I hope this chapter was worth the wait!


The praying mantis perched precariously on the side of the building, just above her eye level. It was the largest one she had ever seen, with an abdomen plump and round with eggs—a female, who would probably give life to thousands just like her. The insect stared back at Christine with an awareness that seemed so sentient it bordered on human.

"Hello, beautiful," she whispered to the elegant, intelligent creature. "You look like you've got a lot to carry there."

"What you got there, doggy?" The voice that came behind her was one she knew well.

She turned around to see the owner of the voice. A boy a foot taller than her who had targeted her for ridicule from her first day at the new school two years prior. He had adulterated her last name from 'Daaé' to 'Doggy'. He had mercifully picked on her Goodwill purchased clothing, her too short pants, her frizzy hair and round-rimmed glasses. Her school binder had found its way in the urinal of the boy's room once, her backpack in the creek running behind the school, her art projects or book reports she had put so much time into had suddenly developed phallic images or curse words and the teacher would cluck her tongue sadly, for she knew the culprit but could do nothing without proof.

Over the past few months, the boy's attacks had grown more aggressive, more physical. She had been tripped and shoved more times than she could count. The day before her eleventh birthday, she had come home with the frames of her glasses bent beyond repair. Replacing the glasses was a huge expense that they couldn't afford, but her father hugged her and went out anyway. When he had returned, the arm on the frames had been replaced and her father seemed weak, sporting a bandage on his arm.

It wasn't until she was older that she learned her father had been secretly selling his plasma to keep them afloat.

"Nothing, Brandon," she lied, while making an unsuccessful attempt at hiding her insect friend.

Brandon had two friends with him, boys who were just as vicious as he was and carried the mantle as Christine's tormentors when Brandon wasn't around to do the job himself.

"That thing is so ugly," Shawn, one of the other boys said with a crinkled face.

"Are we talking about the dog or the bug?" Carlos, the third boy snickered. "Because Christine is probably uglier."

Brandon let out an amused guffaw, while bending down to pick up a handful of large-stoned gravel.

"They're both equally gross." Brandon replied. "We gotta kill one of them to keep the gross factor in the world down. How about some target practice, dudes?"

Christine gasped as Brandon hurled the first grey rock at the innocent creature on the building, narrowly missing. The other two boys reached down to collect their own gravel and began to follow suit, but Christine jumped in the way of the rocks. She took painful blows from the pelting stones in the head and back while she reached up to rescue the helpless insect.

She had nearly gathered the pregnant mantis into the cage of her quivering palms when she was yanked painfully backward by the red wool scarf looped around her neck. Brandon gripped the crocheted fabric in a strangling hold, and Christine—despite the constriction around her slender throat—feared more than anything that he would tear one of the stiches and destroy the last gift her mother had ever given her. This last thought was short lived as he threw her down onto the sharp rocks of the gravel road that bit into her knees through her pale gray winter tights.

With great dismay she watched in horror as the three boys approached the mantis, which had dropped to the ground in her struggle, and proceeded to collectively stone it to death.

When it was done, Brandon hoisted Christine by her backpack and forced her towards the crushed mother on the ground.

"Come see your friend, Doggy." He laughed with all the levity of the world.

"Hey!" Came a voice, booming with authority from behind Christine. "Let her go. Asshole!"

Brandon turned with Christine, allowing her to see a boy, likely a year or two older than herself, wearing a crisp school uniform. His blonde hair had defied the neat style it had been combed into, with a rogue lock breaking free to hang over his forehead.

"Are you like her preppy superhero?" Brandon laughed in disbelief.

At this point, the dream Erik was having shifted and warped. It rotated points of view, until he no longer saw the memory through Christine's eyes, but that of her savior—a boy who saw an injustice and stepped in despite being outnumbered, a boy who did not believe in violence but bloodied all three boys that day in the most memorable fight of his life.

The memories skipped forward from there to the feel of her hand as he helped her off the ground and the endearment he felt when she collected a squashed praying mantis for an impromptu funeral. He walked her to her school, a block away from his own private one and tried to learn more about her, making her agree to meet him every day after so he could escort her to class.

He entered his father's study one day, proclaiming he would learn the violin—and wasn't it great fortune that he already found the perfect teacher in his friend's father. His fingers were far too big for the instrument, but he suffered and practiced for hours and hours—while the tips of his tender fingers split—until he could finally play the world's worst rendition of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'.

All this he did to be closer to the beautiful and strange girl who had captivated him that first day, a girl who he felt was so close but so far out of reach, a girl he never felt he could ever truly deserve. She was always something so abstract, enigmatic like a painting he could never fully understand, while he was just Raoul—boring, uninspired Raoul.

"I love you, but I'm afraid you will be unsatisfied…" Raoul's soul cried.

Erik forced himself awake, rapidly blinking as though that could force the images and words away.

