by A. G. Howard
The lavender sectional couch—paired with the ceiling cloaked in inverted parasols that looked like a field of giant mushrooms—reflected off the mirrored floor and painted the room in the soft pinkish-purple hue. Even the pillars supporting the ceiling shared the color scheme. Peaceful, serene, and thought-provoking. Yet after speaking to Rune’s driver, there would be no peace tonight. Things weren’t going at all as he’d planned.
“Stop looking so distraught.” Erik’s voice cast a silken web, wrapping Thorn in luxurious tendrils of melody. His father sat on the other side of the couch, holding a snifter of brandy. He sipped the drink where his three-quarter mask—a silver skull, with eyeholes edged in black velvet—bared his chin and lower lip. “Telling Jon Paul to bring Rune’s stowaway friends was a stroke of pure genius.”
Thorn scowled. He’d had little choice to tell the driver anything else, with Erik seated across from him.
“The entire point is to make her feel like a monster,” Erik continued. “Convince her that her songs are tied to her insatiable hunger. That to give up the music will cure her.”
Lie to her, in other words. Thorn’s frown deepened.
Erik held up his brandy, admiring its color in the light. “Back in the States our precious little pigeon attacked a stranger, and it has haunted her. But to feed off someone she actually cares for . . . it will break her. Render her incapable of forming relationships or functioning in that world. And that’s exactly what we want. So, take pride in a card well played.”
Thorn tightened his grip on his wine goblet and swirled the deep, burgundy liquid, watching it slosh the tall, clear edges—a sea of tainted blood seeking to escape the crystalline fortress too pristine to contain it. He wished he could look into Rune’s memory and see the night she attacked the boy, Ben, to know what really happened. But only childhood moments were strong enough to survive transfer. Once innocence was gone, once a person started keeping too many secrets, memories frayed, became impossible to pass on without disintegrating into threads.
“You need to stay up here tonight,” Erik interrupted his grousing thoughts, blotting the upper lip of his mask where driblets of golden brandy dotted the tooth-shaped edges. “Your black moods make you unpredictable. Watch from your ringside seat, or go home. But do not show your face on the dance floor.”
Thorn managed a cynical smirk. “I wouldn’t dream of showing my face, Father. Grand unveilings are your modus operandi, not mine. À votre santé!” He raised his wine for a toast. “To the Exquisite Nightmare.”
Erik leaned in and clinked his glass against Thorn’s goblet, releasing a flat-pitched, high ping—strangely at odds with the deep, melodic laugh that drifted from the skeletal mask. “Honored, as always, to be the main attraction.” There was a sad underpinning to the quip—a genius and once gentle soul enslaved by the vile shadow of his own monstrosity.
Thorn battled an unwanted wave of admiration as he watched his father down his drink, then, wrapped in a hooded monk’s cloak—a striking contrast to his metallic mask—leave the room without a backward glance.
Erik had designed this establishment five years ago, when Thorn was fourteen. Back then, Erik was still testing the waters, to see if such a ruse would work to lure in people and harvest their energy. To see if they could keep the place secret from the outside world. He wouldn’t allow Thorn to join him and his demonic compatriots for another year after that.
He was protective, like any father. So Thorn would take solace up here, settling atop the lavender couch. Chin digging into the cushioned back, he’d stare out through walls made of windows on this side, and mirrors on the other, watching their victims arrive in Erik’s fleet of hearses. The cars were different than the ones that used to carry his mother to her reprehensible job—but every bit as ominous and sinful. Erik’s hearses brought unwary prey: bodies to provide entertainment and sustenance that would later be discarded in the streets of Paris. And after being injected with forgetting serum—a form of midazolam that Erik had altered in his lab—they would awake in a weakened, half-amnesiac state, alone and confused as to where they had been or what had taken place.
Thorn agreed it was more humane than how things were once done. There was no lurking in bedrooms, preying upon the vulnerable as they slept, or seducing them in their dreams. The victims came to them of their own free will, seeking a night filled with music, dancing, and uninhibited revelry. And their desires were met . . . although that pleasure came at a price.
