Then she tucked her violin against her neck and lifted her bow. Expectant silence swept the arena. She began to play.
The first strains raced after each other like hawks lunging through the air, and all Morgan’s ennui fell away. His hatred for Isabeau, the wounds, and his untenable situation were forgotten, all his emotional distance shredded.
He didn’t welcome it. Part of him went into shock. That part of him hated it, hated her for doing it to him.
He still felt passion, but long ago his passion had turned dark and tinged with crimson. It had died down to a single thread, a burning desire to destroy those who had laid waste to his homeland and had enslaved him. That had become his mission in life.
This. This buoyant crescendo of sound.
It had no place in his life. He had other things on his agenda. Important things, blood-drenched things he had longed to do for centuries.
He had no room for this music. No time for it.
Yet he couldn’t shake the hold it had on him.
She was everything the quotes promised, everything and more. Transcendent. Genre-bending. Her music ran through him with electric energy, more joyous than anything he could remember and more painful than silver. No wonder the Djinn flocked to listen to her. He didn’t think there had been a musician like her in generations.
He didn’t sit. None of them did. For the duration of the entire concert, his attention stayed riveted on her enlarged image, and when it was finished, he felt emptied, wrung out.
He didn’t try to make contact with any of the likely people he had marked earlier. Instead, he made his way to his hotel, and as soon as he was back in his room, he called the ticketing agency to book another of her concerts. And another.
While he called, he ran a Google search on Sidonie Martel on his phone. Of French Canadian and Vietnamese descent, she was thirty years old and a graduate of Juilliard. Five of her albums had gone platinum, and she had won three Grammys.
He stared at the headshot posted on her website, at the high cheekbones, the spark of intelligence in her long, elegant eyes, and that full, sensual mouth. The impact of her personality leaped off the screen at him. Her thick black hair fell in a straight waterfall past slender, shapely shoulders.
When he tried to buy a ticket for a fourth concert, the ticket agent told him, “Sorry, that’s the last concert she’s doing in Glasgow. I’m afraid her next one will be in London.”
“Is it sold out yet?”
“Not quite, but close. Most of her European tour is sold out.”
Tapping his fingers on the table, he surrendered to this new, unwelcome obsession.
“I’ll buy a ticket for every concert of hers that’s still available.”
Chapter Two
Sidonie had a stalker. Another one. She could feel it in her bones.
As she went for her early morning run through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens in London, her security detail kept pace beside her. They were two big strapping males, extremely competent magic users, and ex-Navy SEALs. Nothing at all conspicuous about that.
Sid’s mother had immigrated to Nova Scotia from Vietnam as a young adult. If her mom had still been alive, she would have been torn between pride and disapproval at the direction Sid’s life had taken.
She would have been very pleased Sid’s career had advanced far enough that she needed bodyguards, although she would have wished that Sid maintain a more discreet appearance. She also wouldn’t have approved of Sid’s departure from strict classical music, but she would have been delighted that so many other people enjoyed it.
In any case, conspicuous or not, the security detail was a necessary evil whenever Sid went on tour. She was not the most famous musician in the world, not by any means, but she did attract her fair share of weirdos.
“I don’t like the fog,” Vincent said on her right as he scanned the surrounding area.
He had to talk out loud, because Sid couldn’t telepathize. She was a “deadhead,” the slang term for a human who didn’t have any spark of magic.
While she didn’t have any proof of a stalker, there was nothing extraordinary about her sense that someone was watching her. It was a feeling in her bones, the prickle at the nape of her neck when she was sure someone was watching, even when she was alone or when there was supposedly no one in sight. Just good old human intuition.
“Oh yeah?” she said as she glanced around too. They had been running for a while, so her voice came out breathy and short. “I kinda dig it. It’s a proper London fog. Gives everything a spooky, otherworldly feeling.”
“It also obscures line of sight,” he said dryly.
She frowned. The last thing she ever did was cause problems for her security. They cost a fortune, and they knew how to do their jobs.
Vincent had been head of her detail for the last five tours, and he had caught both the other stalkers. The first one was still serving jail time. Vincent had scared the second one badly enough he had gone back to his home in Texas and, last they had checked, hadn’t left again.
They approached the Albert Memorial, Queen Victoria’s loving tribute to her husband. The top of the tall spire looked spindly and somewhat insubstantial in the gray, wet morning. As Sid glanced up at it, she asked, “You want to head back to the hotel?”
“No,” he said after a moment. “We’re good for now. But if it gets any thicker, I think we should probably turn back.”
“Sure thing.” She bit back irritation to keep her reply sounding easy and reasonable.
It was all an act for their benefit. Her OCD tendencies kicked in when she was on tour. Really bad OCD. The strain of the schedule and constantly performing onstage did things to her head, and the result wasn’t exactly pretty.
She had to get her three-mile jog in. She needed to eat the same thing for breakfast every day. Her shoes were always lined up the same way in every closet in every hotel, her clothing organized by color and type, and she had a separate piece of luggage for the pillow she brought from home. She couldn’t go to sleep unless her violin was in the same room with her, and she needed to rehearse three times in every venue before she performed. Anything less than three times was unacceptable.
She made a face at the statue of Prince Albert as they passed him. It was no wonder she was single. She was just as weird as any weirdo she had ever attracted.
Abruptly, her perspective shifted as what Vincent had said sank in. Now, instead of enjoying the cool, thick fog that wreathed the park, she saw how it obscured the nearby bushes and how the path they were currently on seemed to disappear up ahead into a formless, filmy white.
She slowed to a stop, and Vincent and Tony slowed along with her. The two men didn’t chitchat when they were out, which was one of the things she appreciated about them. While they were friendly enough, and she liked and respected them, they weren’t friends.
They were doing a job they took very seriously, and they did it well. Usually their professional demeanor allowed her to disappear into her own head. Now she glanced from the men’s casual, alert stances to their foggy surroundings and frowned again.
After a moment, Vincent angled his body half toward her while he continued to survey the surrounding area. He asked in an easy tone, “Anything wrong?”
She scrubbed at her face with both hands. This blasted tour was getting to her. Why had she listened to her manager, Rikki, and booked so many concerts? It would be months before she got home to New York.
She loved living in New York. It was one of the most diverse places in the world, and she felt she could relax and disappear into anonymity in the sprawling city.
When she was on tour, she lost that relaxation and sense of belonging. She wasn’t good with people. Growing up hapa—a slang term for someone who was part Asian, part Caucasian—had often left her feeling like she didn’t fully belong in either culture.
Added to that, she had spent most of her childhood practicing and studying music, not playing with other kids, and neither her perfectionist mother nor her academic father had considered social interactions relevant or necessary.
As a result, she had developed a reserved personality. It was hard for her to break free from that early conditioning, and often she needed to strategize on how to relate to people.
Constantly having to think things through like that was exhausting. She could never just relax and play cards with the rest of the band and the ground crew. When she was on tour, the only time she really enjoyed was when she immersed herself in her music.