by A. G. Howard
The houselights click on, washing us all in unforgiving light.
Mumbles burble up all around.
Roxie and Kat bump fists.
Bouchard struts across the stage. “Well, it would seem we have our prestigious lead role. The part of Renata goes to—”
“Wait!” I shout, standing up so fast my tote sluffs to the floor like a dead thing. Hair hangs across my eyes, graciously blurring the fifty-some students shifted in their seats to gawk at me. Audrey has lost her chance to let her paraplegic sister live vicariously through her. She’s lost that one shot at a scholarship and the future she can’t afford otherwise. And she and Jax are on the outs before they ever got to reach the supercouple status I know they’re capable of. Because of me.
Unless . . .
There’s one thing I can do to make Jax forget he ever liked kissing me, and to see that Audrey still gets her chance to shine in front of that talent scout, but my entire body quakes just considering it.
A lump of dread strangles me. I clear my throat. “I—I haven’t had my turn yet.” My statement to Madame Bouchard sounds stronger than I feel. I swallow against the lump making another appearance. “I know I can do better than those two amateurs.” The cruel insult shatters loose, jagged and cold as broken glass, cutting both my heart and my tongue.
I sense my friends’ stares of disbelief, but can’t bring myself to look their way.
Kat and Roxie are turned full around in their seats to glare at me, so I focus on them. I’ll use everything Etalon has taught me. If I can master Renata’s song once more and knock Kat down to understudy, she’ll walk away from the opera completely, leaving Audrey next in line.
I glance at the row of teachers behind me. Everyone is there but Professor Tomlin, who often spends weekends in Paris to play with his band. But I don’t need him to sway the vote.
“You told me I could try out if I wanted, right?” I ask.
Aunt Charlotte drags her glasses off her face and considers for an instant, as if worried I’m not ready. Or maybe she’s ashamed that I slammed Audrey so heartlessly, someone who’s supposed to be my friend. Finally she nods—her forced enthusiasm spreading through the others.
Headmaster Fabre pipes up: “Madame Bouchard, it would appear we have one last prospect to consider.”
In spite of the Bride of Frankenstein’s obvious disapproval, she nods me forward, jowls clenched to razor-sharp angles.
I wriggle past Jax, whose face reflects the same disgusted shock as Sunny’s and Quan’s. Without offering any explanation, I step into the aisle to land the biggest role I never wanted.
18
NATURE’S MORATORIUM
“Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.”
Nikola Tesla
Two hours until lights-out. Thorn had to find a way to escape this prison.
Something had happened with Rune today. He sensed the surge in her spirit when she’d performed. She was wonderful and she triumphed, but it upset her. He wanted to know every detail. If it meant what he suspected, if she’d won the most prestigious role in the opera by conquering the music on her own at last, yet still felt no satisfaction, maybe Erik’s plans had merit after all.
There’d been a mental disconnect between Thorn and Rune since last night at the club. Her anger erected a barrier to any spiritual visitations in her dreams . . . a wall that he couldn’t tear down unless he could find a way out to see her, and win her trust again.
He closed the latch on a cage, then stood and straightened his half-mask and cloak. He had a strategy planned, although it was dangerous. Possibly lethal.
Last night, Erik had activated all the pitfalls and torture devices that surrounded the underground apartment, shutting him and Thorn in together. In his youth, Thorn had been taught how to maneuver safely through most of the booby traps, but he knew the Phantom well enough to anticipate a few had been kept concealed. Erik never fully trusted anyone but himself.
Yet there was one passage, via the cellar—a secure escape route Erik had designed, in case their underground home were ever flooded by the river surrounding it. Erik had in fact dammed the tributaries himself, and crafted a latch in the cellar that would open the dams and flood the apartment within a sixty-second destruction sequence, in case he ever needed to obliterate any and all traces of the Phantom.
But the escape route could be used independent of the destruct sequence. It was an airtight chamber that jettisoned through a water-filled tunnel leading into the baptismal. The very route Ange had hijacked the day Rune was in the chapel, causing the basin to fill with water.
