Back she went to the place which so recently had been her nightmare-abode. She disembarked from the carriage carefully, shading her face with a hat, her hair bound up into a bun, and wearing plain, ordinary clothes.

Mercifully, no one outside in the streets seemed to recognize her. She could scarcely believe it after all the goings-on of a few nights before, but she was grateful that her simple effort at partially disguising herself seemed to be working amazingly well. It was likely her hair, she decided…rather astonishing, the simple effects of changing one's hairstyle could create in one's appearance. People were used to seeing her dark locks curling and cascading in a slightly unruly fashion down her back, and she supposed the hat worked wonders as well to further her disguise.

She tiptoed deftly into the Opera, her shoes making a dull thudding sound upon the polished marble floors. Oh, she would give all she possessed to not be seen by the management, or anyone from the chorus, or the ballet corps, or…

A hand grasped her shoulder.

She sucked in her breath, trembling.

Turned around timidly. "Y…yes?" she whispered, and then nearly sank to the floor in relief. It was Meg.

Meg, who would never tell.

"Christine," she whispered. "Chr…" She looked about her, then hurriedly steered her fellow artist into a shadowed corner, where it would be difficult to see either of their faces. "Where have you been?" she demanded, her voice almost a sob.

"I have been staying at the house of one of Raoul's aunts, just outside the city," whispered Christine. "I know it's been four days…I'm so dreadfully sorry I sent you no word of me. I meant to…I really did…but—"

"Oh, it doesn't matter now," gasped Meg, apparently trying very hard to keep her composure. "Oh, I'm so glad that you're back…I…I wondered if you were dead…and I…I went there…with them…that night—and I found…this."

The thing she placed in Christine's shaking hands made her vision blur, darken. She felt as though she were fainting.

"Oh, God," she said aloud, and put a hand to her forehead.

Feeling the cool, smooth porcelain in her palm abruptly brought back a disturbingly erotic shadow-memory of a long white hand about her waist, fingers ginger but strong. Her own hand was burning feverishly, sliding up that self-same porcelain as she leaned against him most indecently, her head flopping backwards on his chest, curls spilling against the white of his cravat…

She shuddered. When had that ever happened?

Had it been…had it been the night when he had taken her down, that very first encounter between them face-to-face? She remembered barely anything from that experience; indeed, it was as though she had been in some sort of deep trance.

I do not doubt it, she thought suddenly, with a sort of angry jolt. So afraid, he could not reveal himself to me in my waking lucidity. He had to be in power. Always, in power.

"Why could he not simply have introduced himself to me, as normal men do?" she found herself saying aloud, but the idea stopped in its tracks. He had never been a normal man—at least, not in all the time she had known him—and she had hardly known him at all, when one took into account the minimalism and infrequency of their honest-to-goodness, face-to-face encounters. Perhaps, she thought, he had been trying for so long to be normal and failed that he had simply given up on any semblance of normalcy that he ever might have possessed.

The cold smoothness in her hands was making her feel dizzy, almost bewitched.

"Meg," she whispered. "Did you…did you see him? Anywhere?"

"N…no," shuddered Meg. "God, Christine, if I had, I would have been so startled and afraid that I likely would have given him up to the gendarmes almost at once. They never found him. It was as though he had vanished into thin air…"

Christine felt crushing, bittersweet relief, mixed with dread.

She grasped Meg's hand, feeling her soul quiver and grow cold. Thinking of him always made her feel cold.

A sudden thought came to her, then, very much connected to the shadow-memory of before. Was it possible that…

No. She would have known. There would have been some sign…there would have been, she was sure, soreness or discomfort in that place when she awoke, or spots of blood on the sheets…something. Whatever hypnosis she had been under that night he had first taken her down to his dark abode, she had been entirely lucid the next morning. Of course she had still been dizzy, but she had been aware. She would have known.

As far as she knew, he had left her entirely alone, save for that strange intimacy during his hypnotic musical caress.

Was the source of his power possibly in his voice alone?

She shivered. It was not merely that, she was sure. It was in the way he moved, the way his eyes looked beneath half-closed lids, peering out, fluttering, burning. Merely thinking of it made something in her breast quiver and shrink. She felt frail all of a sudden, weak.

"Christine," said Meg in a low, frightened voice. "Are you quite all right?"

