We’re almost where we last saw Sunny and Quan, prepared to follow in their tracks, when the Phantom’s giant image onscreen repositions, stopping us. He’s standing inside the coffin now. His looming form hovers there for a few seconds before levitating gracefully onto the stage. He opens his mouth, and one pristine note escapes, so pure, lyrical, and heartrending, it’s like the marriage of every harp, violin, cello, flute, piano, and bell that has ever been played.
Everything falls away. All I can see, hear, and feel is the performance unfolding before me.
The Phantom spreads his arms and casts a song from his throat in a rain of operatic ornamentation. It floods through me and reaches inside with liquid fingers, plucking at the strands of my heart as if I were his instrument. This is different than when he guides me with his violin. This is intrusive, seductive, frightening—yet at the same time, inevitable.
The notes sluice through the nucleus of my being, invading every pore, bringing the music I’ve dammed within my depths to rise in my throat on a surge of anguish, but I fight releasing it.
I’m drowning and gasp for breath, edging closer to take the lifeline the Phantom’s voice offers. Jax follows, his eyes on the stage, mesmerized like me. Like everyone.
Nausea churns through my stomach. The music has trapped me, my enemy once more. I’m a marionette, but this time, it’s the Phantom’s beguiling voice pulling at my strings. I want to ask him why he betrayed me; why he promised to bring my father to me, only to make me a victim; I want to know why he helped fix what was wrong, just to break me again. But if I open my mouth, I’ll be incapacitated once I purge the song.
I can’t be vulnerable like that, not here.
Beneath my confusion and the Phantom’s serenade, another voice breaks through: Rune, turn away. Do not sing for him.
Then I remember the boy from my dreams. The Phantom onstage doesn’t sound like my maestro, he isn’t humble and gentle like Etalon. This man is powerful, majestic, and menacing.
Somehow, they’re not the same person at all.
In that moment of clarity, the music gurgling in my throat sinks into my chest until I’m in control once more. The danger of the situation hits hard and fast: Quan and Sunny are missing, and Jax is standing beside me in the darkness, hand in mine, still entranced, both of us overshadowed by the other ravers leaving us behind on their journey to reach the stage.
Holding tighter to Jax, I back us up, headed for the stairs we descended earlier. He tries to pull away and join the forward-moving crowd, but I overpower him, taking advantage of his weakened, song-induced stupor.
Like the others, he doesn’t hear what I hear: the Phantom’s serenade is no longer beautiful . . . it’s raging and violent. All the instruments have resumed: electronic keyboards, cymbals, and drum lines, throbbing into the roots of my teeth and knocking against my bones and marrow. Jax doesn’t see what I see: the chandelier’s black tentacles curling down like living, thorny vines, stretching closer and closer to the crowd; the acrobats with eyes aglow, floating like spiders on anchor lines, creeping ever closer to their prey; the employees surrounding the stage in their flashing vests, offering a distraction to keep everyone from looking above.
Oblivious, the ravers march around me and Jax—an ultraviolet line of ants avoiding two strands of grass on their journey to get closer to their source of nourishment: the Phantom and his rapturous, brutal song.
I whimper upon seeing one of the employees in pursuit of us. Jax and I scramble up the stairs to escape. Once we make it to the balcony, I’ve lost sight of our stalker’s flashing, hooded vest.
It gives me some small relief that Sunny and Quan were escorted out before all the mayhem began. The surge of ravers has reached the edge of the stage. They stretch their hands high, some crying, others moaning as if in pain, each one surrounded by an aura of purple and crimson—offering up their spirits and loyalty to their tormentor.
As the music reaches its crescendo, a fluctuation on the giant screens snags my attention. The Phantom lifts a black glove and rips off his mask, exposing a horrific distortion of crinkly, waxen flesh, hanging askew on a gnarled, misshapen skull. His eyes—those eyes I thought I knew—burrow under his bulbous forehead, and his nose is gone, as if it were a candle that melted away. I don’t know who’s been visiting me each night, because this is the true Phantom. He doesn’t even have half a face.
A sob lodges in my throat. I peel my gaze away, unable to watch another second. It’s not the deformity that makes it unbearable. It’s the unquenchable agony inside those glimmering deep-set eyes—over a century’s worth of dejection, sorrow, and rage.