Selene had to stop singing.
But she’d offered her blood to the shadows, and the shadows had slipped inside of her. She couldn’t close her mouth, she couldn’t move. Her body was a prison of its own making, no longer hers at all. She’d given up too much. She could only stand there and sing. Her voice was no longer her voice. Her breath no longer her breath. Her heart beat only shadow.
She sang through those final bars, leading up to the high note. Her eyes caught on shapes and shadows in the audience. Wisps of her blood and her will, slithering up.
The light changed. The shadows crept up the golden scroll of the chandelier. One by one, each of the flames burned black. Everything was cast into darkness. Living and breathing and free. The black spread into the veins of the marble on the ceiling, like poison.
The metal groaned.
The chandelier dropped from the great domed ceiling into the crowded audience, a shimmer of shadow and gold.
Selene’s final note was a scream.
Chapter 40
There was a moment between heartbeats when Selene was unsure. The magie du sang had trapped her inside of her own body. Inside of her mind. She watched the chandelier shudder and fall. It would crush all these people. The fire would catch and spread. The whole opera house would be in flames in a matter of moments. Not a star at all, but a black hole. Swallowing up and destroying everything in the bottomless dark.
And it was all her fault.
Then she remembered who she was. What she was.
I am Selene Dreshé and I am relentless. A too-bright star.
There was no darkness in that. Only the endless light of truth. It was enough. She curled her fingers into fists. She had her power back. She was power.
Selene brought the knife blade over her palm and sang for light. It burst from her, illuminating the terrified faces. She could not let them die.
She sang the wind and she sang the metal and she used them to slow its descent. But the chandelier was made of more than that now. It belonged to the dark.
Selene had darkness, too.
Selene let the darkness pour through her. Not the way she’d channeled it before. She treated it like music. She was an instrument, not a well of power. She let herself be a vessel, opening her mind wider and wider. Blood and music. She needed togive a little more. Let it have a little more of her. She opened her mind and opened her veins and hoped that it would be enough.
Something cracked inside of her.
Not a breaking, just a fissure. As if through a line on a broken winter window, the magic seeped in like cold. She could taste it on her tongue, feel the dizzying expanse as more magic poured through her. But it was fine. It would be fine. She could hold on a moment longer.
Madame Giroux and Gigi and all the others were beside her, then. Singing and moving the chandelier back up. There were others, too, magicians she didn’t know. And Victor. He was beside her, singing, reaching for her hand.
Selene let him take it, even though it was slick with blood. She willed the shadows away. The darkness ebbed. The chandelier was back in its place. She sang the fire back into the candles. The lights burned so bright that all the shadows were banished.
“Selene,” Victor said. “It’s done.”
She closed her eyes, trying to catch her racing heart. It beat in rhythms she wanted to chase. Music and music and magic in the fluttering. People moved around them, water around a stone. Fleeing what should have been their doom. She had stopped her own destruction.
Not now,she thought.
She leaned into Victor. Her head swirled with music. It moved around her, like light through a prism that was the whole world, casting rainbows of music on everything. She hummed the melody. There was magic in each note. She’d given too much to the magie du sang. What had it taken from her?
Victor stiffened. “I didn’t want this for you.”
The king stood before them. His dark hair was threaded with gray. His eyes were so like Victor’s, a touch darker, seeded with black instead of gold. Selene had pushed aside his face so often to get behind the tapestry. Something stirred in her, the ghost of a memory. Eyes the clear blue of glacial waters, blood against silver. But when Selene reached for it, there was nothing.
“That was spectacular,” the king said. He brought his gloved hands together in muffled claps. “Congratulations.”
“For what?” Selene said.
“Selene Dreshé, you are the King’s Mage.” The king looked at her with empty eyes. “Mine.”
