“Unless you taught her.” Selene tried to grasp what it would be like to create magic, instead of following someone else’s rules. Wasn’t that what she tried to do, when she attempted a third motif ? Wasn’t that what she was doing now, by blending the magics?
“I would remember.” He articulated each word like he was invoking something; like if he said them right then, the memories would flood in. “What was her name?”
“Brigitte Giroux.”
Something lit in his eyes. The name was enough, a light in the dark. “I remember Brigitte. She was relentless, like you. She wanted to win at any cost—at first. But she didn’t like the cost of the magic. She wanted to keep her pain. She was afraid.”
“So afraid she jumped from the roof.” Selene looked for part of him that should make her afraid. She had seen him as a monster, and yet that wasn’t enough to scare her. She knew his very soul. “She’s known you were trapped here, all this time … and she left you.”
The ghost turned from her. “Perhaps she knows something you and I don’t.”
“You don’t deserve this. No one deserves this.”
“I have found ways to occupy myself.”
Selene blew out a breath, trying to focus on something she could do. “How did you know you could do magic without music?”
“Magic doesn’t need music. Music is just another tool, a form of focus, like pain. There were so many ways magic could be channeled.”
“Where did it all go? That’s what I don’t understand. How did it all get lost in a hundred years?”
The ghost shrugged, but there was a tightness in the uptick of his shoulders. “A lot can happen in the winding of a clock.”
“The effort it would take to erase that much history … ”
“Improbable, impossible, and yet here we are.”
He was so casual about it all, as if it was inevitable that whatever magic existed in his world could be lost in hers. Selene needed to grasp it, needed to make sense of how much the world could change in three generations.
“How did you create the magie du sang?”
He closed his eyes. “From an excess of pain. The memory is there. I just can’t quite grasp it.”
Selene thought of his endless scars. “Who did this to you?”
The ghost opened his mouth to speak. The darkness vibrated, pressing in around them. She had seen the dark take from him before. She couldn’t witness it again.
“Don’t speak. Please.”
The ghost squeezed his eyes shut. “You are asking the right questions. They are merely questions I cannot answer.”
Selene’s skin crawled. “I’m sorry.”
“You are relentless, Selene. Never be sorry for that.”
The ghost pricked the inside of his forearm with his knife. The shadows writhed, forming a mass between them. The darkness seemed to fight against him for a moment. Twisting and churning and roiling like a storm-tossed sea. Had Victor been caught in storms like that, carrying the precious box with the rose he’d made for her?
He’d swept back into her life like he’d never been gone. Like he belonged there.
No,Selene thought. She had to focus. She could worry about tomorrow tomorrow.
The ghost sat down in front of the grand piano he’d crafted out of shadows and blood. It was elegant and slick, like something out of a half-remembered dream. His fingers stretched over the black keys. He played the first chord.
“Let us begin.”
Chapter 29
It could have been hours or seconds or years. Time was a tide that ebbed and flowed with a fickle moon. Everything was melody and heartache and the impossible beauty at their intersection. Selene bled the tips of her fingers to mark the page. The ghost left smudges of blood on the keys and on the edges of the sheet music. She watched him from the corner of her eye, the cut of his jaw and the passion in his icy blue eyes. He was in love with art the same way she was. Music was more than bleeding and wanting. Each note was pulled from the ether and pressed into sound. Sung and played and felt down to the soul.
