Vivienne Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Vivienne could read the fragment now. She could not play it. The score's notes climbed past midnight, and every record said the same thing: a musician who played after dark lost her voice forever. She needed to hear the melody whole to know what Thorne meant it to do. She could not risk her own throat. So she went to the one person who sang without using a living voice. Luna waited in the back room of the library, Esther's youngest cousin, a medium who called the dead for coin and conscience. She had set a ring of salt on the floor and candles at its edge. "A spirit can carry the tune," Luna said. "The curse takes the living. It can't take what's already gone." Esther stood by the locked shelf, arms crossed. "This is reckless." "So is doing nothing," Vivienne said. She laid the fragment inside the salt ring. The crawling symbols between the staves blurred her eyes again, and she looked away. Marcus shut the door and put his back to it. "If this goes wrong, how do we stop it?" "We don't," Luna said. She knelt, pressed her palms to the floor, and began to hum. The flames bent toward the paper. The room cooled. Vivienne's breath fogged. A voice answered from nowhere. Low, cracked, a century old. The candle nearest Vivienne guttered out. Luna's head tipped back. When she spoke, the words came in a man's register. "Aldous Thorne," Vivienne said. "Sing the fragment." The borrowed voice obeyed. Luna sang the notes on the page, each one clear, each one wrong in a way Vivienne felt in her teeth. The melody did not open a door. It pulled. She understood, too late, that the song was not a key. It was a summons, and Thorne had built it to call himself home through any mouth that carried it. Luna's hum broke into a scream, then stopped. Her mouth kept moving. No sound came out. Her eyes went wide and found Vivienne's, and her lips shaped a word with nothing behind it. "Luna." Vivienne broke the salt ring with her shoe and caught her. Luna's throat worked. Silence. The curse had not spared the medium. It had followed the song into her and taken her voice through the spirit she carried. Esther dropped beside them. "You brought it into her." "I didn't know," Vivienne said. Her hands shook on Luna's shoulders. Marcus pulled the fragment from the broken ring. The symbols on it glowed faint and steady now, awake. "He heard us," Marcus said. "Whatever that was. It knows where we are." Vivienne had the melody now. She knew what it did. The knowing had cost Luna her voice and told Thorne exactly where to come. The race was over. He was coming to them, and the only person who had heard the whole song could no longer speak a word of warning.