Phantom Heart

by Kelly Creagh

  I frowned at him, both baffled at his words and able to see his reasoning.

  Why did that hurt so much?

  “I am here before you now against my better judgment,” he went on without further prompting. “While I wish I could say that I have come to prepare you for whatever will transpire next, I can lie to you no more. And so I will tell you that I have returned simply because the misery of missing you has, at last, outweighed the pain that comes with being in your presence.”

  I couldn’t have hidden my shock if I’d wanted to. Because those words, simultaneously as ardent as they were devastating, couldn’t have come from Zedok. Only Erik could have said such a thing to me.

  “Would the pain be any more to bear,” I heard myself whisper, “if you let me go?”

  “Stephanie—”

  “I would come back,” I hurried to say. And maybe, possibly, I even meant it.

  “It’s not—”

  “I miss my family.” I started down the stairs toward him. “I miss Charlie and my father. They’re gone because I am. And I know they’re not going to come back until I do. They need me. Erik, please.”

  “You don’t understand.” Turning, he headed into the parlor. I went after him, stopping in the doorway while he went to the fireplace. With one gloved hand, he picked up the ticking mantel clock.

  “This was once my father’s,” he said. “Every hour of every day, it reminds me of him. Stephanie, it eats at me. Erodes the fractals of my soul the way sand devours a forgotten relic.”

  Stepping back from the mantel, he hurled the clock into the hearth with sudden violence, the shattering of glass and the cracking of wood making me jump.

  Next, he crossed to a short table stacked with books, which he kicked over. Then, turning, he stormed toward me.

  I held both my breath and my ground, fearful I’d be the next target on his tirade. But he merely took me by the hand, something he’d never done since bringing me here.

  “Listen,” he said as he pulled me out with him into the hall again, his bony fingers dropping mine the instant we’d passed fully into the foyer. “Do you hear it?” He pivoted to face me, standing closer than he had ever dared to come on his own outside of a dream.

  I listened, searching the darkness that contained his eyes . . . but I didn’t hear anything.

  But then the mantel clock resumed its quiet ticking.

  He pressed a hand to my spine. Then, gently, he guided me back into the parlor. Once more, he parted from me, pointing to where the unmarred onyx clock sat on the mantel. The books and table had righted themselves once more, too.

  But . . . I didn’t get it. He wasn’t showing me anything new.

  “The house resets itself,” I said. “Nothing changes.”

  “And why is that?” he asked.

  “Because of the curse.”

  “Because that is the house’s nature,” he corrected.

  I frowned at him—at the way the change had overtaken him. No longer was I in the presence of a monster. There was no creature here. Just . . . Erik.

  Could a rose truly be responsible for this significant of a shift?

  In implanting it, what had I done? What had I really done?

  “Are . . . are you saying that you won’t release me because it’s not in your nature?”

  “I am saying that I cannot release you,” he said as he strode away from me, back in the direction of the fireplace. “The curse. It renders me incapable.”

  “But . . .” I began, telling myself to tread carefully here—and ignore my knee-jerk need to argue. “You want to?”

  “More than anything I have never wanted.”

  “Don’t make jokes.”

  He hung his head, bracing a gloved hand on the mantel. “I haven’t breathed in nearly a century,” he went on to say, “and yet you have become as air to me. How could I joke about such a thing?”

  I was glad he’d turned his back to me, because the flush had returned to burn my cheeks.

  “For over a hundred years my world has remained shrouded in shadow and snow,” he said. “Then you appeared. I have never wanted to keep you against your will. Valor’s efforts, I hope, proved that to you. But, more deeply than that . . . I admit I have never wanted you to depart. That is truly why you are here now.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at where I stood stiffly on the oriental carpet, my eyes wide, ears burning along with my face. What could I say to that? Wrath might never have lied, but he’d certainly never been this honest, either.

  “You’ll remember I attempted to rescue and steal you all in one night,” he said through an ironic and humorless laugh. “But you don’t know the most disturbing part . . .”

  What could be more disturbing than the contradictory statement he’d just uttered?

  “Wrath. The whole reasons he made plans to abduct you was because he knew of Valor’s plan to—” He stopped himself there. “Well, to get you to leave.”

  I frowned at him, sure he’d almost said something else.

  “It’s true this heart makes me whole enough to set you free,” he said, plowing on. “Yet the threat of your departure stands only to rupture it anew. And so we are gridlocked. For so long as the curse binds me to this world, I will stop at nothing to keep you. You must already understand my volatility. Or you would not have made that bargain with me.”

  “I . . . I just don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” I murmured, a statement that now and had perhaps always included him, too.

  “After much thought,” he said, “it is my wish to cancel our agreement.”

  A silent bomb went off somewhere in my midsection.

  “You want . . .” I whispered, shaking my head. “You want to break the deal?”

  “I wish to propose a new one,” he said, glancing at me from over one shoulder, but only briefly. “Timid” was the only way to describe him in that moment. Not a word I ever imagined using in reference to him.

