But there was nothing. Nothing he could do. Nothing he had not already tried.
“Kitala Bell,” he murmured, gazing once again at the paper in his hands. “Forgive me.”
Kit, who was not prepared, who had gone almost a year without signs of death, almost threw down her fiddle. She caught herself in time, though—made the pause in her music nothing but an extra beat, some artful hitch—and hid her nausea with a grimace that she hoped would pass for a smile. She had no choice. The fifteen hundred individuals seated in the posh Queen Elizabeth Theater had shelled out fifty dollars a ticket to see the final leg of her North American tour.
Screaming
Jesus Christ!
and hauling ass off the stage to puke simply would not do. Kit was a professional that way.
So she gritted her teeth, buckled down. She looked away from the dying woman—anywhere but at that one seat directly in front of her—and rimmed the air with a fine high beat, dancing down the devil inside her mind as she plucked and skimmed, bending her soul around the music running fast from her fiddle— faster, faster—until her skin felt like the strings and the world a bow of light, until the music was so much a part of her that each breath became a note, each heartbeat a melody.
She was alone on the stage. No accompaniment necessary. Few musicians in the world could claim the same, and it was part of her draw. Because when Kit played, there was not a soul on earth who could keep up with her. She played to the death, death down to ashes, and nothing less satisfied. She might burst her heart one day for real on her fiddle, but that would be the perfect way to go: giving it all, dying like one long note on a string, cutting air and ears and souls. No regrets. Just music. Always, music.
Now was no different. Kit forgot bones and blood and knives; her thoughts faded into a baser instinct. No one could play with heart and think; no one could hold such music without a little insanity.
The set ended. The audience began roaring before the last trembling note, but she paid no mind to the applause. The knife was still there.
Kit bowed and left the stage at a run. She wanted to vomit, to take an aspirin, to get back to her hotel for a hot shower and some kind of goofy cartoon to take the edge off the ghoulishness in her head; but as she stood in the shadows offstage, heart pounding, head bent, she could feel the thunder of the audience rumbling in her veins, and she could not run. Not yet.
Kit took a deep breath and raced back on stage. She started playing as soon as she left the wings— Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D, but at a breakneck tempo, her bow rocking over the strings until she hit the center of the stage and stopped on her toes, transforming the rondo into something far more earthy, cutting the notes with Irish roots, burning them into a jig. The audience shouted, men and women stamping their feet, clapping hard with the beat.
All except two. The young woman was gone. The old man beside her was missing as well. Their absence caused no relief. It meant only that the woman had gone to die. Die soon or die later, in a year or a lifetime, with terrible violence as the cause. A knife in her eye.
And there isn’t a single thing you can do about it,
Kit thought bitterly.
She finished with a flourish. The audience begged for more. Kit did not listen. She smiled and waved, kissed the air with her thanks, and then with a sweeping twirl of her patchwork emerald silk skirt, ran lightly off the stage.
Her fiddle case lay on a chair just beyond the wings. Her coat was there, too, as well as her purse. Ready for a quick getaway. Kit had no dressing room; she had come to the theater straight from the hotel, and while the stage manager had tried to press upon her one of the Queen Elizabeth’s numerous suites, she had shrugged him off. All Kit needed was her fiddle; bottled water and flower arrangements were unnecessary for her mental health. She was not picky about how or where. All that mattered was that she got to play.
The Queen Elizabeth’s stage manager was an older gentleman named Alec Montreuil, a Quebecois born and raised. He and Kit had known each other for some years, enough that words were almost unnecessary as she hugged him good-bye. His brow crinkled when he looked into her eyes. She shook her head.
“I’ll tell you some other time,” she said.
“Soon,” he replied, his accent heavy. “Your father would be worried, I think, by the expression on your face. False smiles do not work on me, Kitala.”
“And here I thought I was a fine actress.” Kit shook her head. “I’ll look you up before I leave town, Alec.”
“Yes,” he replied solemnly. “You will.
Bonne nuit, ma belle fille.
”
“Good night,” Kit replied, and walked away. She could feel Alec watching her, but did not look back. She tried not to feel like a dog for doing so—it was bad manners at its worst—but she had no choice. She had to run. She had to get out. The knife was still in that woman’s eye—in Kit’s own eye—dangling like a fishhook. Blood was everywhere.
She barely pushed through the stage door in time and hit the poorly lit back alley, gagging. Had to lean against the slick, wet brick wall as her body heaved. Nothing came up—she ate no dinner before performances, ever—but it still hurt, still made her eyes well with tears. She wiped them away with the back of her hand—did the same to her mouth—and took a deep breath. The air was good and sweet. Tasted like medicine in her lungs. She heard low voices and glanced to her left, meeting the startled gazes of some theater employees who stood on the loading dock, smoking. They waved at her, frowning.
Kit waved back but did not wait for a response. She turned and walked away, fast, trying to ignore the faint sound of her name as the men bandied it about behind her. God only knew what they were saying, what they thought. Not that it mattered. There was only so much she could do to protect her image.
Kit’s nausea faded by the time she hit the sidewalk. She took a right on Cambie, avoiding the main press of theatergoers streaming across the street. No one noticed her—or if they did, were polite enough to leave her alone. Away from the stage and spotlight, Kit knew she was just another woman with brown skin and brown eyes; ordinary, normal. The magic lived only in the fiddle, in the theater.
Hotel Georgia was a couple of blocks up the road, a straight line from the theater, but Kit took an alternate route, away from the crowds. It was early enough in the night that she felt safe walking the streets. Not bravado; she had spent the morning scouting out the area, familiarizing herself with the best routes, the most dangerous spots. She knew her way; a cab would not be much faster, and she needed the air. Her stomach was better, but the memory was still poison; she wanted that woman out of her system.
