Page 45 of Angel’s Flight (The Phantom Saga #4)

London

“W e have to make a decision .” Christine didn’t like how disappointed and dour she sounded, but she couldn’t be bothered to pretend to be anything else.

The shock of discovery and the loss of the potential of a life were a deep, throbbing ache, but she had no time or patience to attend to either.

Erik was more broken than she was and it was up to her, again, to put them both back together.

Erik looked up at her from where he had secreted himself in Letitia’s parlor, looking out over the dark street. It was past three in the morning; no one would be about now, but he seemed more interested in the dark than in the voice of his wife behind him.

“Did you hear me?” Christine asked, sighing in weariness that went beyond her body to her soul.

“I did,” Erik replied quietly. He looked small in the corner next to the curtain.

The mask he had borrowed (of course Letitia had a good store of them for salacious reasons) was black and awkward and he didn’t need it with Christine, but she understood how it made him feel safer. “What must we decide?”

“Where we’re going. We can’t stay in London, not as long as Bidaut is looking for us here,” Christine said, repeating herself from the long conversations in her head over the past few hours. “Letitia says maybe someplace like Oxford or Cardiff might suit us.”

Erik shook his head. “Another city we don’t know that you’ll hate.” He sounded utterly miserable.

“Or we can get ahead of them.” Now that made Erik turn to her at last. Christine straightened up. “When I had Pauline tied up in Lucca, she made it clear where she might hunt us if we slipped her grasp. She knew the name of your mother’s village. In Ireland.”

“We can’t go to Coolaney,” Erik said, firm and sour. “No more backwaters or ignorant villagers.”

“You just said no more cities!” Christine argued, aghast and confused.

“No more foreign cities we don’t know,” Erik corrected, eyes shining with resolve. “We can go back to France. We should go back... and face this.”

“Absolutely not,” Christine snapped.

Erik straightened in shock. “What?”

“We’re not going back to a country where so many people want to see you dead,” Christine explained, her ire rising. “It shouldn’t be hard to understand.”

“I said, we’ll—”

“Face them?” she scoffed. “Meaning you’ll drag us into more confrontations and violence? Where will it stop?”

“That’s not—” Erik shook his head, at a loss for words or some other comforting falsehood.

“I know you, my Erik,” Christine sighed. “I know you wouldn’t seek that violence, but somehow, it would find you. Find us. At some point, we’ll stop being lucky. I live in fear of the day this curse will take you from me.”

“Then we should go home and hide until it’s safe.” Erik’s voice was so sad, it hurt Christine to hear it. “I know it’s not ideal, but we could make it work, somehow. Like I did before.”

“You know we can’t,” Christine whispered, pitying him. She had spent so much time in the last months homesick for ideas of places that she could never go that she had forgotten that Erik had been forced to leave the only home and safety he had ever known too.

“I miss it, Christine,” Erik said softly. “I miss my books and my organ and my piano and my bed and my opera.”

“I miss it too,” Christine admitted, heart and soul aching.

She let herself feel it for a brief moment, that bone-deep longing for the familiar, even if it had been flawed and dark.

Erik’s house on the lake had been a tomb, home only to the dead.

It was a place they had escaped, as much as they had left it behind. “But do you miss who you were there?”

“Sometimes,” Erik answered softly. Guiltily.

“We have to leave that behind too.” Christine hated to say it. Hated to tell him he had not changed enough.

“Is that really why you want to run off to my mother’s cursed village on the off chance of catching that woman? Not because she hurt you, but because it’s good?” Erik shot back.

Christine gritted her teeth. “Because there are innocent people in that town. People who deserve some warning about what’s coming or salvation from it if she’s already there.”

“Why do they deserve it? What have those deluded strangers ever done for you?” There was cruelty and bitterness in Erik’s voice that she had not heard in it for a long time.

“They deserve safety because they are people just like us, and we all deserve to live free of strife,” Christine answered slowly.

“No one lives free or safe in this world, and most don’t deserve it,” Erik replied, and it made Christine ill to hear it. She had to remind herself that he was angry, rattled, and hurt. “Especially backwards fools in forgotten villages.”

“Like the people in Lungern?” Christine asked, face hardening.

Erik’s eyes were shocked behind his mask. “What?”

