Running Hot

FORTY-SEVEN

Notes of pure, crystalline energy drew her up out of the depths of an unnatural darkness. Madness and death pulsed and flashed in the music. The power of the singing dazzled and riveted Grace’s disoriented senses.

She realized in a rather vague way that she was sprawled on her side on a carpet. Beneath the carpet she could feel an unyielding concrete floor. Panic splashed through her, briefly pushing back the nearly overwhelming energy of the singing.

She opened her eyes and levered herself to a sitting position, one hand braced on the carpet. She was vaguely aware that she was still wrapped in the hotel bathrobe. The first thing she saw was a luminous beam of energy slicing through the night. For a few heartbeats the hot ray of light got tangled up with the impossibly brilliant notes of the music. Her senses could not seem to separate the two.

Martin Crocker came to stand in front of her. He smiled his I-can-give-you-anything-you-want smile.

“You’re dead,” she whispered.

“Am I?” he asked.

“Yes.”

She had intended the word to come out as a defiant shout. Instead, it emerged as a breathy gasp of sound that was drowned beneath the torrent of mad psychic energy that swirled around her.

“You were very useful to me,” Martin said. “But all good things must come to an end. Unfortunately, you’re no longer an asset. You’ve become a liability.”

This was not a dream. She was officially going insane. The music was making her crazy.

She clamped her hands over her ears. As a defense mechanism it was pathetic. The singing dimmed a little but it was still too powerful. It flooded through the atmosphere around her.

“You’re dead,” she repeated, louder this time. Her senses pulsed in response, sending out sharp spikes of energy.

To her amazement, the image of Martin Crocker winked out. Relief shivered through her. Shaking, she took her hands away from her ears and clamped her fingers around the nearest object. It turned out to be the arm of a theater chair.

The scalding music continued to soar and flash, drawing her deeper into a hell fashioned of purest crystal.

She turned her head to follow the beam of light and found herself looking at a stage. A woman in a white gown that appeared to have been splashed with blood stood in the center of the light beam. Her blond hair was loose around her shoulders. She gripped a knife in one hand as she poured the psychic energy of her Siren’s music out into the theater.

Vivien Ryan, La Sirène.

In a fleeting instant of horrible clarity the memory of one of the online film clips that she had viewed while researching coloratura sopranos slammed through Grace’s fevered brain. Vivien was singing the famous Mad Scene from

Lucia di Lammermoor. The blood on the virginal white gown looked all too real.

So did the body sprawled in the shadows of the stage. A man, Grace realized. His face was turned away from her.

She clutched the seat arm, feeling as though she were about to drown. In the opera the scene she was watching takes place

after Lucia murders her unwanted bridegroom. What if she was too late? What if Luther was already dead?

No. She would know if he was dead. In spite of the relentless power of the music, she was certain of that much. The knowledge gave her a curious strength. Her senses pulsed more strongly. It was not Luther who lay so unnervingly still on the stage.

Vivien released another cascade of high, delicately pure, eerily shattering notes. The music was accompanied by dangerously erratic spikes in her aura. Like Lucia, Vivien was driving herself deeper and deeper into insanity with her song, and she was trying to pull her audience of one down with her. It was all there in the music and in the aura. Grace could see it, hear it, fear it; but she was not sure she could resist it.

There was a terrible kind of power in madness, and La Sirène was exulting in it.

Grace pulled herself to her knees but before she could get all the way to her feet, the monster who had tried to rape her in the foster home appeared. He started up the aisle toward her, grinning. She trembled. Please, not again. She could not deal with another ghost. She had to focus on surviving.

“Don’t worry, you’re going to like what I’m going to do to you,” the monster promised.

“You’re dead,” she said. She had made Martin disappear. She would make the monster vanish, too. She managed to summon a sharp pulse of will that translated into a strong flare of psychic energy.

“You’re dead, damn it.”

The monster dissolved, just as the image of Martin had.

Pay attention. There’s something important here, something that could help you fight back.

She was on her feet now but still under the compelling spell of the music. She was moving down the aisle toward the stage, not fleeing to safety. She struggled to resist but only succeeded in slowing her steps. She could not stop the inevitable. She was being summoned to her doom just as surely as the sailors in the myths had been drawn to their deaths.

Onstage, Vivien raised her arms. Her song of madness soared ever higher.

Grace put her hands over her ears again and concentrated on pulling her scattered senses together so that she could jack her own power higher. She pushed energy out against the storm of the music, trying to create a bulwark against the waves. It seemed to her that the force of the singing lessened a little. Encouraged, she threw more energy at it. Her mind cleared. She was able to think more clearly.

There was no way she could stand firm against the great rolling breakers of the Siren’s call, but it might be possible to skim through the psychic pulses that energized the song, like a surfer riding the pipeline.

Even if her theory was correct, she knew she could not neutralize Vivien’s power from this distance. Nor could she turn and run. The compulsion of the music was still too strong. There was only one chance, and that was to get closer to the stage.

Face the music and dance, Grace, dance, as fast as you possibly can.

She watched Vivien’s aura, not her face, focusing on the patterns of the flaring, flashing pulses. Cautiously she sent her own energy into the valleys between the spikes on the Siren’s raging spectrum. It was like firing arrows at a machine gun, but she knew she was making progress when she felt the compulsion ease further.

