She awoke late, and for a moment she didn't know where she was—an unfamiliar room, sparsely furnished, with strange clothes hung on hooks on the wall. And toe shoes. She was in Paris again, with Meg, Mme. Giry, and, astonishingly, the Angel. Erik. She was hungry and gritty, but Christine rolled over and pulled Meg's pillow to her. He might be anywhere else in the house, and she wanted to gather herself. It was so strange to think of his having a name, stranger even than his being alive. For so many years, most of her life, he had been a figure of overwhelming influence, part master and part father figure, but never an actual person. The night of Hannibal, when he had drawn her through the mirror, she had been amazed that she could actually touch his hand. The leather of his glove had been cold. The whole episode remained a blur—candlelight, song, a white horse straight out of fairy tales. Then he had stood behind her, his arms around her, and there was nothing cold about him at all. There was been gossiping crushes during her early teenage years, but what the Angel—Erik! she whispered fiercely—had enveloped her in his warmth and strength, his beautiful voice thrumming through her, and she had felt like a girl in a novel, weak-kneed and breathless. Had it not been for the disturbing figure in the wedding dress, with a face too much like her own, her virtue would not have survived the night.
This had not made him seem any more real. There was too much strangeness. Then she had awoken to find him looking weirdly vulnerable, half-dressed and bent over his keyboard. Had she been sensible, she would have kept her distance, talked to him, perhaps solved a mystery or two. But the shy expression on his face and the gorgeous masculine curve of his neck were too great a temptation. Her hands had itched to touch him. It had been a marvel of textures—smooth hair, warm skin, the satiny chill of his leather mask. There had been a hot flutter deep in her belly when he arched his neck at her touch and very nearly purred with pleasure. It had not occurred to her that there was a reason why he wore the mask.
She had no time to be repulsed by his face; the surprise was too great, and then he was shouting at her, cursing her, and she understood only that she had disappointed him. It was later that the face tormented her with its ugliness, made worse by the knowledge that her dreams of angelic glory were gone and that she had always been wrong.
For the months afterward, particularly the time after the stagehand's murder, she had been furious with the Angel. She felt that he had tricked her, had used her for some wicked purpose that she didn't even know, and she brushed aside all the affection and gratitude she had felt for him. It had been a triumph of sorts to accept Raoul's suit, to throw over the disappointing Angel who had frightened her, deceived her, and instead turn to someone young, handsome, and living in the world. Since that time, though, she had remembered all the years of kindness, and she regretted many of the things she had done. She had been so lonely as a little girl, and the Angel had been hers alone, sent by her dead Papa to look after her so that she need not be afraid. He had protected her—he seemed to know everything that happened in the theater, and, several times, people who had bullied or frightened her had broken bones or suddenly run afoul of management, so that even in her unpopularity she had been safe. His belief in her, in her talent, had helped to shape her. She thought that she would not have handled things with the Chagnys so well if it had not been for all those years of affirmation.
She still could hardly reconcile the beautiful voice of her angelic friend with the man whose kiss still tortured her, much less with the man in this house who had apparently helped her friends to safety and was even now keeping them alive. Why Mme. Giry? He had never mentioned her, although there had been times when Madame had brought messages from him, now she thought about it. It was this thought that finally drew Christine out of bed. There were stories within stories here, and she felt that she must hear them all before she truly understood what had happened to her. She rose, washed, dressed, and went in search of the first set of answers.