I freeze with my hand still clutching the doorknob to Cyril’s office. The chef’s thick unibrow furrows as he takes in my black mask and cloak. Clutched in his hands is a gleaming silver tray piled with slices of baguettes and steaming tea.
“Who are you?” He takes a step back.
“An—an employee of the opera house,” I say, releasing the knob. It is not a lie. Not exactly. “Is Cyril home?”
“He didn’t mention he would be expecting anyone this early.” He glances past me to the foyer and the front door. “May I have your name?”
“Colette.” I keep my voice even and casual.
“Do you have an elixir delivery?” His gaze travels over my mask and drops to my wrapped fist.
I shove both hands into my cloak, and my fingers brush the pistol I stuffed into my belt earlier. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’ve come to discuss a classified matter with him.”
“I see.” His brow lowers even farther so that his eyelashes seem to tangle in its coarse hairs. He takes another step back and lowers the tray of food onto an antique decorative table to his right. “Why don’t you take a seat in his parlor? I’ll go on up and let him know you’ve arrived.” He gestures toward the room that looks so much like the opera house.
There’s no way Cyril has made it home yet. He’s likely still out in the city, searching for me in all of the wrong places.
I give a slow nod and turn, slipping the pistol from my belt.
As soon as I do, the chef slams me to the floor. He yanks my arms behind my back, pulling the gun from my grasp. I stifle a yelp when he jerks my injured hand.
“You’re the gravoir they’re all looking for, aren’t you?” The man digs a solid knee into my back. I arch my spine as pain spasms down through my tailbone and bite my tongue to keep from shouting. “Monsieur Bardin is going to be so very pleased I found you.”
Struggling against the thick swell of his fingers around my wrist, I buck and squirm. But he’s too heavy, and the last of the elixir in my veins has gone.
He wrenches me to my feet facing away from him and jams the pistol’s barrel into the side of my neck. I rear forward and slam my head back into his face. Pain flashes white and yellow across my vision, and my ears ring, but the man grunts and his grip loosens just enough. Swinging around, I drive the heel of my boot straight into his groin.
He yowls, doubling over.
His cry pulls at my power, and I let the river of his memories flood my mind. I sink easily to the place where his elixir lies, and I drag it out of him in one glowing, delicious stream, smacking my lips with each swallow. Every time he tries to silence himself, I strengthen my power’s grip and force him to continue until the whole house quakes with the sound of his screams.
In moments, he is dead.
I laugh, reveling in the way the world has grown sharper and more alive around me, at the way the blood dances through me to the sweet music of a lifetime’s worth of elixir.
As I retrieve my gun and scarf down all of the tea and bread on the tray, I listen for anyone else. I hear not a footstep. Not a creak of a floorboard. Not an intake of breath. Only the wind ravaging against the house outside.
Stepping directly on the chef’s sternum, I make my way down the hall to another door and tug it open. A set of stairs trails down into the dark.
Resting my hand lightly on the smooth, polished banister, I glide downward, not even bothering to light a lantern or search for a candle. My elixir-enhanced vision will do perfectly, and besides, darkness is my home.
The cellar hosts a well-stocked store of wines and other alcoholic beverages in smooth, wooden racks. Where I expected to find the musty smell of dust, the place is as clean as any other part of the house I glimpsed upstairs. I lift the lid of one of several dozen crates in the corner and find what looks like files of every purchase Cyril has made in his life stacked in folders and organized by date.
Frowning, I turn, and a hulking black mass in the corner pulls my gaze. I approach it and run my hands along its smooth, glossy surface. It’s a vault, complete with a complex-looking lock on its handle. My mind goes fuzzy at the thought of how many coins and valuables might be able to fit in a thing like that. As I shuffle along it, my foot nudges a slightly glowing bag near the vault’s door.
I heft the bag between my hands, surprised by its weight, and undo the knot at its top. Golden light pours from the opening, shining off the vault and sparkling on the wine bottles. Saliva pools in my mouth as I stare in at the vials of elixir nestled snugly within. There has to be at least a hundred memories’ worth in there.
My body quivers with desire, and I reach in to pull one of the tiny bottles out. As my fingers brush the glass, a sound stops me cold.
Has Cyril returned home? Has someone found the chef’s body?
The sound comes again. It’s a quiet, wet sound, somewhere between a cough and a breath.
And it’s close.
I scan the area for anything out of the ordinary. The room is much too clean and organized for anyone to be able to hide.
When it happens again, my eyes snap to the vault. Is there someone inside? I drop the bag and press my ear to the door.
There it is. That choking noise. It’s definitely coming from within. I wrap my hands around the combination dial on the front and let a breath out through my teeth.
I may be a musician, a manipulator, and a monster, but I am no lock pick.
I spin the dial this way and that, clicking through one pattern of numbers and then another. Anything that might be important to Cyril. His date of birth. The date of the opera house’s grand opening so many years ago. The more combinations I try, the more frustration begins to buzz under my skin.
I run out of ideas. Grinding my teeth, I kick the vault and then, when my elixir-infused foot doesn’t even hurt, I mutter every curse word I can think of at it.
