Hi, everyone! I'm so sorry this took so long, but rest assured, I haven't abandoned this story. The world away from fan fiction (horrible place that it is) caught up with me for a bit... But here it is!

Disclaimer: I do not own Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux), Phantom (Susan Kay), or Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer). Anyone who says I does should stop reading my diary. :)

Chapter Nine: At Last

She was a shell.

The Angel had taken her soul with him when he had abandoned her, and now she waited, voice lovely but hollow, singing when told to but manacled by grief. It was as though the centre of the world had collapsed, leaving a gaping void where once the not-quite-comforting hum of the Angel's presence had been. She had forgotten, for one bright moment, that the Angel was a temperamental and strange creature, and that behind the veil of his divinity was not a man, but something more. She had forgotten that the Angel tolerated no disobedience, no deviation, and absolutely no doubt.

She had forgotten. And now she was paying the price.

She woke the day after the performance to a storm. The media had all gone mad for her, mad for the petite diva with the golden throat and the elusive, mysterious ways. And even as she knew she would have to perform again, her heart rebelled against returning to the Opera. To the Angel. To the Angel, and his madness and his anger and his wretched, wicked control over her. But not to return was far more terrifying, the alternative by far the most dreadful. Because for her not to return was to incite his anger further, true, but also to disappoint him, to throw back in the unseen face of her erstwhile maestro all his hours of tutelage and encouragement. And she couldn't not know. She was so completely his, body and voice, and she was a shell without the Voice's sanction, the Angel's blessing. But she would sing regardless.

Of course she would. It was what he had moulded her for, the task she had been programmed to complete.

And let the LEP come. She had the strangest feeling that after tonight there was nothing more for her to do. Holly had been reduced to a spectator in her own life, someone mindlessly viewing events instead of making them react to her choices.

This was not the person she had wanted to be. This was not the way her life was meant to go.

Oh but the Angel let her sing. Surely that was enough?

xx

The performers, the stage hands, even the managers... they all parted before her that day, as though to stand in her presence was both an oddity and something too marvelous to be countenanced. Rehearsals ran as smoothly as they ever did, with only a handful of minor hiccups to reassure the most superstitious that all would go to plan at the performance proper.

And the day had flown by before she had a chance to even think about it, and suddenly it was the evening and she was dressed and combed and made up for the opera. In the mirror of her dressing table at the Opera her eyes were red with sleeplessness and unshed tears, throat locked up with the terrible silence where once angels had sang to her.

How could she go on like this? she asked silently of the empty air. How could she sing when her very being strained to be closer to him, to hear his divine voice call to her in the exquisite night-music she had come to need like oxygen?

"You left me," she finally murmured, perfectly wretched. Her words echoed back to her, bouncing against the walls of the empty room. It did not sound like her; flat and lifeless. But there was no response. How could there be? The Angel had left her. "I wish you'd come back."

And for a moment, just a moment, there was an undercurrent of something more in the room, and she sat up straight, eyes questing for something she had no hope of seeing. And her name, barely a breath, barely a sigh, just a whisper on the breeze that flowed from the open window; but it was enough to catch the breath in her throat.

"Holly," whispered the Voice, altogether too close, too real. "I have forgiven you."

It was as though her heart remembered how to beat.

xx

And so she sang, the celestial voice he had shaped pouring from her throat, completely altered now she knew again the Voice was with her.

The audience tonight were quiet; awestruck, she knew, and she could understand their feelings. They were hearing the Angel's spirt woven into her voice, and it was enough to make even her weak at the knees; the knowledge that her body and throat were enough to let the world hear the glory of a creature such as the Angel.

But. Oh, but,

Part of her was angry - furious, even, but most of her was merely resigned. If it was any other officer, she was sure, they would not have sent a full team to retrieve her. But she was Holly Short, "Captain" Holly Short, and there were more hopes and expectations riding on her than she could ever have wished for. She was the first female captain of the LEP in the history of the force; she could not be corrupted, for the sake of the generations of girls and women waiting behind her to take their place someday as officers of the Lower Elements. Yet the shift in her life, of learning to sing and learning of the Angel - she could no longer be sure of what she wanted. She had never intended it, but now, she was certain, in their eyes she was corrupted.

She could sense them; they were coming. Her kindred were making good on their promise to come and find her, and facing the music - no pun intended - would not be pretty once she arrived below ground again. The delicate shimmers making their way up the aisles were visible only to her and a few sharp eyed, disinterested humans. And even as she sang, voice heavenly enough to affect even the approaching LEP operatives, she cast her eyes around desperately for the Angel, expecting him against her own mind's better judgement.

