RoseBlood(112)

“Take her.” This time, his words aren’t directed to me. They’re for Professor Tomlin, who’s waiting in the shadows.

“It will be over soon, Rune. Then you can have your life back.” My body is too limp to react to the betrayal slithering through my veins as Tomlin slides my tied wrists from around the Phantom’s head and scoops me into his arms, his beard brushing my temple.

I’m only half-aware when my captors stop on the other side of the ballroom’s mirrored wall. The sheer gold fabric paints a hazy scene within: staff and peers oblivious to the swarming bees on their way up. I try to find my friends or my aunt in the crowd, but my vision blurs. With a twitch of his fingers, the Phantom conjures another trick, stirring life into the black leaves on the trees and the floor. They burst into flight like bats, lifting the cobweb chains lining the tables and dive-bombing the now-screaming students and teachers. The bats drop their nets, trapping everyone. My mind is muddled . . . I can’t decide if they’ve really morphed into bats, or if I’m totally unconscious now, having a nightmare.

Tomlin moves us out of the way. The Phantom pulls a lever on the wall that instantly shuts the ballroom’s double doors, locking everyone inside, then releases the enormous chandelier. It plummets to the floor on a high-pitched whistle, raising the chaos to another level as people struggle to scramble out of danger while tangled in the nets. I must be dreaming, because a statue comes to life to shove one of the students out of the way, and ends up getting crushed itself beneath a bone-jolting crash of glass and metal. The fabric tied to the crystal fixture catches fire as it makes contact with the candles around the room. In an instant, the trees against the wall erupt like kindling, cutting off my view with a wall of smoke and flame.

I barely hear the screams inside. I barely hear anything but the Phantom’s lyrical voice, filtered through his mask. “So, so clever . . . using her song, dressing like her, wearing her chains.” He jerks the ring necklace from my neck. “But you broke the tether of illusion just a moment too soon.” He traces the coiled ribbon marks on my wrist that show between spaces of rope, sending a chill through me. “My son should’ve taught you better. The devil’s in the details.” The Phantom takes me back from Tomlin, securing my wrists around his neck again, and cradling my body in his arms. My foggy head lolls against the cool leather of his jacket. “You, stay and see that everything goes as planned,” he directs Tomlin. “Miss Germain and I have an appointment with fate.”





25



SWAN SONG


“The timing of death, like the ending of a story, Gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.”

Mary Catherine Bateson

The asp bared its fangs and struck. Thorn stiffened, adrenaline pumping through his body, setting all his nerves on high alert. An instinctual response. He reminded himself that the clear panel separating him from his death wouldn’t slide open to allow the five serpents from their lower compartment into the glass case surrounding him, unless Erik was here to activate it.

Another asp struck, leaving behind droplets of clear, deadly venom on the glass surface beneath him. A pheromone filtering into their section of the case had provoked the reptiles to a raging state. Their auras were bright, frenzied. Thorn’s feet shifted, but he suppressed the urge to move his hands. It wouldn’t do any good to try with the iron bands holding him pinned to the wall.

“You almost had it that time.” Thorn lifted his shoulder as high as it could go to give Diable leverage. He knew Rune had sent him; she was his guardian angel. If she hadn’t, he’d be alone and useless, contemplating worst-case scenarios for the masquerade going on hundreds of feet above him and unable to do anything constructive to help.

Now, he could possibly climb out and make a difference.

The cat’s body stretched, hind feet settled on Thorn’s right shoulder while one front foot planked his forearm and the other dug with extended claws at the keyhole in the locking mechanism.

Thorn’s glass case was flush to the wall and a few feet from the operating table, to give him a bird’s-eye view of Rune’s torment, and her a bird’s-eye view of his fatal predicament. His stomach knotted. Erik had knocked him out with gas before he left. A tribute to his deviant sense of humor, since he’d been wearing a gas mask himself. When Thorn roused, he was strung up in only his scrubs, feet stripped of his boots, although Erik left him his socks. That, too, was a strategy to play on Rune’s sentimentalities.

All along, this had been his plan. To use Thorn as the bait that would convince her to give up her voice. That’s why he’d allowed Thorn to woo the music in her, to bond with her. She might’ve chosen Thorn’s life over the music even before they had the unity ritual. But now, it would be physically impossible for her to let him die. By trying to protect her, Thorn had damned her.

But there were three things Erik hadn’t counted on: One, he was walking into a trap himself; two, he’d left Thorn within reach of the lever that would release the dams and flood the apartment—Erik’s very own trap. It was on the wall, level with Thorn’s head, no more than two feet away. And since the glass case only came to his chest, if he could free his right arm, he could stretch far enough to trigger the self-destruction sequence. And three, although the cord between twin flames would never snap, it could be severed if one of them died. Thorn was willing to meet a drowning death, for Rune’s freedom.