Angel's Fall (The Phantom Saga) by Jessica Mason

Author:Jessica Mason [Mason, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Retellings, phantom of the opera, dark romance, happily ever after, phantom of the opera retelling, gothic romance, Erik and Christine
Publisher: Murmuration Books
Published: 2024-03-19T18:30:00+00:00

The Opera had never felt so empty as Erik walked the dark halls and salons. There was no one in the galleries and rotundas, just the living shadow that stalked up the great staircase alone. It was cold and desolate, this palace to art and splendor. Erik hated it.

He hated the excess the upper classes had poured into this place to celebrate nothing but themselves and their power. He hated the cold marble and the shining crystal. And he hated the yawning depths beneath, where he had hidden for so long, a den for a wounded animal. Now, it was hollow – his nest of useless trinkets, filled with compositions no one would hear. Christine was gone, and he couldn’t go home to their empty bed.

You did this. You drove her away with your monstrousness, the other ghosts whispered in his ears. You’re just as horrible as his other spawn, you coward. You fool.

Erik turned, as if he could catch the memory that spoke, and gasped at the figure that met his eyes: a shade in a pale mask with glowing eyes. A phantom. Something so far from alive and human, it couldn’t even step into the sun without fear.

“You fool,” he said to his reflection, staring at himself for the first time in six years. “You coward.”

His heart had pounded when he had followed them onto the roof. Even in the fading light he had shied away and kept to the shadows. The glancing sun that had caught in his eyes as it set and stung like acid in a wound. How could she ask him to be in that world when only a few moments of daylight were torture? And yet...

Christine had confessed to whom she belonged. She had been true until she had learned of another terrible lie. The boy was going to steal her away, and Erik was as trapped and helpless as if he were back in Klaus Steiner’s mirrored torture chamber that he had built and rebuilt for himself throughout his cursed life. He was still a trapped child – still afraid to run to freedom even when the door was right there.

Even now, the door out to the balcony loomed behind him in his reflection and it might as well have been the false forest in the torture chamber below: an illusion meant to drive a man mad thinking he was free. What if the illusion wasn’t the mirror?

If he was in a cage of his own making, then didn’t he have the key?

Erik turned from his hated reflection, riding the impulse like a wave that pushed him to the door and out into the fresh air of the night. It was simple to climb and jump down from the balcony and onto the near-deserted Avenue de L’Opéra. He knew the way so well it was a trial not to run. His fear of humanity spurred him too. It terrified him to know people might see him and his mask, even with his hat low to shadow his face.

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