by Kelly Creagh
His face, once so beautiful, now looked like anyone else’s might after decades in a tomb. Though the longer I searched, the more I began to find evidence of a likeness to the boy from my dreams. High cheekbones. Strong chin. Gentle jaw.
Training my focus on the thin straight line of his once full and perfect lips, I kept my hand to his cheek. I brushed my thumb along his jutting cheekbone.
His eyes opened, their gray gaze meeting mine. And there he was. My Erik.
I leaned in close. Close enough to press my own lips softly to those papery ones.
He smelled of salt and lavender. And too many years to count.
He didn’t move an inch.
I lingered, reluctant to pull away. Because this wasn’t a fairy tale. Because I wasn’t going to draw back to find him alive and beautiful again. Not that I had kissed him because I thought for one moment I might.
He wanted the fairy tale, though. With everything in him.
Why else would he have brought me here?
No. I’d kissed him—was kissing him still—because I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him here with the false assumption that I did not care what inevitably became of him.
Or that things couldn’t have been different if . . . if they’d only been different.
In parting from him, I turned away, leaving his mask on the keyboard.
As I rose, I scooped his silver ring from the piano, and hurrying from the room, I slid the ruby-eyed skull onto my ring finger.
I went to the stairs, tears slipping down my cheeks as I began to climb.
Because I knew he would keep his word.
And because I knew that meant that I would have to keep mine as well.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Lucas
To ensure Rastin would come to Moldavia, I’d texted him early in the morning that we were there already and that we’d give him exactly one hour before we went in without him. After that, Wes and I had waited in my Dart, which I’d parked just outside the house.
“Have you heard from her at all?” I asked at last while we both watched the sun rise through the windshield. “Charlotte?”
“Called me a lot of names over text,” Wes said. “But.” He shrugged. “I kind of liked the attention. You?”
“Just one text,” I said. “She wanted to know what caused our fight.”
“And?”
“All I said was that it wasn’t Stephanie.”
Wes got quiet. Then after almost a full minute, “She didn’t say anything after that?”
“She didn’t.”
More quiet. And then, out of nowhere, Wes said, “You know my mom cried when she found out we got into a fight. She likes you. Says you’re a good influence.”
“Really? Because my mom kind of hates you.”
Wes jutted his bottom lip out and nodded. “I feel that.”
Gazes meeting squarely for the first time since yesterday, we both grinned in spite of ourselves. Because my mom was always making Wes food when he came over. And sending him and Patrick home with leftovers and cookies.
“Think Charlotte will ever forgive you?” I asked him.
“For kicking your ass? She might. When she finds out the truth.”
“You mean that we faked the fight?”
“No, moron. When she finds out we were fighting over her. Or . . . that I was. She’s a Leo, so she’ll think it’s super hot.”
I rolled my eyes, then looked up at the cracking of tires over gravel. One glance into my rearview showed me Rastin’s Beamer ambling down the long drive. He’d come more quickly than I had thought. Quickly enough to suggest that he might have even already been on his way. Had he planned to go into the house on his own? It was certainly looking that way.
“That was fast,” I said.
“Faster than Jimmy John’s,” muttered Wes.
“Don’t give him time to argue,” I said.
“None,” Wes replied as, simultaneously, we climbed out of the Dart.
Then I frowned as a far more familiar green Corolla pulled onto the lot.
“Oh God,” said Wes beside me. “We’re dead.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, neither of us even giving Rastin a second glace as he got out of the Beamer. Oddly, he didn’t pay us any mind either as he hurried straight up to the house, stopping just shy of the front porch. “By the way, great plan, Wes.”
“Hold me” was all he said as the car skidded to halt near the Beamer, its blonde driver having caught sight of us both.
Immediately, she tore off her seat belt and kicked open her door.
“What in the hell?” Charlotte screeched at us as she emerged from her Corolla. Seated on the passenger’s side, Patrick shook his head at us through the windshield, and though I couldn’t hear anything he was saying, my lip-reading abilities told he’d almost gotten through all the really bad words.
Her face going scarlet with rage, Charlotte stormed up to us both. Patrick emerged from the car, holding up a hand and continuing to shake his head as though he truly had run out of words to say to us. Or maybe he was praying that Charlotte would not eviscerate us. Hard to tell . . .
“You two idiots planned this?” she railed.
“She’s so beautiful when she hates me,” muttered Wes at my side.
“What do you mean we planned this?” I asked her. “What the heck are you doing here?”
“We both realized yesterday that you weren’t going to stop,” answered Patrick as he slammed his own door shut. “No matter what we did. So, in a bid to save your crazy twitterpated ass, she and I cut school and went to get Rastin.”
“He wants to kill you, Lucas,” she said. “And you’re so wrapped up in your feelings for Stephanie that you keep wanting to let him!”
“What else was I supposed to do?” I shouted back at her. “Wes said you were planning to go in there by yourself!”
“Shut up, Lucas,” warned Wes. “I swear to God your whole face needs to shut up right now.”
It was too late. Charlotte veered on him next, actually delivering a shove to his shoulder.
