Gigi rippled with emotion, no doubt wrestling with the options. Selene could stay, but at what cost? They both knew what was at stake.
“Go.”
Gigi turned the pad of paper around. She had sketched a preliminary dress for herself. The gown was blue taffeta, soft embroidered flowers up the bodice. It was a spring day over a crystal-clear lake. It was a promise of new life, of new magic. That’s what Selene needed. Something new.
“Draw something for me? Make it red as blood.”
Chapter 24
Selene held up the seashell, pressing it to her ear one last time. It whispered the music of the sea, transporting her to that moment last night, with Victor by her side. His presence was a complication. As much as she’d missed him, as much as she wanted to fall back into old habits, she knew she was borrowing trouble. He’d always had a gift for distraction. He wanted her to go and she needed to stay.
The mirror soaked up her blood.
Selene stepped through the glass, closing her eyes to ride the wave of disorientation. The coils of darkness shivered with pleasure, inching closer and closer still. She sang the light and cast a halo around herself. They buzzed around her impatiently, as if waiting to have her.
No matter how many times she saw the ghost, his beauty still overwhelmed her. He faced away from her. He reached up, his thin linen shirt pulling up to reveal the low dimples at the base of his spine. The skin on his back was marked with the silver strips of long-healed scars. He was singing softly to himself, making patterns with light. Selene saw this for what it really was: keeping the darkness at bay. She understood that need. She wished she was better at it.
“Back so soon?” He looked at her over his shoulder, eyes bright with the false light.
There was a shadow to his smile, a worry Selene did not understand. She was afraid to ask. She knew what the darkness would do to him if she said the wrong thing. Instead, she held up the shell.
“A nautilus.” His brows furrowed. “Unusual for these parts. You really are a girl of impossible things.”
She smiled and dropped it into his palm. She didn’t tell him that the shell was not hers. Didn’t tell him that Victor had scooped it from the shore. Where it came from didn’t matter as long as it worked.
The ghost held the seashell up to his ear. For a moment, Selene worried that the resonance wouldn’t exist in the mirror. Seashells, after all, were only echoes. But he must have heard something. His face turned to rapture. The light played on his cut-glass cheekbones and broken nose, highlighting the scar above his eye and the stubble on his chin.
Selene held her breath, not wanting to change the sound. Not wanting to move, lest she trigger the tendrils of darkness that were pressing against the light. The ghost did not heed them. He was enraptured by the music of the shell. When he opened his eyes, they were like a clear summer day.
“This I have asked and you have answered. Thank you. It has been too long since I heard the sea.” He held out the seashell with more reluctance than she’d ever seen from him. The darkness did not hesitate. He pulled his hand away right before the shadows touched his skin. “What is it you want?”
“To be the King’s Mage.” A bubble of excitement rose within her. Here in the dark, she could finally let herself be happy. “I made it. I’m in.”
The ghost’s smile was bright and genuine. He took a step toward her, as if to embrace her. Selene leaned closer, wishing that he could. “Congratulations. It is well deserved.”
“It was at the king’s insistence.”
“Who killed your father, Selene?”
“When will you stop asking me that?”
“When you give me the right answer.”
She pressed her fingers to her temple and massaged. The migraine still pounded behind her eye. “I killed him.”
The ghost took the oil spill knife from his pocket. He peeled open his shirt and cut the space above his heart. The cut was deep. The blood soaked his shirt, his pants, and then the floor. There was so much blood. An unreasonable amount, far more than the pinpricks Selene had offered with tiny beads of blood like precious jewels. This was a travesty, a waste. She wanted to press her hands against his chest and hold the wound closed.
“What are you doing?” Selene cried.
The blood congealed into shadow, lifting from the floor. It shifted, rising, and then burst into a dark red mist. The mist surrounded her, filling her mouth and nose and eyes.
She gasped and thrashed, drowning in shadow. She’d been waiting for this moment for so long, for the sins of her past to catch and consume her. There was a stark relief to this penance. Father killer, breaker of rules, betrayer of friends. She’d been a fool to think that her life was worth anything more than the waiting dark. She had known he was a monster when she’d stepped into the glass and she deserved whatever terrible thing happened to her.
All at once, the shadows left.
And with it, the throbbing pain in her head.
Selene wasn’t sure whether to express gratitude or regret or horror—none of them seemed like the right emotion.
