Luthier's Apprentice, The (21 page)

He wished he could help Lili. But as he had lost all his powers to Sonia a long time ago he could only watch helplessly.

If I can get my hands around your neck, I’ll squeeze until your eyes pop out.

The portal was wavering, weakening.

Amidst the smoke, Niccolò saw Emma’s grandfather push Sonia’s daughter into it. A moment after the woman disappeared through the purple cloud, the portal vanished.

Corey was trying to free the violinists, his hands struggling with the metal strings. Niccolò knew this was a waste of time. The only way to free the violinists was to destroy Sonia.

As Emma rushed to help Lili to her feet, Niccolò took one more step toward Sonia…

S
ONIA TURNED TO EMMA. “DID YOU
really think you could destroy me? Go ahead, help poor Lili to her feet. It will not do any good. I am much stronger than both of you put together.”

Emma and Lili stood side by side. They held hands.

Did they think by holding hands they could destroy her? The fools!

The power of evil incarnate was inside her. Sonia could feel it, could wallow in it. She looked at her hands—the fingers were red and throbbed like incandescent pieces of gold.

She prepared herself to shoot another ball of fire. Tilting her head back, she extended her arms and laughed. “Lord of Darkness, destroy—”

Someone knocked her to the side. She lost her balance and stumbled against one of the fledgling maples. Grabbing the tree for support, she fell anyway.

On the floor, she turned over to look at her attacker.

Niccolò’s black-clad figure loomed above her.

“You!” she accused. “You worthless worm...how dare you!”

She saw Emma and Lili approaching, their eyes shining like beacons. Their gazes were fixed on her and the baby maple beside her.

Sonia tried to get up, but couldn’t. “What the—” She felt the maple branches grow and move under her, slowly entwining round her arms and legs. “No!” Her scream echoed across the grand hall, which was now rapidly filling with smoke.

As she struggled against the branches, she looked at Niccolò. His face was strangely placid, his lips twisted in a sneer.

“I curse you,” Sonia said with loathing, her words directed not only at Niccolò, but at Emma and Lili as well. “I curse you all!”

The branches crawled up her gown, her face... and began to curl tightly around her neck.

“You think mere death will stop me?” she rasped, gasping for air. “I shall find a way to come back... and when I do, I will get my revenge.”

E
MMA, AUNT LILI, GRANDPA, NICCOLÒ AND
Corey watched in horrified satisfaction.

Sonia’s fingers turned chalk white as she desperately clawed at the choking branches. Purple light enveloped her, spreading over her body as her soul was absorbed by the fledgling maple. After a long moment she stopped moving. Slowly, the branches relaxed and retracted back into the trunk.

As soon as Sonia was gone, the violin strings slackened and the violinists were able to disentangle themselves and ease their way to the ground.

Emma ran to Monsieur Dupriez. “Are you okay?”

“As good as can be.” He hugged her.

The fire was spreading. Flames lapped at the walls.

“This room will collapse if we don’t get out now,” Niccolò said.

“We need to open a portal,” Aunt Lili urged. “Emma, come!”

But Emma’s eyes darted desperately around the room. “What about Blackie and Noah? We can’t leave them here.”

“I’m not leaving without Noah,” Corey said firmly.

“
Oh per l’amor di Dio
,” Niccolò said, as if the idea of saving a couple of pets was distasteful. “They must have run outside. Let’s move.”

Aunt Lili touched Emma’s arm. “As you run, mentally summon Blackie and Noah. I’ll do the same. They’ll hear us and come in our direction.”

Emma nodded. “You got it.”

“Only three minutes before midnight,” Grandpa warned. “
Sbrigati
!”

Niccolò led the way, with Emma, Corey, Aunt Lili, Grandpa and the violinists close behind. Eluding the flames and gasping for breath in the thick smoke, they ran out of the grand hall and through an arched narrow passageway connected to the exterior. They emerged in an open terrace overlooking the woods. The violin music produced by the trees wafted their way.

They dashed down the terrace steps and toward the forest—just in time to see two silhouettes appear at the edge of the woods.

V
AN KETTS WATCHED THE CHILLING SCENE
from the doorway.

Once everybody ran out of the grand hall, he rushed back inside and searched for the maple that had absorbed Sonia’s soul.

He had to act fast. The flames were quickly spreading. The castle would soon collapse.

Risking his own life, he dodged the flames and lifted the maple from the floor.

As if it were a baby, Van Ketts cradled it in his arms.

Now to find a portal…

W
HAT’S THAT?” COREY ASKED AS HE
ran next to Emma.

Emma grinned. “
That
, my dear Watson, is our pets!”

Blackie sprinted into her direction. Noah broke into a run and headed straight toward Corey. All the meanness had vanished from his face. When they at last collided, Noah covered Corey’s face with affectionate licks. By this time Emma already had Blackie secured in her arms.

Behind them, there was a massive explosion. They spun around to see angry flames lapping at the sky and hundreds of shattered, incandescent pieces of wood soaring their way.

“
Sbrigati
, to the trees!” Niccolò shouted.

They ran for their lives as fractions of castle crashed every which way, bursting into flames as they hit the ground. Finally they plunged into the relative safety of the woods.

Inside the forest, the violin music was deafening, a demented contortion of notes. Emma had once read that the resonance of violins was the closest sound to a woman’s voice, but if that were true, these trees were like women screaming.

Then Emma saw the faces on the bark of the trees. She gasped. “What are those?”

“Don’t look at them, Emma,” Grandpa warned. “Those are the violinists’ souls.”