That would be Thorn’s safe exit tonight.
Should he try leaving any other way, he would risk tripping devices Erik had kept secret. Each trapdoor led to cubicles containing their own horrors: plants hiding tiny poisonous dart frogs; bats trained to chase and disorient their prey until their hearts gave out; heat-seeking missiles that released swarms of wasps and hornets upon detonation; shrinking quicksand floors surrounded by walls crawling with assassin bugs that would slowly eat their compressed victims alive . . . not to mention the boxes of scorpions connected to trip wires lining every corridor.
The Phantom had honed the art of persecution in Persia while serving as an assassin for the shah over a century ago, long before motion sensors, laser beams, or computer electronics ever came into the world. At the time, he made do with booby traps, secret lairs, and concealed poisons. His twisted intelligence, paired with the elegant destructiveness of insects, had proven unsurpassable. Nature’s arsenal roused an instinctive fear in mankind. To torture someone utilizing that fear rendered them psychologically broken.
Erik, in his brilliant paranoia, had installed a labyrinth to protect his home from enemies, but also so he could keep prey trapped inside. Thorn had never been considered an enemy, or prey. Now he was both.
Gripping the two large cages he’d prepared, Thorn stepped into the gated elevator leading to the cellar lab, shut himself in, and pressed the button, hoping his father would be in his coffin resting. Thorn already had his violin hidden beneath the false bottom of one cage where he usually stored feed. He didn’t want to resort to any more lies.
The car rattled and groaned on its descent, spurring the three birds and five reptiles within the cages to rustle restlessly behind their bars and screens.
Thorn had thought he’d executed the perfect deception last night: leading Rune’s friends out of the club while disguised as an employee. No one had recognized him. And after hypnotizing the driver upon his return from dropping off Rune and her crew, he’d covered all his tracks.
What he failed to remember was that the Phantom had eyes everywhere, beyond the surveillance cameras that Thorn had taken care to avoid. There were the living spies, those who had been manipulated and tormented until Erik’s will became their own.
Thorn had run into one such operative inside the club’s elevator on his way back up to the lavender room, where he’d planned to discard the employee vest and mask, then feign sleeping before Erik returned upstairs. From behind his orange flashing costume, the man had commented on the blindfold in Thorn’s hand.
Thorn shouldn’t have taken it from the driver to begin with, but it harbored the scent of Rune’s perfume and residual smudges of her makeup, and he couldn’t bear to leave it.
His luck couldn’t have been worse. That particular spy had firsthand knowledge of Rune and her friends. And, being a musician, he’d also had the perfect vantage point from the stage to watch as Thorn led each one away during the performance.
It wasn’t until Erik and Thorn returned home that he realized the man ratted him out. In a tirade, Erik found the blindfold inside Thorn’s jacket pocket. The Phantom held it up, initiating one of his magic tricks to spontaneously ignite the fabric. The blindfold drifted down—flickering with orange flames—then landed on the marble tiles and tapered to ashes and smoke at Thorn’s feet.
Furious
, Thorn had threatened to pay a visit to the drummer . . . make him regret ever double-crossing him. The man was nothing more than a marionette. It was time his strings were cut.
Erik turned his back then, assuring Thorn, should he try to leave that night, there would be deadly consequences.
But that was last night, when Erik was still brimming with power and life after the feeding frenzy at the club. Tonight, if he happened to catch Thorn on his way to the escape route, he would be weakened from spending all that energy in the cellar.
The elevator rattled to a stop and Thorn hesitated, his nostrils stinging from chemical and electrical scents.
He hadn’t been down here for several weeks. He’d grown to dread the horrific, heartbreaking scene that awaited him each time, for it forced him to cross-examine the moral philosophies his maman had instilled in the boy he once was. Principles he lost sight of, but never forgot. He failed to voice these concerns to the man who saved his life and taught him how to survive. He’d had too much respect for Erik to crush his hopes.
Hope . . . what a tragically miscast word for what was contained within this room.