  I grew cold all over, the blood rushing out of my veins.

  “You want me to marry you,” I muttered, my stomach clenching.

  “I want you to agree to,” he corrected. “If you agreed . . . I think I could release you in exchange.”

  My insides withered with the weight of the fear his suggestion sent coursing through me. “But that makes no sense.”

  “It buys you your freedom,” he whispered. “Your release.”

  I stood there, dumbfounded. Trying to process the logic behind his plan.

  He turned to face me—suddenly grim and awesome once more. “You would only be required to agree to my proposal. We would be engaged but nothing else. You could think of it as . . . as a game.”

  I scowled, my horror growing. Because it sounded like a trick.

  “You’re forgetting that you almost did kill him,” I whispered, hating having to bring up Lucas. Because any attention on Lucas was too much. “And that was after you’d promised you wouldn’t. What would keep you from hurting him if I accepted this new agreement?”

  “So long as you have promised me your hand, swearing off all rivals . . . I will be unable to treat him as such. To behave in any other way would deny my trust in you.”

  “But . . . once I go home. What happens then? I still won’t be free. And I can’t marry you. I’m sorry, Erik, but—”

  He turned toward me, his gaze meeting mine full-on.

  “Stephanie,” he whispered, like I’d missed his whole point. Like it had been the simplest of math equations I’d failed to solve for and not the bombshell he proceeded to drop in my lap with his next utterance. “That is why you must betray me.”

  SEVENTY

  Zedok

  Her eyes. Within them, I saw the spark of hope ignite.

  In the next instant, though, she set her jaw as though she feared I had noticed.


  Had she forgotten I could feel her now as she could feel me? Her fear over the prospect of being joined together with one such as I. Had it not decimated me? Nearly as much as her hope now buoyed me.

  “This heart you have given me will rupture,” I told her, touching my chest. “There can be no avoiding it. And so, once our deal is done, you must leave Moldavia.”

  Her eyes shone unblinking in the lamplight. Was it too self-indulgent to think a portion of her unshed tears might have been for me?

  “Even if I agreed,” she said. “How can it work when you know I don’t really mean it?”

  “I have thought of that as well,” I said with a nod. Clasping my hands behind my back, I turned to pace over the carpet. “And that is why you must leave the grounds as soon as you can. Only this time, you must never return. The heart. It should last at least until you are gone for good and I am sure I shall never see you again. So long as it remains . . . any plans of betrayal on your part . . . Well. They will not matter.”

  “Why wouldn’t they matter?”

  “Because,” I snapped, wheeling on her. “That is what true love is!”

  It was out before I’d known I’d said it.

  She gaped at me, awed and horrified. And still so beautiful.

  “Oh, I don’t expect you to believe it,” I said. “What cause have I given you to? How can such a thing as love survive in a place like this? In a thing like me? It does, though. Perhaps it is what caused the roses to return and the snow to vanish. I know it is the thing that allows me to stand before you and consciously offer you the key to my undoing.”

  “And what happens if . . . if I say no?” she asked, trembling.

  “Then . . . there will be blood.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Stephanie

  I watched him in disbelief. And yet I believed him all the same.

  He turned from me and went to the piano, where he paused to remove a ring from one gloved finger.

  The silence in the room swelled. Between clock ticks, the metal ring clicked loudly against the piano’s smooth and polished black surface.

  “You don’t have to say a word,” he said. “You don’t have to say yes. I know it frightens you. Just . . . take the ring. Take it, and that will be enough.”

  More ticks and tocks. More silence. Then he moved to walk past me, out of the room.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping him by placing a hand to his chest, my lids fluttering in shock at my own words. “Don’t go . . . yet. I . . . I’m not ready to be alone again.”

  He’d said he’d missed me. Had I just admitted to having missed him, too?

  “You prefer my company to solitude.” His gaze went from my hand to the clock. It wasn’t a question. I could tell by the way he’d said it—like he was just repeating the punch line to a joke he’d found funny. “Things really have gone too far . . . haven’t they?”

  I tilted my head at him. These lucid questions. They kept coming. Evidence of his growing awareness? His mannerisms and his demeanor, too, had shifted toward those of the boy who had appeared in my dreams. So much so that I halfway wanted to ask if this was a dream.

  But. Would he be wearing a mask if it was?

  “Before, in the basement,” I said, withdrawing my hand from his form once I was sure I’d stayed him. “You told me you hadn’t been able to play. But now you can. Does that count for the piano, too?”

  For a moment, he didn’t move, only glanced between me and the enormous instrument.

  Just when I thought he would refuse, revert to his colder self, and whisk out of the room, he took a seat on the piano bench, placing his hands to the keys. As he did, my eyes went from his gloved fingers . . . to the place where he’d set the silver skull ring.

  Its ruby gaze stared into me—rooting me to the spot.

