Page 39 of Angel's Flight

Shaya opened his mouth to spout another useless argument, but a knock at his door stopped him.A rather frantic knock at that.“Make it strong,” Shaya muttered to Darius.

Shaya opened the door to reveal Armand Moncharmin looking pale and clammy.Not an entirely unexpected sight, given the circumstances lately, but still a worrying one.

“I’ll make extra,” Darius said before disappearing into the kitchen.

“What’s going on?”Shaya asked as he let Armand inside.The man’s answer came in a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

“Someone has taken up our old friend’s manner of correspondence.”Armand thrust the letter against Shaya’s chest before flopping into a chair by the fireplace.

Shaya looked down at the ghost’s note.For that was what it was...Yet it wasn’t.The handwriting was jagged and the ink was red, just as Erik’s old notes had been, but it was not exactly his old friend’s hand.The contents were even curiouser.

My earlier note has been ignored, so I write again with my warning.Remove the following patrons from the positions, or there will be severe consequences for them.

De Lancey.Goncourt.De Montier.D’Amboise.

There was no signature.

“This isn’t Erik,” Shaya muttered.

“I know, but it’s something or someone making trouble,” Armand sighed.“And hurting people.These men are next!”

“Can’t you just warn them not to walk alone at night?”Shaya knew the futility of that suggestion the moment it left his mouth, and Armand gave him a withering look.Men like these didn’t take such warnings seriously.“Can you just do as you’ve been asked?”

“Those men represent tens of thousands of francs of funding for the Opéra that we desperately need right now.Things are bad, my friend.I can’t just cut them off!”Armand whimpered.“Though they are all rather odious.”

“Who could be doing this?”Shaya wondered aloud.“Everyone who knows Erik’s secret knows that you know it.”

“I’m sure that sentence made sense to you.”

Shaya scowled.“Whoever is doing this knows that the opera ghost is a fiction, one that can be adopted by another, as it seemingly has been.”

“None of this makes sense,” Armand sighed.“You’re the only one who has any idea how to go about this.I can’t bloody well tell the police.They barely let the incident with Comte Philippe go, and I can’t have them snooping in the cellars.”

Shaya closed his eyes at the words, darkness falling in his heart.It was a sin to take a life, and yet he felt so little remorse for killing Antoine de Martiniac, and that troubled him.

“What about the correspondence being ignored?Have you received other notes?”

“You think I wouldn’t have told you if that were the case?”Armand scoffed.“I came as soon as this reached me.”

“How did it reach you?”Shaya pressed.Erik had sent his notes through box five’s concierge, Madame Giry, or when he was feeling especially dramatic, just left them on the manager's desk.

“It came in the mail,” Armand replied simply, blinking at Shaya.

“In the mail?That’s far from ghostly,” Shaya scoffed.“In fact, perhaps this character is not trying to be a ghost at all.The attacks have happened outside of the Opéra.”

“So what do we do?”Armand asked, just as Darius returned with two fresh cups of tea.

“Well, we have four names and two of us,” Shaya said and received an incensed look from Darius as the words left his mouth.“Three, I mean.”

“I can ask Robert for help, perhaps...then we might follow all four of these men after the next performance and see if someone comes for them?”Armand looked green at the idea, but Shaya nodded.

“Until then, I will do some exploring,” Shaya sighed.“Though I must admit, I won’t be happy to be back in those cellars.”

Lucca

Christine took a deepbreath as she braced herself on the door.She could do this.Erik was here – though he had brought more complications than solutions.That was a fight for a different time: they had a prisoner to deal with now.

“Are you sure?”Erik asked softly as he arrived beside her, eyes wide and worried behind his plain mask.Christine nodded.

---