Page 59 of Angel's Fall

“Goodbye, Raoul. Forever,” Christine hissed as he finally let her squirm away. “Leave.”

She did not look back as he stalked away. She could imagine the determination in his face that she knew would be her doom. She waited for the sound of the door crashing closed before she collapsed, weeping and shaking, to the cold roof. It was all done – her lies had found her and destroyed everything. One of the men who loved her would be dead by the spring, she knew it in her soul, and it would be her fault. She couldn’t save them. She couldn’t save herself.

Now she felt the ghost behind her. She had to turn and face the phantom who had stolen her soul and still possessed her heart. The man who had killed the father of the first boy she ever loved.

“Did you hear it all?” Christine asked Erik’s shadow as it appeared beside hers.

“I heard enough.” Even in the most terrible of moments, his voice sounded like an angel’s. “Christine, I’m—”

“He wants revenge for his father and he won’t stop.” She turned to see her lover at last. Erik stood tall, mask shining in the twilight, his black cape fluttering like wings in the wind. Beneath the brim of his hat, his golden eyes glowed with pain, but not regret. “Did you know? About his father?”

“Yes. I—” Erik began, and Christine heaved another sobbing breath in shock. “Only since yesterday. At the—”

“You knew and didn’t say anything?” she cried, jumping away as he reached for her.

“I didn’t know how to tell you.” That had been his excuse the first morning she had found herself in his bed. The first time he had destroyed her.

“You never do,” Christine intoned numbly. “You hide, and you lurk, and youwait. I love a ghost who won’t follow me into the world! Who leaves me alone to face every trial sohecan be safe in the shadows. You can’t even use a goddamn door to find me!”

“Christine, please, I can fix this,” Erik protested, a storm in his eyes.

“Will you? Will you heal Adèle?” She spat and Erik winced. “You know what your brother did to her, don’t you? Will you kill Antoine for that?”

“You’d ask that of me?” Erik replied in horror that made Christine want to laugh.

“Even if I did, you won’t. It’s too risky! You don’t want to destroy everything you’ve built here. All your illusions and masks.” Christine wondered if confessing to Raoul had burned away even the lies she told herself. “All you want is here, but you can’t kill to keep it. Will you make it so that I don’t hate it when I step out on the stage you put me on? Will you give me some goddamn hope that my life can be more than music and darkness? Because that’s not enough.”

“It’s all I can give,” Erik pled.

She wondered if there were tears under his mask. “It’snot enough.”

Christine ran past her angel, knowing he would not follow. She ran down the thousand steps through the flies where she had lost her soul, past the stage and corridors where she had lost her innocence, and finally out into the streets. She couldn’t run home, because her home was gone, if it had ever existed. Still her feet carried her to the place where she would beg forgiveness. There was no place to go but to the first place she had lost her heart.

––––––––

Shaya waited in thecafé and listened to the other people talk. There was a peculiar thing among these white Europeans: they would glance at him and decide based on his dress and skin that he was not one of them, and therefore, could not possibly understand them. They’d make no attempt to speak quietly or to even disguise their disgust that suchpeoplewere all over the city now. As a spy, he didn’t mind. Their prejudice allowed him to hear so much. But some days, it did weigh on him to be a pariah in a foreign city.

“Another understudy coming on? What’s happening?” a man said over his coffee, and Shaya looked at the speaker in the reflection of the café window. He was not too well dressed; perhaps he was a musician or one of the secretaries? His companion was another man in a well-worn suit who looked tired.

“Do you think the ghost did her in? Valerius?” the second man asked. Shaya’s ears perked. “Heard she’ll be off the stage for a month.”

“How’d you hear that?” the first man scoffed.

“From Hugh who heard it from Bosarge!”

“You’re trusting a trumpet player? They’re worse than tenors.” So they were from the orchestra. “I heard from Giry in the ballet corps that she’s just faking it for more money.”

“Why the hell were you talking with the petits rats?”

“We weren’t talking, I was just listening to them. That other dancer – the mean one, what’s her name?”

“That’s most of them.”

“No, you know who I’m talking about; the head of the third row. Jammes!”

“What about her?” Shaya found himself holding his breath. “Well, she caused some sort of stir when she heard the news. Started ranting about the ghost and saying it was all him.”

“See, like I told you!”

---