by A. G. Howard
He knew her the moment he saw her soul bared, the instant she released the first note. He’d heard her in visions for years. She had inspired countless compositions upon his violin.
Today, after hearing her in reality, the music rang in his head and burned an imprint behind his eyes. So many colors and emotions, a spectrum of auras—vivid and alive. An abundance of energy so pure, every sensory receptor in his body had reacted. He tasted the music, more luxurious than fresh honeycomb melting on the tongue; he felt the notes on his skin, soothing like raindrops on a hot day.
He’d never experienced anything so healing and sweet.
Yet it nearly broke her to sing.
He tried to be calculating, tried to remind himself that that was as it should be; that it would work to his advantage—the way it pained her to use her gift. She must despise music by now.
Instead, he couldn’t stop thinking that if this were another time, another place, nothing would stop him from reaching out. When she fell to her knees, her aura faded to a dark gray too close to black, drained of vitality; it was all he could do to stay hidden. She was so small in stature, so fine-boned and fragile—like the other songbirds he’d healed throughout his life. He understood her pain. Her energies were unbalanced. He had the ability to help her. Her song never broke her in his visions. Instead, her song was her power, because he played for her.
He cut a glance to his Stradivarius, shut within a case in the corner, sugar-coated in dust and fringed with spider webs. He hadn’t touched the violin for two years, ever since the academy first opened. He wondered if she’d missed their duets as much as he had.
But today, the melodic energy he’d absorbed from her song shook the silent wail of the violin’s strings and rattled the cage of his ribs. A plea so visceral it sucked the core of his heart dry, making it wither and curl like the dead roses he’d left for her to fret over earlier.
How was he going to do what was expected of him now? To have the girl anywhere close to him would only open his veins and bleed him dry.
He would avoid her as much as possible. He had six weeks until Halloween, when they would meet. Until then, the groundwork for bringing her down could be played out behind the scenes . . . all his clues placed without ever having to be face-to-face. During that time, he’d find another outlet to stifle his yearnings—a way to push her voice from his conscious mind. Although there was little he could do for the subconscious.
No matter what, he would not lose sight of his goal. He would lure Rune down, then that would be the end of it for him . . . and the end of life as she knew it for her.
5
BROKEN SONGBIRDS
“In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.”
Robert Lynd
He strode past his neglected violin and the pipe organ next to the dining nook, pausing when he reached the three bedrooms at the back of his home. The one on the left belonged to him, and the one on the right was reserved for her . . . once she lived again.
But it was the black door in the center where Ange waited that held his interest now. Even after all these years, the gargoyle door knocker held him in the thrall of its hideous snarl because what it guarded within was equally grotesque, powerful, and fascinating.
Choosing not to use the knocker, his knuckles thrummed the door lightly. “It’s Thorn. Are you decent?” He waited for a response.
Eleven years before, at the age of eight, he’d busted inside, eager to show off the ortolan songbird he had rescued from a cat. His guardian was standing at the mirror—bared of the fitted mask that usually hid the top three-quarters of his face.
Thorn had stared in stupefied horror at the exposed reflection: the jaundiced skin, crinkled and waxy . . . stretched so thin that every vein and frayed capillary manifested itself like a gruesome road map, revealing large hematomas, red and pulsing underneath; the cavernous indentions above his eyebrows, making his eyes appear sunken; and most horrifying of all, the bridge of a nose stopping almost before it started, leaving no cartilage to cover the two large, black holes from which he breathed. A missing upper lip opened to a row of teeth, so perfect and straight, that like the strong and flawless chin below, they mocked the jigsaw-puzzle face above.
Thorn had never seen anything like it—a corpse’s rotting head atop a man’s living form. He’d screamed and clenched his hands in a knee-jerk reaction, crushing the tiny bird cupped between his fingers.
The ortolan’s agonized chitters broke through his trancelike state, and he dropped her to the floor. His careless mistreatment of the bird earned him a cuff to the ear from his guardian, a reprimand so sharp and instantaneous, Thorn almost blacked out from the resulting dizziness.