Christine's hand fluttered to her forehead, feeling a cold sweat come away upon her fingertips. "I don't really know," she whispered. "I don't know whether I shall ever be all right again."

Meg shuddered. "Christine," she said, her voice trembling, "did…did he…" Her eyes were wide, her face white, her mouth open and flapping wordlessly in a nameless horror.

Christine shook her head, feeling a hot flush creep up her cheeks. "No, no," she said quickly, nearly stammering. "He…" She felt foolish, saying it. "He let me go. With Raoul."

"With Raoul?" Meg gasped. "The Vicomte followed you after all, then? And…"

"Very nearly got himself killed," Christine moaned, holding a hand to her eyes, trying to blot out the memory, the memory of those burning eyes as He spat out an ultimatum, while her would-be lover hung from a rope. "I don't…I don't know what…"

…What possessed me.

She didn't finish her sentence. Somehow she could not tell Meg about The Kiss. It was something deeply visceral, somewhat intimate, almost embarrassing. She couldn't get the words out. Telling Meg about The Kiss would be something akin to telling a stranger on the street about one's wedding night. It did not matter that Meg was perhaps the closest thing she had ever had to a real confidante. She simply could not reveal it, not here, not now.

She almost didn't like to think of it as a kiss. It was more of a desperate act, like a child groping helplessly in the dark for the corner of a table, the outline of a chair.

His lips had tasted of salt, of grime and the barest bit of blood. There had been something else, too, something stale on his breath, as though he had not eaten in days…

Christine closed her eyes and shuddered.

His great, shuddering breaths…the wetness on his face, beneath her hand. Her fingers had been coated with it, with his tears and with some other unidentifiable substance, likely lake residue of some kind…

They had all been dirty, when it was over. Water had splashed everywhere, Raoul's shirt had been covered in grime and muck from his sojourn through the sewers…the tattered remains of her wedding dress had been nearly unrecognizable when finally he and she had emerged from the dark depths, soiled and streaked with slime and water-stains, torn and disheveled.

"Christine," Meg whispered, insistent, demanding, her fingers grasping Christine's sleeve so tightly that they appeared bloodless. "What happened?"

Christine's eyes opened, swiveled around to meet Meg's. "Someday I will tell you," she said softly. "When it is behind me. But not now. Not now…"

Then, for pity's sake, she grasped her friend's hand. "It was nothing terrible," she said, almost as though she were trying to convince herself. "Nothing awful…it was simply…"

"What?" queried Meg, her eyes rapt. She had always been fascinated with Him, Christine remembered suddenly, had been since her girlhood. Every tale, every wagging tongue that happened to mention the word Fantôme had captured Meg's attention like trumpets ringing out from the rooftops. Even if she were in the midst of eating something, the morsel would halt inches from her lips, held suspended in her hand, and her gaze would become slack, staring. "What's that you said?" she would demand suddenly, leaning forward with bright, keenly interested eyes. "What did you say about the Ghost?" Always, always little Meg poking about after the Opera Ghost. It was a wonder he'd not carried her off, she'd been so interested in him…

Christine fought off the urge to snort derisively. It wasn't that she held herself in a higher position than Meg, it was simply the miserable absurdity of the whole situation, of having been carried off in the first place, when nothing might have been nearly so disastrous had he chosen Meg instead—she might have relished it, even. Who knew why anything had happened the way it had?

Meg's mouth slid into a miserable frown. "I shall never know, shall I?" she muttered. "Never…"

"Someday," Christine said, rather half-heartedly. "Oh, Meg, I don't know what I shall do now. Raoul and I have broken off our engagement, and I feel…"

"But why? Was it because—"

"I told him that I needed time," she said hollowly. "Meg, I'm not certain I…oh, I don't wish to talk about it now. There's something I need to do. Promise—" She caught hold of Meg's shoulders, grasped them firmly. "Promise you won't tell anyone I'm here. You wouldn't, would you?"

"Not if…not if you don't want me to. Oh, Christine, you're beginning to frighten me. Why have you come back, if you didn't want anyone to know?"

"I need…I need to do something," she said. "I need to find someone."

"Him?" Meg whispered.

