“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.