It was the first and last time Father Erik ever struck him. He had other, subtler ways to discipline Thorn, methods far more effective than corporal punishment.
Thorn had struggled to stay standing. The ringing in his ear couldn’t drown out the songbird’s whistling gasps as she labored to breathe against the broken ribs puncturing her lungs. His guardian bent to pick up the dying bird.
Hot tears streaked Thorn’s face. He fixed his gaze on the yellow-and-green clump of feathers inside his father’s fine-boned hands, avoiding a second glance at that deformity atop his neck.
After wrapping the bird in a handkerchief, Erik snagged Thorn’s chin. Thorn tried to close his eyes, but his guardian simply had to speak.
“Look at me, child.”
Thorn’s eyelids locked open, unable to resist that hypnotic voice. It was Father Erik’s ultimate power. Those vocal cords sparked decadent sensations—so preternaturally persuasive there was no escape. With just a spoken word or a serenade of song, the man had the power to wrap a deadly cobra inside a cocoon of coiled obedience, and bring a cold-hearted murderer to drown in a pool of their own repentant tears. Once the net of his voice was cast, he could capture and manipulate anyone and anything. Sometimes only for seconds, and other times for hours or days or years, depending upon the victim’s inner strength and will.
“Embrace your revulsion.” Father Erik’s resonant, masterful command had cradled Thorn in softness that day, quieting the buzz in his throbbing ear. “But never pity me. Never. For pity makes us both victims. Be true to your instinctive horror. Turn it outward and wield it.”
Erik held the limp, gasping bird against Thorn’s chest. He caught Thorn’s hand and urged him to touch his disfigured face . . . to feel the withered flesh that crinkled like moist, decaying leaves under his palm, to rake his thumb at the edge of the spongy craters where a nose should’ve been. Thorn obeyed, never blinking an eye. Nausea and repellent fear gathered around his heart until it burned. The fiery sensation culminated and passed from him to the bird’s feather-encased breast. A shiver of turquoise light flashed through her eyes, then her breathing eased and she fluttered, enlivened.
Cured.
“Did you see the aura’s color, Thorn?”
Thorn nodded. He’d experienced such pigments of light in small samplings since he’d been living there, doled out by his guardian, but had yet to learn how to harvest the flashes himself. And he’d never seen such a transfer give life . . . only take it.
“Auras are vibrations of color, signifying the energy around all living matter,” Father Erik had said, releasing the songbird from the handkerchief so Thorn could return her to the woods outside. “The colors change with mood . . . a brilliant clarity that only our kind can both see and command. And now you know that one of the most distilled forms of energy is harvested from the depths of dread. The moment you’ve mastered inspiring fear in others, you will be their master. The only thing more potent than the despair of terror is the rapture of music. As you remember, from your own past.”
The power of the terror Thorn embraced that day couldn’t compare to the remorse he’d felt for bringing shame to the man who had shown him such compassion since the tender age of seven . . . who became his guardian and teacher and friend.
Tensing at the memory, Thorn pounded Father Erik’s door once more. His chest constricted at the resulting silence. The damp air, a result of being so close to the water, usually soothed him. But today, it clogged his lungs, thick and weighted like a death shroud.
He shoved the door open. The coffin, balanced atop its dais and lined with red velvet, was empty. Just as he’d feared.
Cursing, Thorn stared up at “Dies Irae” painted in lovely black script around the top edge of the room to form a border against the red walls. The verses had never seemed more apropos—a requiem mass as ghastly and rhapsodic as the man who had built this lair over a century ago for his sanctuary: the composer, the alchemist, the architect, the magician, the mastermind.
The Phantom.
But that legendary man had grown weak and sickly of late, and no longer ventured topside alone, neither to the secret passages of the academy that held nothing but bad memories for him, nor to anywhere in Paris. He went only when Thorn accompanied him to provide support.
