Page 54 of Angel’s Flight (The Phantom Saga #4)

“I couldn’t sleep,” Meg confessed.

“And why is that?” Her mother sank awkwardly to the floor next to Meg, wrapping them both in her shawl, like a bird protecting her chick from the rain. “Have your adventures gotten away from you?”

“What?” Meg looked up at her mother in surprise. “I haven’t...”

“Meg. You’ve been out and about non-stop in the last few weeks,” her mother sighed. “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me what you’ve been up to, and I’ve been patient, but don’t think I don’t notice. I’m a mother – we always know when something is amiss.”

Meg couldn’t control the way her chin began to tremble or the moisture that sprang to her eyes. She could name it now – the crushing feeling she had endured since Shaya had left her, and even before then. Even among her supposed friends and fellow dancers, she had felt it for months – loneliness.

She fell against her mother’s shoulder and wept, comforted by the embrace of someone who would never leave her. Who never had left her, all this time.

“Mama, I’m sorry, I just—”

“You wanted something of your own, I know,” her mother cooed, petting Meg’s hair. “Everyone wants adventure at your age, but it’s a lonely thing to take it on your own, even if that’s the way it must be.”

Meg sniffled and nodded. Sometimes, she forgot that her mother could be wise. “I’ve... I’ve been trying to discover who the new ghost is. Or something like that. It’s all gotten away from me.”

“Ah, so that’s where the letter went,” the elder Giry chuckled.

“You’re not mad?”

“Only a little. More so worried that you’re putting yourself in great danger.” Meg shrank into herself, remembering all the reckless things she had done and how lucky she was not to have been compromised or hurt.

“I’ve been so stupid, and for what?” Meg sighed. “I haven’t helped anyone or discovered anything.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s true.”

Meg blinked through her tears to look up at her mother’s kind face. “You don’t?”

“If you’re anything like I was at your age, you’ve learned quite a bit about yourself,” her mother said with a wry smile.

Meg paused to think those words over. Her mother, as usual, was right. In a few weeks, she had grown in ways she’d never even dreamed of. Done things that the little Meg of even a season ago wouldn't have thought possible. “Perhaps I have.”

“And you didn’t even have to sneak across the border into Prussia to do it like I did when I was your age,” her mother remarked with an easy shrug.

“What?” Meg gaped at her mother.

“I’ll tell you the story later. We’re talking about you right now,” Madame Giry replied as if she had not increased how interesting she was to her daughter by tenfold. “Tell me what you mean by a new ghost. I’ve had my suspicions about what’s been going on, but I want to hear it from you.”

Meg took a deep breath. If there was anyone she could tell about all of this, it was the woman who had been in the ghost’s confidence as much as anyone else in the Opéra who hadn’t disappeared.

“The ghost wasn’t a ghost. He was a man,” Meg began, and the words began to flow out of her. All she knew and suspected, all the secrets she had learned, finally confessed to a sympathetic ear.

It took her until dawn to finish the story, with the milky light of morning filtering into their parlor. Meg felt like she’d run a mile when she finished, looking up to her mother for some sign of hope or understanding.

“There is one thing in all of this that doesn’t make sense to me entirely,” her mother said, looking wistful.

“One thing?”

The elder Giry scowled indulgently. “I’ve suspected his identity. I wondered why a ghost would need somewhere to sit, honestly. But how did he bring down the chandelier when he was also snatching Christine Daaé from the stage?”

Meg blinked. She hadn’t thought of that at all.

“He had help,” Meg stated aloud. “He had help dropping the chandelier and turning off the gas before it fell, so there would be no fire or chaos. He was in three places at once.”

“Interesting,” Meg’s mother murmured. “He shared secrets with someone before he disappeared. Maybe someone is still using them.”

“But why?” Meg asked again.

“Why did we think the first ghost did what he did? There are only so many reasons for a man to take on such madness: love or revenge.”

“It’s not love,” Meg said quickly, though she doubted it the moment she said it. Maybe it was that, in part. “That leaves revenge.”

Her mother shrugged. “What’s been done to those patrons sounds like it was something they deserved.”

Meg chewed her lip, wondering where this left her, if it left her anywhere at all. “Wait. You said disappeared. I told you Shaya insists that the old ghost is dead.”

“Yet he does not wish the Vicomte – pardon, Comte – who was so involved in all this to know that these attacks and hauntings have resumed,” Madame Giry replied, calm and insightful as ever. “Then runs off to another country for urgent business.”

Meg was thunderstruck, but it made sense.

Shaya’s refusal to share secrets out of supposed respect for the dead and his lack of concern for Christine Daaé.

He wasn’t concerned, because he knew where she was: with the man Shaya had hunted and now protected.

With the ghost. Did that mean this new phantom was someone who wanted to protect them too by causing some diversion, or was it someone who wanted to draw the old phantom back?

Suddenly, Meg doubted everything.

Sligo

W hen did everything become so cold? It seemed like yesterday that Erik had been going mad with the Florentine heat, but now the Irish damp was deep in his bones.

He had never been one to miss the summer, but right now those days in Florence felt like a glimmer of vital life in his memory.

Everything around him now bore the chill of death.

He touched his throat, letting the faint bruise there smart for a moment.

It didn’t bring him comfort as other mementos of penance and pleasure had.

It brought him shame that he had deserved and enjoyed such a thing.

He was a killer, who had been wanted by a madwoman because he was monstrous.

He remained monstrous, as confined and hunted as ever, dragging an angel down into the muck with him again.

“What did she say to you?” Christine asked from across the room. She was staring at the wall that separated them from the woman they now held captive again. Who they couldn’t release without risking further violence...

“What?” Erik asked back, trying to regain his bearings in the conversation they had been trying to start all morning as guilt and silence kept rearing up between them.