Thorn dragged his gaze to the glass chamber in the corner, where yellowish plasma discharges pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat. Hidden by a tarp, the fragile occupant—frozen within a syrupy mixture of glycerol and other cryoprotectants to prevent crystallization of tissue—fed off the buzzing, popping currents. The sophisticated life-support and preservation system had been built at Erik’s hands, over a century before human medical standards had ever reached such technological advancements.
Thorn was struck by all the hours and days he’d spent down here, aiding his father as they kept her alive—injecting her with osmolytes drawn from winter flounder and wood frogs, small molecules that worked like antifreeze and prevented damage to her bodily fluids and vital organs so she could be suspended in time.
As he opened the gated door, Thorn allowed himself to relax slightly, grateful for the tarp blocking his view. He couldn’t have stomached looking upon her tonight, regardless that she hadn’t changed in the twelve years he’d lived here, and hadn’t aged for more than a hundred years before that.
“Have you come to twist the knife in my back?” Erik’s weary accusation greeted him from a plush chair in the adjacent corner where he often sat to recuperate after siphoning away his energy.
Thorn’s shoulders sunk beneath the wounded tone of that dulcet, waning voice.
Erik’s bony form shifted in the shadows to better face him. An operating table stood between them, and a dim lightbulb swung above it, reflecting off the shiny metal surface. This was the table where Erik had gently and patiently taught Thorn how to be a surgeon as a child. How to piece animals back together once they’d been broken. Later, his responsibilities changed to unnatural alterations that left him feeling at odds and out of sorts, procedures that Erik didn’t have the stomach to do himself.
As if it could read his thoughts, one of the birds in the cages he held whined like a fox and a lizard hooted in response. Thorn’s head bowed, heavy.
When he was young, and honing such strange skills, he could’ve never imagined why: That one day they would be used upon a girl who was his mirror soul. How could he possibly bring himself to slice through her beautiful skin?
A twisting agony clenched his chest. The last time he’d been here, the table was covered in dust. Over the past few weeks, Erik had prepped it for Rune’s Halloween visit tomorrow night, including updating and testing the metal coils, levers, and switches that would aid in conducting the transfer. He’d even gathered strands of blond hair out of the overpriced brush Thorn had stolen from that snotty prima donna, and had them braided with nylon and threaded through sterilized needles, placed on a tray beside Thorn’s scalpels. Now everything was set.
Just the thought of the heinous excision made the room spin around Thorn: wooden shelves with unrecognizable organs preserved in formaldehyde, test tubes, beakers, and distilling columns. A worn chalkboard filled with mathematical and scientific equations, and a table where encyclopedias—chemistry, physics, biology, occultism, and alchemy—were opened to pages of underlined text.
Overcome with dizziness, Thorn coaxed his boots forward, setting the animals outside the elevator then leaning against the cool, stone wall to regroup. Ange tottered over and pecked the bars with her bill, sympathizing with her caged friends.
“I have the last of my patients to free,” Thorn said, pulling gloves out of his cloak’s pocket to cover his trembling hands. “They’re healed, and as you always taught me, shouldn’t be caged a minute longer than necessary. Already, they’ve been waiting a month due to our neglect. And since we’ll be busy the next few nights . . .”
If there was one thing in the world Erik revered above all else, it was the lives of lesser creatures. When he had Thorn use them in experiments, he ensured Thorn took the utmost care not to harm them, and watched them fervently as they healed. Even in his torture chambers, Erik chose to use wasps, scorpions, and hornets—insects that could sting repeatedly without hurting themselves. Never bees. He couldn’t stomach forcing an insect to commit suicide for his cause. He would only use bees as a diversion or an intimidation in wide-open spaces, where the insects were less likely to attack.
Thorn could argue it was fitting in some way, using nature to manipulate the Phantom, as he himself had manipulated so many victims over the years.
“I would have you free them for me, Father.” Thorn met Erik’s eyes, struggling to hide the dishonesty in his heart. “But you’re too weak to go to the surface.”