"Meg, you can't tell a soul. There's something I must tell him, something I…"

"But I thought you were scared to death of him, that you never wanted to see him. You told me but a week ago how frightened you were—"

"Meg, don't press me," Christine moaned. "Oh, don't press me, please. I can't even explain it to myself. You won't tell—will you? He won't hurt me. I know he won't. You don't need to be worried. I doubt that I will even be able to find him, if he really vanished as you say. I simply need to try. Can you understand it? Can you swear to keep your silence?"

"Yes," Meg whispered. "If you really require it of me."

"Not even your mother, Meg. Not even her. Swear it."

"I swear," whispered Meg. "I swear not to tell a soul."

"Thank you," said Christine, and gave Meg a swift kiss on the cheek. "You are a dear, Meg." With that, she ran swiftly down the hall to the old dressing-room, praying she would be able to work the mechanism of the mirror.

Nobody saw her as she slipped into the dressing-room. After quickly lighting one of the candles in the sconces, she closed the door quietly behind her.

She remembered with humiliation how she had thought at first that he had been magic. It was Madame Giry who had told her there must be a hidden spring or lever, after Christine had spoken of what she could remember of her strange journey. She had never searched for the spring herself, nor told anyone that it existed. And He had certainly never mentioned how it worked.

The mirror was cold and dark. She felt a little shiver up her back as she stared it in the face. Was it possible he was behind it even at this very moment? No, of course not, for what reason would he have to be here now? How could he possibly know she was here, unless…

Now the shiver was colder, and longer. He might have been watching her, all this time. He might have been following her, without her knowledge. He might even have been listening when she and Raoul suspended their engagement. Would he have risked such a thing, with the police crawling all over the city like cockroaches, looking for him? It wasn't as though he blended into the crowd with any measure of ease, although she supposed if he wished he might be able to disguise himself enough. She had witnessed a few of his abilities which might have convinced even the most skeptical of souls that he was a veritable wizard.

Cautiously, like one who walks in a dream, she approached the mirror and held out her hand. "Are you there?" she whispered. "Are you?"

There was no reply. Suddenly Christine felt desperately foolish. And it's a fool's-errand I'm on, that's for certain.

Her fingers searched up and down the wall, looking for a crack, a protrusion. She found nothing on the left side of the wall. It was altogether possible that there was no mechanism on this side of the mirror at all—that it could only be operated behind the mirror, in the tunnel, rather than in the dressing-room.

On the right side of the wall, however, she thought she saw something strange near the very top of the mirror—it was too high for her to reach, but a man of His height could have reached it easily.

Dragging a stool over to the mirror, she stood atop it, steadying herself against the wall when the legs began to wobble and creak. She closed her eyes for a moment. Please, oh, please.

She fumbled at it with her fingers, first pulling, then pressing. As she pressed, she felt it give way, and she nearly fell from the stool in surprise and alarmed, giddy excitement. The mirror swung open, revealing a black, empty tunnel, wet and dripping.

Fighting down a lump of fear, Christine stood before it for a moment. "Angel?" she whispered. The breath choked in her throat. "Phantom?"

She could not traverse that dripping darkness alone. She could not. She should never have attempted to find him this way.

It was foolish, and yet she could think of no other way. She plunged blindly into the blackness, and the door swung shut behind her.

With a scream, she tried to find something to open it again, repenting fervently of her idiotic impulse, but she could find nothing but wet, slimy rock. She put her hands against the mirror. There was nothing to break the glass with; perhaps if she screamed loudly enough, someone would come—

And then what? They would ask questions, perhaps even think she was in league with Him. She would be arrested, hung…

Oh, God. Was the shame and anguish worth it? Could she not attempt to find him, after all? How difficult could it be, really—

She knew too well how difficult it would be. There was no reason on earth he would have made the journey to his underground domain easy for anyone, even for her.

After a few more despairing moments of searching for the hidden spring, she gave up and descended blindly into the passage, groping with her hands. There was no light from the dressing-room to illuminate the passage. The candle had burnt out, and it would not have given off sufficient light anyway.

"Oh," she groaned, "oh, if you're here, please, please…"

Her voice echoed eerily around her, mocking her cruelly.

"Phantom!" she screamed desperately. She did not even think she could find her way back to the dressing-room. It was pitch-dark, blacker even than a night with a new moon.

