RoseBlood(80)
Kat and Roxie are turned full around in their seats to glare at me, so I focus on them. I’ll use everything Etalon has taught me. If I can master Renata’s song once more and knock Kat down to understudy, she’ll walk away from the opera completely, leaving Audrey next in line.
I glance at the row of teachers behind me. Everyone is there but Professor Tomlin, who often spends weekends in Paris to play with his band. But I don’t need him to sway the vote.
“You told me I could try out if I wanted, right?” I ask.
Aunt Charlotte drags her glasses off her face and considers for an instant, as if worried I’m not ready. Or maybe she’s ashamed that I slammed Audrey so heartlessly, someone who’s supposed to be my friend. Finally she nods—her forced enthusiasm spreading through the others.
Headmaster Fabre pipes up: “Madame Bouchard, it would appear we have one last prospect to consider.”
In spite of the Bride of Frankenstein’s obvious disapproval, she nods me forward, jowls clenched to razor-sharp angles.
I wriggle past Jax, whose face reflects the same disgusted shock as Sunny’s and Quan’s. Without offering any explanation, I step into the aisle to land the biggest role I never wanted.
18
NATURE’S MORATORIUM
“Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.”
Nikola Tesla
Two hours until lights-out. Thorn had to find a way to escape this prison.
Something had happened with Rune today. He sensed the surge in her spirit when she’d performed. She was wonderful and she triumphed, but it upset her. He wanted to know every detail. If it meant what he suspected, if she’d won the most prestigious role in the opera by conquering the music on her own at last, yet still felt no satisfaction, maybe Erik’s plans had merit after all.
There’d been a mental disconnect between Thorn and Rune since last night at the club. Her anger erected a barrier to any spiritual visitations in her dreams . . . a wall that he couldn’t tear down unless he could find a way out to see her, and win her trust again.
He closed the latch on a cage, then stood and straightened his half-mask and cloak. He had a strategy planned, although it was dangerous. Possibly lethal.
Last night, Erik had activated all the pitfalls and torture devices that surrounded the underground apartment, shutting him and Thorn in together. In his youth, Thorn had been taught how to maneuver safely through most of the booby traps, but he knew the Phantom well enough to anticipate a few had been kept concealed. Erik never fully trusted anyone but himself.
Yet there was one passage, via the cellar—a secure escape route Erik had designed, in case their underground home were ever flooded by the river surrounding it. Erik had in fact dammed the tributaries himself, and crafted a latch in the cellar that would open the dams and flood the apartment within a sixty-second destruction sequence, in case he ever needed to obliterate any and all traces of the Phantom.
But the escape route could be used independent of the destruct sequence. It was an airtight chamber that jettisoned through a water-filled tunnel leading into the baptismal. The very route Ange had hijacked the day Rune was in the chapel, causing the basin to fill with water.
That would be Thorn’s safe exit tonight.
Should he try leaving any other way, he would risk tripping devices Erik had kept secret. Each trapdoor led to cubicles containing their own horrors: plants hiding tiny poisonous dart frogs; bats trained to chase and disorient their prey until their hearts gave out; heat-seeking missiles that released swarms of wasps and hornets upon detonation; shrinking quicksand floors surrounded by walls crawling with assassin bugs that would slowly eat their compressed victims alive . . . not to mention the boxes of scorpions connected to trip wires lining every corridor.
The Phantom had honed the art of persecution in Persia while serving as an assassin for the shah over a century ago, long before motion sensors, laser beams, or computer electronics ever came into the world. At the time, he made do with booby traps, secret lairs, and concealed poisons. His twisted intelligence, paired with the elegant destructiveness of insects, had proven unsurpassable. Nature’s arsenal roused an instinctive fear in mankind. To torture someone utilizing that fear rendered them psychologically broken.
Erik, in his brilliant paranoia, had installed a labyrinth to protect his home from enemies, but also so he could keep prey trapped inside. Thorn had never been considered an enemy, or prey. Now he was both.
Gripping the two large cages he’d prepared, Thorn stepped into the gated elevator leading to the cellar lab, shut himself in, and pressed the button, hoping his father would be in his coffin resting. Thorn already had his violin hidden beneath the false bottom of one cage where he usually stored feed. He didn’t want to resort to any more lies.
The car rattled and groaned on its descent, spurring the three birds and five reptiles within the cages to rustle restlessly behind their bars and screens.
Thorn had thought he’d executed the perfect deception last night: leading Rune’s friends out of the club while disguised as an employee. No one had recognized him. And after hypnotizing the driver upon his return from dropping off Rune and her crew, he’d covered all his tracks.
What he failed to remember was that the Phantom had eyes everywhere, beyond the surveillance cameras that Thorn had taken care to avoid. There were the living spies, those who had been manipulated and tormented until Erik’s will became their own.