In the dimness, the answering tremor in Erik’s chin appeared more threatening than usual, shadowed as it was by the skeletal mask still covering his deformed face. He must have slept in his clothes, because he still had on the monk’s robe, too, as if he hadn’t bothered to change since last night. “It’s obvious that it’s your freedom you’re seeking. You want me to release you? First, you will explain why you’ve proven to be the crimp in my plans. You, who vowed loyalty to me years ago. You, who said you would dedicate your life to bringing me my most quintessential need and desire. I would never have opened my home to that vagabond child had I known he was only pretending so he could have her for himself.” Resting on his knee, Erik’s right fingers twitched beneath his robe’s sleeve. His breath broke in restrained gusts.
Thorn recoiled. The subtle flash and crackle of the electrical currents in the glass case mimicked the unease erupting along his nerves. He’d underestimated Erik’s vulnerability. Even half-asleep, the master assassin could still cast a Punjab lasso. Thorn lifted his hand to the level of his eyes, an attempt to protect his throat from the lethal wire and lead ball being slowly threaded out of Erik’s sleeve.
Ange flapped her wings and warbled low in her throat, sensing the mortal magnitude of the moment. She lighted atop the operating table and nested in place, situated between them.
“I was protecting our way of life, as I’m avowed to do.” Thorn looked past the swan’s glossy red plumage, disturbed by how closely she resembled a pool of blood on the stainless-steel surface. “I had to escort Rune’s friends away before they ended up with puncture marks on their wrists and ankles. For five years, the club has managed to stay under the radar . . . considered nothing more than rumors, only because the victims are consenting adults. The police will be forced by parents to investigate should under-aged teens start sporting the telltale physical symptoms discussed on the streets and at underground clubs.”
“I’ve nothing to fear of man’s law,” Erik scoffed. He wasn’t being boastful. He’d spent more than a hundred years evading repercussions for the countless murders he had committed. Most of them could be justified as vigilante justice, since the victims were murderers themselves—or worse. And here in Paris, he had the added benefit of contacts in every branch of law enforcement, psychic vampires who’d mastered blending into the common populace. It was their job to keep any traces of their kind und
er the radar, so they would never be exposed.
Early on, Erik convinced them any murder he committed was to preserve their obscurity—that his victims in some way threatened their lifestyle—and so his contacts covered his tracks. But ultimately, he had been using those stolen years of life to extend his own . . . so he might live long enough to experience what he’d been seeking since he was treated as an abomination by not only the world, but by his very own mother: unconditional love.
“You’re right,” Thorn answered at last, sympathy tugging at his resolve. “There’s no need to fear mankind. But our own kind? That’s a whole other level of culpability, isn’t it? Our subterranean alliances wouldn’t appreciate the complications such inquiries would present. It goes against our vows to keep our kind hidden. It would pose a threat to the anonymous mass feedings made possible by your club. The club they poured all their money into, so you could make their lives cushy and comfortable. You wouldn’t wish them to discover the other reason for your grand design. That you had to find a way to absorb extra energy for her.” Thorn shifted his gaze to the cryogenic chamber, fighting that tinge of bitterness again. Why would Erik put everything in danger for her . . . when he already had the unconditional love of a son? “Should our investors feel threatened, they will pull the plug, and she will suffer most of all.”
Erik tucked his hand into a pocket—putting away his Punjab lasso.
Thorn let out an indiscernible sigh of relief.
“Let us be clear.” Erik barely spoke above a hissing whisper. “She’s already suffering. How could you look at her all these years and think otherwise? And it’s not that you led Rune’s friends away. You led her away. Last night was set up to be her final downfall, so she’d be desperate to escape the torment of her conscience. It’s our one chance to trick her into compliance, since somehow she’s overcome her fear of the music itself.” He flashed an accusatory glare at Thorn who turned his gaze to his boots, dulling any emotional reaction so his aura wouldn’t give him away. “But we still have her uncontrolled appetites. That is our ace. Tell me you at least allowed her to feed. And be aware: Your answer determines more than the fate of your animals tonight, my son.”