The sound happens again, only this time I’m sure it’s a sob. Someone is crying inside that vault, and I’m willing to bet every drop of gold in my veins that it’s Arlette.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I force myself to focus. I sift back through my own memory, pretending it’s like a tide of liquid time the way it is when I look into others’ minds.
I trickle in and out of old moments. As flickers of Cyril’s face grow younger and softer and as he seems to grow taller with the shrinking of my perspective to a child’s height, something gnaws at my stomach. An achy longing.
If only I could return to that time. Back when it didn’t matter what was outside the opera house because all the reds and golds, the fine silks and shining pearls filled me with such wonder. Back when I could look in the mirror without wincing, before I recognized that my face was different from everyone else’s.
Mostly, I long for the time when Cyril held me on his lap to read me stories, when I had a little bed in that practice room near his office and I slept there with the window open to let in the starlight. Back before I knew what he was. Back when I was sure he loved me.
Glimpsing him again through the adoring gaze of a child brings a lump to my throat. Hissing, I swallow it down to where the monster can burn it to a crisp.
But it does not go down easy. No, every time I try to push it down, it rises back up, like a hopeful little bubble checking to see if I’ve changed my mind.
With tears stinging my eyes, I drop into one of the memories. My tiny frame is wrapped in a coarse wool blanket, and fatigue pulls my eyelids downward, but I force them to stay open so I can hear the end of Charlotte and the Mirror of Forgotten Things. The tale always ended with that little nursery rhyme, and I loved to hear Cyril recite it in his whispery, tired way.
When Charlotte looked in the mirror
She saw a great many things
A bone, a bauble, a book, a barrel
Of berries picked last spring.
All the images
she’d forgotten
As her mind grew old and gray
Little details, bigger ones too,
A thousand nights and days.
But her favorite thing to see
When she looked into its depths:
A four-layer cake, fourteen roses,
And sixty strands of baby’s breath.
The lace on her sleeves and veil,
And the ringing of bells up above.
The thud of her heart, the strum of the strings,
As she gave her soul to her love.
As memory-Cyril snaps the book shut, I open my eyes in the present. The echo of his voice drifts in and out of my mind.
What a silly story it was. A girl who gave up all of her memories in exchange for piles and piles of gold to travel the world. She didn’t believe it would be possible to forget everything. But when she did and set sail across the sea, she left behind a husband and children and a whole lifetime without so much as a backward glance. Then one day when young Lottie had grown into an old, wrinkled woman, she came across a magical mirror that showed her the life she’d abandoned, and she finally realized that for all the gold and all the sights and all the experiences she’d gained, she’d given up the only thing that had meant anything at all.
When she returned to her home, her husband was dead and her children long gone. So she kept the mirror, became so obsessed with the things she saw there that she abandoned the present completely. She lived the rest of her life staring into the glass, longing for what she’d lost.
As a child who could never forget a moment of her life—including my mother’s attempt to have me killed—the idea of valuing one’s memories was a thrilling concept.
Now, standing here in the warm cellar of Cyril’s home, I wish I could forget. If I could forget the sound of my mother’s gasp when she saw my face for the first time, or those moments when Cyril seemed to care for me, perhaps I would be stronger. Perhaps I would have recognized his lies earlier. Perhaps I might have had the strength to break free of the opera house long before I finally did.
I grip the combination lock and swallow down that lump once and for all, squeezing away the tears that threaten to spill down my cheeks.
I don’t have time for all of these memories and all of these feelings. I need to get into this vault, and quickly.
What could the combination be?
Cyril’s voice is still trailing along the inside of my skull. A four-layer cake, fourteen roses, and sixty strands of baby’s breath.
I twist the dial. Four. Fourteen. Sixty.
The lock clicks. The mechanism inside turns. Scarcely daring to breathe, I grip the handle and pull the door open.
Golden vials shine from inside, draped with jewelry and jammed next to bulging bags of coins.
But there is no one there. I stomp inside and whirl, scrutinizing every corner and every shadow.
Where has he put her?
The sob chokes out again, and I drop my gaze to my feet. The sound came from below. I crouch, dig my fingers into the corner of the carpet on the vault’s floor, and rip it up.
The only thing I find is a waxy cement.
I pound my fists against the nearest shelf, and coins clatter.
Growling, I dive out through the door and brace myself against the side of the vault. I push all of my body weight into the cold stone, pulling on every ounce of the chef’s elixir in me.
Perhaps I really have gone mad.
Perhaps I don’t care.
I push harder than I’ve ever pushed anything in my life. My jaw pops as I clench my teeth against the strain, and my head pounds as blood rushes through the injured places in my skull.
It’s as though the pocket watch in my dress is ticking in my blood, a constant whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of Emeric’s time slipping out of my fingers.
I squeeze my eyes shut, digging my feet against the wall.
Finally, the vault begins to move. It groans slowly across the floor, revealing first a small crack in the stone, then the edge of a trapdoor, then an inlaid handle.
I do not stop, do not even breathe, until the vault is free of the door completely, and then I collapse, my whole body quivering as I gasp for breath.
The sobbing sound is louder now, and it is unmistakably high-pitched. A little girl’s voice.
