RoseBlood(18)

It was the first and last time Father Erik ever struck him. He had other, subtler ways to discipline Thorn, methods far more effective than corporal punishment.

Thorn had struggled to stay standing. The ringing in his ear couldn’t drown out the songbird’s whistling gasps as she labored to breathe against the broken ribs puncturing her lungs. His guardian bent to pick up the dying bird.

Hot tears streaked Thorn’s face. He fixed his gaze on the yellow-and-green clump of feathers inside his father’s fine-boned hands, avoiding a second glance at that deformity atop his neck.

After wrapping the bird in a handkerchief, Erik snagged Thorn’s chin. Thorn tried to close his eyes, but his guardian simply had to speak.

“Look at me, child.”

Thorn’s eyelids locked open, unable to resist that hypnotic voice. It was Father Erik’s ultimate power. Those vocal cords sparked decadent sensations—so preternaturally persuasive there was no escape. With just a spoken word or a serenade of song, the man had the power to wrap a deadly cobra inside a cocoon of coiled obedience, and bring a cold-hearted murderer to drown in a pool of their own repentant tears. Once the net of his voice was cast, he could capture and manipulate anyone and anything. Sometimes only for seconds, and other times for hours or days or years, depending upon the victim’s inner strength and will.

“Embrace your revulsion.” Father Erik’s resonant, masterful command had cradled Thorn in softness that day, quieting the buzz in his throbbing ear. “But never pity me. Never. For pity makes us both victims. Be true to your instinctive horror. Turn it outward and wield it.”

Erik held the limp, gasping bird against Thorn’s chest. He caught Thorn’s hand and urged him to touch his disfigured face . . . to feel the withered flesh that crinkled like moist, decaying leaves under his palm, to rake his thumb at the edge of the spongy craters where a nose should’ve been. Thorn obeyed, never blinking an eye. Nausea and repellent fear gathered around his heart until it burned. The fiery sensation culminated and passed from him to the bird’s feather-encased breast. A shiver of turquoise light flashed through her eyes, then her breathing eased and she fluttered, enlivened.

Cured.

“Did you see the aura’s color, Thorn?”

Thorn nodded. He’d experienced such pigments of light in small samplings since he’d been living there, doled out by his guardian, but had yet to learn how to harvest the flashes himself. And he’d never seen such a transfer give life . . . only take it.

“Auras are vibrations of color, signifying the energy around all living matter,” Father Erik had said, releasing the songbird from the handkerchief so Thorn could return her to the woods outside. “The colors change with mood . . . a brilliant clarity that only our kind can both see and command. And now you know that one of the most distilled forms of energy is harvested from the depths of dread. The moment you’ve mastered inspiring fear in others, you will be their master. The only thing more potent than the despair of terror is the rapture of music. As you remember, from your own past.”

The power of the terror Thorn embraced that day couldn’t compare to the remorse he’d felt for bringing shame to the man who had shown him such compassion since the tender age of seven . . . who became his guardian and teacher and friend.

In that one mask-less moment, he had looked upon the only father he’d ever known as a monster. Although now Thorn understood someone’s appearance was not the measuring stick for a soul’s predisposition toward goodness or evil, he still regretted that instinctual prejudice fueled by immaturity.

Tensing at the memory, Thorn pounded Father Erik’s door once more. His chest constricted at the resulting silence. The damp air, a result of being so close to the water, usually soothed him. But today, it clogged his lungs, thick and weighted like a death shroud.

He shoved the door open. The coffin, balanced atop its dais and lined with red velvet, was empty. Just as he’d feared.

Cursing, Thorn stared up at “Dies Irae” painted in lovely black script around the top edge of the room to form a border against the red walls. The verses had never seemed more apropos—a requiem mass as ghastly and rhapsodic as the man who had built this lair over a century ago for his sanctuary: the composer, the alchemist, the architect, the magician, the mastermind.

The Phantom.

But that legendary man had grown weak and sickly of late, and no longer ventured topside alone, neither to the secret passages of the academy that held nothing but bad memories for him, nor to anywhere in Paris. He went only when Thorn accompanied him to provide support.

Or so Thorn thought. There was only one reason Erik would risk going without him today. The same reason he’d lost all his senses a hundred years earlier at an opera house much like this one—before Thorn was even born—and kidnapped the opera’s prima donna.

Thorn’s gaze shifted to the painting hanging on the wall where Christina Nilsson, Erik’s cherished Christine, was dressed as Pandora from Greek mythology. A necklace holding a ruby wedding ring hung from a nail beside it.

Thorn growled. Should Erik be seen or captured, their entire way of life—all that his father had worked for and built, along with their ties to the subterranean world—could be exposed.

Turning back toward the darkness of the parlor, Thorn shouted the “Dies Irae,” the tension on his vocal cords excruciating: “Day of judgment! Day of wonders! Hark! The trumpet’s awful sound; louder than a thousand thunders, shakes the vast creation round!”