Thorn needed the energy supplements, just as all psychic vampires did. And Erik needed them even more than most, being constantly drained to keep his one hope alive.
Although they were from different bloodlines, he and Erik were one and the same. Thorn had been born of a dream, just as Maman used to tell him. His incubus father—a creature Thorn never wished to know—had seduced his human mother as she slept, drained her of energy, but left her alive and with child.
Using his connections in the subterranean domain, Erik had traced Thorn’s preternatural lineage to a prosperous clan who lived in an underground mirrored city in Canada. When Thorn turned fourteen, Erik offered him the opportunity to go to them. But Thorn chose to stay. By then, he hated his real father for abandoning his mother, resulting in her death and Thorn’s orphaned childhood.
More important, by that time, Thorn already loved Erik as family.
That’s what drove him to lie to Rune in the note yesterday. A half-lie. He was going to give her a father tonight. Just not the one she was expecting.
If only he could forget the sound of her gentle voice from the last evening they were together, when she said the word: Etalon. How long had it been since he’d heard his true name spoken by anyone?
Each time he closed his eyes, he imagined Rune’s lips curved to a smile and pressing that name against his mouth, imagined stealing a kiss, drinking of that pure white light—her celestial essence that cradled and calmed him like nothing ever had in his life. Spending time with Rune gave him true serenity. She inspired him, yet at the same time, left him teetering at the brink of desolation. It was overwhelming, to be so close to being united, after being separate for so long.
Erik had once told Thorn how rare it was for twin flames to be incarnated on the earth at the same time—for them to be close enough in age and proximity to find each other. “How precious and fragile the bond,” he’d said. “It can be heaven or utter hell.”
If either or both of the twin flames were incomplete people, if they were still learning who they were themselves, the relationship would be fraught with pain and misfortune. At the time, Erik had been referencing his own experience with Christina. But it appeared Thorn was cursed to repeat that tragic performance.
Rune was his soul’s mirror. Each time he looked at her, he saw himself. Her strengths paralleled his: a seamstress, with the talent for taking scraps and making masterpieces, just as he did with broken animals; a kinship with flowers and plants—the quiet, lovely parts of the world that asked nothing from anyone other than to be admired, respected, and appreciated; and a deep, introspective curiosity that sought out powers too strange or frightening for typical people to embrace.
She even shared his flaws, the things he struggled not to despise about himself: the inability to sing without pain, the isolation from being born different, a deep distrust of everyone but himself.
But he had managed to bypass her distrust; he’d healed her pain, by speaking to her with his violin—a violin that he now knew, after experiencing her childhood memories, had a deeper tie to her blood than she could possibly fathom.
He was having trouble reconciling that detail himself, how the instrument had come into his possession at all. No wonder their connection was so strong.
It had been easy to justify taking advantage of their spiritual bond. To tell himself he was helping her on some level. But all he’d really done was make things more difficult for everyone. She came here hating her gift. And he’d opened the door for her to love it
.
If she truly had come to love it, how could she possibly give it up when the time came? She had only two days left until Halloween and her imminent appointment with fate in Erik’s cellar lab.
The thought of his father’s plan coming to fruition sliced through Thorn’s gut like the brambly clawed vines that waited downstairs to capture their unsuspecting victims.
He stared at the floor. All it would take was a flip of a switch, and the mirrors would slide open, revealing the club below—his ringside seat. The guests would still see a domed, reflective ceiling from their side. They’d never know he was spying upon them, or siphoning off their terror through black, energy-absorbing tubes that connected the club to this room.
It was an art form, the way Father Erik could enchant an audience, cushion them with billowing chords of operatic splendor, then send them plummeting into the depths of revulsion and dread before they even realized the trapdoors of their subconscious had been triggered.
Thorn ground his teeth, envisioning Rune alone, trapped by an instinct she didn’t yet understand or control, in that surging fray of victims and harrowing energy. He slammed his wine goblet to the table. No way in hell was he going to watch from here.
