I seriously don't have time for this anymore, I'm a senior, with a job, taking a college class and the SATs, and running XC. I will finish this, but chapters are probably going to start taking months.
Les nuits dans l'armure légère
Nights in Flimsy Armour
—
Scene XVII
Focus: le monstre
The gentle kiss of lightning slowly spiraled up his spine, the silent presence of divinity. The softest of sighs escaped his lips as his gloved fingertips brushed the strings of rosaries hanging on their rack.
Even this place had changed.
Irregular in shape and size, the chapel seemed more of an afterthought. The wood floor was intact, but little else in the awkward room was the same. Lady Madonna now smiled benevolently over niches that had found room for a menorah and small set of scrolls and another with a table draped in orange with incense set before small statues of Lord Krishna, Shiva, and Ganesha.
It was just as well.
Noiselessly, he turned to check the breach in the fifth cellar.
—
Scene XVIII
Focus: la Suédoise
Charlotte felt sick as she counted her steps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, jump! For the distorted breath of time she sailed high above the stage, she felt someone had been watching her, now such a constant paranoia that she gave it little consideration. Then she landed with a thump that sent the bridge swinging on its cables. She should have fallen short, she knew, she should have plunged to her death. Gracelessly, she flopped down to sit and recover her nerves.
'What was she to do?' was a question Char had asked herself over and over again. Coming here was always a mistake, wasn't it? She snarled up her hair by running her fingers through it.
As if in answer, from down below, someone called, "Hello! Who's there?"
She froze in place, although the plank still swayed; it was Max. She'd thought enough to leave him a message, mostly about Ralph, but she hadn't said too much about that either. Ralph had certainly filled him in on the details, exhaustingly. As she crouched to flee, she wondered how long Marguerite would hold her silence.
How easily she escaped and hid from Max, who was better acquainted with the floor plans of the opera house than she, was another drop in the bucket of her welling suspicions.
—
Scene XVIII
Focus: le guardien galant
"Ralph! Come in! How are you?"
"Not so good, have you seen Char lately?"
The lovely young ballet instructor's brown eyes lit up.
"Why yes, she left just this morning, dropped in yesterday. Seemed to have found something really important to your presentations. Won't you come into the kitchen and have some tea? You look as though you're coming down with something horrible."
On cue, Ralph sneezed, pulling out a tissue just in time.
"That would be great, Margo," he seemed to be folding into himself with tiredness as he spoke, "did she say anything else?"
"Hold your horses, boy, you can barely stand upright on your own."
She took his arm and guided him to a white wooden chair, at the blue tiled table. The kitchen seemed to glow in the comforting way that some do and Ralph began to feel extremely drowsy as he watched Marguerite put a steel kettle on the stove.
"She asked me to help her go through some new material with her," she said as his vision began to falter.
Marguerite stepped into the other room for a second and returned with a folded piece of paper. Several folded pieces of paper actually, yellowed and aged.
"There's much more, but somehow I think this may be of interest to you."
As he leaned over them he saw the ink had faded to an unpleasant shade of red and the script was exceptionally messy, but at some length of squinting, wavering, and rubbing his eyes he managed to decipher: Monsieur le Vicomte.
—
your encouragement and feedback means so much to me i just want to thank you for putting up with me.