Trapped

Ten seconds after I knocked, a light came to life on the other side of the door. I could see it through the peephole-not that the peephole was designed to let visitors see into the room, but I was standing in pitch blackness so it was easy to notice any illumination coming through the fish-eye lens. A

She'd been sleeping in a long white nightgown-not excessively sheer, but modest white cotton simply isn't equipped to hide warm dark skin completely. Over the top of the nightie, she'd do

When she saw it was me, she froze. Like a stage actor doing a double take: eyes going wide, body turning rigid. It almost made me laugh… but my nerves were so strained from the ghost-harp concerto, the laugh would have come out shrill. I swallowed the hysteria and simply said, "A

My voice seemed to break the spell. A

"A

Bollixed and tongue-tied. Wondering what thoughts were going through A

Stupidly, I held out my foot for her to examine. She never took her eyes off my face. My skin was turning clammy, my tongue stumbling over words. "I came here to ask if you knew about the ghost… or if there's someone in your classes, a girl who plays the harp, and maybe, if she died tonight, cared enough about the music that she'd play one final piece-"

A

Some time later, I pulled away. "Sorry," I said. I touched her hair where I'd pressed my face against it: the thick dark strands were damp with my ridiculous tears. "Sorry," I said again.

"Shock," she replied. A soft voice, but controlled. The Caryatid once told me A

Music, one way or another. She'd known what she wanted to do with her life-what her calling was. I envied her.

A

"I didn't see it; I heard it. In the music room."

She took another step back, then sat gracefully in a chair covered with a throw-cloth of red and yellow satin. Her eyes never left my face. "Tell me," A

I did… settling into a wooden rocking chair padded with a white wool quilt. It was positioned opposite A

"So," I finished a few minutes later, "I came to you. Because it's your music room. You'd know if there'd been hauntings before. But I also wanted to ask who played the harp. In your classes. If there's a girl so devoted to the instrument that when she died… that her ghost… not that I believe in ghosts… that some effect would make it look as if her ghost had gone to play all the things she never had time to learn…"

I stopped because A

"Rosalind?" I interrupted. "Rosalind Tzekich?"

"Yes. You know her?"

"She's in my Math C."

Rosalind Tzekich. Sixteen years old, very quiet, very intense. Perhaps the same sort of girl Musicmaster A

Rosalind's mother, Elizabeth Tzekich-known also as Elsbeth the Bloody, Our Lady of Shadows, or Knife-Hand Liz-was the outlaw terror of Southern Europe… or at least one of the terrors, since Hispania, Romana, Hellene, and the Balkans all seemed to cultivate criminal organizations as profusely as olives. (The Black Hand. The Hidden Cry. The Circle of Friends. Each specializing in some form of ugliness, from extortion to smuggling to kidnap.)

Mother Tzekich ran a band of thugs called the Ring of Knives. They made their money through sleazy mod-and-aug operations in back alleys from Gibraltar to Jerusalem. Did you want a poison gland implanted in your tongue so you could murder someone with a single kiss? Did you want a wi

Ambitious Mother Tzekich didn't rest on her laurels. After making a name in the slice'n'dice trade, the Ring branched into other realms of business: forcibly seizing enterprises run by other criminal clans. The resulting gang war shook the Mediterranean. Soon it escalated farther afield, as the Ring fought to expand east into Asia and west to the Americas. In skirmish after skirmish, the Ring never suffered a significant defeat-partly because Tzekich had a genius for choosing the right targets, and partly because the Ring decked out its people with subcutaneous armor, enhanced reflexes, and even (so the rumors went) genes spliced from nonhuman sources. Animals and aliens, plants and ETs.