Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel (13 page)

I got to the door of the music room and was just about to put my hand on the doorknob when I abruptly stopped and perked up my ears.

I heard a low voice inside.

Peeking in from a crack in the door, I saw a girl in a school uniform crumpled up on the floor, crying.

In front of her I saw finely shredded pieces of red paper scattered around. I gasped and pushed the door wide open.

She jumped in surprise and looked up at me, her eyes wet with tears, a petite girl with childlike features.

I had seen her somewhere before.

Of course! It was the girl who’d been in here kissing Mr. Mariya before!

“Did you hear about Mr. Mariya quitting, too?” I asked. The girl nodded, and tears started pouring down her face again.

I walked over to stand in front of the girl and comforted her, saying, “Don’t worry,” waiting for her to calm down.

Her name was Sugino, and she was a first-year. She hadn’t been dating Mr. Mariya; rather, it had been unrequited love.

As I listened to her story, my eyes ran casually over the red paper scattered everywhere. Just as I’d suspected, it had been an envelope.

“A red envelope with a ticket to the recital inside came from the name Camellia…”

I remembered Tsutsumi’s story and felt a chill.

“Did you tear this up? How come?”

“
Snff
…’Cos ever since that letter came, Marmar’s been acting weird…He started organizing these files all of a sudden, and even though I offered to help, he told me I couldn’t. He always treated me like a kid and not like an equal, but then out of nowhere, he invited me to a hotel…But even then, he just left without doing anything.”

She said Mr. Mariya had acted strangely even after they went into the hotel. He walked cautiously around the room, as if he was looking for something, and then when Sugino had showered and come back, he was fixated on the bedside table with a grim expression she had never seen before, and he’d been whispering.

“What was he saying?”

“I…I couldn’t really hear him, but…‘I’m too late’ and ‘The angel took her…’”

The angel!

“Then he just walked out of the room.”

The kiss I’d witnessed in the music room had happened the next day. Apparently it had been his apology to Sugino, who had been indignant at being abandoned in the hotel.

Just hearing about how Mr. Mariya had acted, it sounded unnatural. And then he’d said, “angel.”

“Since Marmar always looked really pained when he was looking at the envelope, I started wondering what was inside it…I snuck it out of Marmar’s desk. But there was only an opera ticket in it—no letter.”

After that, she revealed in a quiet voice, she’d been unable to find the right moment to return it, and she’d held on to the envelope all that time.

“Did you see who sent it?”

“Yeah. It said Camellia.”

A shock ran through my skull.

It was identical to the envelope Tsutsumi had gotten. What did this mean?!

Did Mr. Mariya know Camellia?! Was he involved in Mito’s disappearance?!

Anxiety threatened to send me reeling, and my breathing grew labored. But Mr. Mariya had said he wasn’t that close to Mito…

Sugino kept crying, but I managed to calm her down and returned to class right before lunch ended.

I nearly collided with Kotobuki at the door.

We were both surprised and backed up.

“…S-sorry!”

“N-no problem.”

Kotobuki bit down on her lip and looked at me meekly. It looked like there was something she wanted to say.

I looked back at her as I struggled over whether or not I should tell her that I’d gotten a call from Mito or about Mr. Mariya.

At that moment, a shrill ring emanated from Kotobuki’s skirt.

Kotobuki went completely white and pulled her phone out of her pocket to look at it, spinning so her back was toward me and then rushing off. Who in the world could be calling her? What was it about?

I was bursting with a desire to run after her and ask. But the teacher was coming, so I went back to my seat.

Kotobuki was staring at her cell phone, hidden under her desk, with a tense expression.

When classes were over, Mori and the others surrounded Kotobuki, and they left together. They were going to a crepe shop apparently. Kotobuki’s friends were probably worried about her because she was so down.

Akutagawa went to his team practice, and I left the room feeling antsy.

I could feel the normalcy that surrounded us fracturing and threatening to break apart so intensely that it pressed down on my chest, and I had no idea how to react to it.

Why had Mr. Mariya invited Sugino to a hotel? Why had he acted the way he did?

I had no leads left besides Omi. He apparently hated Mr. Mariya, and he’d warned me not to get close to him. Maybe he would know about this teacher that Kotobuki and I didn’t recognize. And about the angel, and Mito…

I was afraid to talk to him even now and didn’t know if he would give me a complete answer even if I did ask, but there was nothing I could do but throw myself into it. I would just go to the library, and if he wasn’t there, I would ask one of the staff where his homeroom was…

Just then, in the hall that led to the library, I saw a boy wearing glasses standing at the window, and I quailed.

Omi—

The instant I felt his frigid gaze turn on me, I felt as if claws were digging into my heart and I flinched.

Omi muttered in a low, threatening voice, “Stop lurking. You’re going to get hurt.
And not just you. Nanase Kotobuki will, too.
”

As soon as I heard that, heat flared at my temples.

“What are you going to do to Kotobuki?! You’re not sending her any weird messages, are you?”