They were like something out of a nightmare. The bark on some of the trees extended and undulated in different shapes and formed faces in agony, screaming faces with open mouths living in permanent torture.

Emma tried to avoid looking at them, but they were everywhere, on almost every tree. She turned desperately to Lili. She knew they had to open a portal.

As. In.
NOW
.

Aunt Lili nodded, as if reading her thoughts, and fixed her eyes on a spot a few yards away.

Emma followed her line of vision and focused.
Open, portal.

Just as before, a flash of light cut through the air. The solid texture of the leaves-covered ground began to change, turning syrupy, then translucent, enveloped in a purple cloud...

Niccolò ran to it and beckoned them to hurry.

Emma hastened to Niccolò’s side just as she heard Corey groan in pain. She whirled around and saw him half sitting, half lying on the ground. He’d tripped on something. “Corey!” she said, rushing to his side. “Are you okay?”

“I think I sprained an ankle,” he growled, grimacing.

“Put your arms around me.” She seized him around the waist. “Come on, this isn’t the time to play macho.”

Grandpa came to help. Together, they dragged Corey to the portal.

Something started to change. The violin music diminished. The faces on the bark of the trees started to vanish. Souls rose into the air all around them.

For an instant, they stared in awe.

The souls, at last, were free.

I
N SPITE OF THE DARK FATE
that awaited him, Niccolò was overcome with a deep sense of peace.

But there was no time for melancholic thoughts. He ushered Emma, Corey, Donatelli, the violinists, and the pets into the portal. When it was Lili’s turn, she grabbed his hand.

“Come with us,” Lili implored, her eyes welling with tears.

He shook his head. “
Non è possibile
.”

Her nails sank into the flesh of his palm. “I can’t leave you!”

“
Arrivederci, amore mio
,” he said, before he pushed her into the portal.

A
COUPLE OF DAYS LATER EMMA, HER
mom, Grandpa and Aunt Lili sat in Emma’s living room drinking hot chocolate topped with marshmallows in front of the open fire. The burning logs popped and crackled while yellow-brown leaves flew in the wind outside.

Their lives were beginning to get back to normal. Annika was back at home with her family. Corey was with his mom, whom he felt closer to than ever. As he’d suspected, his right ankle was sprained, but it didn’t really bother him because he had Noah back. To say he was beyond bliss that Noah still lived was the understatement of the century. Better yet, he would be able to enjoy Noah’s company for many years to come. Since there had been no ‘time’ in Sonia’s purple world, the dog was as young as the day Sonia stole it—only one and a half years old.

They had decided to keep everything a secret. Who in their right mind would believe them, anyway? An ex-violinist-turned-evil sorceress? A purple parallel world? Zombies of famous dead violinists? Souls of dead musicians inhabiting trees? The media would have a field day and they would all be humiliated if the truth ever got out.

Madame Dupriez’s and Van Ketts’ whereabouts were still unknown. Had they vanished together with the parallel world or had they managed somehow to escape?

Monsieur Dupriez and the other violinists, however, had to offer a reasonable explanation for their disappearance, as the police had spent a lot of time and resources hunting them. Each of them lied, claiming they had needed to get away for a while, that the stress related to their work and careers had become unbearable. The authorities were suspicious, but had no choice but to close the investigations. Some believed the violinists belonged to a Masonic club, a sort of secret society, and that they had been hiding all along.

Though he was depressed about his wife, Monsieur Dupriez had gone back to work right away. Emma and Corey were thrilled. The violin competition was seven weeks away and they needed him more than ever.

Grandpa was… well, let’s put it this way: Emma had never seen him happier in all her life. He would continue making beautiful violins, but this time the wood would come from normal forests.

As for Aunt Lili, Emma often caught her with a sad, melancholic expression on her face, staring quietly through the window at nothing in particular. Her mind seemed far away and Emma wondered what—or
who
—she was thinking of.

Between cups of hot chocolate and plates of orange and almond cake, the four of them discussed the strange recent events.

“I’m still a bit confused,” Emma said. “Why do we have this power, Aunt Lili? Where did it come from?”

Aunt Lili sighed, placing her mug on the coffee table in front of her. Just like Noah, she was the same age she had been when Sonia kidnapped her. It was really weird because Aunt Lili and her mom were twins, yet Lili was ten years younger.

“As you must know by now,” Aunt Lili began, “our family tree goes back all the way to Niccolò Paganini. Ever since Niccolò made a pact with the devil, our ancestors, at least one in each generation, were destined to become a luthier. That was the deal: Paganini would get supernatural powers and immortality in exchange not only for his own soul, but for at least one other soul each few decades thereafter as well. These other souls were transferred to the fledgling trees—you saw with your own eyes how that horrific ritual was done—and then planted in the woods. Later on, from the wood of those trees, the luthier made his violins. That was part of the deal too: to build haunted violins with the essence of the violinists’ souls. Of course, Sonia took this a step further. She took advantage of the situation to help women violinists and eliminate the men. But I am moving away from the subject,” she said, shifting slightly in her chair. “As I said, from these special trees violins were made. The luthier’s job in each generation was to get the wood and make the violins. If they refused, horrible things would befall the children in the family—disease, insanity, even death.”

Now Emma understood why her mom had always been so ambivalent and reluctant about her violin-making, and why she’d sometimes had the eerie feeling that Grandpa hated having her in the workshop. All along, they’d been battling feelings of bitterness, helplessness and doom. It wasn’t that Grandpa disliked her company or was displeased with her work. He simply couldn’t cope with the pain of watching her become the next apprentice. “So the haunted forest in the parallel world existed at the time of Niccolò?” Emma continued, following Aunt Lili’s train of thought.