“Too old? I thought he looked like he was our age.” I rub my forehead. “Maybe it was one of the students in costume. He was in Victorian clothes, hanging around the garden with a set of pruning shears.”
Sunny’s eyes meet mine; both honesty and intelligence shine bright inside of them. “I don’t know what you think you saw when you got here, but all of us were at auditions. They take roll. Attendance is mandatory. There was a time when the garden was beautiful. I’ve seen black-and-white pictures in the school library upstairs. But that was back in 1925, when a journalist did a spread on the abandoned opera house to celebrate the Palais Garnier’s fiftieth anniversary. The anonymous keeper of that garden would be long dead by now.”
My hand spasms and I drop my mug, soaking my jeans and the bed with hot soup.
He arrived at the apartment’s secret entrance and found the swan quivering at the bank’s edge.
Something was wrong.
“What happened? Why aren’t you inside?” he asked, climbing out of the boat and onto the dock that opened into his underground home.
Ange flapped her crimson wings, urging him to hurry. He peeled away his gloves, boots, and cape to prevent trailing mud along the lavishly patterned tiles inside the apartment. The swan warbled low in her throat—a fretful, worried sound. Her webbed feet clacked behind his silent tread in thick woolen socks.
The lanterns along the walls had waned, and being so deep underground meant no windows to invite the last streams of twilight inside. He would’ve been all but blind had it not been for the glow of his eyes lighting his footsteps. He wove his way through the parlor, past the heavily upholstered furniture, wall tapestries, and garish ornamentation.
He wrestled a familiar niggle of frustration that they still honored the Victorian epoch of antiquity, regardless of how many times he’d tried to bring them into the twenty-first century. The only parts of the house that merited gas lamps or electricity from a generator were the old-fashioned elevator with a gated, cage-style door, the cellar laboratory it led to, and the four-hundred-gallon aquarium that stood on a platform in his bedroom.
The hair on his neck lifted as he passed the birds, animals, and reptiles in shadowy cages and terrariums lining the parlor walls on either side of the pipe organ: a blue jay with a busted wing, a rabbit with a gnawed-off hind leg, a lizard missing one eye—and many other creatures. Some were hurt or orphaned and needed his help; others were patients from procedures he’d done his best to block from his mind, although there was no chance of ever forgetting.
All of them relied on him to stitch them back together with new pieces and parts, and nurse them to health before being returned to the wild. Tonight, they seemed to glare from inside their temporary prisons, judging . . . accusing. It was as if they could see his own brokenness, how he ached to commit a betrayal so self-serving, he should be caged himself.
He swallowed a groan. All this time he’d waited, hoping he might one day connect with the mirror piece of his soul. His flamme jumelle.
For the academy’s new arrival to be that mirror was a twist of the scalpel. He despised the confusion and conflict she inspired in him, and he despised himself for being drawn to her.
“Rune,” he muttered in hushed tones. In ancient times, runes were mystical, divine liturgies, powerful enough to cast spells. That explained why he was bewitched by her.
All he could do today was make mistakes. It would have been enough proof to see her eyes from the other side of the mirror, the way they glistened with unspent energy. If he’d only left then, instead of following her through the narrow secret passageways inside the wall to the third floor; instead of watching through the mirrors and hearing her sing . . .
He knew her the moment he saw her soul bared, the instant she released the first note. He’d heard her in visions for years. She had inspired countless compositions upon his violin.
Today, after hearing her in reality, the music rang in his head and burned an imprint behind his eyes. So many colors and emotions, a spectrum of auras—vivid and alive. An abundance of energy so pure, every sensory receptor in his body had reacted. He tasted the music, more luxurious than fresh honeycomb melting on the tongue; he felt the notes on his skin, soothing like raindrops on a hot day.
He’d never experienced anything so healing and sweet.
Yet it nearly broke her to sing.