“I know some slight you won’t speak of that drove us from the first place I thought we’d rest. I didn’t ask because I kept hoping you’d tell me and trust me, but you never have.”

“Because it was too shameful,” Erik whispered back, turning away. Hiding himself from her as he so often did when he wallowed in his guilt and self-loathing.

“You never need to be ashamed with me,” Christine lamented. “Haven’t I told you this enough?”

“Perhaps I don’t want to relive the pain of coming across a child in the woods when I was walking – like a fool – without my mask,” Erik said, fists clenching.

“Perhaps I don’t want to remember how he screamed and ran; how he fell and cut himself when he saw my cursed face.

Perhaps I don’t want to go to Coolaney because the same thing will happen there when someone alerts the village of fools about the monsters at the edge of town. ”

“Erik,” Christine sighed with equal parts pity and frustration. She pushed Erik by the shoulder to face her. “I’m sorry you had to bear that alone. I wish you had told me.”

“So you could convince me to stay until some other disaster befell us?” Erik almost laughed. “Now you want me to go to the village that never welcomed me before.”

“I want to go and help people because I have to be able to do something!” Christine found herself growling back with an intensity that made her husband draw back in shock. “I don’t know what my life is or who I’m supposed to be anymore, but I still know what’s right and what needs protecting.”

Erik stared at her, and she wasn’t sure if it was in horror or wonder, thanks to the damn borrowed mask. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again with contrition that made Christine’s heart clench.

“We are here – I am here – because of my choices as much as yours. We swore to face these challenges together,” Christine said as she grasped his left hand with hers, entwining their fingers so their wedding bands glimmered in the light.

“We have to do this. I have to do this. Please don’t fight me or run away. ”

Erik’s eyes fell on their hands, the battle raging in him evident from his shallow breath and tense shoulders.

Christine squeezed his fingers, praying her touch could reach him in whatever dark place his mind had taken him to.

Perhaps it worked, for his shoulders sagged as his breath left him in a defeated sigh.

“To Ireland then,” Erik said at last, and Christine felt at least one knot in her chest unfurl.

“At least it will be native soil for one of us,” Christine said, though she held little hope that it would be any more than a stop on this journey that never seemed to end.

Paris

I n the past, Meg had enjoyed being the center of attention in a rehearsal.

Today, she hated it. She hated how her mother wouldn’t let her out of her sight.

She hated how she had to repeat over and over what had happened and what it had been like to speak to the police and yes, the attack on Monsieur d’Amboise was the same as the others.

The assailant had struck from the dark, unseen, and the incident had left d’Amboise convinced he would never set foot in the Opéra again.

Meg didn’t want to repeat that. She wanted to talk to Monsieur Moncharmin, or barring that, Jammes.

She had to stumble her way through some Debussy first, then Gounod, and then assure her mother four separate times that she was fine and she could go home.

Meg would be waiting in three hours at the door for Madame Giry to escort her home, she promised.

Meg hoped that was true, even though she didn’t know where her adventures would take her once her mother finally relented and left.

She didn’t want to be home late, in all honesty.

She wanted to sit with her mother by the fire and forget about étienne d’Amboise’s clumsy hands and his broken body on the street and how those things made her feel.

Surely it was as wicked to have been with him as it was wicked to be happy to see her fellow man hurt.

“Have you seen Jammes?” Meg asked Blanche as they stretched in a corner.

“She was in her usual spot, of course,” Blanche said idly, checking her reflection in a small mirror. She had rouge on.

“I meant since we broke,” Meg sighed. “Where’d she get off to?”

“Why would I know?” Blanche shrugged. “Do you think I made a good impression on the Comte de Chagny?”

“What?” Meg squinted at her friend only to be ignored. “Never mind.”

The halls were quieter than the dance studio, with the patter of toe shoes from the dark and the distant sound of the orchestra rehearsing. Meg took a moment to enjoy the calm and think how it was so rare to be alone in the Opéra. There was always someone hiding somewhere, living or dead.

Leave it to her to be so absent-minded that she turned a corner and found exactly what she was looking for. She slammed into Jammes’s sturdy frame, sending the older dancer skidding back while swearing.

“Goddamnit, Giry!” Jammes hissed. “Are you so broken by finding your patron on the street that you’ve gone blind?”

“He wasn’t my patron,” Meg shot back, suddenly righteous. “And I was looking for you!”