Chapter Thirty-Six
Niccolo clutches his head and screams, his eyes ringed with white and shot through with red.
I lurch closer, wanting to help but terrified to touch him. What if I make it worse?
Lorenzo de’ Medici and two more guards pour through the open door. Lorenzo balks at the sight of me. “You again!”
I sidestep them before I’m boxed in, racing through the door and back into the hall.
Leonardo and Clarice de’ Medici are gone.
I make a split-second decision to go right, the opposite way of the grand stairs leading to the garden and the glittering party.
At the end of the hallway, another door bursts open, and out pour five more guardsmen.
I skid to a stop, choking back panic. The guards from the painting studio pound down the hall behind me; these are racing toward me from the other side, and there’s no way to go.
I have no weapon except the stupid skull-headed key, which will prove beyond a doubt that I’ve been sneaking into forbidden spaces.
I should’ve slipped a knife in my boot; God, even a paintbrush would be more useful, but I didn’t think this through, and now they’re almost upon me.
I can count the gray hairs in the first guard’s mustache—
“Virgil!”
A hidden door thuds open from the wall. Leonardo is frantic, his face ghost-pale.
I dive into the space right before the guards reach me.
Leonardo slams the door shut and kicks a splintered board between the door and the wall.
When the guards slam against it, the board only lets it open wide enough for a single, furious eye to glare at us.
“Come out, ragazzi! We only want to talk.”
“The party is fabulous! What more is there to say?” Leonardo kicks the board again, and the eye vanishes.
We run down the pitch-dark servant passageway.
I hold my breath each time we pass one of the doors leading into the main house, but no one bursts through them.
We stumble up a small staircase, then down another, and then the passage dead-ends at a door.
It opens up to the hay-and-horse-smelling courtyard.
Laughter and music reach us, the din of the wedding on the palazzo’s other side.
How long will it be before the guards figure out where we ended up?
“Should we steal horses?”
Leonardo snorts. “You think I can ride?’ ”
The door from the palazzo bursts open, guards rushing out.
We dash into the street.
Each turn leads us to some new obstacle—chickens, kissing couples, drying laundry—and loses us precious seconds. The heavy footsteps behind us crescendo, angry voices nipping at our heels. I taste blood in every breath.
Unless a miracle happens, we’re not going to outrun them.
We tear around another corner and stop short.
The city wall rises before us.
Yellow stone stacked fifteen feet tall. If I tilt my head back, I can just spy the merlons staggered at the very top.
A curious helmeted head peers down at me from between two of them.
Guards behind us, guards on top of the wall.
My jaw clenches so hard, I see stars.
There’s nowhere to go.
“Virgil.” Leonardo’s eyes dart all around. “What do we do?”
A sour taste floods my mouth. There’s nothing for us to do, but I can’t be the one to dash his hopes. It should only be me caught alone at the end. He wasn’t supposed to be here. This is why I pushed him away. Sodding hell, why can’t he ever listen?
The Medici guards draw closer, bellowing for help from the men above. I hear the shift and clink of armor. Their attention sharpens on us, hands going to blades. Leonardo gives a soft cry.
I knot my fingers fiercely through his and yank him closer, wishing with all of my wild, racing heart that I could stand between him and whatever’s next.
There’s a dash of gold along the rooftop.
I jerk up, but it’s gone.
Gold flashes again, right overhead. A scream pierces the night.
“Watch out!” Leonardo pushes me. A sword plummets to the spot I was just standing in.
Then something far larger thumps to the ground before us.
“Into my arms!” Lupa, her body alight with a green-gold glow. Her hair floats in an otherworldly breeze, the black of her pupils gone entirely in a gold haze.
The Medici guards stop, mouths hanging open. One of them drops to his knees and makes the sign of the cross.
“C’mon!” she shouts.
We throw our arms around her shoulders. Lupa starts running, not away from the approaching Medici guards, but toward them, the glow surrounding her getting brighter and brighter until I have to squint my eyes against it.
Most of the men cower, but one nocks an arrow to his crossbow. He levels it with the center of my chest. His finger twitches on the trigger.
Lupa leaps as the arrow twangs, lifting us up with her. The arrow passes under my feet.
And my feet don’t touch the ground again.
Wings arch from Lupa’s shoulder blades, a million golden filaments burning against the deep violet sky. They flare brighter with each downward stroke, showering little golden sparks on the red rooftops beneath us.
We’re flying.
The whole city falls away. I feel like I’m looking at one of Leonardo’s blueprints, an overwhelming whole broken down into its little details right at my fingertips. Terra-cotta roofs reduced to rectangles, steepled bell towers to marsh reeds.
The only thing taller than us now is the redbrick duomo. Lupa cants toward it, gaining more altitude.
“I’ve always dreamed of flying.” The stars gleam in Leonardo’s overbright eyes. He stretches out a hand, as if the distant lights are close enough to touch.
At least one of us is enjoying this. I cling to Lupa more tightly, feeling like my stomach might fall out of me with each wing stroke.
“You escaped and showed everyone your strange magic. They know you’re different now. This wasn’t worth the risk!” I say.
Lupa’s holding one of us in each arm. She turns her lips to my ear and my ear alone. “It was. It will be.”
Brunelleschi’s great red dome grows bigger and bigger.
Catching a glimpse of the cathedral’s marble walls at the end of a street always felt to me like stumbling across a sleeping giant, yet it somehow seems even bigger from the sky.
Huge white ribs hold up the thousands and thousands of bricks that compose the dome.
An octagonal white marble lantern tower caps the dome’s very top, the highest point in all of Florence.
When Lupa dips toward it, I gasp. “No no no no no, you can’t leave us there!”
Her feet land on the tower’s flat bottom. She lets go of us. I scream and grab one of its marble pillars. There’s no railing. Of course there’s no stupid railing. Why would anyone want a railing around the pinnacle of the entire damn city?
Lupa crosses her arms. Her wings flare, sparks scattering. “I won’t be back until you tell him the truth.”
The blood rushes from my face. “The truth… about what?”
She can’t mean that I’ve fallen for him, right? Because I was planning on doing that in a note. One Giovannia will find among my things when I’m dead. Lupa’s rushing me, and I don’t like it.
Lupa draws a finger across her throat with a raised brow. “Why you really left the workshop. He deserves to know the truth.”
Oh. That. “I can’t.”
It’ll devastate him. There’s no reason for him to know. It doesn’t change anything.
She cocks her head and smirks. “Then good luck getting yourself down.”
And she steps backward off the ledge.
Leaving me alone at the city’s peak to talk about the very last thing I want to discuss with the last person I want to tell.