back of his hand with my thumb.

  The smile slips from my lips.

  No.

  As though I’ve dipped myself into a river full of visions of the future, I see all too clearly what will happen if I keep Emeric the way I want to. This hunger of mine, this craving for his music and the way he compounds my magic will only grow stronger and stronger, until I am consumed by it.

  He’ll become my prize, my gem, my tool for revenge.

  As much as I want to punish the entire world, as much as the phantom inside of me longs to drink the elixir of every person on earth, I know I cannot.

  I
cannot do to Emeric what Cyril did to me.

  I won’t.

  Releasing Emeric’s hand, I pull my knees against my chest and rest my arm across them. I trace his features with my gaze—the perfect point of his nose, the arch of his brow, the divot in his lower lip. The dark lashes and the dimples and the long, shaggy hair.

  I think of him on that stage opening night when the world trembled to hear him. When the stars dimmed their light to listen. When the very sky quieted its breath to wonder at his music.

  The way he glowed. Eyes shining, face pink with excitement.

  I always knew he was meant to be there. Meant to perform. Meant to sing.

  I cannot take that away from him, either.

  My eyes dart to the city, burning under a blackened sky, flames glowing against the snow.

  The Council and every police force in this country will hunt me for what I am and what I have done. I will be a fugitive for the rest of my life.

  When Emeric wakes, he will try to stay with me. He will tell me that being an opera performer doesn’t matter, that all he wants is to find somewhere where Arlette and I will be safe, happy, and loved.

  But I know what it will cost him. His lifelong dream. His destiny. And, when I succumb to the demon inside of me, his freedom.

  I press my palm to my forehead to quell the quaking of my heart and the trembling of my soul.

  “Emeric?” I whisper, placing my hand on his shoulder and shaking him gently.

  He stirs.

  “Emeric, it’s Isda.”

  “Is...” His smile is soft.

  “Emeric, I—” My voice breaks, and I clear my throat as tears sting once again at the corners of my eyes. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Any—anything,” he croaks.

  “Will you please sing with me?” The words come out quiet and strained, and I can barely see him through the film of wetness in my vision.

  His eyes finally open, and he turns them on me, wondrous and beautiful.

  My throat closes. I rub a fist across my face.

  His hand settles on my knee. “What’s wrong, Is?”

  “I just need you to sing.”