Or so Thorn thought. There was only one reason Erik would risk going without him today. The same reason he’d lost all his senses a hundred years earlier at an opera house much like this one—before Thorn was even born—and kidnapped the opera’s prima donna.
Thorn’s gaze shifted to the painting hanging on the wall where Christina Nilsson, Erik’s cherished Christine, was dressed as Pandora from Greek mythology. A necklace holding a ruby wedding ring hung from a nail beside it.
Thorn growled. Should Erik be seen or captured, their entire way of life—all that his father had worked for and built, along with their ties to the subterranean world—could be exposed.
Turning back toward the darkness of the parlor, Thorn shouted the “Dies Irae,” the tension on his vocal cords excruciating: “Day of judgment! Day of wonders! Hark! The trumpet’s awful sound; louder than a thousand thunders, shakes the vast creation round!”
Ange answered with her own trumpeting squawk as the elevator made a whining hum, the cables drawing the car up from the cellar. She tottered toward a shadowy figure clambering out of the gated door with a lantern in hand.
“Brava, Thorn!” Erik’s deep and dulcet praise floated over to him, stroking him like a loving pat to the head. “Stunning recitation. Although you mustn’t strain your voice. And hymns are best delivered in their native tongue. The protestant version holds no torch to the Latin.” With a weary grunt, his silhouette slumped to the floor. The swan huddled in his lap and scolded him, her beak tugging at his ear.
Thorn crouched beside the duo, relieved it had only been a case of Ange not knowing where her master was. But that relief sunk to concern when he noticed the sickly gray aura surrounding Father Erik. Thorn fought the usual bout of jealousy that niggled at him, seeing Erik give so much of himself to his cause in the cellar lab. His father was always exhausted on Sundays, after burning all his energy, but this was extreme. “You should be in bed, saving your strength,” Thorn said, pushing out the statement from a throat still raw and achy after his panicked tantrum.
“Just as you should be respectful of your own limitations.” His father’s unsteady fingertip tapped Thorn’s Adam’s apple in the lantern’s soft light, then moved to his face, as if assuring himself all of Thorn’s features were in place.
He often compared Thorn’s appearance—defined dark brows above piercing, wide-set brown eyes; high cheekbones; a straight nose above plump lips shapely enough to be a woman’s; square, cleft chin; and defined musculature—to the heroes in the mythological tomes Thorn liked to read. Thorn, however, preferred the monsters of those tales. Their tragic misbalances and flaws were so much more compelling than any perfection could be.
And so it was with Erik. Having no outer beauty to empower him, he’d honed his inner artistry instead, the things that truly made him unique: mind, talents, voice, and mysticism. Attributes that demanded respect, fear, and awe.
Thorn had watched and learned during the twelve years he’d been under Erik’s tutelage. Pretty faces were no more than masks worn to justify laziness and intellectual monotony. Since Erik had been born without one, he’d crafted a myriad of his own—masks that gave the illusion of conformity but could be cast aside whenever he wished to unleash the true, blinding radiance of deviation.
Thorn followed in his guardian’s footsteps, made his own masks—some stitched of cloth, some ceramic—to cover the right half of his face in tribute to his mixed bloodline. Although he had nothing physical to hide, a demon lurked inside him, afraid to forge into the light of day. His masks made him feel safe, and as adept as he was at blending into his surroundings, he rarely walked the grounds without wearing one. Today being the exception. A mistake he wouldn’t make again.
Erik’s palm smelled of formaldehyde and iodine as he patted Thorn’s cheek. “How could I rest this evening, my lovely boy? The girl has arrived. I feel it.” Thorn could hear Erik smile behind his own chosen mask, shaped of copper and coated with silver. Ange’s enthusiastic greeting had knocked the covering askew, blocking his mouth and revealing that sunken crater in his forehead where one of his eyebrows jutted out unnaturally.
When the mask was in place, all that showed was the bottom quarter of his face—strong chin and full lower lip—making him appear deceptively normal, distinguished. A middle-aged man with a head of black, well-groomed hair and piercing amber eyes that glowed when he was at his most powerful.
