Chapter Thirty-Nine
Too late, too late.
The awful words echo, pounding in time with the thud of my feet down the duomo’s spiral staircase to the cathedral below. Lupa’s sailed west, toward the workshop.
Why is she going back there? Why is she doing the worst thing possible for herself?
Behind us, the shocked priest who unlocked the lantern tower’s door calls for us to stop. It only makes me faster. When I trip and nearly tumble to my death, Leonardo seizes the back of my doublet before I realize I’m falling.
“She said goodbye?”
“Something like that.” The ceramic vial digs into my side with every step.
Why would she give it to me if she knows making one more bargain would kill me?
We hit the wooden door at the end of the spiral.
Leonardo wrenches it open. A black-robed priest jerks up from the altar.
His look of open-mouthed shock is all I see of him before we’re careening down the nave, heading toward the triple set of double doors at the end.
I can’t believe Lorenzo de’ Medici married Clarice here yesterday.
It feels like a lifetime has passed between those two moments, each hour stretching out into a year.
We race down Via dell’Agnolo, toward the workshop, every window in Verrocchio’s house too brightly lit, like wide, staring eyes. We skid to a stop outside the courtyard door. Leonardo lifts the latch carefully, and then we’re standing in the space betwixt the house and the workshop.
No one is there.
“The morning exercises. They’re probably already working,” Leonardo says.
I bite my lip and nod, opening the workshop door. But the space is dark and still.
I tiptoe inside, unease coiling in me. “Where is everyone?” It’s just after or during breakfast time—the start of the workday. Even the candles are still snuffed out, the edges of the room hidden in shadow. “Lupa?”
Nothing.
Leonardo runs a finger down his bargain mark, What the hell is going on? written all over his furrowed brow. I lift a hand, urging caution. There’s a reason for this. There must be.
But then a shadow grows sharper at the back wall, comes out into the light. My gasp of fear turns into surprise when I see who it is. “Master Verrocchio?”
Verrocchio slowly draws closer, a queer expression on his face I can’t quite read. “She’s already gone.”
“Gone?” It doesn’t make sense. We came here as fast as we could.
Lupa’s faster, of course, but Verrocchio wasn’t expecting her: I thought I’d find them mid-quarrel.
I rise up on my toes, searching the farthest corners of the workshop, as if Lupa’s lurking just out of sight, waiting to play an unfunny prank on us.
“That’s what I said, no?” The column of Verrocchio’s throat pulses. Too late, his expression clicks into place.
It’s one of fear.
Iron hands clap down on my shoulders.
The workshop floor is suddenly filled with Medici guards.
There are six of them, each one standing in a pool of shadow except for the one who grabbed me. The other five stand eerily still, faces hidden behind pewter helmets. I tear away from the guard with a snarl.
He doesn’t try to touch me again. But the rest of them join him, stepping out from their hiding place to form a gleaming, deadly line.
Acid floods my insides, hot and horrible.
An ambush. But no. Lupa had to know I’d follow her. She wouldn’t lead us into a trap on purpose. And six guards feels like a number you’d send to capture a dangerous, successful murderer, not a former artist apprentice who once accidentally stabbed himself with his own palette knife.
Unless they think I’m more than I seem.
The guards step closer. Leonardo sucks in a soft breath. I plant myself between the guards and him, thumb caressing the empty sword scabbard at my belt. It’s nothing, laughably useless. I’d be better off throwing paint in their eyes. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.
But the table that holds the paints is curiously clear. I blink, frowning. The last time that table was cleared off was the moment it was newly built into the workshop. There are crusty smears on it older than I am.
“Why are they here?” Leonardo demands, any authority in the question undermined by the crack in his voice. “Where’s Lupa?”
Verrocchio crosses his arms, then uncrosses them, eyes flicking to the guards behind us. “The Medici took her away. She was defective.”
“Defective?” Anger sizzles through me, hot and smoldering. Only things are defective. Lupa isn’t quite a person, but she’s far from a thing. “You know better than that.”
Leonardo’s fingers are light on my elbow, holding me back. “Why would the Medici take an angel away? Shouldn’t it have been the church?”
