CHAPTER NINE
Grant~
His Genevieve was sitting sixth row center right under his eye as he had intended. She was as lustrous as a pearl. Her rosy lips parted, her bosom swelled, and her green eyes sparkled when Grant opened his mouth and let the splendor of the words pour out in a magnificent wave. For her.
Whatever Dan Gilmore was to her, Handel was more. She smiled and shook her head when Dan put his lips to her ear. Unfortunately, Gilmore wasn’t the only man who couldn’t take his attention off Grant’s queenly mate.
The two men from the lobby were standing together at the rear. Standing room tickets went on sale the day of a performance. These cheap tickets were usually snapped up by pensioners and students. These men were no kind of music lovers. It would have been one thing if they had been using their opera glasses to pick out the performers, as so many others were doing. But their unwavering stares were fixed on Genevieve and Gilmore.
Who the hell were these grim, grizzled thugs? His uneasiness grew as the men failed to transfer their attention to the singing or the singers. Just before the half, Genevieve and Gilmore stood and joined in the Hallelujah Chorus with the rest of the audience. But the two observers did not sing. Their opera glasses did not waver. Neither did they join in the applause.
Shift. Grant was going to have to distress Frau Mueller by disappearing during the intermission. He needed to do some spying of his own. Fortunately, if he took lesser phoenix not only would he be virtually invisible to people, he would only be hawk-sized and could fly around in the high-ceiling lobby. Surely among that overwrought splendor, he could find a discreet perch?
He only had twenty minutes to track down his quarry and get his monkey suit back on before Act Two. By any definition, it was going to be a rush. He opened the door of his dressing room a crack before he changed into lesser phoenix and deprived himself of hands. He locked his clothes in the bathroom away from prying eyes.
No one noticed when a glowing bird hopped awkwardly past the door of the star’s dressing room. He hoped that if Frau Mueller or her assistant passed by that they would leave his door ajar. Otherwise he was going to add to the already flamboyant legend of the Angel of the Opera by appearing backstage in the altogether.
The lobby rang to happy chatter. Nearly everyone was sipping at a glass. He spotted Genevieve’s shining golden curls without difficulty. She was far and away the tallest woman in the room. And the most beautiful. And where she went, the gallant Gilmore led, once again cutting through the assembly without fuss.
And behind them came those shoving brutes, shouldering the crowd aside. They pushed their way to the nearest table, elbowing between a gray-haired couple quietly sipping champagne. The man protested civilly. Thug One responded with a grunt. Thug Two made a rude gesture. The man leaned around Thug Two and pulled his wife to his side. They bowed frigidly and went away exclaiming about modern manners.
Grant circled the room to be certain that Thugs One and Two had no friends present. They seemed to be alone. He perched on the gilded column behind them and listened to their grumbling. Grant had the phoenix gift of tongues, honed by years of living in foreign parts. Bulgarians. Stinking Bulgarian boar shifters. Spies making plans for later. Plans involving Gilmore and Genevieve.
He didn’t need the twitching of his rictal bristles to tell him those plans were evil. Ill will had a stench all its own. This pair intended violence. He knew that as surely as he knew Genevieve was his to protect. The question was how.
He remembered all too well the attack on his niece in California*. He had dealt by himself with the wolverine who had arranged Quincy’s abduction. He could deal with these boars. Except that immolating two men in the lobby of the Alte Oper would cause its own set of problems. He needed back-up and he needed it now.
Frau Mueller was rapping on his bathroom door and impatiently calling out. He perched on the picture over the couch and willed her to leave his dressing room. The silence made her swear. She instructed her assistant over the headset. Johann was to seek Herr Doktor Doktor D’Angelo in the soprano’s dressing room.
At the best of times, Frau Mueller’s formality embarrassed Grant. Both his doctorates were purely honorary. He had managed to persuade her to drop the second Doktor, but of course she would not when speaking to an underling. She left shaking her head and shutting the door firmly behind her.
Grant returned to human and grabbed his cell. He called Lincoln from the bathroom as he struggled back into his clothes. Shift. He had exactly eight minutes and twelve seconds.
Lincoln answered at once. “What the hell do you want? I’m working,” he complained.
“I’ve got a problem, Linc. And this phone is on speaker and it’s not encrypted. I repeat, not encrypted.”
“Huh. Just a minute.” There was a pause while Lincoln did something. A muted buzzing filled the background. “Okay, Grant. Proceed. In code. Where are you?”
It took six of his precious minutes to discreetly inform Linc that his old buddy Daniel Gilmore was at the Alte Oper being shadowed by unspecified shifters. Fortunately, the D’Angelo brothers had perfected their secret code in adolescence. Unfortunately, they had not anticipated this conversation.
But Linc’s, “I’ll take care of it,” required no code at all.
Frau Mueller was back, rapping desperately on the bathroom door. “Herr Doktor, are you ready?”
“I will be.” Grant flushed the toilet. His tie was still undone and he fiddled with it as best he could.
“Go sing,” ordered Linc, as if he was in charge. That was the worst of big brothers.
Grant hung up, pulled the edges of his bow tie square, adjusted his lapels and joined Frau Mueller and Linda in the hallway.
“Something I ate,” he murmured at their skeptical faces.