RoseBlood(19)

Ange answered with her own trumpeting squawk as the elevator made a whining hum, the cables drawing the car up from the cellar. She tottered toward a shadowy figure clambering out of the gated door with a lantern in hand.

“Brava, Thorn!” Erik’s deep and dulcet praise floated over to him, stroking him like a loving pat to the head. “Stunning recitation. Although you mustn’t strain your voice. And hymns are best delivered in their native tongue. The protestant version holds no torch to the Latin.” With a weary grunt, his silhouette slumped to the floor. The swan huddled in his lap and scolded him, her beak tugging at his ear.

Thorn crouched beside the duo, relieved it had only been a case of Ange not knowing where her master was. But that relief sunk to concern when he noticed the sickly gray aura surrounding Father Erik. Thorn fought the usual bout of jealousy that niggled at him, seeing Erik give so much of himself to his cause in the cellar lab. His father was always exhausted on Sundays, after burning all his energy, but this was extreme. “You should be in bed, saving your strength,” Thorn said, pushing out the statement from a throat still raw and achy after his panicked tantrum.

“Just as you should be respectful of your own limitations.” His father’s unsteady fingertip tapped Thorn’s Adam’s apple in the lantern’s soft light, then moved to his face, as if assuring himself all of Thorn’s features were in place.

He often compared Thorn’s appearance—defined dark brows above piercing, wide-set brown eyes; high cheekbones; a straight nose above plump lips shapely enough to be a woman’s; square, cleft chin; and defined musculature—to the heroes in the mythological tomes Thorn liked to read. Thorn, however, preferred the monsters of those tales. Their tragic misbalances and flaws were so much more compelling than any perfection could be.

And so it was with Erik. Having no outer beauty to empower him, he’d honed his inner artistry instead, the things that truly made him unique: mind, talents, voice, and mysticism. Attributes that demanded respect, fear, and awe.

Thorn had watched and learned during the twelve years he’d been under Erik’s tutelage. Pretty faces were no more than masks worn to justify laziness and intellectual monotony. Since Erik had been born without one, he’d crafted a myriad of his own—masks that gave the illusion of conformity but could be cast aside whenever he wished to unleash the true, blinding radiance of deviation.

Thorn followed in his guardian’s footsteps, made his own masks—some stitched of cloth, some ceramic—to cover the right half of his face in tribute to his mixed bloodline. Although he had nothing physical to hide, a demon lurked inside him, afraid to forge into the light of day. His masks made him feel safe, and as adept as he was at blending into his surroundings, he rarely walked the grounds without wearing one. Today being the exception. A mistake he wouldn’t make again.

Erik’s palm smelled of formaldehyde and iodine as he patted Thorn’s cheek. “How could I rest this evening, my lovely boy? The girl has arrived. I feel it.” Thorn could hear Erik smile behind his own chosen mask, shaped of copper and coated with silver. Ange’s enthusiastic greeting had knocked the covering askew, blocking his mouth and revealing that sunken crater in his forehead where one of his eyebrows jutted out unnaturally.

When the mask was in place, all that showed was the bottom quarter of his face—strong chin and full lower lip—making him appear deceptively normal, distinguished. A middle-aged man with a head of black, well-groomed hair and piercing amber eyes that glowed when he was at his most powerful.

With the mask and wig, one wouldn’t know he’d been in the world for centuries, or that he was disfigured and had only a scant cluster of hair. With everything in place, one couldn’t see the irregular shape of the eye sockets, how they burrowed too deep into his skull. They could only see the expression harbored within those depths: wise, intense, and maniacal beneath the weight of irrepressible genius and tortured memories.

Thorn’s palm covered the warm, white swirl of energy from Rune’s song, still snuggled under his sternum. He’d been selfish to think, for even a second, that he could keep any of it for himself. That he could feed his latent compositions with the fire of brilliant green that pulsed through her eyes when she performed. Erik needed it so much more than he ever could.

“Yes,” Thorn answered at last, helping his father straighten his mask so the synthetic copper nose centered over his absence of one. “It’s her. She possesses the gift. Just as was foretold.” He gripped Erik’s hand and placed it across his glowing chest where his own hand had been. “I hold the proof. Her voice—it’s immaculate.”

“Seraphic, you mean to say,” Father Erik corrected, half-teasing, as his hand began to absorb the power—a tug Thorn felt all the way into his feet.

With a rueful smile, Thorn nodded. “Undeniably. A fine match for yours, or any choir in heaven.”

“Despite that she was born to an ensemble of demons,” his father answered with that flare for dark, self-deprecating humor.

They shared a laugh, though Thorn didn’t feel any joy in his heart as he watched Erik’s veins surge with light.

Rune’s light. The purest white he’d ever seen . . . incarnate, rare . . . the essence of an angel. Thorn wanted it back, nestled inside his body. Warming him and resurrecting his muse.

“She wishes to be free. I sensed that,” Thorn added, more to distract himself from the loss than to justify their heinous plans, although it served the latter purpose well enough.