“Did she say anything about her plans or what she intended to do if you didn’t meet her terms?” Christine looked ill as she said it, but not furious the way she had last night.

“She said she was going to burn Coolaney to the ground, metaphorically,” Erik answered with a sigh. “It’s a complicated scheme of some sort. She acted like she would own the town.”

“How could someone own a town to destroy it?” Christine scoffed.

“The English own this entire country – well, stole it,” Erik replied with a sneer. “Every village is controlled by a manor that some English family owns. Sometimes it’s a rich Irish one who bowed at the right time if they’re lucky.”

“Does Coolaney have such a manor?” Christine asked as the same idea occurred to Erik.

“It does, though it’s small, and last time I was there, it was already falling into disrepair.

It was granted to a man – a knight, not even a Lord, I think.

Maybe it was a punishment.” Erik thought back to if he had even seen the old codger.

His mother had talked about him too, so he couldn’t possibly still be alive.

“Is he still alive? Who will it pass to?” Christine asked. “If Pauline had some scheme to buy it or swindle him?”

“She said Bidaut thought it was too complicated and she mentioned ghosts,” Erik murmured. “It sounds vindictive enough for her.”

“Then we need to go and undo it. Or something,” Christine said, springing up. “We have her. We can make her tell us the details.”

“Why on earth would she do that?” Erik didn’t mean to sound so very condescending, but his tone made Christine freeze, then frown. “I doubt she’d even talk under torture.”

“We’re not going to torture anyone!”

“Yes, certainly if it won’t be effective,” Erik grumbled, and Christine rolled her eyes in frustration.

“That is beside the point. We have to help those people and keep them safe.” Christine chewed her lip as if it would make some solution appear.

“Why though?” Erik asked with a weary sigh and knew immediately by Christine’s look that was the wrong thing to say.

“I know it’s the right thing, but... is it?

These are strangers. If we thwart her there and let her go, she and Bidaut will just go after someone else.

Or us personally until we agree to their terms.”

“What are you saying?” Christine asked, her face stark with a kind of shock and disappointment that made Erik’s insides turn.

How could he explain that he did care about people most of the time, but right now, he found it hard to care about anything?

Everything felt so dark and hopeless. A world full of dead ends.

“What if we just pay them off and run?” Erik asked with a sigh.

Christine looked at him as if he’d suggested murder, which he had been proud of not doing. “You want to give up? Let them win?”

“I want peace,” Erik countered. “I want to be free of this.”

“What about our future?” Christine asked, something heartbroken in her eyes. “I know you never wanted that money. I know it’s a burden to you, but having it means that, someday, we can finally rest and stop running.”

“I know,” Erik whispered back, his mind swimming with visions of domestic normalcy that made him feel like he was being choked again.

A monster and freak like him, who had lived so long on the fringes and underground, couldn’t belong in a life like that.

He’d barely survived in this haphazard existence he’d thrown them into.

“We can’t keep going like this,” Christine pushed. “Erik. I can’t endure this rootlessness for much longer.”

“You did with your father,” Erik argued automatically.

“He was running away from life,” Christine snapped back, the honesty shocking Erik.

“He was running from the memory of my mother and his failures, and any sort of responsibility, and it nearly broke me too. All I ever wanted was a home that lasted, and the only reason we ever came close to having one was because he got too sick to move.”

“But you survived.” Erik felt like he was being attacked now. Like he had to defend himself and all his choices and desires. “I lived on the road for years too.”

“And you told me what you were searching for the whole time was a home – a place to stay and be safe,” Christine protested, emotion rising in her voice that made Erik cringe.

“I found that place,” Erik heard himself say. “And you made me leave it.”

Christine blinked at him, on a precipice between fury and heartbreak. “You wanted to die there and take everything with you. I begged you to come into the light with me and live. We knew the cost.”

“Did we though? This isn’t...” Erik sank into a chair, cradling his skull as it pounded with confusion and hurt.

“I love you and I want to make you happy, but this is so hard. You asked me to forgive, to be brave enough to let go and seek goodness. But I don’t know if I can.

I don’t know if I’m truly brave enough to live in this cruel, greedy, confusing world. ”

“There’s nowhere else to live.” Christine’s voice was small and hurt, and Erik couldn’t bear to look up at her.

“I know this is hard, but that’s the promise we made to each other.

To walk in this world side by side, through good and ill.

I chose that because I love you and I’d rather face this world with you than without you. ”

“Even if that means falling further into darkness and depravity because of me?” Erik asked back, finally looking up. It hurt his very soul to see the tears on Christine’s face. More tears he had caused her to weep. He could do nothing but hurt and corrupt.

“Stop talking like this,” Christine whispered. “Or you’re going to say something we’ll regret.”

“Christine,” Erik exhaled. “I love you more than life, and that’s why I hate doing this to you. If I can’t give you what you want or need... If all I do is hurt you and drag you down... Maybe you should go back to London, and I should go home to—”

“I said stop ,” Christine gritted out. Erik bit his tongue as she turned away before he could indeed say something more he would regret. “I’m going to deal with her. Stay here, or I swear...”

She left without further words, and Erik stared at the door after her.

He didn’t understand what he had almost done.

What he was still considering doing. He wanted to run, she was right.

He wanted to run all the way back to Paris and hide away with his books and music and ghosts and never face these sorts of hardships or people ever again.

Christine would be free and he’d be alone, like he deserved.

Was that so different from dying? The thought struck him like a blow.

Would fleeing now be any different than flinging himself off a cliff?

Would it hurt Christine – the woman he loved and had sworn to stand by – as much as his demise?

Or would it save her? Was this what a truly good man would do when he saw someone better than him sinking into darkness?

Would that temporary grief be worth it in the end if she could truly live a life of freedom. .. without him?