“You!” she snarled at him. “It’s going to be your fault if he gets hurt again, do you hear me? I trusted you.”
“I just . . . didn’t want you getting hurt either,” said Wes.
“So instead of telling me that, you told Lucas? And then staged a fight?”
“Yeah?” he said, suddenly timid in her presence, which presented a funny picture given their drastic difference in height.
“Well, that is how you operate, isn’t it?” she challenged. “You’re so insecure you don’t tell anyone anything that’s real—least of all how you feel about something. Or, God forbid, someone. Instead, you hide behind your jokes and try to scheme and finagle your way around to getting whatever it is you think you want so that you don’t get hurt.”
“That’s . . . not true,” he mumbled back, though without his usual conviction, and seemingly at a loss for any of his customary quick-witted rejoinders.
“Yes, it is!” she hissed. “And, while we’re on the subject, can I just say that I am so sick of waiting for you to actually work up the nerve to ask me out? You’re a tool, Wes.”
With that, she brushed past the both of us, heading up toward the house where Rastin still stood facing the front door.
“Charlotte,” Wes called, taking a step after her. “Uh. W-will you go out with me?”
She rounded on him. “Try not to die and I’ll think about it!”
Suddenly, without warning, Rastin turned to face us. “There’s something wrong,” he said.
“What?” I started toward the porch, terrified he was about to tell us all we were too late.
“His hope,” Rastin said, touching his sternum. “That part of him I’ve harbored for so long. I felt it go from me the moment we ent
ered the lot. But now . . . now that it’s gone, I can’t sense him at all. His spirit. It’s . . . gone.”
“What about Stephanie?” I demanded.
“There’s nothing,” Rastin replied. “Either this is a trick . . . or he is not there.”
“The curse,” said Wes. “Are . . . are you saying it’s broken?”
“It’s impossible,” Rastin whispered, though more to himself than to us.
Then, without warning, he hurried into the house.
SEVENTY-FIVE
Stephanie
Mirrored walls surrounded me on all sides of the enormous room.
Golden chandeliers hung in twin rows from a vaulted ceiling filled with French-style portraits of angels. The angels’ robes billowed against azure skies, their wings stretching the width of the golden frames that separated the depictions. Ambling down, those decorative gold barriers joined with the pillars that lined the grandest ballroom I’d ever seen.
Gilt statues of robed and masked figures stood sentinel atop the pillars. One held a lyre, another a violin.
No sooner did I notice their instruments than orchestra music—a ghostly waltz—began to pipe in from nowhere.
Turning, the voluminous skirts of my dark blue ball gown rustling with the movement, my slippers tapping against the shining marble floor, I searched for the music’s source.
Instead, I found him.
He stood mere feet away, wearing no mask. Erik never needed one.
His own steps made no sound as he approached.
Keeping one arm folded behind his back, he came to a stop in front of me and offered his other.
A dance?
Uncertain, I placed my right hand in his left.
He drew me to him, settling his free hand on my upper back. I placed mine on his shoulder. Then he began to lead me in a waltz, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t know the steps. Because this was a dream, and he did.
We revolved through the empty ballroom, the golden walls and mirrors blurring into smears of color and refracted light. Our reflections chased after us, splitting us both into a hundred versions of ourselves.
Though I waited for him to say something—anything—he never breathed a word. He just bored his crystal gray eyes into mine, their intensity and beauty robbing me of words.
The music echoed around us, warbling and distant, as if it was coming from some faraway dimension, or from a memory.
He danced us closer to the far end of the room, to the place where a black partitioning curtain hung over the opening to another room, the interior of which remained shrouded in obscuring darkness.
We turned toward the curtain and then beyond it, leaving the ballroom and the music and the angels for a strange candlelit realm of nothing. He let go of me and I stepped back from him, suddenly apprehensive, too afraid to ask him where he’d brought us—and why.
Maybe my fear stemmed from having already known.
Because my heart. It told me things about him. And said things about me. Things he must have somehow heard, because then he stepped up to me. His strong hand returned to my back, trailing down to press into the base of my spine. He pulled me into him, his other hand cupping my cheek. He bent to me, his lips, warm and alive, meeting softly with mine.
The scent of lavender assailed me, and I inhaled him, melting into the kiss that, even in this dream state, felt more real than any I’d ever experienced.
Though he’d closed his eyes, I held mine at half-mast, enough to see his brow furrow with an almost painful bliss. That bliss, that pain—it resonated through me, too. The love he’d professed for me echoed through him, resounding with enough force to make my knees go weak.
I leaned against him, my hands braced on his chest, my body responding all on its own, awakening to desires no longer latent. Both his . . . and mine.
My fingers curled around the lapels of his jacket. Answering his kiss with my own, I drew him to me, as if being as close as possible still wasn’t close enough.
With these small actions, I stoked within him a hidden fire, inciting the kiss that up until that moment had been both chaste and cherishing to become something more consuming.
Fervent, even urgent, his lips sought mine with a sudden hunger that told me just how long—how much—he’d yearned for this. For me.