He gave me a thin smile.

“And if I were?”

Something burst inside my head, and I grabbed hold of him.

It was an act I never would have imagined myself capable of, but it wasn’t simply because I remembered how pale Kotobuki’s face had been as she looked at the message; I was probably also driving back my terror, which was a trembling I could feel in my core.

I gripped his collar in both hands and shook him, shouting, “What did you do to Kotobuki?! What do you know?!” Omi clucked his tongue, and the confrontation turned into a minor scuffle.

Just then a silver chain spilled out from beneath his collar.

At the end of it, I saw a thin silver ring, and a shudder ran up my spine.

“She’s already taken her ring off.”

The ring glinting on his chest was an accessory anyone could buy in a shop. It wasn’t so strange for a high school boy to wear jewelry nowadays.

But not something like that…

Omi grabbed the ring that had fallen out in one hand and fixed his glinting eyes on me in a glare.

“Stop howling. There’s nothing you can do anyway. You’re just like that idiot Raoul.”

Then as I stood rooted and gaping, he said in a cold voice filled with hatred, “
Aren’t you, Miu?
”

A shock pierced my heart, and I felt as if the familiar sights around me were warping crazily in that moment.

Confusion and terror assaulted me like black waves, as if I had been shut up in a different dimension that someone else controlled.

How did he know about Miu?!

And how did he know that I was Miu Inoue?!

There was no way he could have. But he’d definitely said it just now!

That accursed name that I’d kept hidden, the name of Miu Inoue—!

He’d said it to me!

The boy who stood before me seemed an unsettling, enigmatic creature, and a chill coursed through my body. My legs were trembling.

In my confusion and fear, he loosed his final blow on me with a cold stare.

“You’ve never held anything heavier than a pen, have you,
Miu
?”

I took a staggering step back, then turned my back on him and started running.

“Stop lurking. You’re going to get hurt.”

“And not just you. Nanase Kotobuki will, too.”

“Aren’t you, Miu?”

His words—his voice—echoed in my mind.

“Miu, Miu, Miu, Miu, Miu—”

Quick, quick—I had to get somewhere his voice wouldn’t reach me.

I’d been bitten by an angel with his fangs bared!

Even when I got home and closed the door to my room, I couldn’t get my shock under control.

My mind was in turmoil, and I couldn’t get it organized. Why had Omi said that to me? I’d never even told my friends in middle school that I was Miu Inoue. I was sure that the only people who knew Miu Inoue’s true identity were my family, my publisher, and Miu.

Even now it seemed that I could hear his voice. I put my headphones on in a daze, started some music, and turned up the volume. I lay in bed like that, cradling my head in my arms and closing my eyes.

What
was
he? Did that ring belong to Mito?

Was Mito with him? What about Mr. Mariya—Kotobuki—?

I desperately thought about other things, trying to forget the name Miu; about what had happened; about the
Phantom of the Opera,
which I’d been reading at night—but my thoughts tumbled back to the same place again and again and kept replaying the same scene.

Raoul and the Persian were cruelly cornered by the Phantom, who had cast off his angel’s mask.

The Phantom flaunted his power for Christine and laid bare his crazed obsession with her, forcing her to love him.

“I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn around in the streets. You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight!”

“You are crying! You are afraid of me!”

“I am not really wicked! Love me and you shall see!”

“If you loved me I should be as gentle as a lamb!”

“You don’t love me! You don’t love me! You don’t love me!”

Knowing that Christine’s heart didn’t belong to him, the Phantom’s anger turned on Raoul, his rival for her love. Christine tries to protect Raoul. But inside the vast subterranean labyrinth the Phantom constructed, he has Raoul at his mercy and hunts him down. The Phantom was so terribly powerful and overwhelming that fighting back was futile.

“There’s nothing you can do anyway. You’re just like that idiot Raoul.”

The cold voice filled with contempt crept into my mind, accompanied by the giggling of a young girl.

“I will remove you from
his
power, Christine, I swear it! And you shall not think of him anymore.”

He could never have toppled the Phantom with only integrity and passion.

And besides, did Christine want to be saved? If Christine had actually chosen to reign in that subterranean kingdom with the Phantom, then Raoul was beyond help.

I’d become Raoul without noticing it.

A chuckling voice pursued me as I ran around in the darkness underground.

“Don’t come for me. Go away! Don’t make me listen to that voice!”

Ahead, a faint light appeared. I had to get to it!

But when I reached my destination, frenzied, the Phantom stood there, his body obscured in a long black cloak, and his face covered with a white mask.

All of a sudden, the laughter stopped.

Within the frigid silence that enfolded the darkness, in the face of my terror, the Phantom slowly removed his mask.

Behind it appeared a girl I knew very well.

Miu!

A screaming cacophony rolled through the room, and the shadows fractured and fell away.

“So you were the Phantom!”
I shouted in a voice that seemed ripped from my body.

Miu pointed at me, and her cold eyes declared:

“No, the Phantom was you, Konoha.”