Chapter Nine
After Niccolo disappeared, sometimes I’d go to one of the bridges straddling the Arno River and stare into the rush below. I’d wonder if it would be so bad if it sucked me under.
I wasn’t going to act on the thought. But if it happened, if someone accidentally pushed me, I might not try to catch myself on the way down.
Having less than a year feels like staring into the darkness again. It’s impossible to believe that next winter I won’t be here, that each meal I eat or snowflake I catch on my tongue could be my last.
“What’s wrong with you?” Leonardo demands after we spend an entire day sharing a workbench and I don’t complain a single time. “You hate it when I bounce my leg!”
Was he doing that? I barely remember. “Are you… complaining that I didn’t complain?”
He scowls and gestures to me with both hands, as if all of me is the problem. “For the past week, you’ve barely eaten. You’ve barely talked. You barely even work anymore, which is more my thing than yours, by the way. You’re going around looking like someone died!”
I shrug and don’t say anything. With a big, gusty sigh and something that sounds suspiciously like “That’s what you get for being a concerned citizen,” he leaves me.
Being alone doesn’t make me feel better. And he has a point. My moping is becoming noticeable, and I don’t want anyone to know what I’ve done. Magic was supposed to save me, and now that it’s damned me, I can’t stop feeling a bit like a jilted lover, my betrayed shock a shameful secret to hide.
To show that I’m perfectly fine, I make sure to cheer extra loud when Master Verrocchio announces that Leonardo has won the Medici wedding painting commission, although the news makes my heart clench. I couldn’t bring myself to start a sketch for it.
Even Lupa notices I’m not myself.
“You seemed to care about painting the Medici boy a lot, and now you do not care at all,” she says. “Why?”
I kick a rock down Via dell’Agnolo, not looking at her.
I’m heading to one of the apothecaries where Master Verrocchio sources his painting pigments.
It’s on a rougher edge of town, a fair walk from the workshop through narrow streets and hunched stone buildings.
“If you must follow me, can you at least hide the fact that you’re not human?
” Angels aren’t supposed to leave their workshops.
Huffing, Lupa flips up her cloak’s wool hood. “Only if you answer.”
“I didn’t see the point.”
Lupa’s frown deepens. “Why? You are not dead yet.”
I whirl to face her. “Right, but I will be. So why start anything new?”
She blinks, unfazed by my angry outburst. “Humans die so easily, all of the time. If I had not told you how much time you had left, would you still be afraid of dying?”
I’m not afraid of dying! But I can’t force it out. It’s not a lie, but it’s not the entire truth, either.
I’m afraid of leaving my family destitute. I’m terrified of not being able to find Niccolo before I’m gone. But the reason why I can’t do more than glide through the remains of my life like a ghost? It’s so shameful and small in comparison.
I thought I’d have a long, successful career as an artist, and now I’m going to die before I can sign my own damn name on a single painting.
Every time I want something for myself, it’s yanked away as soon as it starts to feel like a real possibility.
Opening my own workshop. Finding my brother.
The moment I see a path forward, a gate with spikes on the bottom plummets in my way.
I don’t know why this keeps happening to me. The unfairness makes me want to scream.
“I’m afraid of failing my family.” ’Tis the easiest answer: one I don’t have to explain.
Lupa brightens. “Because of the gold! The kind you don’t eat.”
Never mind. Some explanation is obviously needed. “They need it to keep living in their house.”
“Do they, though? We could gather sticks for them, like the birds in the workshop.”
“No, bird nests and people houses are different.”
Lupa sighs explosively and crosses her arms. “So many rules! It would be better if there were fewer of them.”
“Undoubtedly.” I gnaw my bottom lip, keen and frightened to ask the question that’s burned through me for days. “On the subject of rules… you said I’m out of life. Would you take my memories instead for magic?”
For all my bargains struck, I’ve never once parted with a memory.
Memory is too delicately stitched into the fabric of being human to be ripped out like a seam.
One of Verrocchio’s artists, wild with grief, bartered away the memory of his deceased wife for the ability to always know which colors a painting needed.
But gradually, his vivid canvases grew dull, and by the end of the year, he could only paint in shades of gray.
He cried softly at his easel, trying to remember what it was that once filled his life with brightness.
He was gone a month later. Verrocchio never told us if he had quit or died, but I had my suspicions.
Lupa shakes her head. “No, they are not different like you think. Memory is life already lived. If I take anything more from you, you will die.”
Angels can’t lie, so I know she’s telling me the truth, but I feel like part of it is missing.
“You should live as though you don’t know you are dying,” Lupa says. “That is what everyone else does.”
“I don’t know how.” My confession is soft, barely a whisper.
She shrugs, as if the discussion of my untimely, tragic death bores her. “Ask the da Vinci boy to let you help with the painting for the Medici if it means so much to you.”
My stomach jolts like I missed a step and everyone saw me stumble. “No jests. Haven’t you heard I’m dying?”
“He likes to be helpful.”
“He likes to be meddlesome. It’s much different.”
Lupa stares. An ancient, thousand-yard, dead-eyed expression we’ve been working on teaching her not to do because it unsettles people. “Be honest with him and he will say yes. You are like a cat everyone wants to pet, but who always has his claws out. Where is the harm in asking?”
I am supposed to drop dead sometime this year, so she has a point.
But what Lupa doesn’t understand is that there are a hundred other ways to die.
Asking for help feels like one of them. Asking Leonardo for help feels especially horrible.
He doesn’t know what it’s like to work hard only to fall flat on his face in the end.
If he had to, Niccolo would ask his least favorite person for help. I groan and rub my temples, feeling sulky and cornered. “What do you know about cats? You barely know how to use a fork.”