But there. Was that a halo she could see, bright against the darkness. Were those black, sweeping wings, or merely shadows? She sang, voice continuing against her will, and she could not move from her place on the stage. It was not the Voice's will, after all.

And then the world erupted.

A man fell from the flies, face swollen and blue, a cord around his throat bobbing him up and down like a grotesque puppet. She did not scream; it was not the first time she had seen a hanging, and certainly not the first time she has seen a dead body. But it was undoubtedly the first time incidence of a corpse dropping down nearly on top of her, and she cannot restrain a small gasp of chorus girls screamed in tandem, their usually crystal voices a cacophany of broken glass and screeching metal.

Everywhere she looked people were surging, screaming, moving towards the exits in the fractured, jerky movements of panic and hysteria. She saw the not-shapes that were the LEP as they rose into the air, and she could almost hear the words 'mission aborted' with the ears of her professional memory.

But the hand on her arm was no memory, a vice closing around her bicep to drag her away from the throng as the lights flicker out. She could not fight the dark, shapeless form that dragged her away from the mass of terrified people, free only to stumble as her feet tried to keep up with the pace of the stranger.

She was wrenched through a nondescript door, and she fought him all the way. Her assailant was tall, and slender, and he (she?) pulled her along as though she was nothing but a rag doll, down flights of stairs and along corridors. Her feet barely touched the ground as she was dragged behind the stranger as though she weighed nothing at all. But beneath the black clothes power lurked like a coiled spring, and Holly was well aware that this strange creature was no one to be trifled with.

Slamming her fist as hard as elfinly possible into the man's stomach - she had decided he must be a man, from his height and strength and demanding attitude - she watched with no little pleasure as he crumpled. She darted away, back the way she had been brought, but the darkness was impervious even to elf eyes and as she picked her way up the dank stairs, she was conscious of the footfalls behind her.

The hands caught her again, and she swung, ready to face her attacker and do battle in any way necessary. But she was in no way prepared to meet the eyes of her assailant; they incapacitated the very spirit, frighteningly bright and searing down into her, as though he could see into her heart.

It was a man, and his eyes blazed an unholy blue through the darkness, the rest of his features obscured by the black mask she could barely distinguish from the night. The eyes were all she could look at, electric blue and they seemed to be almost crackling with impatience and anger as he puller her now unresisting body along with him. He was tall, even by mortal and not fairy standards, and he ushered her around corners and down corridors with the experience of someone at home only within the night.

"Please," she whispered, her voice faltering and weak in the darkness that surrounded them. Those eyes turned from their ceaseless examination of the shadows to fix upon her. She swallowed, gathering her wits. For the love of Frond, she was a LEP officer, not a cringing, terrified girl. She could take down any mere Mud Man, regardless of the dark and her fear and his bright, madman's eyes. "I don't know who you are and what you want, but if you don't let me go - "

The stranger sighed, the exhalation rattling out through his throat with a sigh. It spurred her on, his sigh, as though he was the wronged one.

"Now see here, Mud Creature, I don't know who the hell you think you are but if you think for one damn second - !"

"Silence," interrupted the Voice. For a moment, she thought she had hallucinated it, or that the Angel had come to her in her hour of need. But that hope slowly fell away. The stranger had stopped, was looking down at her, and it had been from his obscured lips that those words had fallen from.

"Angel?" she gasped, mind going blank, eyes flying wide. her brain could not compute this new information, that her immortal Voice, that had soothed her and comforted her - he was the Voice. The Angel was a man. Oh, she had suspected, of course, but the reality struck her with the force of an anvil falling from the sky.

"I am no Angel, Holly," the man said, his words still in that lovely, ethereal murmur. But for the first time, she noted, his voice was drenched in a soft, lilting accent.

The Angel was Irish. The thought made her smile for a moment, her lips twisting into an expression of amusement that quickly crumpled into other, nameless emotions. Her shoulders shook with the cold and the fear and the discovery, and the events of the past few weeks and that night caught up with her.

Her head spun. Her eyes blurred. And through all of this, she was suddenly, painfully aware that she had not completed the Ritual in months.

The stranger reached out, gripping her shoulders in strong hands. "Holly? What is it?" he asked, voice low and urgent. He was careful not to touch her skin, but she couldn't stand his hands upon her. With her last vestiges of strength, she pushed him away.

"Don't touch me," she gasped out. And then even the darkness went black.