Stones Unturned (39 page)

No, it remained. Even without that memory, there were so many others. Love abided. Yet she stared now at her boy, her Danny, and wondered if all that remained of him was a monster.

Time started to flow fully again, and she gasped as the razor-sharp glass continued to bite into the cord of flesh. Instinctively she reached out, taking hold of Danny's hand, preventing the shard from cutting any further. Danny turned his face to her, and for the briefest of moments she did not recognize him. The hatred and fear in his eyes made her fear for her own life, and for her own soul.

His eyes flashed, and he bared his fangs at her, but she held his gaze, and the demon's stare softened. Julia shook as she reached out and pulled him close, though with love or fear she did not know.
Maybe both
, she thought, as she took him into her arms.

Kneeling in the broken remains of their home, the two of them began to rock. Julia closed her eyes, rubbing her hand along his back lovingly, as she had done so often when he was an infant and would wake up crying in the night. It had been the only thing that would comfort him so that he could go back to sleep. Julia would rock with him in the rocking chair, softly singing to him.

Julia wanted to sing to her son now, as they rocked together.

But she couldn't remember the words.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Night in Florence was a celebration of light and music. Clay had always considered it one of the most beautiful cities in the Western world. The architecture and city design made it a fairy tale place, where art and beauty were venerated above all else. True or not — and history proved it both true
and
not — whatever blood and intrique existed in the city's past, its beauty endured.

Clay and the ghost of Dr. Graves had visited the Pitti Palace earlier in the day and wandered the Boboli Gardens, where the symphony had been playing on that night in 1943 when Graves had been murdered. A lovely spot, the gardens held nothing else of interest. Neither of them sensed any resonance of the violence that had occurred there so long ago, and when Graves slipped into the spirit world he returned to report finding the place nearly barren of spectral activity.

They ought to have been despondent. No discussion had occurred as to what they expected to find in Florence, but both of them had arrived in this city with growing anticipation. Ever since they had begun looking into the murder of Dr. Graves, the mystery had broadened and deepened. Zarin had been savagely killed by his own pet. The FBI forensics team had revealed the connection between Graves's murder and the Whisper, and the link to the murder of Roger Alton Bennett.

After hours spent meandering about the Boboli Gardens in fruitless search of some bit of its haunted past, some echo or clue, they should have been at the least disappointed. Conversation ought to have ensued as to what their next step would be, though they were both well aware that there was no logical next step from here. If the visit to Florence turned up nothing they would have to start from scratch and come up with entirely new angles and theories regarding Graves's murder.

Yet neither Clay nor Dr. Graves mentioned the possibility of departure. There lingered in Clay a dreadful certainty that they had come to the right place. It might have been just a feeling in his own heart, but there also seemed a strange frisson in the air that had affected him the very moment they had stepped off of the plane in Florence. His skin prickled, and the small hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

After their visit to the Boboli Gardens he had stopped in an outdoor café for a cappuccino. A sudden shudder went through him. Clay glanced around, attempting to make the reaction appear to be natural.

The ghost of Dr. Graves had been seated in the chair beside him, and in that moment Clay was sure he saw an odd ripple pass through the ethereal substance of the specter.

"What is it?" the ghost asked.

"Do you feel it?"

Graves stared at him for a long moment before nodding. "
Focus
. Like someone is watching us."

Clay tapped the edge of the table. Whichever way he turned he felt the spiderlike skittering of — Graves had called it focus — up his spine. "Someone," he agreed. "Or something."

The waiter brought Clay's bill. Only after he had set it down and walked away did Clay notice that there was a folded promotional flyer beneath it. The slick, full-color piece was a tourist-targeted plug for the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, where the city's great symphony was in residence.

"Graves," Clay said, and unfolded the flyer. He almost expected to find something written inside, but there was nothing.

The ghost rose from the chair, passing right through the table as he drifted up behind Clay to read over his shoulder.

"The symphony performs tonight," Graves said.

Clay had already noticed. He pushed back his chair with a scrape of metal on stone and started after the waiter. The man was standing by another table taking an order from two elderly women whose mouths were twisted into twin permanent sour expressions.

"
Scusi, signore
," he said, but his grip on the waiter's arm was anything but polite.

The man flashed him a confused, angry, and somehow dismissive look. "I will come to you in a moment —"

Clay flashed the Teatro del Maggio flyer in front of his eyes. "This. Why did you give me this?"

He knew the answer before the waiter could even open his mouth. The man's eyes said it all. He had never seen the flyer before. And yet Clay had seen him set the bill down in its small leather folder himself, and the flyer had been inside.

"I did not. You are mistaken."

Clay wished he could argue, but there was no lie in the waiter's expression or his tone. Someone had either slipped the flyer in with the bill without his knowing it, or he had been compelled to do so himself by some outside force and now had no memory of it. In a world of dark magic, this latter would have been simple enough.

"I'm sorry. Excuse me," Clay said.

He returned to the table and paid the bill, tipping generously. The ghost of Dr. Graves stood behind him, watching closely but saying nothing. Only when Clay strode away from the café and turned into a narrow, cobblestoned street that would lead to his hotel did Graves speak up.

"Someone is playing games with us."

"No doubt."

"I take it we now have plans for this evening?"

"Yeah," Clay replied. "The symphony."

The theater resounded with rapturous applause. In the glow of the stage lights, the faces in the audience beamed, enchanted. From his seat in the box nearest to stage right, Clay could see both the orchestra and those held in their sway. The audience seemed composed both of well dressed Firenze natives in suits and gowns and tourists clad in whatever remained clean and neat from their luggage.