The word echoed around her, a horrid, piercing shriek.

Phantom! Phantom! Phantom!

After what seemed to be an hour of groping blindly, Christine sank to her knees in despair, feeling suffocated. He was gone; he would never find her, and she would die of starvation in these black tunnels, lost and alone.

The floor came up to greet her, and she knew nothing for a long time.

Firelight, flickering and red against her eyelids. Was the Opera burning? Was she to be trapped in a blazing, hot grave?

She sat up with a start, and then her heart went into her mouth. "God," she whispered, and sank back down again.

There was a long, strange silence, while her blood throbbed and thundered. All around her was blackness. Nothing else.

She got to her feet, began groping again, in the direction she thought was down.

Lost, lost. Never find me, never find him, lost. Gone. Maybe dead. Why was I such a fool?

Something gave way beneath her feet, and only by grasping tightly to an outcropping did she keep from falling to her death—and only marginally so. She heard stones tumbling below her, splashing into the water, and then, with a great creaking groan, the thing that had given way closed ponderously again. Her fingers were slipping. She felt gingerly with her shoes for the edge. There was a small crack where trap-door ended and floor began. She gasped when she stood upon it, gasped with a great, shaky relief, so great that she began to laugh, and laugh.

She laughed so hard that she sank into a heap, and then she began to sob. After a few moments, she began to scream again, so loud her throat was beginning to go hoarse. She was close to fainting when she saw the firelight again, glimmering some distance away. After a moment, it disappeared, and the strength sank from her limbs, seeming to leach her very life itself. She really did faint, then--"Phantom" being the last brief murmur on her lips before she succumbed to unconsciousness.

There was something soft beside her. Something warm. Was she dreaming again? Was it a rat, perhaps?

She screamed, struggling, but something held her tightly, something not warm at all, but cold as ice. She could not tell what it was, or if she was in the grip of some waking nightmare, or if she was dying. She felt herself floating—no, hanging—over something hard, swaying back and forth. It came to her slowly that she was being carried, like a sack of potatoes, flung over someone's shoulder, and a sweet relief, mixed with a coppery fear, swam slowly through her veins. Perhaps she was merely dreaming again…she could not tell. A feeling of nausea overcame her, and she slipped back into the grip of insensibility.

A cold cloth was being pressed to her face. "Wake up," she heard someone muttering, "Wake up," and then she realized that it was His voice, but that was impossible. She had dreamed the whole thing, no doubt, and was even at this very moment sitting in her flat with—

She opened her eyes.

The face floating before her drew back, as though afraid to alarm her. She might have gasped, but instead, she sat up slowly without a sound. Vaguely she noticed that she had been lying on a little bed of worn, slightly moth-eaten cushions, covered with an embroidered burgundy blanket that had once been elegant but was now looking decidedly the worse for wear. A few candles gave off a dull sort of light. Altogether, this was a far less splendid cavern than the one he had dwelt in previously. Before I ruined everything, she thought, and then felt a hot, awkward blush come up in her face. He had forced her into it, after all, "ruining everything"—he had given her little choice, and everyone else had left her even less.

"Am I dreaming?" she asked.

He stared at her, his gaze broiling with emotion. Anger, that she could identify, and pain, and perhaps a hint of the old passion. She shivered.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

His large, misshapen lips twitched, and then he looked away.

"Why?" he asked at last, his voice silken and trembling. "Why did you come? What utter foolishness possessed you to traverse that dark passage with no light and no idea of whence you went?"

"Don't ask me," she whispered. "I don't know."

He closed his eyes.

This was far more uncomfortable than she had imagined. She struggled desperately for something to say, something to break the silence. An awkward, straining tension seemed to fairly permeate the air.

"He and I are no longer engaged," she blurted on impulse, not daring to say her formerly betrothed's name aloud, and his eyes slid over very slowly to meet hers. There was a curious expression in them—he regarded her coolly, but she also thought she detected a trace of triumph, and of sudden, violent eagerness, carefully contained.

"It was silly, really—to have gone through all that, only to find that all he could have offered me wasn't what I wanted," she said, and then felt stupid, to have said such a thing. It made her sound petty.

"Is that why you came?" he asked hoarsely.

An eternity of silence.

"I told you," she whispered, "I don't know why I came."