In response, my heart beat with a wild rhythm—one that begged me to forget all that I’d branded impossible and put my trust in him.
His thumb brushed my cheek. In answer, my hands unfastened his cloak. Next, they trailed down the fabric of his waistcoat. Encountering buttons, my fingers performed, again, the task of their unlatching, shaking even more uncontrollably than they had the night before last, though now for entirely different reasons.
This time, I wasn’t afraid of what I would find. I was afraid of what had found me.
These feelings. This yearning.
He let me undo the waistcoat, and he didn’t stop his pursuit of my lips, either. Not even when I untucked his shirt. He just kept kissing me while my fingers crept under the barrier of the fine fabric. As I pressed my palms to a sculpted and smooth abdomen—the flesh there as real and alive as the rest of him—his own hand went to his throat, where he loosened and then pulled free the cravat, letting it drop.
Stripping away the waistcoat next, he let that fall, too.
Breathing hard, my heart a thunderstorm, I stepped back and watched him not breathe at all.
His stare burned through me a moment longer. Then he closed the distance between us again, backing me toward and then onto the black-curtained bed I had sensed was there all along.
I scooted myself backward, drawing him with me onto the mattress. The moment my head hit the heavy blankets, his lips found mine again. Only now, with growing abandon, he deepened the kiss, his dark hair falling around us to block out the candlelight from the countless tapers that surrounded us.
My world, my whole awareness of everything, then zeroed in to exist only at our points of contact. While my palms took his face, he trailed a hand down the front of my bodice, causing the night-blue dress to become my dressing gown. And only my dressing gown.
He slid in closer, our bodies lining up, the heat of him radiating through the thin barriers of fabric that yet remained. I matched his lips brush for brush, a soft sigh escaping me as I relished the feel of his skin, of his realness—his closeness.
His right hand gripped me behind the knee, and he hiked my leg to the side of one hip.
Taking hold of the collar of his open shirt, I tensed at the sudden escalation. Of everything.
Velvet soft, his tongue swept mine, and his kiss, passionate and incinerating, now beckoned to the most buried parts of me.
My whole body, my whole soul, sang with this intensifying duet, anticipation warring against the apprehension that unraveled as his hand, in a caress, traveled from my knee to my thigh. From there, his fingers followed the curve of my hip, then slid up over my rib cage, barely bushing the outer curve of my breast before scaling my arm to capture my left hand.
From there, he inserted his thumb into the fist that held the iron grip on his shirt, and, loosening it, he laced his fingers with mine. Then he squeezed, causing the metal of the skull ring to bite into my skin.
What was he telling me? Where would he take us from here?
But then . . . where else was there to go?
“Stephanie.”
Eyelids fluttering shut, my mind left me the moment he said my name, so that there weren’t any clear thoughts to be had. Just fragments evoked from the next kiss he captured me with.
Erik. Heat. Love. Now.
He pressed into me, his free hand roving where it would. My own clamped his shoulder while my heart thumped against the one I had given him.
Our bliss spiraled. Carrying forward for one moment longer.
Until, s
uddenly, Erik stopped.
He parted the kiss. His hand unraveled from mine, and without warning, he drew back.
His eyes found mine in the gloom, the sudden twin flashes of light within them replacing my momentary delirium with fright.
He let go of me then, retreating through the darkness.
“Erik!”
I sat up fast, shouting—reaching after him.
Into a cold and empty room filled with the stark and blinding white light of day.
SEVENTY-SIX
Zedok
I had not planned to do what I had done. Neither, when I’d been in the midst of its euphoric unfolding, had I intended to stop where I had.
But when had my plans ever panned out in the way I conceived them?
After Stephanie had fallen asleep, I had stolen into Myriam’s room and had transported her, as I had promised, back to her own room, exiting my side of Moldavia for hers through Myriam’s closet. After laying her into her own bed, I had returned to my Moldavia, shutting the door after myself, aware in spite of our betrothal that I would not find her there again.
From there, I had resisted as much as I could stealing into her mind, creating around us another dream. In the end, though, that had proved a battle I could not have hoped to win.
Something yet called to me. Some part of her. It came through the mysterious link that had been forged between us. Harkening to it, I’d halted at the doorway of the parlor, noting my chair inside. The one from which I had projected my mind those times I had entered her dreams.
I’d touched the scarred cheek of Tumult’s mask, beneath which my leathered skin recalled the grazing of those delicate fingertips. My lips. Did they not also still hold the sensation of the soft caress of her own?
These lips. She had kissed them.
Mine.
She had kissed me. Touched her angel’s lips to my dead ones.
The heart Stephanie had given me. If it had held through that kiss, would it not also hold until her final departure?
Heedless of the answer, I gave in to the need to see her one last time. In entering this final dream, I had only meant to show her the truth of the feelings I had contended with all this time, no matter what form or mask I took. And she had not run from me when I’d invited her to dance. My daring grew, encouraged by our invisible connection, her seeking eyes rendering me powerless to resist the desire that I had theretofore managed to keep at bay, if not deny.
