The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (6 page)

“Yeah, well, I don’t think there’s
enough money in the world that would make me put up with that,” said Layne with
a shake of her head and a chuckle.
 
Then
her eyes widened and her face took on a look of mock horror as she
groaned.
 
“Oh, God—I’m your
bodyguard.
 
This means that when you do
lessons…”

I grinned smugly and chuckled as
Layne stepped forward, looping my arm around her neck again as the elevator
doors
dinged
and opened up to the ground level.
 
God, she was so hot—not in the metaphorical
sense (though yes, she absolutely was), but more in the body temperature sense
of the word.
 
Like, she was almost
feverish to the touch.
 

“I’m not paid enough for this if
you have to teach kids while I’m around,” she chuckled, and I gazed at her
sidelong, listening to the deep smoothness of her laugh.

“I’ll get you some earplugs before
I take on another kid for lessons,” I promised her.
 

“You’d be surprised how good my
hearing is, earplugs or no,” she muttered mildly.
 

We walked across the pavement to
the sidewalk outside.
 
Boston in
June—It’s one of the most beautiful times of the year to come visit our fair
city.
 
There were hotdog and taco
vendors on the street corners with the scent from both wafting towards us and
making my stomach rumble, women and men in their business suits and kids
staring down at their cell phones at every corner and on every bit of the
sidewalk as they moved through their lives.
 
College kids sat along the entrance to the art museum as we passed it,
writing in their notebooks, or—most often—typing into their electronic tablets.

We walked about two blocks, and by
the end of the second block, even though Layne was fully supporting me and all
but helping me put one foot in front of the other, I was really feeling
it.
 

Finally, thankfully, Verity’s
Violin Shop came into view.

It’s in one of the older buildings
in Boston, made up of pretty brick and Victorian embellishments, added well
after it was built.
 
The sign out front
has been hanging above the old metal front door for over fifty years, though it’s
been re-painted many times.
 
The sign still
looked vintage and beautiful though, with its looping, scrolling words, “Violin
Shop,” a hand-painted violin nestled into the words on the sign, as if the
letters had to grow around the painted instrument.

The front window had several
violins on display—several regular sized ones, propped up against their cases
and then some extra small fiddles for the really little kids.
 
The familiar, soothing chime of the front
door bells rung when Layne pushed the door open and held it for me to enter.

The inside of a violin shop has one
of the best smells on earth:
 
well-oiled
wood and beeswax.
 
I inhaled deeply, and
a warm smile came over my face as I spotted Verity behind the front counter.

She was in the middle of stringing
a red child-sized violin, but stopped the moment her eyes flicked up to meet
us, and she saw who it was.
 
Verity is a
pretty impressive lady, with her shockingly (for the age she is—she’s only in
her mid-forties) white hair drawn back into a smooth ponytail, and her bright
blue eyes assessing every situation smartly behind the most retro-looking cat
glasses you could ever see.
 
She was
dressed in her usual chic black turtleneck and immaculate pencil skirt, black
tights and black flats, and as she came from around the counter to greet me
with a quick hug, her normally smooth and serene features contorted into a
grimace as she stared aghast down at the crutches.

“Oh, honey, what happened?” she
asked.
 
Verity’s eyes flicked to Layne,
but she, thankfully, didn’t comment on the fact that an extremely attractive,
never-before-seen woman was gripping me around the waist and practically
holding me up.

“Oh, you know, just a little
accident,” I smiled wanly at her, but returned the hug, looping an arm around
her shoulder awkwardly.
 
“Sadly, I come
with grave news:
 
my violin met with an
untimely end,” I told her with a grimace.

Verity stared at me in shock for a
long moment, her bright blue eyes wide, then she smoothed down her features
again, and she became all business.
 
“Then it’s a
very
good thing I have something for you,” she said,
tapping her finger against her nose as she grinned and rushed behind the
counter, into her back room.

Beethoven’s pastoral symphony—his
sixth—was being piped through the speakers overhead as Layne helped me to the
front counter so that I could lean on it and “stand” without her help.
 
Then, curious, she began to roam through the
shop, pausing to look at the back wall display, an entire wall covered in
different violins and bows on pegs, ranging from the standard student model
that was only around a hundred bucks, to some of the better concert-ready
violins, in the fifteen hundred dollar range…and some higher than that.

I watched Layne, doing my best to
be surreptitious about it.
 
She was
genuinely curious as she crossed her arms and rocked back on her heels,
whistling in a low tone as she stared up at a particularly pretty violin.
 
It was plain, but burnished so brightly, it
seemed to glow.
 
I happened to know that
that one was two-hundred years old, refurbished because it’d been in such bad
condition when Verity had gotten hold of it.
 
I’d almost bought that particular violin off Verity a bunch of times,
actually, because I’m a sucker for a violin with a past, but
particularly
a
sucker for a violin with a past and a pretty juicy story.

“You know, that one has a story,” I
commented to her then, leaning heavily on the counter with my elbows as I tried
to ignore the pounding in my thigh’s stitches.
 
Normally, I wouldn’t offer to talk up a violin to any random
person.
 
I mean, it’s kind of nerdy to
be so obsessed with musical instruments, I fully admit it.
 
But the way she was looking at that
violin—it seemed that she was at least a little bit interested.

“Really?” Layne asked, turning back
to me.
 
There was a soft smile turning
up the corners of her mouth that stole my breath away just then, and it took me
a full moment to realize that she wanted me to go on.
 
I blinked, then cleared my throat, shifting my weight a little as
I rested my elbows a little firmer on the counter taking all the weight off my
leg as I placed my chin in my right hand and purposefully gazed past her.
 