He snarled in his throat and threw the washcloth to the side of him, where it made a soft splat on the floor. He stood up and turned his back to her.

The hems and legs of his trousers were grimy, caked with day-old dirt and slime. There was a grey-brown crust upon his once fine-looking coat. She felt another little rush of shame, for having brought all this upon him.

"You know," he said softly, "I shan't let you go this time. It was in an extraordinarily weak frame of mind that I did so in the first place."

"Yes," she whispered. "I know."

"Then why did you come?" he cried out. He swept around to face her, his long white hands held out, palm-up, in a strange supplication. "Why did you not get away?" he groaned. "Why did you not remove yourself from me as far as possible?"

She had no answer for him.

He collapsed to his knees and put his hands over his eyes. "God," he whispered. "I really have driven you mad, after all. To think, if I had left you alone…"

"Do you still want me?" she asked in a trembling voice, so quiet she herself could barely hear her own words. She wished heartily that she had not said it. His hands dropped from his face. He stared at her, his gaze vaguely beastlike.

"Want you," he said hollowly. "Do I want you?" He came toward her on his hands and knees, covering the short distance between them. "Do I want you?" he asked again. There was something incredulous in his voice, and something intrinsically predatory, ravenous.

She shuddered, and leaned back a little as his face loomed over hers. His lips, twisted and swollen monstrously out of shape, hovered a breath away from her cheek. "Want you," he said again, a musing repetition of her words. His voice was a languid, throaty caress. She closed her eyes. She hoped he would not kiss her, and then again, she hoped that he would.

"Christine Daaé," he said, almost mockingly, and there was a melodious, drawling sing-song in his voice when he said her name. It slid along his tongue, coating it like honey. She half-thought she was going to faint.

Her hands came up, fingers curling around his shirt. Hardly knowing what she did, she drew a little closer to him, and she heard him give a long, shuddering sigh. His misshapen mouth, hot and quivering, brushed wetly against her neck. "Oh, you've come back," he gasped. "You've really come back to me. I'm not dreaming. I'm not." This last was said in something like a moan.

She could think of nothing to say. It was, ironically, very much like a strange dream. She felt vaguely as though she were outside herself. Feeling all but experiencing nothing, she thought wildly. Would that make this weird, illicit reunion any less of a sin or a crime?

"In dreams, you came back," he whispered, "but this now is certainly no ghost of fantasy, haunting me, torturing me. Time and again I would wake to find you gone, a wisp of memory, my limbs cold. But now you will not leave. You'll stay with me, I'll make sure of it. You shan't go again."

His hands were on her waist very firmly, almost enough to hurt. She was frightened, and dizzy.

"I must look a sight," he said suddenly, "covered in muck, and…" He abruptly turned his face away, so that she could see only the left side, that which had escaped his mother's womb relatively unblemished. She lifted her fingers, ran them along his cheek. There was, as there had been days ago when this had all come crashing upon their heads, a surge of pity in her heart, and of compassion. She traced the deep line around his mouth, a line caused not by a freak accident of nature, but by long, weary years. His lips parted a little, and his eyelids fluttered half-closed. His eyes glimmered hotly beneath them, smoldering embers that gave her heart a kind of panicked little thrill.

"Why did you come?" he whispered for what seemed the thousandth time. "Why did you not get away?"

She closed her eyes again, and felt the tips of his fingers cupping her jaw, the heat of his mouth hovering close to her cheek. "Foolish child," he murmured. "Foolish, beautiful child."

"I'm not a child any longer," she said abruptly, turning herself away from him. "I haven't been for some time. One would think you had noticed, or you would not have been so eager to abscond with me." She was a little shocked at herself for saying this.

"Do you hate me?" he asked quietly, a strange, resigned curiosity in his voice.

"No," she said.

There was silence for a moment.

"Sometimes," she amended.

"When you do not hate me," he asked, "what emotion does reside in your breast?" His long, cool fingers slid over her hair. He was trying to make her look at him, she thought, but she did not turn.

"I don't know," she said, feeling stupid. She did know, but she could not say it.

He took her arm in his hand, jerked her around to face him. She gasped a little from the suddenness of it, the near-pain in her arm.

