CHAPTER ONE
Grant~
The sky was a midnight blue bowl of stars. The moon a slender curve on the furthest horizon. Spread beneath him was the familiar beauty of his family’s land, greenish-gray in the starlight. Grant D’Angelo angled his wings and let the wind carry him sideways until he hovered over the burbling, silver creek. Its liquid melody echoed the song in his heart.
He opened his beak and poured his love song into the night, summoning his mate. He strained to hear her response, but although the hills threw his serenade back at him in crystalline waves, no other phoenix song gladdened the night air. He altered his melody, weaving greater passion and persuasiveness into his enchantment. Silence mocked his efforts.
Again, and again, Grant circled over the drowsing land, his paranormal vision picking out the sleeping cattle and the small nocturnal mammals scuttling through the undergrowth. To them his song and his radiant plumage were equally imperceptible. The barn owl circling below him, in pursuit of mice for his babies, faintly heard Grant’s plaintive song but ignored it to focus on his hunt. Grant felt a pang for the hapless mouse, but it was not his place to starve the owlets.
The moon was directly overhead, and his throat was aching when at last he caught a distant singing. The delicate, chiming notes spread through the air like hope. Their sweetness pierced his soul. He flew toward the sound and the radiant glow that was his mate.
In the gray light of dawn, she was as bright as the sun. Her wings spread wide and beautiful. Even in the faint starlight she reflected a rainbow of paranormal colors. Her long, forked tail-feathers fluttered golden in her wake. Her plumed crown enticed him. And from her brazen beak issued music that challenged and complemented his own.
The instant she spotted him, she turned and raced toward the horizon. Grant gave chase. He was larger, stronger, swifter. Soon he was sailing above her, echoing her song. Still singing, his mate spun in the air, executed a dizzying barrel roll and darted away in a burst of speed. Her wings blurred as she headed for the hills.
This was no playful coyness, but a desperate dash for freedom. Ahead of him, her wings beat ever faster and her song grew ever fainter. Only the fact that she sang counterpoint to his tune persuaded Grant to follow. The sun popped up and turned the sky pink. His mate vanished. Bereft, Grant sang a lament that filled the dawn with sorrow. The clear sky darkened. Drizzle fell.
The sound of his alarm woke him. Grant stared blankly at his hotel room. A chink in the draperies admitted the late morning sunshine. The bedside clock informed him it was nearly noon. After last night’s performance of Tristan und Isolde and the supper party that followed, he had gotten to bed at three in the morning.
Why had he set his alarm for 11:45?
He had a meeting with his manager and the artistic director of the Teatro Colón, the Buenos Aires opera house. He had better shower and make himself presentable before Linda knocked on the connecting door. Linda might be old enough to be his mother, but she had an embarrassing way of entering on her knock.
He returned to the bedroom swathed in the thick hotel robe to find her scrolling through her messages in the armchair by the window.
“I ordered you coffee,” she said without looking up from the screen.
“Good morning,” he responded. “It looks to be a pleasant day.”
“What?” Linda raised her silver bob from her phone. “Oh. Good morning, Grant. We meet with Señor Mattemamo in half an hour.”
“I know.” Grant fished his underwear out of the dresser drawer. He always unpacked completely no matter how short his stay in a hotel was to be. Otherwise he would be forever making do. Bad enough he spent two-thirds of his life traveling. “Can’t you do that in your own room?” he asked the shining head.
“What?”
“Can’t you go look at your email and leave me to get dressed?” He spoke from the depths of the closet. “My dinner jacket needs to go to the cleaners.”
“Sure,” Linda shot back. “But how the hell will your tux get cleaned if I do?” She grabbed the hotel phone and spoke briskly into the receiver. Her Spanish was bad, but whoever answered obviously spoke English, because she continued in English.
She hung up and marched over to the closet and began to methodically search the pockets of the black jacket. She laid his passport, a handful of coins and an unused handkerchief on the dresser, before subjecting his pants to a similar inspection. She placed his billfold, a taxi receipt and a second handkerchief on the polished dresser.
“Thank you,” Grant managed through set teeth.
He took his clothing into the bathroom and looked at himself in the steamy mirror. The Angel of the Opera looked much the worse for wear this morning. He needed to settle down. Fragments of his recurrent dream taunted him. He had been ignoring his phoenix intuition for years and the results showed in his face. A phoenix without a mate was only half a man. He left the bathroom with fresh resolve. It was time and past time.
Linda was handing over his tux to a uniformed employee. “We’ll need this back in two hours.” She held up two fingers.
The man nodded. “Certainly, Señora Hoskins,” he said in perfect American English.
“Shall we go down?” Grant asked.
“We need to discuss what to say to Señor Mattemamo,” Linda objected. “Before we meet with him.”
“You know what we decided, Linda. If he’s doing Wagner, yes. If not, no.”
“He wants you for Verdi,” she admitted.
Grant sat down. “Which opera?” He was tired of Rigoletto. Ditto Traviata. Perhaps he could make the trip to South America for Aida. He always enjoyed the elephants.
“Don Carlos,” she said triumphantly.
“I’m singing it in Milan next year,” he reminded her. “And we take it to Munich and London.”
“And Señor Mattemamo hopes to bring that production to Buenos Aires. It would be a master stroke if he could advertise not only the La Scala production but La Scala’s tenor.”
“Hmm.” It was a tempting role. “What are the dates?”
Linda got out her laptop and began to look at his calendar. “April of 2021. You have time between Parsifal in Milan and Trovatori in Sydney.”
“How much time? I’m going to be a married man. I won’t be able to just hurl myself across the world without a break.”
Linda narrowed her hazel eyes. “What the hell?” she yelped. “Married?”
“Hmm. It’s time I grew up.”
“Your fans don’t want the Angel of the Opera to be a married man.”
“They adored Pavarotti. And Domingo. Happily married and yet heartthrobs. My public will have to deal with a Grant D’Angelo who doesn’t have a mistress in every city.”
“Not mistress,” she corrected soberly. “Mistress doesn’t strike the correct note of devil-may-care, international glamor. Girlfriend.”
Grant groaned.
Linda laughed. “If your public only knew. But, admit it, there is no PR value in D’Angelo the Musical Monk.”
“You would know. But I have plans,” he said. “I intend to be married by spring. My public will have to settle for Grant D’Angelo paterfamilias Americanus.”
“What plans? Who is she? Carmen Buscelli?”
“Kindly remember that my affair with the adorable Carmen exists only in your publicist’s fertile imagination. You have never met my future wife.” And he was not about to share Genevieve’s name with a woman dedicated to creating news out of his private life. Genevieve was not going to discover she was the chosen bride of the Angel of the Opera from some tabloid.
Linda snorted. “So will you do Don Carlos or not?”
“How many performances?”
“Six.”
Grant thought. “If I have a week or ten days to recover before Sydney. And the same after Milan.”
“You have eight days between Milan and BA. But I was hoping to squeeze in an oratorio in Sydney before Don Carlos. It’s Susanna,” she coaxed.
As always, Handel tempted him, but Linda had to stop overworking him. “Your job is to think of my vocal cords.” Although phoenixes usually enjoyed extremely long lives as singers. Look at his great-grandfather’s example. Benito D’Angelo had sung into his eighties, although the books assumed he had retired at sixty-five. And his recordings sounded as great as Caruso’s.
“Either Susanna or Trovatori, but not both.” He folded his arms.
“We have a contract for Trovatori,” Linda sulked.
“Then no Susanna,” Grant said firmly. “Or no Don Carlos.”
“There’s more prestige in singing Don Carlos,” she allowed.
“Then I don’t see the problem. Shall we go to lunch?”