I regarded the violin with a nod.

“That fiddle was made by a
traveling music man about two hundred years ago, up in Maine,” I told her,
jerking my chin in the violin’s direction.
 
“His name was Alfred McNalis, and he was self-taught in the art of
instrument making, but he ended up making quite a few very impressive
violins.
 
He just had a gift for it—and
this was violin, in particular, was one of his finest pieces.
 
But legend has it that he bargained that
violin to the devil to save his life.
 
There was a fire, and the house he was staying in burned down,
everything completely destroyed, including everyone else who’d been staying in
the house…but old Alfred and his fiddle were perfectly unscathed, not a
horsehair missing from his bow, not a button out of place on his jacket, and he
kept raving while he held up the violin, ‘the fire never even touched us.’
 
Later on, the fiddle was badly burned in
another fire, but that was long after its creator had died.
 
Alfred was over the age of a hundred when
death finally caught up with him, a feat practically unheard of in those
days.
 
And everyone says it’s because he
sold that fiddle to the devil.”

“That’s a pretty impressive story,”
said Layne with a wink.
 
“Now how much
of that is actually true?” she asked, but she was grinning lazily, indulgently,
as she strode over to me and leaned her left hip against the counter, arms
still crossed, and looking down at me with bright, flashing eyes.

“I…I don’t know,” I said, gulping
at her nearness.
 
This close, the heat
radiating off of her was something I could actually feel, even though we stood
about two feet apart.
 
“There are a lot
of legends surrounding music and musical instruments,” I said with a shrug
after clearing my throat.
 
“Probably not
much of it is
actually
true,” I said, all in a rush.
 
“But it makes for a good story, doesn’t it?”

“You know, come to think of it…why
are there so many stories about devils and violins?” asked Layne, her face
taking on a quizzical expression now as her eyebrows furrowed.
 
“I mean…that song, the Devil went down to
Georgia.
 
That violin guy who sold his
soul to the devil so that he could play perfectly.
 
Stuff like that.”

“Because,” I said, pushing off from
the counter, and pressing my palms flat against the wooden countertop.
 
I didn’t even think about it as I said:
 
“the violin makes such a beautiful sound
that people couldn’t explain it any other way than the fact that it must be
supernatural.
 
How else could such
beautiful music come from something that is, essentially, hollow wood and
wire?”

Layne’s eyes narrowed as she
watched me for a long moment.
 
Her jaw
was clenched, and she looked like she wanted to say something very important,
pain flickering behind her eyes, but Verity was pushing back through the door
again, a beat-up violin case in hand.

“Sorry it took me awhile to get
to—I was storing it in my safe in my back office,” said Verity in a hushed tone
as she set the case down gently on the counter.
 
She was practically glowing as she leaned forward and
murmured:
 
“I think you’re going to
love
it, Elizabeth.”

Verity always kept her eye out for
violins for me.
 
She knew my style, knew
what I needed in an instrument, and had a lot of connections in the stringed
instrument world.
 
All I knew about this
violin was that it was about a hundred years old, and masterfully crafted—she
hadn’t told me anymore than that.
 
She
knew that I needed it to play in the orchestra, so I knew the instrument would
be of superb quality.

But I couldn’t have imagined it
would be quite like this.

There are a lot of violinmakers who
have copied one of the most talented violinmakers who ever lived:
 
Stradivarius.
 
You can tell in the slope of the body of the instrument, in the
specific curlicues…it was Stradivarius-inspired.
 
I love a good Stradivarius-inspired violin, don’t get me wrong—he
was a master, and masters
should
be copied.
 
But I also love a violinmaker who isn’t afraid to be himself.

The guy who made this violin wasn’t
afraid in the slightest.

The instrument itself was of simple
construction—there was nothing fancy or ornamental about the body of the
violin.
 
But as I picked it up—freshly
tuned by Verity—out of the case, I ran my fingers over the strings, and
somewhere in the hollow cavity of the violin, a delightful
thrum
answered
the sound of my skin connecting to the strings.

I ran my thumb over the strings
again, purposefully plucking at them.
 
The cheerful sound of the notes sang vibrantly into the room as Verity
picked up the bow from the case and rosined it for me, running the rosin up and
down the horsehairs of the bow with the familiar
swish
sound, bits of
dry beeswax flaking off into the air.
 
She handed me the bow with the same sort of smile that a cat makes after
it’s devoured the canary.

I held the violin up and placed my
chin against it, the movement so familiar but also so unfamiliar with this new
instrument as I learned its new shape, bending my body in miniscule ways to
connect better with it.
 
I held up the
bow and placed it gently against the strings.

I played.

I closed my eyes.
 
I listened as the bow
swished
effortlessly
across the strings, as a pure and radiant melody came from the violin, spinning
into the air around us like magic.
 
It
was so clean, those notes, so pure, that a surge of emotion moved through me,
my throat constricted, and almost instantly, tears sprung up in my eyes.
 

I played across the strings, having
chosen something simple to test the violin out with—the piece of music that was
one of the first ones I ever learned that I really enjoyed playing on the
violin, the
Allegro
movement from Bach’s third Brandenburg
Concerto.
 
It’s such a perfect baroque
piece, almost textbook with all of its dainty, complicated melodies, the kind
that you hear and immediately think “period drama,” but it has a very innocuous
thrum of power beneath it—don’t be fooled by the piece.
 
It sounds like something made for kings and
queens and court, but underneath the top melody, there’s this great passion
moving like swift-flowing water far below a perfectly calm surface…