Page 78 of Angel's Kiss
“You have to go, don’t you?” Christine whispered, her heart filling with fear again. She knew today she could not go with him. And perhaps, she should not.
“There is much I’ll have to attend to today,” Erik said sadly. “Meet me at sunset, at the stables. Then I’ll take you...” he paused, rolling his lips.
“Home. You’ll take me home.”
He nodded. Without another word he rose, shying away from even the dim light of day as it touched his eyes. Christine rose as she watched him dress, marking the long scars across his back from lashings long ago, the way they faded into his burns, like rays of sun into a cloud. They were nothing compared to the damage upon his soul. His back straightened as he put on his mask, and the room grew colder. He looked back at Christine, still nude beneath the sheet covering her.
“Keep breathing today, please,” Erik entreated. The light in his eyes was no longer visible, now that the night had passed, but the adoration and worry were still there. The love.
“I promise I will,” Christine whispered. He seemed unconvinced as he drifted to her and pulled her into one final, aching kiss. It was an entreaty, that kiss, a desperate call to her heart to survive the day and return to him.
“I love you,” he breathed as their lips parted. “I love you more than I have ever loved anyone before. I want you to know that.”
“I would never doubt it,” she replied. She knew, somehow, that he did not expect her to say it back, but even so, it scared her to think of the words crossing her lips.
“Until I see you again, my angel,” he said with a final kiss on her brow. She closed her eyes as he left and kept them closed until the click of the door closing made her jump like a gunshot. She wrapped herself in her sheet, running to the window to watch him go. She saw him for only a second, a shadow on the street below that disappeared into the cold alley behind the church in an instant. She fell to her knees, gasping.
He was gone and she had to face the day alone with a man’s death on her conscience. She would have to stand and dress with the ache in her groin and thighs from how a killer had fucked her. She would have to walk through Paris, to his opera, knowing what he had done and the things she would so willingly let him do to her again. Her fear choked her, but she forced herself to breathe, as he had commanded her.
Christine did not know what terrified her more: being without the one capable of driving back the dark that threatened to consume her, or the man himself, who had brought that darkness upon her.
12. Persephone
Erik came home viathe sewers and tunnels into the fifth cellar. He didn’t bother with a lantern; he knew his way in the dark. He knew he was close to the lake when he heard them. He hadn’t listened for the ghosts in a while. Their whispers and cold breezes were simply part of the underworld which he inhabited, like the sound of water dripping in the damp blackness, or the scent of earth and stone. Maybe they knew he had confessed and spent the night thinking on his crimes. Or maybe they had a new companion to welcome with open arms. Erik did not fear Joseph Buquet’s spirit; only the consequences to Christine of separating said spirit from its body.
He stopped in his tracks, just as he reached the glow of the furnace fires that never slept, thinking of her. This was the only place in the cellars, save his home, which was warm. And yet he was sure he could lean right against these steel beasts and not feel the same heat he had when Christine’s body was made one with his. He would do anything now, for her. He’d kill a hundred, a thousand, at her command. He had given up on regret many years ago, but it shocked him now, to think how he would discard any shred of conscience he had if it was at her command.
He came up through the sets and storage below the stage, listening for activity. Thereshouldn’tbe anyone there so early in the morning after a performance, and on a Saturday no less. But there were voices and footsteps above. Serious, low voices and purposeful steps. Buquet had been found.
Erik hid under a trapdoor – one that was there intentionally, for theatrical magic and not one of his. He peeked up through a crack at the edge to make sure the path was clear then stole out of the opening like a shadow, hidden behind a flat at the back of the stage. He had to find the gun Buquet had dropped—
“Will you be needing anything else of me, Monsieur Mifroid?” Erik froze at the sound of the boy’s voice.What was he doing here?
“No, Monsieur le Vicomte, you have been most helpful,” a man replied, Erik assumed it was the Mifroid who had been addressed. He sounded tired and surprisingly bored.
“Too helpful, one might even say.” It was Richard’s voice that cut in, and he rose slightly in Erik’s estimation for the mockery of the so-called Vicomte in his tone.
