Running Hot

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