There had been a vote. Tony bitched and moaned about it, but deep down he understood the others in the band had a point. He was the one who’d given the kid the okay to sing. He’d have to be the one to explain the situation to Vince’s folks.

Vince led T into the street, across four blocks of the kinetic madness of midtown Manhattan at rush hour, and into the vast subway system. Instead of heading uptown like Tony expected, he and Vince found themselves rocketing through the dark and silent veins of the city to a brown, broken, needle-strung neighborhood in the Bronx.

Vince was eerily quiet from point A to point B, even when Tony attempted to initiate conversation. The mystery behind those collected, prematurely old eyes and that otherworldly voice was not to be solved today, that much was clear. But Tony needed to know where the boy had come from. He thought, in his shamefaced way, maybe it had something to do with God.

When Vince’s mother opened the door, Tony knew that he could not have been more wrong.