He should have never touched that boy while he slept, but he couldn't help himself. When he stood over the two unaware mortals clasped blissfully together in their sleep, the potent nature of his envy grew. It terrified him that he wanted to kill the young man right there where he slept, despite all the consequences it would garner.

Instead, he touched the boy on his forehead, warm with mortality, and interfaced with his soul to gain his secrets.

Nothing he found was to his benefit, further fueling to his secret torment instead, plaguing him with dreams like the one he just brutally ejected himself from.

He should just stop sleeping he supposed.

A siren nearby pierced the early morning air, drawing his attention to the open window of his sad little room. Across the street, Christine's apartment was dark and quiet. The tips of his fingers were hungry for the violin which he lifted from its prone place beside his pile of blankets. He couldn't hold a candle to that boy in any other way, but in this, at least, he was superior.

A song lifted from the strings of the violin, woven like a tapestry on a loom. It was sweet with longing, sharp with sadness, but more than anything it was shaped like her. Erik had never just heard music, that was so terribly banal. No, he could see, feel it and sometimes taste it as well. He watched now as it filled the space of the room like a living entity and touched each surface and object like a curious lover.

He wondered if he were to kiss her, would his capabilities be strong enough to produce music that could replicate her flavor? He would have to kiss her first, of course, to test such a hypothesis. And in that stood the grandest of challenges. It meant he would need to speak to her.

The music had changed with his agitated state, sending sinister dark tendrils to crawl about the room like vines which threatened to choke and destroy while a bitterness coated his tongue with each thorn filled note. For several minutes he observed those angry strands pouring through his open window like living things fleeing captivity.

Across the street a light came to life. His hands jumped in response, slipping on the strings and letting out a sound from the well-loved instrument that resembled a squealing pig before slaughter. The morbidly disgusting sound was followed by the backlit form of the very woman occupying thoughts. She peered out the window with a terrified stance.

"Fuck," he muttered while clenching the neck of the violin in a strangling hold, as though to punish its insolence. He knew she couldn't see him in the darkened gloom of his shabby little home, but he could feel her eyes on him all the same. There was no doubt she tried to decipher a shape or form in the dark rectangle of his window.

There was something which felt profound in that awful, fleeting moment, like a message from the universe…though what it was, he could not say for he was always fucking terrible at listening to anything from the divine. Was it a warning? Or was it a call to action? Should he even pay attention to this sinking, twisting feeling at all, or should he pack up the sad details of his current existence and move elsewhere to forget her entirely?

Forget her…

He gritted his teeth and growled, whether at himself or at the very existence of those two words combined, he wasn't sure, but he didn't know if he could just walk away now. Every moment of his tortured immortality had been lost to isolation and the burden of memory until he discovered her, but now he was backed into a corner. Fight or flee, which would it be?

For the first time in a century, he was creating music that wasn't saturated in blood and trauma and it was the result of one touch. What would the result of a true caress gain him?

His fists clenched at the mere thought.

"She doesn't know her own value," he muttered mournfully beneath a shaky exhale.

She needed him.

Or, at the very least, that's what he told himself in that pivotal moment before he raised an arm and opened a portal through the fabric of space itself—beyond that distorted tear she stood, back towards him as she fretfully searched out the window.

Clutching the violin like a talisman, he silently stepped through as the egress sealed simultaneously behind him.

And then he realized in a blind panic that he had nothing upon his face. His free hand thrust into his trouser pocket to withdraw the crumpled and faded mask. With all the dexterity of a drunk man, he struggled to get each elastic loop about his ears with awkward fingers that suddenly felt like the vilest of traitors.

The flurry of his nervous activity must have alerted her in some way, for it was just as he had managed to straighten the ridiculous scrap of cloth that she turned her attention from the window and glanced over her shoulder with all the reluctance of a woman preparing to see her own murder.

With eyes rounded and mouth slack with fear, she emitted a nearly airless scream that did not pierce the air between them, but instead, dropped out of her throat like a feather in a vacuum and somehow seemed deafening in its softness.

The moment couldn't have lasted past the span of a second, but it seemed to slow to the point of being static. Every detail rushed at him in crisp clarity, down to the surprised terror shining in her eyes like bright stars to the fluttering of the largest artery running down her throat. This close he could feel her soul and all the fear that poured from it in waves. It all forced the single, terrible realization that he had, perhaps, acted too rashly in appearing to her in this way.

He was beginning to think he had a problem with impulse control, though, why he had never taken the evidence of his entire life to have formed that understanding prior to now, he would probably never know.

The moment felt awkward as he fumbled for what to do or say to diffuse the situation, but no action or plan would take shape. It was she who made the first move, lunging to a set of keys resting on the floor beside an air mattress to her immediate left.

Strange choice for a weapon, he dazedly thought to himself as he aimed to puzzle out her choice of move in the scant moments it took for it to happen.