But he’d promised Erik not to show his face tonight. That much he would honor.
On the drive here, we passed what felt like a half hour in dead silence, other than the sound of the hearse’s motor, our breaths, and the wind streaming through the slightly cracked windows. The dampness of evening sifted in and a slight breeze rustled the loose curls at my neck—an odd, unsettling tickle like the one inside my head, warning me: turn back, turn back, turn back.
Our ride has now come to a stop. The car doors open. No words are exchanged as someone helps me and my friends out and removes the headbands from our wrists. It’s not the driver. Whoever loosens my “cuffs” isn’t wearing gloves. The blindfolds stay in place but my coat is coaxed off my shoulders and tossed into the backseat. Cool night air chills my skin as we’re herded like sheep away from the hearse. The one thing that keeps me from changing my mind is the bone-deep knowledge that my maestro is here, waiting for me. I can feel his anticipation. It matches my own.
“Hey, what about our bags?” Sunny pipes up, causing our escorts to pause. “I got money in there!”
“You have wristbands.” The driver’s nasally French accent answers from behind us. “That’s all the currency you need inside. I’ll keep your personal effects locked in your car. They’ll be here for the trip back to the city.”
Back to the city . . . where exactly are we? Goose bumps erupt on my bare arms, an acutely vulnerable sensation when paired with my blindness.
“Just want to reiterate”—Jax grumbles at my left as we’re nudged forward again—“how stupid this whole plan was, in case it’s the last thing I ever say.”
Sunny snorts from my right, and Quan moans from her other side.
The clomp of several sets of feet keep time with my stiletto heels as, arm in arm, my group is guided along a rough surface that feels like cement. Our direction shifts and we follow a gritty, descending incline, enveloped by a musty odor. Every sound echoes, as if we’re moving through a tunnel.
The unmistakable ping of an elevator greets us and we’re steered into the small space, the air thick with carpet cleaner and foreign colognes. The hum of a motor under our cushioned feet carries us down. As the elevator doors sweep open at our stop, an unrecognizable subgenre of dance music shuttles through my body and hammers my ears. It’s like chamber music meets underground techno rock. My heart pounds in time with the frantic beats.
We’re led out, instantly slammed with a fusion of perfume, sweat, and the faint sting of sulfur—reminiscent of summers on Fourth of July with my friends. That thought sends me spiraling back to Trig and Janine, and how crazy they’d say I was for doing this. Just like I was crazy when I went to that frat party.
Poor Ben . . .
Jax tightens his arm through mine. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lie. If he knew what I’d left in my wake in Texas, he’d already be running in the other direction. So would Sunny and Quan. But I’m not going to let them out of my sight. I’m the only protection they have here. I can’t allow anything to happen to them tonight. Tensing my arms through Jax’s and Sunny’s, I link the four of us tight as an escort removes our blindfolds.
It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the contrast of darkness and throbbing, neon lasers. From our bird’s-eye view on the narrow balcony, a pulsating surge of reflective, brightly colored clothes makes the floor appear to shiver under the black lights.
“Holy goat balls of fire,” Sunny says as she looks over the waist-high railings. The shimmers across her face blink in time with the rainbow lights on her wig. “Are you seeing this, Rune?” The question sounds like a whisper under the growing swell as the band onstage at the back wall begins a new techno-dance number.
I home in on the architecture and décor.
“Incredible,” I mumble. I’d know this place anywhere, thanks to all the Phantom research I did online. The infamous opera house. But it’s a grand deception . . . an intricate design crafted upon the walls by skillful strokes of fluorescent paint. Instead of a flat and false representation, the glowing 3-D scene looks as if you could walk straight into it . . . become a part of its baroque resplendence: interweaving corridors, winding stairs, bronze statues of Greek mythos, alcoves and landings, and row upon row of velvety seats. The cleverly executed optical illusion gives the stadium-size space the appearance of stretching on for miles, while accommodating the frenzied movement of ravers who would otherwise trip over any real stairwells, seats, or statues.