Vivien stopped singing. The abrupt silence was electrifying.

“Do you really think that little trick will work against my talent?” she asked, amused.

Grace stopped in front of the dark well that was the empty orchestra pit. Opera singers cannot allow themselves to get genuinely emotional when they sing, she reminded herself. Powerful emotions tightened the throat and chest, destroying both breath and sound.

“You know, Viv,” she said, “the clothes are great and the theaters are classy, but when it comes right down to it, you’re just another singer in a band.”

“

Shut up, you stupid woman. I am La Sirène.”

Grace looked at the motionless man lying in the shadows. “Who is he?”

“Newlin Guthrie.”

“You killed your lover?”

“Oh, he’s not dead. Just unconscious.” Vivien smiled. “Why would I want him dead? He’s very useful to me. He’s the one who found you. Imagine my surprise when he told me you were in the audience tonight. I’m so glad you had a chance to hear me sing the Queen. Astonishing, wasn’t I?”

“Give me a break. Your career is on the skids. Everyone knows it. That’s why you’re singing here in Acacia Bay instead of at the Met.”

“That’s a lie,” Vivien shrieked, her aura sparking with fury. “I am La Sirène. No other singer alive can do what I can do with my voice.”

“Come on, we’re talking about opera, remember? You may have been good once upon a time but you’re losing it. Remember how they booed you at La Scala? The claque could hear the weakness in your voice.”

“I silenced an entire section of the audience at La Scala with my voice,” Vivien shouted.

“I’ll bet there are probably a couple dozen sopranos coming up behind you who can take your place. What’s more, a lot of them are ten years younger.”

“Stop it,” Vivien shrieked. “My voice is flawless.”

“Maybe a few years ago but not any longer. I’ve got a theory about that, by the way. I’m something of an expert on the laws of psychic genetics, you know.”

“Shut up.”

“My theory is that every time you used your voice to kill, you made yourself a little crazier. People who go insane lose control. That’s what’s been happening to you these past couple of years, Viv. You’re losing control of your voice.”

“I am not crazy,” Vivien screamed.

“Sure you are. It’s all there in your aura.”

“I’ll show you what I can do with my voice,” Vivien shrieked.

“Be careful. I doubt if screaming is good for the throat.”

Vivien clenched her hands in the skirts of her bloodied gown and erupted into song. The high notes of Lucia’s descent into madness exploded from her once again.

Grace shuddered and clamped her hands more tightly over her ears in an attempt to lessen the impact of the mesmerizing song. It was the musical equivalent of watching a volcano erupt while trying to hide under a piece of cardboard. She had braced her senses for the hellish rain of crystal fire but she could not stop all of it. The music fell on her in a molten torrent of sharp crystals.

She was going to die if she did not destabilize Vivien’s aura.

She shoved hard at all the weak places on the Siren’s spectrum.

Vivien went higher. The notes she sang were still piercingly clear but they began to grow fainter, weaker. Her fury was interfering with her ability to project her astonishing talent. She was literally choking on her frustration and rage. One very high note and then another fractured.

Still singing, Vivien whirled and stalked to the stage steps. It didn’t take a psychic to see the madness and murder in her aura now, Grace thought.

Vivien descended the steps with theatrical deliberation as though she was in the middle of a dramatic production. When she reached the bottom she advanced toward Grace, the dagger held high for a killing blow. The jagged notes of her mad song spilled forth in mere squeaks.

Grace felt the last of the compulsion evaporate. She could move freely now.

She jumped up onto the nearest seat, stepped over the back into the next row and rushed toward the aisle. Running between the closely packed rows proved complicated. Her thigh collided painfully with one of the chair arms.

Vivien was screaming now, her voice hoarse, her power almost gone. She grabbed a fistful of her bloody skirts and raced toward the far end of the front row, dagger poised to strike, clearly intent on intercepting her quarry at the aisle.

Grace scrambled to a halt, climbed up onto another seat and jumped down into the third row. She vaulted into the fourth, trying to put more distance between herself and her pursuer. She gained ground quickly, her bathrobe flying around her.

Vivien was reduced to hoarse screeching.

A blinding light spilled from the lobby entrance. The silhouette of a man appeared.

“Grace,” Luther shouted.

“I’m okay,” Grace shouted back. “Be careful, she’s got a knife but she can’t sing worth a damn anymore.”

Vivien floundered to a halt in the aisle. Her harsh breathing seemed very loud in the sudden silence of the theater. The light from the lobby illuminated her stained gown and disheveled hair. Her aura was a rainbow comprising all the colors of a nightmare.

“I am La Sirène,” she whispered.

She dropped the dagger, turned and fled back down the aisle toward the stage.

Luther started forward, cane in one hand, gun raised in the other. His aura was flaring, an icy-hot spectrum of violent hues.

“No,” Grace said quietly. “It’s not necessary. Let her go.”

For a few seconds she was afraid he wasn’t going to pay any attention to her. Then he lowered the gun and his aura.

Vivien raced up the short flight of stage steps and vanished behind the bloodred curtain.