Constance (Constance #1)(6)

Her LFD buzzed, and Con checked the ID. Kala Solomon. At this hour? It must be an emergency, and Con could guess what kind. Against her better judgment, Con resisted the urge to let it go to voice mail. LFDs transmitted sound via bone conduction, sending vibrations directly to the inner ear, which as a musician, Con didn’t think she’d ever get entirely used to.

“Con?” Kala sounded like the last survivor of a sinking ship. “I’m really sorry for calling so early.”

“Hey,” Con said, conscious of how voices traveled in the atrium.

“Can you hear me? You’re really faint.”

“Sorry, I’m in a waiting room.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just my annual,” Con lied. Having a clone wasn’t anything she talked about to anyone. Not everyone was a member of Children of Adam, but the subject was a third rail and it was impossible to predict how anyone felt about it. “What’s up? Everything okay with you?”

“It’s Trina,” Kala answered, confirming Con’s suspicions.

Trina was the singer in Kala’s band, Weathervane. They weren’t bad. A little green, but Con dug their sound, a wild blend of country and go-go—Lucinda Williams meets Chuck Brown—that worked better than it had any business doing. Trina was gorgeous. A magnetic presence on stage with a huge voice, but she was also the Mayan apocalypse of lead singers. Kala spent half her time micromanaging Trina’s mood swings and supernatural pharmaceutical intake.

“What happened now?” Con asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t find her.”

“Any sightings in New York?” The last time, Kala had tracked Trina down in Harlem after a two-week bender.

“She’ll turn up when she’s ready,” Kala replied diplomatically. “Thing is, we have gigs every night between now and the thirtieth. So naturally, Trina would pick this as the time to bug out.”

“The holidays are hard,” Con commiserated, bracing herself for the inevitable question.

“So will you do it?” Kala said. “I know it’s short notice again, but you killed last time. It was unbelievable. The crowd ate you up. Everyone’s still talking about it.”

Con rolled her eyes. She’d been the guitarist in one lousy band. A band that hadn’t ever gotten around to recording its debut album. Yet despite that, or perhaps because of it, she got her ass kissed by every musician in DC who had bought into the morbid hype surrounding Awaken the Ghosts. Personally, Con thought the band was overrated, tragedy lending them more significance than they deserved. Or maybe it was just easier to believe they never would have amounted to anything because now they never would.

“Please?” Kala said, on the verge of begging.

Con had been scrolling through her list of prefab excuses, so it surprised her when her mouth opened and said yes. She hadn’t been on stage in a while. Maybe that was part of the reason she’d been so down. Performing always buoyed her spirits; hopefully it would help shake off her holiday depression.

“You will?” Kala said and thanked her a hundred different ways.

“But only until the thirtieth,” Con qualified.

“Of course,” Kala said, relieved and excited. “Oh man, I owe you so huge.” She filled Con in on the details and promised to send her the set list for tonight.

Before Con had time to think about what she’d just gotten herself into, seams appeared in the far wall. A door swung open silently, and Laleh Askari emerged. Although she was a registered nurse, her official job title was steward. Instead of hospital scrubs, Laleh wore a sapphire-blue pencil skirt and an egg-yolk-yellow blouse, lustrous black hair piled high on her head, held in place with a single surgically positioned gold pin. Her heels made no more sound than ballet slippers on the stone floors. Con admired Laleh’s dedicated retro flair. It wasn’t a look Con could pull off, but Laleh made it look effortless. Con was a master of the dark art of looking like she was too cool to care how she dressed. Women knew the difference, of course, but men were never any the wiser.

“Hello, Constance! Happy holidays,” Laleh said, her accent a silken blend of British and Iranian. Palingenesis prided itself on its personal touch. Laleh had been Con’s steward since her first appointment and always greeted her as if they were old friends unexpectedly reunited. Except that Con’s friends knew not to call her Constance. Con hated it—a family name from her mother’s side, which had a tradition of saddling girls with old-timey names: Chastity, Charity, Faith. It made her sound like a pioneer settler trudging wearily across the Great Plains in search of a simple life. She hadn’t gone by her full name since the day she’d stopped singing in the church choir. She’d been a star since she was a precocious seven-year-old, but it hadn’t been until her twelfth birthday that it occurred to Con that her voice was the only value her mother saw in her. Con had quit to test the theory, and nothing that followed had done anything to change her mind.

“I’m so, so sorry about your aunt,” Laleh said. “We can absolutely reschedule.”

“I’m fine,” Con said, although she was a little taken aback. She didn’t know why she assumed no one at Palingenesis knew her relationship to their founder. Laleh had never mentioned it before now.

“I understand. It would just be a shame if you had to repeat the procedure because your refresh was corrupted.”