  Then he began to play, the first and all-too-familiar notes of “Für Elise” wandering out of his fingers and into the space between us.

  I shut my eyes, fighting off the pain that came with the beauty.

  Perfection poured from the piano, the mellow, meandering notes collecting themselves gradually and with tentative steps into a surer shape. Then the melody shifted into certainty, trilling and tripping along, light as the rain that pattered on the window. Then the song fell again, settling into its original pace.

  Opening my eyes, I found myself moving toward the music, floating nearer to him. I came closer. And though I expected my nearness to disrupt him, it didn’t.

  He went on and so did I. And when I arrived at his side, I did the impossible. I lowered myself onto the bench beside him so that we were sitting just as we had in the dream, when all the walls had still existed between us and not just a single remaining mask.

  Directly in front of me, his skull ring glinted—its crimson eyes unblinking, as dead as they were serious.

  Suddenly, the song changed, darkening the way the sky does when storm clouds move in, his left hand repeating a low A while his right shifted between the accompanying chords.

  With my shoulder barely brushing his, I found myself leaning into him. Together, we weathered the dark until his right hand climbed toward me, taking us out of the danger before falling away in a quick descent to rediscover the main theme that had started everything.

  And then he killed me with the final fading, those dying notes that caused my heart to ache, though I couldn’t be sure if the pain was all mine. And when at last he did stop, the silence swam in to swallow us both, as cold and shocking to the system as the frozen lake had been.

  Seconds elapsed. All of them counted and chronicled—stolen—by the clock.

  Catching the faintest hint of lavender, I shifted toward him on the bench.

  He turned his head to me, but not all the way, almost as if he’d known what I was about to do—even before I did.

  I did it anyway, my hand rising between us, moving on a slow collision course for his mask.

  He let my fingers come as close as his cheek. And then, he caught me by the wrist.

  Without moving, I waited. He said nothing. Just held me in a grip that, though not tight, remained wholly inescapable.

  Finally, I spoke.

  “You once asked me if I trusted you,” I said, my eyes trained on the hand that held mine. “Now, after everything, you’re asking me to do that again.”

  He made no comment. Just held my wrist, like he was trying to decide what to do.

  “Won’t you do the same for me?”

  He kept his hold on me. I didn’t pull away, though.

  Another moment of intense nothing elapsed between us in which even the clock seemed to hold its breath. Suddenly, he released me.

  I paused. And then my hand moved again, my palm closing the distance, impossibly settling on the cold—nearly freezing—surface of the iron mask.

  With the smallest of tugs, the barrier came free.

  I fought to keep my hand from quaking even as I held the metal mask, so much heavier than Wrath’s, in place. Inside my chest, my heart boomed a warning that my blood carried through to every cell of my body.

  Ignoring it, I took my hand away and with it . . . the mask.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Zedok

  Eyes shut—no courage in me with which to face her—I braced myself for the scream that would split my mind and bring Madness down upon us both. For the tenuous heart inside my breast would surely disintegrate at her horror—shrivel and become as dead as me.

  Her words had made the truth clear, though. She would not budge if I did not give in. And if I had learned a single thing about Stephanie Armand, it was this: that my determination to stay hidden would not win against her determination to see.

  But . . . as air, as breath—hers—touched my coarse flesh, the scream I so feared never came.

  Still, the rose in my chest clenched itself tight as
an angry fist.

  Any moment, it would rend, regardless of her reaction.

  Just when I could bear no more, warm fingertips brushed my right cheek.

  I scowled, still unable—still unwilling—to open my eyes.

  Not even when I felt the impossible sensation.

  Of her . . .

  Leaning closer.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Stephanie

  When it came to the question of what lay beneath his mask, I didn’t really need an answer.

  Hadn’t I seen more than enough last night?

  Amazingly, my hand stopped shaking the moment I began to lower the mask—the moment I began to see.

  The mask had always given the impression that his twin light eyes had existed in pits of solid nothing. That had just been an illusion created by shadow, though. He had eyes. Real eyes. Sunken and deep-set. Would they match the eyes of the boy from my dreams? I wouldn’t know until he opened them.

  I waited for that moment to come, and in the meantime, I allowed my own gaze to wander . . . and absorb.

  Parched, yellow-charcoal skin, eroded enough in one place to expose sinew and cheekbone, did what it could to cover a human skull. His other cheek, the one I’d glimpsed before when he, as Valor, had fought Wrath, jutted sharp as a blade, threatening to break through the barrier of leather flesh.

  Feather light, I brushed my fingertips over the curve of the bone—just so that he would know I wasn’t afraid. The scowl knitting his brow deepened with confusion, the motion causing a pang of sorrow to resonate through me.

  Because it told me that, whatever he’d been expecting from me, this hadn’t been it.

  Though I waited for him to open his eyes again, face the moment—and me—he didn’t. And I smiled slightly, sadly, with the thought that the trust he had for me could only come this far.

  Granting him another moment’s refuge, I continued my close study of his features.