Impossible, maybe. Learning how to forget was one lesson Kit had never mastered. Too stubborn, too much heart to forget those singular prophecies of violent death that sprang upon her like random illnesses. Knowing how people were going to die was a terrible burden.
Let it go,
she told herself, clutching her fiddle case.
Let it go. Everyone dies. Everyone goes on. You can’t change a thing. You can’t.
“Right,” Kit muttered, still miserable.
It was not quite eleven-thirty. Vancouver at night felt both lovely and dangerous, with an urban shine that was modern, sleek, all fine hard edges with towers and skyscrapers full of electronic stars, glittering bright. A deceptive beauty; the city’s underbelly, as Kit knew all too well, was raw with drugs and cold cash and prostitution. No amount of refinement could hide that, though the natural scenery helped. Everything looked better—cleaner—against a backdrop of mountains and ocean.
Just don’t look too close,
Kit thought, reaching up to touch her eye. She caught herself, but not in time; her fingertips traced a circle around her lashes. She shuddered.
Don’t look too close, don’t look too close.
Or else risk seeing things that could never be taken back. Suffering. Death. Lingering like a sore.
Just like the woman in white—the woman dying, the woman already murdered with a knife in her eye. That vision, another cut inside Kit’s heart, another wound, one of many. Whispering, like all the others,
maybe
and
could have,
and that deadly
what if.
Kit turned right on Georgia Street, passing coffee shops and wide, clean storefront windows pimping trendy clothes and purses, bright like the eyes of peacock feathers, for show. Yuppie, not much personality. She heard a shout ahead of her, looked sharply and saw two men jump a vehicle parked at a red light. One held a bucket, the other a rag. Guerrilla car washing, for spare change. The men splashed on some water, slopped the rag around the windshield then screamed at the driver until he inched down the window and tossed them several crumpled bills. The light turned green; the car sped away.
Kit crossed the street before the intersection. The men watched her bypass them and she met their gazes, hard and strong. They did not follow. They had more cars coming; bigger fish.
Close to the hotel, only a block away from tourist-friendly Robson Street, Kit encountered more pedestrians. She tried to keep her eyes on the sidewalk, but could not help herself—she watched the faces, searching. All she saw was normal, easy and happy; no murder, no mayhem, no weapons. Just men and women out for a good night, with the promise of more and better.
Nice. She needed that.
Until, ruin. The end. Just ahead, the door to a Starbucks swung open and a blond woman in a white coat stepped out. The old man was with her, swinging a cane.
Kit stopped walking. Stared. No blood or knife, not anymore, but that did not mean the woman’s fate had changed. Message delivered, message received; that was all that mattered.
The young woman and her companion stood on the street corner, waiting for the light to change. Kit started walking toward them. Slow at first, then fast. The woman and the old man began walking, too. They crossed the street. Kit followed. She did not know what to do—she had no plan, no words. What could she say?
Hello, excuse me, you’re going to be murdered?
Right. She had tried that once before and gotten nothing for her trouble but ridicule; worse, even. Which by itself was not such a terrible thing, but now she had a career to consider, a profession that put her in the public eye. Silence, no matter how much it hurt, had been her policy for years.
And all those what-ifs? What are those worth? Are you going to sell yourself out, let a woman who needs your help pass on by? Even crazy people can play the fiddle. There’s no one who can take your music away.
Kit took a deep breath. Fine, then. She would do it, this one time. It would probably just freak the woman out, offer no protection whatsoever, but at least she could sleep easy knowing she had tried to give a warning, to divert fate.
Her grandmother slipped into mind. Brown skin shining beneath the New Orleans sun. Strong fingers crushing mint. A smoky voice, talking up such things as destiny, the movements of chance and fortune. Playing games with Death.
Ain’t nothing or no one can close that eye once it got its mark on you,
old Jazz Marie had rasped, again and again.
So don’t you waste precious energy tryin’ your hand, Kitty Bella, or else maybe
you
get the mark instead. And that’s something you not strong enough for, not for some time yet.
Kit pushed away caution and caught up with the young blond woman and her elderly companion. Their heads were bowed together; no laughter, just quiet conversation. Peaceful, serene.
She almost stopped. Almost gave up and turned away. No spine, no courage—or maybe, as her grandmother would say, too much good common sense running through her veins. Old Jazz Marie would let this sleeping dog lie.
And Kit, despite her convictions, was about to do just that when the young woman suddenly slowed and looked over her shoulder, directly into Kit’s eyes.
Kit stumbled. So did the woman. Up close the blonde appeared very young, the definition of charming, with a quick intelligence in her pale eyes that focused immediately on Kit’s face.
“I know you,” she said softly. “You’re Kitala Bell.”
“I am,” Kit said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. “And you?”
“Alice.” She hesitated, then held out her hand. Kit had no choice but to take it, and the first contact of their skin made her nauseated all over again. Blood dripped from the woman’s wrist—ghost blood— covering Kit’s hand; she could feel its warmth. Kit looked into the woman’s face and the knife jutted, quivering.
Alice frowned. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Kit murmured, gently disengaging her hand. The vision faded, but the sickness did not. She swallowed hard.
“My dear,” said the old man beside them. “You do not look fine.”
Alice glanced at him. “Uncle John, I think she has something in her eye.”
Kit’s heart lurched painfully. “What did you say?”
“Your eye,” Alice repeated, almost sadly. “Your eye.”
“Oh, my,” said the old man, staring. “Oh my, indeed.”
Kit’s hand snaked to her throat; she touched the leather cord of the gris-gris and the gold of her cross— charms of protection, worn at the insistence of her grandmother—and around her body felt a tickle of something she had not experienced in years, not since old Jazz Marie lived. The sensation was shocking. Invasive. She backed away, watching Alice and the old man. Wondering at her bad luck.