“Yes, Grandpa.”

“Luce mia, I know it’s not easy to understand. But this is not the sort of thing for little girls.”

One does not simply break a cursed violin.

Actually, yes, they do.

Cursed violins are more common than one might imagine. The details vary, but most follow a typical pattern of notoriety: the violin is stolen, someone kills for it, dies for it, pulls it from a grave, bathes it in blood.

Not surprisingly, their owners tend to keep quiet. Thus, cursed violins rarely receive regular maintenance. More than a few have been ruined, not by Hell’s Infernal Forces, but by being played without a sound post or with a backward bridge.

Even worse, most every player of a cursed instrument seems compelled to flaunt their anguish like a cheap Paganini understudy—snapping a string, spewing various bodily fluids, playing drugged or drunk, lurching like a contortionist.

And if a player cracks the pegbox while playing because he absolutely had to writhe as if possessed by Mozart’s illegitimate child, what then?

People willing and equipped to repair such violins didn’t advertise openly. Such business was conducted quietly, through word of mouth.

The Matías had done this work for generations. And they were paid very well. But curses are, well, curses, with all the danger and unsavoriness that the term implies.

Thus, Catalin and Francisco Matía had only worked on these particular violins late at night, or early in the morning, when a pretty little girl like Lucy was safely tucked in bed.

Here was the legacy of the Matías. And not only the client notebook—others even older, full of special techniques and recipes, with lists of tools and incantations passed unbroken through time.

Just then, the doorbell jingled.

“The lights were on, so I decided to drop in.”

She looked up to see who had entered. For a second, he looked like a toad.

27

“Lucía Matía. My name is Tremon Philippe. I noticed that you are open for business.”

Tremon Philippe. A black-and-white photo of him was on the wall.

“This … San Gabriel Valley … is interesting. In this seemingly ordinary place are two people who are very important to me: the Queen of Hell and you.”

“What?”

“Rumors suggested that you might be closing the shop.”

“I suppose word gets around. But no, I’m not closing. However, I had been planning to limit our work to student violins … at least until Andrew might make the shop worthy of its name.”

Tremon looked at her workbench. “Yet that is no student violin.”

Lucy shrugged helplessly. “Shizuka Satomi decided before I could say no.”

“That’s her in a nutshell, isn’t it? So, her del Gesù. What do you think of it?”

Lucy was about to say something diplomatic when a strange energy came over her.

“Aesthetically, del Gesùs aren’t to my liking. They’re not as refined as, as…”