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electronic tools screaming away made conversation next to impossible.
    Inside the relative quiet of the storeroom, Christine locked the door and pulled out her iPad. She’d done the Verdi room early on, one of those first quiet, creepy days. She was sure of it. Scanning her database, she found the listings. Nothing about the Angel’s Hand. It had been written in after she’d been through there.
    By someone who had access to the Big Notebook of Doom. And who knew she’d been adding to the database as she went and so wouldn’t look at it again.
    She wouldn’t waste another minute looking for the red herring there. No, it would be here, in the Mozart room. In the cabinet where the magic flute was supposed to be and never was. Carla’s game of chess.
    To be safe, she spent a few minutes pushing a leather-bound seaman’s chest against the door. Then she went to the back of the room, to the antique armoire with roses carved in the doors, the stained wood dark with age, the red of the petals the rusty black of old blood. She’d looked in this cabinet before, on the first hunt for the flute, and remembered the glass-topped box. But she’d been focused—hell, she’d been frantic—on finding the flute, so she’d pushed it aside, one of the many things she’d touched and never added to her lists.
    There it was. Hidden in plain sight.
    Covered in old leather, the box smelled like something dead but felt like something alive with magic. The glass of the top, though dusty, showed the contents clearly.
    A human hand.
    But there was no ring. Then she glimpsed the white gold band that matched hers and knew the opal and diamond ring had been turned in, toward the palm.
    No wonder Tara had known immediately how wrong it was. Though Victorian in design, the hand was no English family’s mummified relic. Its nails were long and carefully oval, the shape of the hand a lady’s, preserved in all its refined delicacy. The ring a relic of recent centuries. The twin of her own.
    With a deep sense of certainty, she knew these fingers, immortalized in the box and hidden in the opera props, would fit the other handprint on the pillar and break the binding that held the Master and the shadow people captive.
    Taking a table runner from a box—and squelching the urge to note in the database that she’d done so—Christine wrapped up the box and stuck it deep in her big shoulder bag. It seemed insane to carry it around but worse to leave it here.
    If the Master wouldn’t let her use it, she’d at least keep anyone else from finding and using it. She would hide the horrible artifact away where it could never be found.
    It was nerve-wracking, spending the afternoon running errands all over the opera house, the various rehearsed solos, duets, and choruses jangling together in her head. The excitement and stress over the imminent opening night seemed vapid compared to the crazy drama her life had become. When she had a few moments, she added her own notes to Tara’s and hid the notepad in the vent again—with a coded reference to the object’s new hiding place. Then she sat at her desk with the door invitingly open, ostensibly working on the iPad inventory—but writing down everything that had happened. It felt like the right thing to do. She hoped that following in Tara’s footsteps this way wouldn’t lead her down the same doomed path.
    But her fate would never be the same as Tara’s, because she had the Master.
    Tara hadn’t really had anyone.
    This was the worst part—how badly she wanted to go find the Master. To tell him what she’d found out. To be with him. But this would be it: her final performance as Roman’s fiancée. Tonight she would lay the trap for the Sanclaros. She’d draw them out with the promise of the Angel’s Hand, then either expose them as murderers or blackmail them into silence.
    Then she could