Chapter Six
Where’s your shadow today?” Leonardo lifts on his toes and searches the street. “I thought you weren’t allowed to go anywhere without her.”
The city’s artists have been summoned to attend a grand meeting at the city hall—the Palazzo della Signoria—to learn what sort of beautiful wonders the Medici seek for their latest celebration.
Wedding bells will soon sing for the marriage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the twenty-year-old heir to the family’s vast fortune and power.
This walk is the first bit of peace and quiet I’ve had for days, so of course Leonardo has to come and ruin it for me. “We both know angels aren’t allowed to leave their workshops,” I say crossly. “And Lupa isn’t my shadow.”
Except she is.
I thought getting the angel settled would mean giving her clothes, showing her where she would sleep, where we took our meals, but no. Lupa has become my full-time job.
She lurks outside my door each morning and follows me around all day, asking endless, unceasing questions.
Who painted the sky blue?
Why do humans eat deer but not dogs?
Why do your insides smell so sweet?
The last question stopped me the week before. I was despairing over the damn Tobias and the Angel painting, still unable to make the dog resemble anything approaching canine-like territory. Verrocchio had started asking pointed questions about what was taking me so long.
“It’s my blood. You need it to live.” I turned to Lupa, tugging up my sleeve to bare my black marks.
My pulse lurched nervously, as if I were on the verge of my very first kiss.
“Would you like to make a bargain with me? I want to make one with you.” My voice lowered.
“I could give you a day, a week. A memory, if you like that more.”
I felt Leonardo go still behind me. I wished I could tell him to go away without revealing that I was paying attention to him.
The angel stepped closer, nostrils flaring. There was a scrape on my arm, a casualty of brushing too close to a jagged, unfinished sculpture. I gasped when her tongue flicked against my broken skin, quick as a cat. She pulled away, wiping her mouth with a grimace. “I don’t want to right now.”
My heart fell. I tugged my sleeve back down, feeling exposed, as if Leonardo had witnessed something embarrassingly intimate. “That’s fine,” I lied. “I’ll ask again later.”
We burst out from the narrow streets into the city hall’s piazza. The sunlight flooding the open square blinds me.
“I finished the Tobias and angel painting,” Leonardo says abruptly.
I stumble. “When?”
He grabs the back of my doublet, keeping me from falling. “When you were explaining to Lupa the difference between butter and gold during breakfast.”
That sly stronzo! Master Verrocchio told me to finish the painting. If Leonardo did it instead, then the money from the commission will all go to him. Was this his plan the entire time? Distract me until the old angel died, and then swoop in to steal the glory and coin for himself?
This close to his face, his stupid freckles look like gold dust. The observation is a stone in my shoe—I can’t ignore it again now that I’ve noticed it.
Freckles are too friendly, too sweet. How can you hate someone covered in freckles?
I push away from him with a growl. “Thanks for stealing my commission.”
An unreadable expression flits across his face—one that looks awfully like hurt. “I told Verrocchio you did it.”
My heart wrenches in the opposite direction, all my anger and disappointment crashing into nothing. “Why?”
Leonardo tugs a hand through his messy hair, mouth twisting. Only now do I notice the purple marks under his eyes, like he hasn’t been sleeping. He’s wearing the same tunic he wore yesterday, the one with the dark blue stain near the collar. He’s not lying; he was definitely up early.
But he still hasn’t answered my question.
My body winds tighter and tighter the longer he stays quiet. I start to wonder if he needs a physician. If he can’t talk, something is wrong. He never shuts up, even when I beg him to.
His shoulders hitch with a big breath. “Because it matters more to you than me,” he finally says.
Heat squirms under my skin. I didn’t want—hadn’t wanted—anyone to see what finishing this one project meant to me. How much of myself I was pouring into it, how little of a difference it was making.
I scowl up at him, resenting for the thousandth time the few inches he has over me. “I didn’t need your help.”
Leonardo laughs carelessly. “Too late.”
My heart pounds furiously. “What do you want from me? No one’s this self-sacrificing without a reason. What’s yours?”
He surveys me, head tilted to the side. A breeze whips his hair across his face, and I want to push it aside to see his expression.
We work together. We eat together. We’re cursed to spend most of our waking hours together.
But we’re not friends. Friendship means laughter and ease, a slice of focaccia pulled apart by too many hands.
It’s not this itching, wretched feeling of owing someone.
I haven’t had a friend since Niccolo disappeared.
“I’d tell you,” Leonardo says slowly, teasingly, “but I don’t think you’d believe me.”
Frustration slams though me. “Why are you like this?”
Pigeons scatter at my shout. A few people turn to look at us. Leonardo’s smile tangles and falls. “You know what? I don’t think I’ll tell you after all.”
“Fine!” I snap, like I don’t deserve the cold treatment he’s giving me. “Thanks for finishing the painting for me. It was nice of you.”
Leonardo pats my head—pats my head!—and smiles again, bigger, brighter, and more irritating than ever before. “That was a very good first apology. Practice a bit more and I might even believe you next time.”
Oh, damn his need to have the last word every single time! “Did you know that you are the most annoying person I have ever met, and I have younger sisters?”
I can count every tooth in his smile now. “Your compliments could use some work too.” He turns and gasps, grabbing my sleeve like I haven’t just been a beastly shrew to him. “Do you see that?”
Too late, I realize it’s not the sun that’s blinded me, but bronze.
More than I’ve seen in my entire life.