Chapter Thirty-Eight
I blink awake the next morning, rain dripping into my eyes.
And immediately choke at the face three inches from mine.
Lupa slaps a hand over my mouth. “Stop! You’ll wake him.”
Oh, so she’s the one scolding me? “You can’t do things like that!” I whisper-hiss.
Lupa scowls, as if I’m being unreasonable.
Her hair’s a tangled, sodden mess. The sky is gray, sluggish drops pattering across the lantern tower’s marble floor.
In the morning, the drop to the city below unsettles me more than it did at night.
More exposed. It makes me want to cover sleeping Leonardo more fully with my ruined doublet, the world’s soggiest blanket.
One of his arms is still thrown across my waist.
He hugs me closer to his warm, sleepy body, a sweet sigh feathering across my neck.
A tender ache opens up beneath my ribs.
Lupa stares at the place where we touch like she’s tasting butter for the first time. Or seeing a kitten. Or one of her dozens of other firsts that give her that same fervently bright look.
It feels like too much.
I trust Lupa. I’m grateful she forced me to be honest with him. But I’d gladly hurl myself off the rooftop before explaining what’s happened between us to her.
Gently, oh so gently, I ease myself from under Leonardo’s arm. “Have you been here all night?” God, I really, really hope not.
Her mouth twitches. “I gave you privacy.”
Which is very much not a no, though I am squelching like a washrag, so she must’ve stopped sheltering us at some point.
Heat bursts across my face, followed by an icy twist in my stomach.
“You shouldn’t have stayed. You need to leave Florence.
” If the church or the Medici catch her again, who knows what they’ll do to her?
An unreadable expression flits across her face. “Perhaps.”
She doesn’t look well in the weak dawn light.
It pools in lines on her face that weren’t there weeks ago; it barely highlights her dull blond hair.
Her wings are gone, her golden gleam limited just to the rings of her irises.
Did the church refuse to let her make the bargains she needs to live?
Is she starving? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she looks sick. Except… I doubt demons can get sick.
Unease spiders across my skin. “What’s going on?”
She laughs suddenly. “Everything, Virgil, everything.”
She’s not making sense. I glance at Leonardo, half hoping he’ll wake up.
Lupa’s hand shoots out to cover mine. “Don’t wake him. I have things to say to you.”
I stare at the black claws tipping her fingers. They weren’t there before.
“The priest will be up soon to unlock the door.” She nods at one of the lantern tower’s octagonal sides. In the daylight, I see the door seams that were hidden in the darkness last night. “Do you know why demons seek beauty?” she says.
“Because… the devil is an appalling decorator?”
Lupa throws back her head and laughs so hard, pigeons scatter from the cathedral beneath us. Her teeth. Are they pointier than usual? My unease sharpens into fear. “I thought you couldn’t remember anything about hell.”
“I can’t. But when I look at this city, I know I’ve never experienced any of this before.
” Her gaze ricochets between the familiar landmarks: the bell tower with its lovely green and red marble accents, Palazzo della Signoria with its bronze statues, the crenellated tops of the magnificent houses with their hidden wonders.
“I don’t think I came here for the beauty. ”
What did you come here for, then? I want to ask, but I quail away. “Is that why you’re different?”
She shrugs and doesn’t answer.
Cold ripples across my skin. “You’re scaring me.”
She tilts her head—just a little too catlike to be reassuring. “Don’t be frightened. Everything is as it should be.”
Oh, I don’t believe her at all.
The conversation feels like a riddle I’m too dense to solve.
I glance at Leonardo again, but he’s still sleeping, raindrops scattered across his face.
The sweating air has transformed his hair into glorious chaos.
Even if I tried for a year, I couldn’t capture it on the canvas.
Every shade of ocher and red and chestnut wouldn’t do the color justice.
“If you’re in trouble, Leonardo can help—”
She growls, claws nicking my pinned hand. “No! Only us.”
I gasp, soul flinching, a mouse beneath the hawk’s shadow. Even though my body screams to flee and everything feels wrong-sized and uncertain, Lupa has never once hurt me.
She crashed into my life and refused to leave even when I begged her to. She saw what I needed before I could see it for myself. She took my hands and dragged me kicking and screaming through the darkness.
I’m suddenly on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I promise whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it.”
She gives a roll of her eyes and hugs me. Her claws prick through my thin, sodden shirt. “You’re my greatest friend, Virgil. You always will be.”
I squeeze her back, surprised and touched and overwhelmed. It’s so… human, yet also something else, a feeling I can’t quite name.
She presses an object into my hand. A tiny, sealed ceramic vial. “This is a bit of my blood. There’s a second vial inside Dante’s Inferno. Now you can make a bargain with me whenever you want.”
This makes no sense. “I thought you needed my blood to make a bargain?”
Her tongue darts out, dabbing at the corner of her mouth. “I tasted you once. It’ll be enough.”
The hair on my neck ripples. “Won’t one more bargain kill me?”
She folds my fingers back over the vial. “Yes.” Her head jerks over her shoulder, as if she’s heard a noise, but I don’t hear anything. “Don’t make one until I’m gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Frustration kicks through me. She’s being mysterious on purpose, and I hate it. She’s got to let me help her. That’s the entire goddamn point of being friends.
She kisses my forehead, and then her fiery wings reappear with a startling whoosh. She dives off the tower with a sparkling snap, leaving behind nothing but a single golden feather. It burns red, then blackens to ash when I touch it.
I stare at the mark it leaves scorched onto the marble and finally recognize the feeling I couldn’t name when she hugged me, realize why it bothered me.
It felt like a goodbye.