His luck couldn’t have been worse. That particular spy had firsthand knowledge of Rune and her friends. And, being a musician, he’d also had the perfect vantage point from the stage to watch as Thorn led each one away during the performance.
It wasn’t until Erik and Thorn returned home that he realized the man ratted him out. In a tirade, Erik found the blindfold inside Thorn’s jacket pocket. The Phantom held it up, initiating one of his magic tricks to spontaneously ignite the fabric. The blindfold drifted down—flickering with orange flames—then landed on the marble tiles and tapered to ashes and smoke at Thorn’s feet.
Furious, Thorn had threatened to pay a visit to the drummer . . . make him regret ever double-crossing him. The man was nothing more than a marionette. It was time his strings were cut.
Erik turned his back then, assuring Thorn, should he try to leave that night, there would be deadly consequences.
But that was last night, when Erik was still brimming with power and life after the feeding frenzy at the club. Tonight, if he happened to catch Thorn on his way to the escape route, he would be weakened from spending all that energy in the cellar.
The elevator rattled to a stop and Thorn hesitated, his nostrils stinging from chemical and electrical scents.
He hadn’t been down here for several weeks. He’d grown to dread the horrific, heartbreaking scene that awaited him each time, for it forced him to cross-examine the moral philosophies his maman had instilled in the boy he once was. Principles he lost sight of, but never forgot. He failed to voice these concerns to the man who saved his life and taught him how to survive. He’d had too much respect for Erik to crush his hopes.
Hope . . . what a tragically miscast word for what was contained within this room.
Thorn dragged his gaze to the glass chamber in the corner, where yellowish plasma discharges pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat. Hidden by a tarp, the fragile occupant—frozen within a syrupy mixture of glycerol and other cryoprotectants to prevent crystallization of tissue—fed off the buzzing, popping currents. The sophisticated life-support and preservation system had been built at Erik’s hands, over a century before human medical standards had ever reached such technological advancements.
Thorn was struck by all the hours and days he’d spent down here, aiding his father as they kept her alive—injecting her with osmolytes drawn from winter flounder and wood frogs, small molecules that worked like antifreeze and prevented damage to her bodily fluids and vital organs so she could be suspended in time.
As he opened the gated door, Thorn allowed himself to relax slightly, grateful for the tarp blocking his view. He couldn’t have stomached looking upon her tonight, regardless that she hadn’t changed in the twelve years he’d lived here, and hadn’t aged for more than a hundred years before that.
“Have you come to twist the knife in my back?” Erik’s weary accusation greeted him from a plush chair in the adjacent corner where he often sat to recuperate after siphoning away his energy.
Thorn’s shoulders sunk beneath the wounded tone of that dulcet, waning voice.
Erik’s bony form shifted in the shadows to better face him. An operating table stood between them, and a dim lightbulb swung above it, reflecting off the shiny metal surface. This was the table where Erik had gently and patiently taught Thorn how to be a surgeon as a child. How to piece animals back together once they’d been broken. Later, his responsibilities changed to unnatural alterations that left him feeling at odds and out of sorts, procedures that Erik didn’t have the stomach to do himself.
As if it could read his thoughts, one of the birds in the cages he held whined like a fox and a lizard hooted in response. Thorn’s head bowed, heavy.
When he was young, and honing such strange skills, he could’ve never imagined why: That one day they would be used upon a girl who was his mirror soul. How could he possibly bring himself to slice through her beautiful skin?
A twisting agony clenched his chest. The last time he’d been here, the table was covered in dust. Over the past few weeks, Erik had prepped it for Rune’s Halloween visit tomorrow night, including updating and testing the metal coils, levers, and switches that would aid in conducting the transfer. He’d even gathered strands of blond hair out of the overpriced brush Thorn had stolen from that snotty prima donna, and had them braided with nylon and threaded through sterilized needles, placed on a tray beside Thorn’s scalpels. Now everything was set.
Just the thought of the heinous excision made the room spin around Thorn: wooden shelves with unrecognizable organs preserved in formaldehyde, test tubes, beakers, and distilling columns. A worn chalkboard filled with mathematical and scientific equations, and a table where encyclopedias—chemistry, physics, biology, occultism, and alchemy—were opened to pages of underlined text.