RoseBlood(16)

I can hardly register Sunny’s babbles about my aunt’s questionable fashion choices; it’s too insignificant compared to her other confession. “Wait. You sneak into her room and steal from her?”

“I told you, I use my powers for good. She’s been trying to quit smoking since I’ve been here. I decided to help her along.” She wrinkles her freckled nose. “You aren’t a snitch, are you? Gonna go running to her because she’s your aunt? If she finds out I’ve been rattling around the teachers’ rooms—”

“No. We’re not that close.” I motion for Sunny to join me inside my bed-cave. Before she sits, she picks up my soup and hands it to me. I nod a thank-you. “To be honest, this is the first time I’ve met Mademoiselle Fran?ais de fantaisie in my life.”

Sunny barks a laugh that comes from her belly—a cheery and round sound that warms me almost as much as the steaming mug in my hand. “So you caught that, did ya? Your aunt even takes us on field trips sometimes, so we can have a real expérience Paris. Still not sure if she’s a French diplomat or our dance teacher.”

I sip my chicken broth and grin. Maybe I’ll make at least one new friend. Sunny’s quirky enough to overlook my own eccentricities—like Trig and Janine always did. And her knack for “lifting” things could be useful.

“How about this?” I ask as the soup coats my throat with comfort. “I’ll keep quiet about your extraordinary ‘talents,’ if you can do me a favor in return.”

Sunny cocks her head. “A gal who sings like an angel and knows how to blur the line between flattery and blackmail.” Taking a puff of her e-cig, she smiles. “A kindred spirit. Okay. What’s the favor?”

I swallow more soup to soothe my spinning stomach and attempt to appear mildly interested—as opposed to how I really feel inside: desperate for information. “Tell me anything you know about the estate’s gardener. You mentioned there’s a cottage somewhere in the forest. Is that where he lives?”

My companion chokes on her caramel-flavored vapor. “Haven’t you seen the garden? There hadn’t been a keeper . . . well, since the whole time I’ve been here. We have a caretaker—Mister Jippetto—who lives in the cottage in the woods, but he mainly tends the cemetery . . . keeps it tidy. He does a few odds and ends around the school. Pruning the bushes that hang too close to the parking lot, sweeping leaves off the steps, helping us make sets for the stage. Simple maintenance. But he’s too old to wrangle all those plants and weeds.”

“Too old? I thought he looked like he was our age.” I rub my forehead. “Maybe it was one of the students in costume. He was in Victorian clothes, hanging around the garden with a set of pruning shears.”

Sunny’s eyes meet mine; both honesty and intelligence shine bright inside of them. “I don’t know what you think you saw when you got here, but all of us were at auditions. They take roll. Attendance is mandatory. There was a time when the garden was beautiful. I’ve seen black-and-white pictures in the school library upstairs. But that was back in 1925, when a journalist did a spread on the abandoned opera house to celebrate the Palais Garnier’s fiftieth anniversary. The anonymous keeper of that garden would be long dead by now.”

My hand spasms and I drop my mug, soaking my jeans and the bed with hot soup.



He arrived at the apartment’s secret entrance and found the swan quivering at the bank’s edge.

Something was wrong.

“What happened? Why aren’t you inside?” he asked, climbing out of the boat and onto the dock that opened into his underground home.

Ange flapped her crimson wings, urging him to hurry. He peeled away his gloves, boots, and cape to prevent trailing mud along the lavishly patterned tiles inside the apartment. The swan warbled low in her throat—a fretful, worried sound. Her webbed feet clacked behind his silent tread in thick woolen socks.

The lanterns along the walls had waned, and being so deep underground meant no windows to invite the last streams of twilight inside. He would’ve been all but blind had it not been for the glow of his eyes lighting his footsteps. He wove his way through the parlor, past the heavily upholstered furniture, wall tapestries, and garish ornamentation.

He wrestled a familiar niggle of frustration that they still honored the Victorian epoch of antiquity, regardless of how many times he’d tried to bring them into the twenty-first century. The only parts of the house that merited gas lamps or electricity from a generator were the old-fashioned elevator with a gated, cage-style door, the cellar laboratory it led to, and the four-hundred-gallon aquarium that stood on a platform in his bedroom.

The hair on his neck lifted as he passed the birds, animals, and reptiles in shadowy cages and terrariums lining the parlor walls on either side of the pipe organ: a blue jay with a busted wing, a rabbit with a gnawed-off hind leg, a lizard missing one eye—and many other creatures. Some were hurt or orphaned and needed his help; others were patients from procedures he’d done his best to block from his mind, although there was no chance of ever forgetting.

All of them relied on him to stitch them back together with new pieces and parts, and nurse them to health before being returned to the wild. Tonight, they seemed to glare from inside their temporary prisons, judging . . . accusing. It was as if they could see his own brokenness, how he ached to commit a betrayal so self-serving, he should be caged himself.