Phantom Heart Read online

  For good reason, Rastin had not stepped physically onto this property since that initial meeting of ours. The fact that he was here in spirit form, his body elsewhere in the world, afforded him the luxury to depart in the same manner in which he’d entered—within the blink of an eye. Even in his current astral state, though, he was still quite vulnerable. I could do him a great deal of harm if I chose to. Lucky for him, Valor harbored no temptation to do so.

  “I was in pain, yes,” I admitted after several beats.

  “You have implanted another false heart,” he guessed.

  “My dear Rastin,” I said through a short and humorless laugh. “You might fancy another trip to the brink of hell, but I personally have quite had my fill. Tell me, though, so long as we’re on the subject of one another’s health, how fares your own heart? No doubt it still troubles you.”

  Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I never shied from offering him a reminder of what his attempt to dislodge me from this estate had cost him. I did this because I didn’t like feeling responsible for him. But Rastin’s little stopovers. Did they not suggest that he felt responsibility for me, too?

  “I’m here to talk and, for now, that is all,” Rastin snapped, taking my reminder as a threat. How characteristically melodramatic of him.

  “Well,” I said. “You are a funny sort of diplomat to request peace but, in the same breath, hint at war.”

  “The people, Erik,” Rastin replied, his initial fear of me waning, his bravery coaxed forward perhaps by the observation that I was not currently under the influence of a mask dispossessed of reason. “I’m here because of the people.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt they are why you are here,” I spat with a bitterness I could not fully bring myself to feel. Because the sudden appearance of the only person who had ever attempted to break my curse so shortly after Stephanie’s proclamation that she would be the next to attempt the task . . . Well, it suggested the influence of the miraculous.

  “Erik, there is a child here,” he pressed. “A little girl.”

  “There are two girls,” I corrected. “One six. One seventeen. And Mr. Armand, their father, is in his forties. Do you think these are details I might have missed? How quick you are to assume I have not already taken pains to see to their eviction. I’ll have you know that I have tried and have thus far failed. Armed with that knowledge, tell me, medium, what is your plan?”

  “This.” He gestured to me with one hand. “Speaking to you—one man to another. My plan, in other words, is to ascertain what your plan is.”

  It did not escape me that he’d referred to me as a “man.” Or that we were having this exchange in civil tones. A far cry from how we had conducted our business the last time he’d visited me in this manner. Though I did not recall which mask had held me in its thrall then, the knowledge that it had not been Valor’s was enough to tell me I could not have been half so sane.

  “Your appearance,” I muttered. “I must say, I do find it rather opportune.”

  “O-opportune?” he stuttered, fully on edge once more.

  “Indeed. One day sooner and you would not have found me so hospitable. Who knows what you might have discovered had you come a week from now? But providence, it would seem, can be bothered with my plight after all. Though not, it appears, until the moment it becomes someone else’s.” I laughed, and a backward glance toward Rastin showed he was far more disconcerted even than before.

  “Tell me, Rastin,” I said, barreling on. “Your powers. Is it fair to assume they have grown since the last time you attempted to exorcise me?”

  “I was mistaken to—”

  “Answer the question,” I snapped. “Granted a second chance, do you think you could succeed?”

  At this, he stood, openly galled now. I, too, could not help but be flabbergasted by my newest and perhaps even more insane plan, which I found myself uttering aloud in real time as it occurred to me.

  “You are toying with me,” he accused. “You hope to lure me into a trap.”

  “I am not.”

  “You must be.”

  “The exorcism,” I said in an effort to refocus him. “If I agreed to submit to it, would you try again? That is why you return here, is it not? Because you hope to find me in a state that would allow you to try again someday. And your heart. Surely it cannot be so damaged that—”

  “It would be a cleansing this time,” he corrected, his concern over the fact that I might be tricking him lessening by a fraction. “And my strength in this matter is not half so important as the fact that I now know what it is I am dealing with.”

  “And what, precisely, is that, Rastin? Please, if you would, enlighten me. For that’s a puzzle I myself have never gained a satisfactory answer to.”

  “A cursed human spirit,” Rastin said.

  “An unbreakable curse, allow me to remind you. And am I still human? Under what authority do you make such a bold assumption?”

  “Just because a curse is irreversible does not make it unbreakable,” he argued, ignoring my question. “Every curse can at least be undone. Even one as terrible as yours.”

  “Do you really think so?” I asked, not bothering to hide my skepticism.

  Rastin spread his hands. “You said it yourself. Would I return to this house time and again if I did not? Would I be here now?”

  “So then. Do I have my answer?” I asked him. “You truly feel you could succeed? You are certain?”

  “Certain?” He shook his head. “No. Confident? Yes. But, Erik, what has led you to this change?”

  “There has been no change,” I growled, clenching one hand into a fist. “That is why your confidence must become your certainty. For should you fail, I will kill you this time, Shirazi. You and I are both aware that is not a threat so much as it is a warning. To us both.”