With the mask and wig, one wouldn’t know he’d been in the world for centuries, or that he was disfigured and had only a scant cluster of hair. With everything in place, one couldn’t see the irregular shape of the eye sockets, how they burrowed too deep into his skull. They could only see the expression harbored within those depths: wise, intense, and maniacal beneath the weight of irrepressible genius and tortured memories.
Thorn’s palm covered the warm, white swirl of energy from Rune’s song, still snuggled under his sternum. He’d been selfish to think, for even a second, that he could keep any of it for himself. That he could feed his latent compositions with the fire of brilliant green that pulsed through her eyes when she performed. Erik needed it so much more than he ever could.
“Yes,” Thorn answered at last, helping his father straighten his mask so the synthetic copper nose centered over his absence of one. “It’s her. She possesses the gift. Just as was foretold.” He gripped Erik’s hand and placed it across his glowing chest where his own hand had been. “I hold the proof. Her voice—it’s immaculate.”
“Seraphic, you mean to say,” Father Erik corrected, half-teasing, as his hand began to absorb the power—a tug Thorn felt all the way into his feet.
With a rueful smile, Thorn nodded. “Undeniably. A fine match for yours, or any choir in heaven.”
“Despite that she was born to an ensemble of demons,” his father answered with that flare for dark, self-deprecating humor.
They shared a laugh, though Thorn didn’t feel any joy in his heart as he watched Erik’s veins surge with light.
Rune’s light. The purest white he’d ever seen . . . incarnate, rare . . . the essence of an angel. Thorn wanted it back, nestled inside his body. Warming him and resurrecting his muse.
“She wishes to be free. I sensed that,” Thorn added, more to distract himself from the loss than to justify their heinous plans, although it served the latter purpose well enough.
“Didn’t I tell you? Just as the old witch predicted. It will take little convincing for her to give it all up, yes?” The silver-and-gray-striped Milano suit, tailored perfectly to Erik’s thin frame, tightened around his shoulders as he tried to stand. He always dressed in his finest clothes on club nights, but today was Sunday. Their weekly sojourns thr
ough the underground tunnels and into Paris were reserved for Saturdays. Thorn was surprised to see him in such fine array while working in the lab. He supposed he’d wanted to look his best, in hopes Thorn might’ve been accompanied by Rune.
Lately, Erik’s desperation made him forget his patience. They both knew it wasn’t time yet. They had to tease her out with carefully placed crumbs. Once convinced she couldn’t trust the students and teachers—on the chance they’d think she was losing her mind—or even herself around them for fear of their safety, she’d venture out on her own, seek the truth within the shadows.
Father Erik had too much to do in his cellar lab in preparation, so it was Thorn’s place to lead her down that path. But only she could surrender to the darkness—body, mind, and soul.
And once she did, Erik would have everything he needed, at long last.
Thorn looped his father’s arm around his neck. Years ago, the man’s six-foot-two frame had towered over him. Now, Thorn overshadowed him by two inches. Using his thigh muscles, Thorn lifted them both to standing. Only fitting, after all the times Erik had carried him in his childhood.
“You must take me to her once night falls,” his father pressed, admiring the glow at his chest, beneath his lavender tie and navy shirt, where Rune’s aria fed his heart with a burst of strength. “Let me see the little pigeon for myself. Her aura will be most visible as she sleeps.”
Thorn seated Erik on the chaise lounge and propped his hip against the curved arm on the other end. A refusal flared at the base of his larynx. He didn’t want to spy on her while she was so vulnerable.
The absurd thought extinguished as quickly as it sparked. How laughable, that such a thing would occur to him.
Their kind was descended from hunters . . . renowned for infiltrating darkened bedrooms and wearing the breath of sleeping women like precious pearls upon their flesh, hijacking their dreams and seducing their bodies and spirits—feeding off their passion, need, and fear.