Atop the mantel, my father’s clock ticked as it had in the dream, its chiding rhythm beating into the brain I no longer had.

As it counted the never-ending seconds, I stood in awe of what I had just done. Or rather, all that I had not.

My sole purpose in speaking to Stephanie at all had derived from my need to incite her and her family to leave.

And I had again delivered my foreboding message, yes, but far less effectively than I could have if I’d only stopped to think for one moment about my approach. But I hadn’t. Instead, I’d become possessed of the desire to gain a modicum of absolution from her.

I’d wanted to absolve Erik.

But . . . I wasn’t Erik.

That Cheney boy. That stupid boy. His jumbled version of the story had riled and incensed me. More than what he had gotten wrong, though, it had been the details he had gotten right that had angered me.

Yet, I should have counted his meddling as a favor.

If I’d had the presence of mind to appear to Stephanie in tonight’s dream not as the glorious Erik but as the horrendous masked figure she had finally begun to believe in—would not the boy’s precursory tales have only aided my efforts?

But no. I had elected to sit down with her. At the piano! As if the two of us were contemporaries. Or more ludicrously—as if she had been my friend.

And then there had been the music. Hesitant and clumsy, it had fallen unexpectedly out of her fingers to land incomplete at my feet—the fractured bones of a long-dead memory. But those notes. Though lifeless, they had still possessed enough of the soul of the masterpiece to send a shock through the scattered shrapnel of my own.

Though I should have liked to blame my derailment upon the music, the truth was . . . I knew better. There was something else at work here. For I had been diverted from my purpose before her fingers had touched those keys. From the very moment I had entered the dream. Or perhaps . . . even before.

Wrath’s prior visit swam to the surface of my memory along with the image that had manifested within the specter’s grim mask.

Stephanie.

As far as reasons went, I could only think of one that might explain why I had seen her, and it had everything to do with the fact that I had dared to become Erik.

In resurrecting him, even if only in image, I had done both myself and the Armands—Stephanie in particular—a critical misdoing. I had tasted forbidden fruit. I had been made to remember what life had once been like. What humanness had been like. And perhaps that was what Wrath had attempted, in his own way, to forewarn me of.

But a herald, no matter how ominous, was still only a herald.

So long as I took charge and changed courses swiftly, I yet had time to rectify my missteps. Thankfully, my blunders had done me the one favor of providing the means to their undoing. Through Erik, Stephanie had come to believe in Zedok. Enough at least that, to get to her, I no longer needed her sister to serve as emissary.