  At this, he scowled. “If there is any hope for my success, then I need to know why you wish to try again. It could be that very reason that sees us through this time.”

  “I . . .” I began, then stopped myself. Because, while I wanted to put him off, I could see his point. Also, in keeping my horrible secret, was I not leaving a terrible gap through which Stephanie might still fall? And lastly, if I was to sell myself out, should I not do it as thoroughly as possible while I still had the chance? “The girl, Rastin,” I blurted. “It’s the girl.”

  “The little one. She reminds you of your sister. Is that it?”

  “No,” I snapped, hating him for prying at me like this. And yet, here was my opportunity to admit my deepest fear to the one person who could do anything about it. “The . . . other girl.”

  “What about her?” Rastin pressed, the sudden reluctance in his tone suggesting he suspected the truth even if he remained unprepared to believe it.

  “You said she is seventeen,” he said, making the connection on his own when I did not immediately answer. “A year younger than you were when . . . Oh. Oh dear. You like her.”

  “I don’t like her,” I said, speaking through gritted teeth. Because of how garish he made it sound. As if she were some sort of pastry—something to merely like or dislike.

  “Love, then,” he said, the very word causing an echo of that grim pain to return.

  Was it that? I would not have thought it possible.

  “How?” Rastin pressed.

  To that, what could he expect me to say? How could I explain to him the way she had about her? Her manner and intelligence. Her fire. How could I make him understand that her presence in this house had done something to me? Awoken something—galvanizing me without my even being aware.

  But Wrath. He had known it all along.

  “I don’t know how, Shirazi,” I said, a new tremor starting in my limbs, as though it was God himself I was confessing to and not a mere man.

  But it was out now, and I had said as much as I co
uld bring myself to say.

  “This mask you’re wearing,” he demanded. “Tell me what its name is.”

  Did he still think this was a trick?

  “Valor,” I said. “For now . . . I am Valor.”

  Though the tension in his frame did not leave him, it did seem to subside slightly with this answer.

  “I have never encountered you in this mask before,” he said.

  “As well you might not again,” I warned. “Which is why, if we are in agreement, we must act quickly.”

  “You would submit yourself willingly to the procedure?” prompted Rastin, at last beginning to believe. To hope. “You would . . . participate?”

  “No more questions, Rastin. You will come to finish what you began, or you will not.”

  Would he be so cruel as to reduce me to begging?

  Rastin, perhaps sensing that I was close, did something he had never before. He took several steps toward me, enough to leave a short space between us. Then he did something even more remarkable than that. He placed a hand, heavy and warm, on my shoulder. Though Rastin was not truly here with me in physical form, his powers were such that he could make it feel as though he was. He squeezed the jutting bones there, an action that stunned me far more than anything he had said or could ever say to me.

  “Of course I will come.”

  Silence pulsed between us.

  Responsibility.

  Perhaps that had been the wrong word to describe the nature of our understanding of one another. What was that old saying about the enemy of my enemy?

  Though Rastin was not my friend, he was perhaps the closest thing I had ever had to one.

  At least before Stephanie . . .

  “How soon can you be here?” I asked, new fear creeping over me. For had we not already conspired on too much aloud in the presence of something that could just as easily unravel it all?

  That was to say . . . me.

  “I am currently far from here,” said Rastin. “Half a world away. But I will leave at first opportunity.”

  Gratitude and a small measure of relief coursed through me. And yet I could not thank him. I dared not for fear that, in doing so, I might curse the plan we had made. The one that, in obliterating me, would save her.

  “Erik,” Rastin said, channeling my attention to him again with his release of my shoulder.

  “What?” I snapped. For maybe now I was Erik again. Maybe she had made me so.

  “For this to work, you know you will need—”

  “A heart,” I finished for him.

  This I did know. And yet I had hoped he would not advise me to implant one.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Not until you arrive. I can’t risk its rupturing. Not with the family here.”

  “You risk more without one.”

  He was right. But wrong as well.

  If I put a heart in, it would draw my spirit together and focus it. With the pieces of my soul banished back into my body, my masks would not be free to have at me. Wrath would be relieved of his power to overtake me. Unless of course something caused the heart to break. In which case I would lose control no matter what.

  In short, it was a gamble either way.

  “Do it now and buy us time,” Rastin urged. “Buy me time. There is something I will need for the cleansing. It will take some doing to get. And you said yourself you might not be as you are for much longer. The next mask. Are you willing to wager you will be as cooperative as you are with this one?”

  “I . . .” I said, because his argument was sound. And yet pure lunacy. “I make no promise.”

  “I don’t need one,” Rastin said as he took two retreating steps from me, his form fading out even as he did so. “If you truly care for her, then I know you will do it.”

  With that, he flickered away. Leaving me, for the time being, on my own.

  If not alone.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Stephanie

  I opened my eyes to the whispery shuffling of paper.

  A cursory glance to my digital clock told me I’d slept beyond the dream with Erik and through most of the night. Apparently, though, Charlie hadn’t.