In place of the infamous crystal chandelier, a massive, black wrought-iron replica spins at the center of the domed, mirrored ceiling. The scrolling tentacle arms seem to multiply with each rotation like a larger-than-life mutating octopus. Thorns, the size of sewing needles, jut out along the lengths instead of suction cups. At the tips of the tentacles, candle sleeves with black-light luminaries drape the room in phosphorescent splendor.
“It’s a mirror image of the Palais Garnier, gothic-glammed,” I answer at last, talking over the music.
“Exactly my thought,” Sunny answers. “Things just got weird.”
“Just got weird?” Jax shouts to be heard over the music. “Pretty sure I’ve been saying things were weird since we put these overpriced circus rags on my dad’s credit card!”
The volume of the song escalates, as if trying to drown out Jax’s complaints. Electronic keyboards and cymbals swarm my eardrums like audible bees, muffling Quan’s ensuing comments. Beneath the buzz in my head, I hear my maestro’s raspy voice. He’s somewhere in this room. His magnetic force lures me to lean over the balcony’s edge. The compulsion to dive into the sea of bodies and swim until I find him is overwhelming.
I teeter there, tethered in place by my friends’ arms. A nudge between my shoulder blades urges me toward the long, winding stairs that lead to the lower level. I glance over my shoulder, finally getting a look at the escorts who brought us here. The three of them turn and walk back to the elevator. I can’t tell if they’re male or female. All I see are hooded vests—aglow with flashing pinpricks of blue light like my dress’s panels. The fabric appears to be floating without a body, then a laser show ignites, illuminating our platform and their black pants and shirts before dimming once more. At the elevator, the escorts step inside and face me. I can’t make out anything under the obscurity of their hoods, other than glimmering eyes, similar to the Phantom’s.
His words at the chapel revisit: What are we, you mean to say.
These employees are like him . . . like me.
“Wait!” I start forward, but too late. The doors slide shut.
Sunny grips my elbow and forces me to look below. The band has left the stage, and all the dancing bodies freeze in response. A drastic hush falls over the room, coating everything with a chilled muffle, like a fal
l of snow-encrusted feathers.
The walls on the lower level transform, snapping free and taking on strange shapes—a puzzle being pulled apart and rearranged into something new. The 3-D paintings of stairwells, auditorium seating, and statues interlock, forming grotesque creatures: nymphs and cherubs cracking apart at the torso, so rib cages made of stair steps can fill their hollowness. Red velvet auditorium seats shift upward and rip through the statues’ mouths to mimic bloody tongues. They’re gargoyles now—a convergence of beauty and horror unfolding before our eyes.
The floor rotates, the guests wavering to keep balance, making way for the stage to revolve until it stops in the center. A sign drops down from above with tiny white lights around the borders—a vintage carnival poster, spotlighting a freak-show attraction. Glittery red letters spell out the words: BEHOLD: THE EXQUISITE NIGHTMARE.
“Oh, we gotta see this.” Sunny breaks free from our chain of arms and starts down the stairs. Quan adjusts his hat and hustles to catch up.
“Sunny!” I shout. “Be careful.” What I want to say is: Here there be monsters. Before I take my first step, Jax clutches my fingers in his. I glance upward at his concerned features.
“Don’t get any ideas about going off on your own,” he says, as if reading my mind. “We’re staying together, right guys?”
Quan and Sunny send nods over their shoulders and continue their descent.
Hand in hand, Jax and I stay close behind on the winding staircase, all the while watching the transformation still taking place around us. Lanky figures in skintight, blinking costumes plummet graceful and quiet from the ceiling, twirling on gleaming ribbons in a spectrum of colors. The acrobats swing toward one another and join hands. They form a chain around the revolving chandelier, like luminescent jellyfish worshiping an octopus in the depths of an ocean. Giant brass bells drop down beside them, pealing loud and deep. Silver confetti descends from the mirrored dome, glittering under the black lights. Before the shimmery rain touches our heads, the swirls of paper come to life, fluttering up and up like metallic butterflies, hovering around the trapeze artists and bells.