"You risked life and limb to traverse the moldering tunnels of my domain," he said evenly, "nearly broke your idiotic female neck in one of my trap-doors…swooned into a dead faint from fright and confusion…" His fingers tightened on her arm, and she winced. "Don't," she whispered. He let go of her at once.

"Either you really are mad," he said, "so mad you lost yourself in the tunnels for no clear purpose—or…" He did not continue the or. There were, Christine thought, privately, too many ors.

"I am afraid," she whispered, "afraid to tell you why I came."

"Afraid?" he asked dully. That was surely nothing new to him. Inspiring fear in others had seemed to be his calling-card.

"Yes."

"Afraid," he said between his teeth, "of what?"

"Being—" Christine choked a little on her words. "Being consumed," she said with difficulty. "Consumed utterly." Body, soul, and mind, her thoughts whispered, but she could not manage to say them aloud.

His eyes flickered.

"Consumed?" he asked vaguely. "How interesting."

There was a long silence.

"You know," he said, as though they were speaking of something as ordinary as the weather or politics, "I have just remembered...you do not even know my name."

"What?" she asked in surprise.

"I never told you," he said again, more deliberately this time, "my name." His voice was soft, perhaps even a little malicious.

"I didn't think—" She broke off. It seemed impossibly ignorant and rude, suddenly, to say I didn't think you had one.

"No," she said awkwardly. "No. You never told me." Something as commonplace as learning a man's name seemed strangely incongruous with this meeting, almost incompatible. She had not quite expected it.

"You thought I had none?" he inquired blandly, and she flinched.

"A good many animals don't have names," he said, his expression unreadable. "All men, however, usually have one, some self-appointed, or some picked up along the road of life, if not given by parents or relatives at their birth." She felt too ashamed to look at him then.

"My mother, it seems, did see fit to give me a name, along with the scrap of cloth which made up my mask," he said coolly. "God knows why I kept it—the name, I mean."

"What is it?" she asked sheepishly.

"Erik," he said flatly. He stood up.

It was a curious thing, but attaching an honest-to-goodness name to the man somehow made him ten times less mysterious, and thereby far less intimidating. He was only a man—really only a man, with a normal name, one that sounded Swedish, no less. He was no supernatural ghoul residing in a man's body. She was a little ashamed to realize that this was more or less the way she had been thinking of him, without knowing it.

"Oh," she said. Her voice sounded dull and stupid in her ears.

"Tell me why you are here," he said.

"I'm here," she whispered, "because—" She struggled for a moment. "I wanted to make sure you weren't dead," she said, "and I had this mad, mad need to see you again. It was impossible. I had to."

"Why?" he asked. "You seemed willing enough to leave with your lover five nights past."

Her cheeks flamed. "I was frightened," she said. "I was angry. Part of me wanted to stay—" She couldn't continue. She was certain she would cry if she did, and Lord knew she did not want to cry.

Even through a massive effort to keep it back, one tear slid down her cheek, having slipped slyly past the guards of her eyelids. She made no effort to swipe it away.

He looked at her curiously, a strange expression on his face.

"I had to go, that night," she said. "I had to. They would have hunted us down to the ends of the earth if Raoul had made it known that I had fled with you. Now people might suspect, but they will never know." Not even Meg will know for certain.

"That wasn't why you left," he said.

"No," she said. "It wasn't. I couldn't bear to stay. I thought I wanted him more than I wanted you. And then, yesterday, I discovered—I realized—I had been desperately wrong." She could have bitten her tongue off.

He was standing stiffly. His face seemed a little frozen.

"I didn't think to find you," she said. "I wanted to—part of me wanted to—but I didn't expect it. I was shocked when I did."

"You did not find me," he said. "I found you."

"Yes," she said. "Thank you." The last words were said shyly.

"I heard someone scream," he said. "I went to investigate. Imagine my surprise when I saw, lying on the floor in a miserable heap, one whom I had thought never to see again."

"Were you—were you glad to see me?" she asked timidly, and then felt stupid.

"No," he said. "Surprised, yes. Concerned, perhaps. But glad? No."

Christine felt as though she had been kicked in the stomach.

"I didn't trust myself enough to be glad," he said shortly, and she felt a little better.

There was another long silence. "Even now," he said, more softly, "I am not quite sure of what to think. What to do—that, in itself, poses a far larger conundrum." His eyes fixed on her, still hooded, and there was a kind of flickering longing in them.