  She sat on the floor with her back to me, her tin of crayons open beside her.

  In the glow of the nightlight that I’d moved from her room to mine, she colored furiously something I couldn’t see.

  “Mmph.” I pinched my eyes shut for an instant, as if I could squeeze an hour more of sleep into the span of a second. Then, slowly, I leaned forward to peer over Charlie’s shoulder and froze at the monstrous scarlet image marring the sheet of white copier paper.

  “Charlie. What is that?”

  She paused in her scribbling to glance back at me, then lifted her finger to point at my closet door. Which stood open. Wide open.

  It had been closed when we’d gone to bed. I’d made sure.

  “You . . . you saw that?” I asked her. “That thing came out of the closet?”

  “No,” said Charlie. “He said he can’t come to our side yet.”

  Our side? Yet?

  I froze, my insides icing over. “Is that Zedok?”

  “He said he was,” replied Charlie with a shrug. And her nonchalance was the most disconcerting part of all of this.

  I tilted my head at her, my bleary mind trying to distill her words into something that made sense. Like Erik’s though, none of them did.

  “I thought you said you’d seen him before,” I pressed.

  “I did,” replied Charlie. “But he didn’t have a skeleton face then.”

  Tossing the covers off, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and hurried to shut the closet. Then, leaning my back against the door, I frowned down at the drawing.

  “How long did you talk to him?” I asked Charlie. “What else did he say?”

  “He watched you sleep for a long time,” she said, peering up at me, her eyes shadowed beneath by small dark circles. “I asked him if he was Zedok, and he said yes. Then I told him he didn’t look like Zedok.”

  I shook my head, almost afraid to ask. “And . . . what did he say?”

  “He just said, ‘Yes, I do.’ ”

  THIRTY

  Zedok

  “Did you see what he did?” whispered the first of the two sibilant feminine voices. “What he brought with him from over there?”

  A second voice then. “You don’t think he’s seriously considering—”

  “Hush. Do not even say it. He knows better. Which is why he never agreed to it.”

  Seated at the piano on my side of Moldavia, the lamp I had demolished the prior evening now intact atop its lid, I lifted my right hand.

  “What does he think he’s doing?” hissed the first.

  “You mean besides imprudently courting disaster?” scoffed the other.

  Ignoring the whispers, I laid my gloved fingers onto the keys.

  I could not play “Für Elise.” But . . . I could remember the feel of her hand beneath mine. The discordant, corrupted music we had made together in the dream.

  And here I was, for the hundredth time in as many minutes, hopelessly lost in the thought of her, left grasping in vain for the ghost of one of our few moments together.

  “He won’t do it, if he knows what is good for him,” hissed the lower of the two voices, her words meant more for me than her companion.

  “But why else sit down at the piano with it? He means to play. He wishes to escape.”

  “It is my conviction that he knows better than to think he can.”

  Again, my mind swept through the memory of last night.

  She and I. We had been so close. Drunk on her nearness, lured by her words, her beauty—that voice—I had craved more. So much more.

  Had I ever longed to touch someone so?

  In closing my
eyes, I was able to block out the keyboard’s black-and-white lines, but not the whispers or the ticking mantel clock, which, like the other things I had destroyed last night, had repaired and reset itself.

  “Well. Are you going to stop him?”

  “We are. Of course we are.”

  This was why so much of my written music existed on the Armands’ side of the house.

  All of my composing transpired there. Where these two particularly obnoxious monstrosities could not follow me.

  “Dearest Spite,” hissed the softer of the two voices. “Did you hear what he just called you?”

  “Oh, Envy, dear heart,” answered the second voice, hoarser and deeper in register. “We are both well aware that, of the two of us, he only ever thought of you as obnoxious.”

  Slowly, I turned my head to glare at them through a single eyehole of Valor’s mask.

  Adorned in emerald and burnt coppery orange respectively, the two women occupied the ever-popular chaise by the parlor’s bay window. They watched me from behind fluttering lace fans while, at their backs, the sheets of snow that never ceased to fall in this realm filled the window’s view.

  Spite and Envy—or, as I had once referred to their living equivalents, the Scorpion and the Grasshopper—represented a pair of debutants who had once dueled for the opportunity to win my betrothal. Though their representatives were now long dead, their doubles had taken it upon themselves to carry their predecessors’ venomous yet saccharine war into my damnation.

  Appropriately, Envy wore the mouthless mask of a bug-eyed grasshopper while Spite’s mask reflected the likeness of an armored scorpion, her long braid, fashioned to resemble the creature’s lethal tail, draping one shoulder.

  Moving in tandem, they plucked their saucers from the coffee table’s colorful biscuit-laden surface, pinching the handles of their respective teacups.

  Ludicrously, they raised the tea-filled cups to the spots on their masks behind which their lips ought to have dwelled, pretending—as their counterparts had in life with so much other business—to sip.

  Both phantasms exhibited enough of their once-living twins’ less-than-civilized characteristics that I was loath to think of them as ladies.