Etalon touches my cheek. The vulnerability and gratitude looking back at me almost makes me leap up and hug him. Instead, I take his hand and flip it over.
“The monstrous things you’ve done don’t make you a monster. You made a conscious choice tonight, to rise above it. To help everyone at your own expense. So, you earned these.” I place the tissue-paper-wrapped gift on his palm and close his fingers around it. Furrowing his dark eyebrows, he tears open the paper. Moonlight streams through the water to gloss his hair with moving, silvery shadows as he spreads out the knitted footwear next to him on the bench. He looks up at me, questions in his eyes.
“Monsters don’t wear toe socks.” I point to the emoticons, hoping to see him smile, hoping he won’t think I’m a child for making them. “And now you have your piggy puppets back, see?”
His answering grin is boyish astonishment. “Best of all, these won’t wash away,” he adds.
I laugh and he joins in—the spontaneous outburst as exhilarating and uninhibited as a song. But I sober immediately when he props his elbows on his knees so our heads are level, and tilts my chin toward him.
“Say my name,” he murmurs, serious and low.
“Etalo—” I can’t finish, because his warm lips cover mine.
At first, he takes his time with it, guiding my face with his calloused fingertips, teasing me—feather-soft contact with just enough spark to electrify my mouth and send tingles through my teeth. We’re one for an instant, lips sealed, then sipping hungry breaths before clinging again. The moment his gentle ministrations coax a whimper of pleasure from my throat, he drops to his knees and drags my body against him, gripping my lower back in a seductive bid for more.
His lips part and our tongues meet, lighting up my insides with voltaic pulses of emotions, auras that burst in my mind on explosions of color flavored with caramel, midnight flowers, and singed spices—dark, tempestuous, and succulent. I tighten my arms around his nape, fingers curled in his silken hair, lost to the magic of us.
He moans and lowers me to my back, breaking our kiss so his lips can traverse my cheek, my ear, my jaw, my neck—discovering me, tasting me—igniting the spiritual music that only he inspires. A jarring jangle of stimulation rushes through every sensory receptor, a string of songs, ringing and humming like tiny bells set loose beneath my skin.
And I hope against all odds this night never ends.
23
MASKS
“Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.”
Philip Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield
It’s fourth period, and my stomach reminds me that lunch is just a few minutes away.
Even though my time with Etalon left the psychic vampire in me satiated, my physical needs haven’t been met today. I couldn’t eat breakfast due to my fear of what’s coming tonight . . . of the traps the Phantom has lying in wait on the floors of this opera house—the ones Etalon couldn’t find. Add to that the strain of trying to go to classes and pretend that nothing has changed in my heart or in my life, when both have been altered forever.
“Follow the routines, appear oblivious.” Those were Etalon’s instructions when he left me inside the orchestra pit at three a.m. with one last scintillating kiss burning on my lips. “We can’t let Erik get any more suspicious than he already is.”
Erik, as in the Phantom. As in, Etalon’s father. And to think, that was the least shocking thing I found out last night.
I also learned that Professor Tomlin was the drummer at the rave club who I thought looked familiar. He’s not one of our kind, but he is in the Phantom’s pocket. Etalon warned me to be most cautious around him.
Luckily, I haven’t seen him. Being at the head of the masquerade committee, he dismissed his classes for the day. First-period science became a study hall monitored by Madame Harris in the library, so Tomlin could make last-minute additions to the ballroom. I can only hope those additions aren’t under the advisement of Erik.
I tamp down the unease in my gut to keep myself in the moment.
Bouchard’s sharply angled back faces the class as she scrawls some vocabulary words across her dry-erase board: Intermezzo, Afterpiece, Ballet héro?que, Romantische Oper, Tragédie lyrique.
Fifteen sets of pens scratch on notebooks.
“You ain’t seriously giving us homework on Halloween,” Sunny grumbles from her seat behind me. Every other student is thinking it; she’s the only one bold enough to say it. I nibble the end of my pen, surprised by the longing her voice inspires, wishing I had my friend to talk to. But what would I tell her if I did?
Hey, bestie! Last night I made out with my incubus twin flame in a greenhouse beneath the river. Gave new meaning to the word steamy. And tonight, we’re going to fight a centuries-old phantom before he can steal away my voice and bring the school to the ground with everyone in it.