“Hasn’t anyone told you not to talk to strangers?” There was humor in his voice. “And not to walk into places when you don’t know the way out?”
“Relentless.” She didn’t tell him that there was something about him, a deep knowing in her that made him unstrange. “There’s never been a door that can keep me out. Even doors that do not exist.”
“There was a door?” The ghost leaned in, hopeful and intrigued.
Selene shook her head. “I saw you in the mirror and put my hand against the glass. And then I was here.”
“A mirror.” The ghost closed his eyes, as if he was drawing something from the darkest recesses of his mind.
Selene ran her teeth over her lip. If she kept talking, maybe she’d trigger another memory for him. “It’s the only mirror inside the whole opera house. Deep below, in a cavern of water and stone.”
His eyes snapped open. “The Palais Renard is finished?”
He spat out the name Renard like it was a poison. Selene could feel the anxiety build around him, buzzing with the electric energy of a thunderstorm. Even the trees around him seemed to quake.
“That name never stuck.” Selene tried to lighten his tension with a smile. “We call it the Opera Magique. Home, to me. It was built a century ago.”
The air changed the moment she said it. Everything colder and cold. The look on the ghost’s face was that of absolute devastation. What little color had been in his face drained away. Selene wished she could take it back, wished it could be different, somehow.
He pressed his hands to his forehead, then through his hair. “I’ve been here for more than a hundred years.”
A single, dark tear—like ink—slipped from the ghost’s eye and down his cheek. He sank to his knees. There was something terrible about it: to weep darkness, like something out of a nightmare. Selene took a step back. She should run. Go back to a place with a little more light.
But he was so beautiful and broken. A hundred years had passed with him trapped in a mirror. How could she let one more day go by? She knelt before him. Her fingers were close enough to feel the heat of his skin. Flesh and blood and more real than anyone she’d known. Not a ghost at all.
He looked up at her with wild eyes, flinching away from her. “You can’t touch me.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Never touch me.”
He had a knife in his hand. The blade swirled like an oil slick, the most color contained in this place. He pressed the blade to the inside of his forearm. Selene reached forward to stop him.
Blood, then shadow, unfurled from his wound. It ran up his arms, gathering swirls of black around his back like thunderclouds. He shot her an anguished glance, those inky tears still on his cheeks.
The darkness spread like wings made of black spider’s silk and tendrils of poisonous vines. The rush of those wings, the force and violence of their exit, pushed her back. It was all she could do to keep from falling out of the light. His wings shuddered and lifted him up until he hovered above the ground, crowned by the stars Selene had created.
She should have been afraid. She should have found the way back through the mirror and never returned. But he was so hauntingly beautiful. His sorrow so close to the skin that it hurt her to witness. She couldn’t live with herself, knowing she’d left him here.
He hovered there—winged in darkness and haloed by false stars—like a vengeful god. There was no music to this magic. This wasn’t controlled by breath or voice. This magic was wild, living. It had taken his blood and made him monstrous and lovely.
Something sparked, feral and hungry inside Selene. Whatever he was doing, whatever dark magic this was, she needed it. If she could harness this, she would have magic like never before. They’d have no choice but to crown her the King’s Mage. To write the Dreshé name down in all the books. She would be unstoppable.
“Selene.” His voice was all the thunder but none of the honey, dissonant and dark and somehow still a siren’s song.
He flapped his great, dark wings. The force of it shattered the air, pushing Selene back, back, back. The ground slid from beneath her feet and she was floating, falling into the shapeless nothing that was the dark.
Chapter 8
All the rumors were true. The myths, the legends, the lies. There was a mirror in the opera house. There was a ghost in that mirror, who was not a ghost at all but a man who might be a monster. And the churning, roiling dark. The impossible, living shadows that enraptured her and made Selene feel watched.
But that wasn’t the half of it. What he’d done in the mirror went against everything she’d ever learned.
He’d bled shadow into wings and fury and taken flight. In Selene’s wildest dreaming, she could not invent a magic so beautiful and terrible.
Selene looked over her shoulder, to the door she’d concealed behind a discarded set piece. She thought of the girl who had leapt from the rooftop because she’d been so afraid of the mirrors. She was the reason they had been banned—the final straw after years of whispers. Had the girl seen the ghost’s ethereal beauty and been unmoored? Had she seen him first as a monster? Did she know what his blood could do?
Selene shivered. She had to tell Madame Giroux. And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to give her a second chance.