She wanted to say his name, but it stuck in her throat. It seemed too strange.

His fingers flexed spasmodically. There was a jellied silence in the air, one in which she seemed suspended, unable to escape.

"Where will we go?" she whispered. He took a deep breath, threw up his hands. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know. I'll think…I'll think, of how…and where—" He turned away, shuddering a little. "To hear you say those words," he breathed, leaning his head against the stone wall. "You really mean to stay, then. You really mean—"

"You said you would not let me go," she said dryly.

"No," he said. "Not that. You said, 'Where will we go?' Implying willingness, a readiness to follow me where I lead. It—I don't know what to think of it. It seems too fantastic, too frightfully surreal."

"Do you think me so churlish as that?" she whispered. "To find you, tell you these things…and then try to escape? If I wanted to be rid of you, I should never have tried to find you." It was true, in a way, but the words she spoke did not entirely reflect her true feelings. Part of her wanted to be away from him, as far away as she could run. Even so, she was surprised to realize that the larger part of her, the much larger part, wished desperately to remain.

He took two long steps, and lifted her to her feet. His hands slid slowly from her arms, trembling a little. "Christine," he said haltingly, fingers hovering over her face. "Christine—"

Her own affirmation, both mental and verbal, that she did not have any wish to escape from his grasp made her feel strangely empowered. Still, she felt painfully shy. She touched his face again, slowly, timidly, and his eyelids fluttered closed. An eternity passed before—heaven knew why—she pressed a quivering kiss to his lips on a mad impulse, and his body shook like a tree in the wind. The kiss deepened, became more probing and desperate. His arms were akimbo again, as they had been during that first, strange kiss days before—he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands. Finally his fingers gathered awkwardly in her hair, which had long since come free from its confines during her sojourn in the tunnels.

After what seemed an eternity, she could breathe again. Her lips tingled, throbbed. She looked into his eyes for a long moment, feeling his chest rise and fall heavily beneath her hands.

"Angel?" she whispered, unthinkingly reverting to the old name.

"Erik," he said hoarsely, and leaned forward a little timidly, as though to claim her lips again. He stopped, seeming to lack the daring. She met his mouth halfway, and they kissed clumsily, awkwardly.

"Erik," she amended uncomfortably, after the kiss had been broken. He shivered. "Say it again," he murmured.

"Erik," she whispered, "Erik," and this time his mouth fumbled on hers. She felt an overwhelming sense of panic, and an awful, strange need. Raoul had kissed her a little like this once, in a dimly lit stairwell, but despite a lurking passion, there had always been something more controlled about Raoul, perhaps because of the way he had been brought up. Their brief, mostly innocent love affair had been exciting at first, mainly because it was new, because it was unfamiliar.

There had never been this sense of urgency, of desperation, and she had never imagined that those very things could be so shockingly sensuous. Raoul had never groaned out her name like a prayer, or shivered under her lips. There was something utterly delicious about the way He—Erik, she reminded herself—reacted to something so simple as her hand on his cheek, her mouth against his. It was strangely gratifying, and gave her a weird little thrill.

He broke away, his breath coming in gasps. "It cannot," he said hoarsely, "be merely pity…"

She shook her head wordlessly.

"Do you love me," he asked, his fingers just barely brushing against her face, "even a little?" There was a breath of hope trembling in his voice, a kind of quiet plea.

She flinched. "Perhaps," she whispered. "After all, you told me once…" She paused.

"What?" he queried, though she suspected that he knew quite well what he had told her, and merely wanted to hear it from her own lips.

"Fear," she said, "can turn to…" She broke off. The word "love" lodged in her throat, digging in its heels. Christine took his hands in hers and gently removed them from her face. She backed away a little.

"I don't know what to think," she said. "Can I love a murderer?"

"You might try," he said. She felt a little faint, looking into his eyes. They seemed to see her very soul, all her thoughts laid bare for his discernment.

"Love me," he whispered, his hands extended beseechingly.

"If I do," she said, "will I be damned?"

"None of us will know until judgment-day," he said.

There was a long silence.

Wildly my mind beats against you—

She reached out trembling hands, and he wrapped his long fingers around them.

But the soul obeys.