She struggled with something on the keys, desperation and a hint of hope coming from her soul. He realized too late what she was planning to do, or he would have stopped her from acting. It was too late to inform her of this lapse in judgement as the fine mist of capsaicin-laden liquid hit his face.

For a being who cannot feel physical pain, the pepper spray did nothing but sit upon his skin and temporarily blur his vision.

The poor girl stared in abject disbelief at the pure ineffectiveness of her defense. He could sense the potency of her confusion as she tries to comprehend why his eyes did not even so much as water.

Then, as if on cue, she began to cough and weep herself as the lingering caustic cloud surrounded her. This is what he would have warned her about—had he the time do so in those frenzied few seconds—he would have pointed out the perils of spraying the chemical defense in such close quarters.

But he hadn't. So here she was before him, struggling to maintain her sight and breath as she dashed at her leaking eyes and coughed dryly to no avail. If he didn't care for the girl so damned much, he would have laughed at the entire sorry situation, instead, he blamed himself for the pain she was in and, for a moment, wondered if he would pay some divine consequence for this. Would he lay, incapacitated for a week, burning and writhing on the floor with no relief for causing this injury? He hoped intention carried some heft of weight in whatever powers decided to dole out that particular brand of punishment.

"Who are you?" she cried helplessly, "How did you get in here?"

"Through a door," he replied cryptically, yet stupidly.

With puffy eyes she turned her head to the only entrance, a door which would have been in her peripheral vision while she stood at the window. It stood unopened and untouched with its brass chain lock till fastened in place.

"Not that door," he answered her unspoken question—because he couldn't very well come out with it and tell her that he was a supernatural entity cursed with immortality and an unspeakable duty until he found some illusive redemption for his hideous life of death and chaos!

A few harsh coughs erupted from her tiny frame as she began to drag in panicked breaths through her enflamed throat and congested nose. The hyperventilating made the coughing fits so much worse.

"Please don't hurt me, "she managed to plead between each agonizing anxiety-induced inhale.

"I have no intention of harming you. "He replied with all the forced ease he could muster.

This whole thing really was not thought out very well at all.

"Are you looking for money? I can give you what I have…" She bargained pitifully, blinking away a fresh wave of tears.

"Don't be absurd, Christine. I would not dream of taking the money you so desperately need." He winced as her name slipped unbidden from his lips.

"How do you know my name?" She asked lowly, "What do you want?"

He wasn't sure how to answer that question, but his attention shifted to the tiny refrigerator in the kitchen nook. It took only three steps to reach it. Setting his violin onto the humble kitchen counter, he opened the fridge door to seek out his intended item.

"Oat milk…" he said aloud as he took in the non-dairy beverage occupying the shelf beneath the little light of the cooling unit. A memory flashed in his mind of Christine guiltily eating ice cream with a friend despite the consequences. "Ah, that's right, you are intolerant," he murmured to himself.

There was no milk, but there was a nearly expired pint of half and half tucked in the back that would work nicely. He quickly plucked it from the shelf and turned towards Christine, who was in the process of sliding the chain off its lock in a hurried exit attempt.

He sighed. It was true that he needed to get her out of this tiny space with this irritating chemical still lingering in the air, but he would rather not take her outside, nor did he want her to flee screaming.

With a flick of his wrist, he summoned his entry right before her and, with a hand pressed against the small of her back, briskly guided her through before she could process what was happening.

It was the first time he had ever attempted to bring anyone else through a portal with him and, once she was through, he was quietly shocked it had worked. Half distracted by that thought, he turned to fetch his violin before allowing the wound in space to seal.

They stood in his own shabby quarters which gave him an acute sense of self-consciousness. It was a cruel joke compared to the enviable standard of living he had maintained while he was living beneath the opera and, for a fraction of a moment, he considered escorting her there instead, but the idea of what that place must look like after a century did not illuminate the idea.

"Here," he gently spoke, opening the carton of dairy and placing it in her hands. "Pour this into your eyes, it will ease the burning."

She stilled for a moment—he was certain she was going to refuse—but then he quietly sighed in relief as she tilted her head back and complied. His head whipped around, looking fruitlessly for something clean she could use to clean her face once she was done. Before he could curse his own inability to provide, she was wiping the white fluid streaming from her face with the cotton fabric of her nightshirt.

Blinking away the remnants of tears and dairy, she finally took in her surroundings.

"Oh my god," she whispered, "Where am I?" Her head jerked to the window—across the street sat her own apartment building. Then her confused and incredulous eyes connected with his. "Who are you?" She asked again with a timidness that shattered his already fractured heart into a thousand shards. Her eyes connected with the window again. "What are you?" She demanded with a soft whine.

Straightening himself and taking a determined breath—as one would before proudly greeting their own executioner—he finally replied.

"I am Erik," he said. "And I will be anything you want me to be."