Golden horns gleamed in the bright lights on the stage. Violin bows glided across strings, eliciting sweet and somber notes in turn. The conductor stood before the symphony orchestra with his back to the audience, baton dancing in his grasp, guiding his musicians into Debussy's
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
, which had been one of Clay's favorite pieces since he had first seen it performed in 1920. The butchery done to his memory in the twentieth century made it difficult for him to recall the circumstances, but the music was a memory unto itself.

In the cacophony of applause that followed the tune, Clay clapped as loudly as anyone. As he did, he surveyed the audience again and leaned slightly to his right, to the space at the edge of the box where the ghost of Dr. Graves hovered beside him, the merest suggestion of a silhouette. The ghost's insubstantial legs passed right through the floor of the box as though he'd been severed below the torso.

"What are we looking for?" Clay muttered low, the words inaudible to anyone else, thanks to the thunderous applause.

As the clapping died down, the symphony launched into a Mozart concerto. Graves rose several inches and gusted forward so that he hung out over the audience. Just when Clay had begun to doubt that the ghost had heard him, Graves floated back toward him.

"I don't know. For the moment, I suppose we simply enjoy the music. But be on guard."

As if Clay had to be told to be wary. More than ever, his guard was up. He had rarely felt so on edge. Though he attempted to portray a sense of easy calm and he applauded in all of the right places, he could no sooner relax into the music than he could have in a viper's den. An almost tangible sense of trouble…of malice…pervaded the theater, overriding the elegance of the orchestra and the enthusiasm of the crowd.

So they waited.

Long minutes passed. Clay remained as still as possible despite the electric tension running through him. Wave of applause followed wave of applause, and soon nearly a full hour had passed. The symphony was not the best he had ever heard, but there were moments when their performance reached the sublime.

Halfway through Ravel's
Alborada del Gracioso
, the orchestra simply halted.

The pause took the audience by surprise, and for several awkward moments they stared and coughed and fidgeted. At last someone began to applaud, slowly at first, and was joined by an uncertain ripple of audience accord.

"What is this?" Clay whispered.

The ghost of Dr. Graves did not turn. Yet even from behind him, gazing at the orchestra through his transparent, gauzy form, Clay could hear his words.

"Perhaps it's what we've been waiting for."

As if on cue, the conductor raised his baton and the orchestra started again, launching into a piece of music unfamiliar to Clay. The melody was both sweet and sorrowful, but it was nearly ruined by the performance of the musicians. There was a jerky, stunted quality to their playing that still allowed the tune to come through but added enough discord that it was nearly wretched.

The ghost of Dr. Graves seemed to billow and flew backward as though blown by some unseen wind. Clay shifted in his seat and started to stand, brow furrowed in concern. No one in the box bothered to admonish him, so startled were they by the unpleasant turn the music had taken.

"Graves —" he whispered.

Eyes a churning gray abyss, the ghost turned to stare at him. "This is it, Joe. They were playing this song that night, when I was shot. When I died."

The lights in the theater dimmed. The musicians moved like marionettes. The cello player lost his grip on his bow and did not seem to notice, his elbow still jerking back and forth as though drawing music from his instrument.

In the midst of this, only the conductor continued to move smoothly. The music became more and more jarring, a savaged interpretation of a piece of beautiful music, the ghost sonata that Graves had so often heard when he traveled into the spirit world. What had he said, that he thought it was the spirit of his wife, letting him know that she was waiting for him.

There was nothing so romantic about this.

The conductor turned, very purposefully, and looked up at the box where Clay sat. For a moment, Clay felt certain the man's strange, silver eyes were staring straight at him. He held his breath, staring back, knowing there was little he could do in such a public place.

Then he realized the conductor's gaze was not locked on him, but on the space next to him. The man with his dancing baton and his wild gray hair was not looking at Clay, but at the spectral form of Dr. Graves hovering in the air beside him. No one else in the theater could see the ghost, but the conductor stared right at him.

And rather than reacting with fright, the conductor smiled.

"Joe," Graves began.

Clay nodded, but he could not tear his gaze away from the spectacle unfolding on the stage. Members of the audience began to boo, even as others tried to shush them.

The conductor raised his baton and pointed it at a violinist, a young, slender, olive-skinned woman. As though on an invisible string, the woman rose from her seat, playing as she walked like some country fiddler. She went to the stairs and descended toward the audience. A rotund man with wisps of white hair sat in the front row, dressed like nobility but behaving like rabble. He shouted at the woman and at the conductor.

As the violinist approached the round man, Clay saw it at last. In the dim light it had not been immediately obvious. His eyes saw the world on several spectrums, and he had not as yet been focused enough to notice the tendril of soul energy that ran back up onto the stage, a ribbon of silver mist that connected her to the conductor, even as he directed her movements.

"What the hell is this?" Clay muttered.

For it was not merely the violist who was affected. Soul tethers linked the conductor to the entire orchestra the same way he had always seen murderers linked to their victims. Yet the members of the orchestra were not dead, only under the influence of the conductor.

The lithe, beautiful violinist stopped playing. She smiled down at the confused, disapproving fat man in the front row, and then she stabbed him through the left eye with her violin bow.

"Move!" the ghost shouted at Clay.

The shapeshifter was already in motion.

People began to scream, some to get up from their seats and run toward the violinist, others to flee for the exits. Clay ignored them all. His entire focus was on the violence unfolding in the front row.

The violinist raised her instrument and brought it down with both hands, shattering it and the man's skull in a single blow.

"No!" Clay screamed as he leaped over the railing of the box. He dropped from the mezzanine down to the aisle below, perhaps forty feet from the violinist and the dying man.

A new soul tether shimmered into existence, connected the murdered man to his murderer . . . yet it did not attach the old man to the girl responsible for the violin bow jutting from his raw, red wound of an eye socket. Instead, the soul tether led back to the conductor, the one truly responsible for this horrid murder.