Lupa’s pointy teeth bare in… a smile? I’m not certain, but it’s worse than her long, dead stare. We’ll have to go over appropriate human facial expressions again. “If you do not do something to help yourself when we return, I will pee on your bed, also like a cat. Your moping bothers me.”
“Oh, apologies my melancholy offends you, Your Holiness!” I place a hand on my chest, my face remorseful and penitent. “How rude of me. Your time on earth really should be all fun and games.”
“It should be,” she says without a trace of irony.
We emerge into a dead-end piazza. A cracked fountain sputters against the city wall at the end, its marble gray with filth above the water and streaked with green beneath.
The Neptune in the center stares with dull, unseeing eyes.
There’s not a smidge of magic in this sculpture.
Nor care, either, judging from the cracks already splintering through it.
But the fountain’s state doesn’t seem to matter to the dozens and dozens of people crushed around it, all of them filling up kitchen pails with the unclean water. A ripple goes through the crowd at the sight of Lupa, a rolling whisper that makes the hair on my arms rise.
“Angel, angel. An angel has come among us…”
Someone jostles me, sharp elbows against my soft side. “A girl,” the woman whispers, lifting her dusty hands toward Lupa. “The angel is a girl!”
Mouth thinning, I push past her and place Lupa’s hand firmly in the crook of my elbow. I don’t like the shine in the woman’s eyes. It reminds me of the priest’s when he really gets going on a good bender about how all sinners are going to hell.
“We’re going to leave.”
Lupa peers into my empty basket. “You didn’t get the pigments.”
I keep a tight hold on the basket, angling it into the crowd. “Someone can get them later.”
After I get her safely back to the workshop.
A woman in a torn skirt throws herself on her knees, a crying baby clasped in her arms. “Please, angel! My daughter won’t stop coughing. You must save her.”
Lupa recoils. Even in the shadow of her cloak’s hood, her golden irises shine that unnatural green. There’s no hiding what she is here or anywhere else in Florence. “What is this pink squalling thing? It is too loud!”
“Please!” The woman thrusts her baby closer. She uncovers one plump arm and sinks her fingernail into it until the skin breaks. The little girl starts screaming, a thin, high sound that puts a lump in my throat. “Let her bargain with you!”
The crowd spills closer, a sea of desperate faces and grabbing hands.
“We ran out of food already this winter—”
“His leg took a fever—”
“Bargain with me, please, angel—”
The demand grows like a rising tide. One man cuts his forearm, then another. The scent of iron fills my nostrils, a tang I taste as much as smell. The crowd presses closer, scarlet-slick wounds offered to the angel like shining, fat olives.
The tip of Lupa’s tongue runs over her pointed teeth, her awful stare on everyone and no one. “Can you taste it too, Virgil?” She whimpers, her nails digging into my arm so hard, I gasp. “They taste so good.”
The lump in my throat hardens. Giorgio’s terrified face flashes across my mind. I feel the awful spray of the old angel’s hot gold blood on my face again.
Even though my brain screams not to let the angel go, I drop Lupa’s arm and beat the crowd away with my basket. “She can’t help you! Leave us alone!”
I don’t know if Lupa would hurt anyone, and I won’t find out. I told Verrocchio I’d look after her. It’s the one promise I haven’t broken yet.
The crowd scatters, only to regroup just out of range, surly and muttering.
A girl with soot-stained cheeks slinks forward. She sneers at the paint stains on my hands, the bargain marks disappearing up my sleeves. “It’s not fair you artists can make bargains, but we can’t!” There’s a chorus of jeering agreement, the sound like a kettle approaching a boil.
My blood starts rushing. I get why they’re angry, but it’s not up to me who angels make bargains with. “If you’re ill and hungry, there’s a hospital nearby—”
She spits at my feet. A knife gleams in her hand. “We’ll take her for ourselves!”
I throw the basket at her face, grab Lupa’s hand, and run.
I hit the wall of people shoulder-first. Cries of pain and surprise surround us, then a clearing opens up. I take it, zigzagging past the final man who tries to block us with a jagged-toothed saw.
I don’t stop running until we’re outside the towering walls of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. I let go of Lupa and double over on the steps, hands braced on my knees, eyes locked on the street.
The crowd doesn’t follow.
I didn’t think they would, but Cristo santo, the misery in their eyes. Someone that desperate could do anything.
Lupa draws her cloak more securely around her body, her strange eyes flicking from me to where we came from. “What was that?” she demands shrilly.
“Oh, that? We call that one ‘an angry mob.’ ”
She scowls. “It felt bad. Please don’t create one again.”
Right. As if I were the one they wanted. I will my galloping heart to slow. Each too-fast beat feels like a grain of sand tumbling from an hourglass, a pointless waste of life. “Were you going to eat those people?”
She bristles, offended. “Angels don’t eat people.”
“You know what I mean.”
She shudders again, tongue tracing her teeth. “I wanted to taste their blood.” A guilty look thrown my way. “But I wouldn’t have.”
Not quite the reassuring answer I wanted, but I let it go. “I suppose we learned the hard way why angels shouldn’t leave their workshops.”
“Why did you help?” Lupa demands.
I grimace and drag a hand through my dark curls. I don’t like her tone—as if I’m someone who steals food from hungry children or kicks puppies. “They were trying to hurt you. Protecting the workshop’s angel is a vital duty.”
She pushes up on her toes and kisses my cheek. “Thank you.”
My hand flies over the spot. There’s a curious, helpless pull in my chest. “You’re welcome?”
She nods like she’s the one who saved me. “Stop this moping and choose to live. I like you, Virgil Pitti. You’re my friend.”
And even though her words are trite, even though I worry that the workshop’s only nonhuman starting to feel like a friend isn’t a good thing, there’s a little burst of warmth in my chest anyway.
I offer her my arm to take her home. “I’ll try.”