I wheeze, noticing a lever on the wall connecting to a trail of mechanisms in the floor that attach to the vault. “Well that would have been easier than pushing the cursed thing,” I growl at myself, as I scramble off the trapdoor and wrench it open. A small rope ladder descends into blackness. Swinging my legs over the edge, I climb down quickly. When my feet reach the ground, I squint through the dark.
It is a small room, lit only by what looks like a lantern full of elixir. A girl with a dark nest of hair sits cross-legged on a cot, a white nightgown draped from her jutting collarbones and sharp shoulders. Her eyes are so black they seem to swallow the night as she stares past me at nothing. She is sobbing, but her face is expressionless, her skin as pale as the clothing on her body.
If not for her weeping, she might be a corpse.
A clammy, slick hand wraps around my heart.
“Arlette?” I whisper.
She does not acknowledge my presence.
I move slowly, cautiously, as though she’s a small animal who might spook.
“Arlette, I’m a friend of your brother Emeric’s,” I say, hoping the mention of his name might jog her into reality.
Her expression remains blank.
“I’m a gravoir like you,” I try.
At the sound of the word gravoir, she jolts back against the wall, shielding her face with her arms. Her sobs grow louder as she presses farther away. “Please. No more,” she whimpers.
The eerie light illuminates jagged brown scars carved into her palms—the catalyseur marks. Even with elixir still making my vision sharp, it’s too dark to tell exactly what they look like. Scars in varying degrees of healing trail all over her arms, which are accentuated by dark bruises and lashes. Her jaw swells purple on one side.
I feel as though a hole has opened up beneath me, and I am falling into nothing and nowhere. My stomach jolts into my throat. Blood rushes in my ears.
“What has he done to you?” I whisper.
Her sobs continue. She shakes away from me, a tiny, starving thing. Only eleven years old.
What would Emeric do if he were here? I can almost see him climbing down the rope ladder and taking her in his arms. He would sob into her hair, kiss her cheeks, and tell her he’s sorry he let them capture her, sorry he took her to see the village that day. He’d run his hands along the marks on her arms, and as she continued to weep into his shirt, he’d stroke her hair and sing to her.
So I pull my pendant out of my neckline, tug it open with my teeth, and sing.
Arlette does not seem to hear me at first, but after a moment, her hands inch slowly downward, revealing red, swollen, tearstained cheeks. The purplish gravoir splotches in her skin have darkened from crying.
I sit down carefully on the bed next to her and hold out my hand.
She peers at my outstretched palm, her lower lip still trembling.
As I sing the last of the lyrics, she places her hand in mine. Her fingers are colder than ice, and her fingernails have all been chewed down to bloody stumps. I try to meet her gaze, but she refuses, so I say, “I’ve come to get you out of here. To take you somewhere safe, somewhere far, far away.”
I wait for some kind of reaction, some kind of acknowledgment that she has heard me and understands what I’m saying, but her face is as unresponsive as ever.
How different this Arlette is from the vibrant, inquisitive child I know from Emeric’s memories.
Gently squeezing her hand, I stand, hoping she’ll follow suit.
She does no
t.
“Arlette? You can trust me.”
A shout bursts from somewhere upstairs, followed by a thud and some banging footsteps.
Panic slams through me.
“Please, Arlette. Come on. We have to go now.”
Nothing.
More cries from upstairs. The other servants must have arrived and found the chef’s body.
My heart beats in my throat as I duck toward Arlette. “Here, I’ll carry you.”
But as soon as my arms wrap around her, she screams and claws at me, elbows and shoulders jamming every which way.
“Shhh!” I lurch back, but she barrels into me, knocking me to the floor as she knots her tiny fists in my hair and yanks. “Arlette!” I whisper as forcefully as I can, gripping both her wrists with my good hand. My fingers wrap all the way around her forearms, and I shudder at how I can feel every bone and tendon through her starved flesh.
She cries out again as a stomp and a shriek echo from upstairs.
“I swear I won’t hurt you,” I plead, shoving her as gently and yet as firmly as I can off of me so I can push myself upright. “I’ve come to help.”
Her eyes are wide with terror and hate.
Cyril did this to her. All while I sat eating sweets and playing my organ and dressing up in costumes. It could easily have been me who was shoved down here into the dark. As I glimpse a world of pain in her expression, I wish it had been.
Arlette wrenches backward and jams her heel into my stomach. When I stumble, she leaps for my throat, but her foot catches on the corner of her cot and she crashes to the floor, knocking her head against the stone wall.
She goes still.
“Arlette?” I push the hair out of her face so I can press my fingers to her neck. Her pulse beats, timid and quiet, under my touch.
A door slams upstairs.
I hoist her limp form over my shoulder. Her body flops as I swing around and climb the ladder. Pressing my bad hand around her waist to keep her in place, I pull us both upward into the cellar, thanking Memory that I didn’t use all of the chef’s elixir moving that vault—otherwise the pain in my hand would be unbearable.
I scan the room for an opening and locate a small window up near the ceiling. As I make my way toward it, I stumble over the bag of vials. A few topple out of the opening, drawing my gaze with their glow.
Sing Me Forgotten Page 24