Verrocchio shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says, confused, then frightened. “I don’t know!”
A sharp breath straightens my shoulders. My master doesn’t know about the demons.
It shouldn’t matter to me right now, but it does. He didn’t let the Medici into his workshop. He’s not working with them.
Verrocchio’s eyes meet mine for a breath. Then they flick behind me.
I tackle Leonardo to the ground just as the guards try to seize us.
But I’m not the only one moving.
“Leave them alone!”
Giorgio’s face looms overhead. He’s leaning over the narrow balcony that runs along the workshop’s second-floor gallery. The other apprentices’ faces pop up beside him, some fierce, some frightened, but all of them set with a frantic resolve.
I push myself up, gaping. How long have they been lurking there? Where was this fierce determination when it came to their lessons?
As if he can read my thoughts, Giorgio winks, an expression he absolutely, one hundred percent learned from Leonardo. “Now, everyone!”
As one, they upend the buckets they held behind their backs on the guards’ heads.
The guards shout and shriek as watered-down paint pours through the holes of their helmets.
Some of them double over with coughing; some rip their helmets off and rub frantically at their eyes.
Verrocchio screams and leaps onto a stool to prevent a flood of paint from sloshing over his very expensive boots, only to scream again when he realizes it’s ultramarine paint, one of the most expensive pigments in the entire workshop, used exclusively for Virgin Mary commissions.
He grabs his face and howls, “Anything but the blue!”
Leonardo’s freckles are sprayed with green flecks, an awed and delighted grin spilling across his face. He kisses his pointer and middle finger and turns them toward the balcony.
Giorgio salutes him and tosses another bucket over the railing. “Lupa warned us something like this might happen before she was taken away. Go get her back!”
We leap to our feet, sidestep the howling guards, and escape to the street.
Pedestrians gasp and leap aside when we pass them. I can only imagine what they think when they see us, dripping with a rainbow of colors, holding hands and running like our very lives depend on it.
They probably do.
“Here.” I tug Leonardo down an alley filled with drying laundry. His eyes pop when he sees me tearing off my shirt. Then my trousers. “We’re too easily spotted. We need to change.”
A beat later, he starts shucking his clothes too. “Right! Of course.”
I’m not sure the end result is less conspicuous than before. Leonardo’s trousers barely go below his knees, and his red-blond hair might be permanently stained green. He examines one of the tresses and lets it fall with a resigned sigh. “Now what?”
“We need to find Lupa.” The fact that the Medici took her and she warned the other apprentices to look out for them confirms my hunch that there’s something she hasn’t told us yet.
“Where would they take her?”
That I’m less sure about. “The Palazzo della Signoria?”
“I don’t think they’d take her somewhere a lot of people have access to,” Leonardo says.
“The Medici wouldn’t want anyone to see her captured.
Angels are still sacred.” He paces across the alley’s narrow length, one finger tapping his chin, the other hand drumming along his long thigh in those ridiculous, too-small pants.
I look away, trying not to be distracted. “I don’t understand how they were able to take her in the first place,” I say. “She has powers. She can fly.”
“Which means they’d take her to a place where no one could see her struggle.”
A chill sinks into my bones that has nothing to do with the boots stomping through the streets or the distant shouts of “Avete visto due ragazzi ricoperti di vernice? Sono dei ladri!” Florence is a city of a thousand secret doors. Lupa could be anywhere.
A soft mroow? distracts me.
A gray-and-white cat perches on a rubbish pile. Its tail lashes over its feet, head tilted to the side in a way I don’t like at all. Another drops from a second-story windowsill.
Leonardo kneels. When his knees hit the cobblestones, the first cat rushes over and brushes its head against him, circling him entirely before prancing to the next intersection. “The cats!”
“What about them?”
He gestures to the gray-and-white one. “I think they want us to follow them.”
“Cats don’t have thoughts.”
But even as I say it, the second cat joins the first. And then a third pops out around the corner. They watch us with uncanny, glowing eyes: so much like Lupa’s.
I braid my fingers through Leonardo’s. “Let’s go.”