Chapter Forty-Seven
His arms wrap around me. I fall into them like I always do. “It’s you.” Tears fill my eyes. “It’s really you.”
Niccolo flinches. He scrubs away my tears before they can fall. “Don’t cry. It’ll bring them closer.”
“Bring what closer?”
He touches a finger to his lips and motions for quiet. I try not to let it bother me, how we’re finally together and he’s already telling me what to do. “We’re not the only things here.”
He’s got the same black curls tumbling over his forehead, the same heart-shaped scar on his cheekbone. The gold gleam dances across his skin, growing livelier. It’s as if my being here has awakened his soul. As if he were a sleeping cinder until I touched him.
He grabs my wrist, forcing me to look him in the eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ve missed you for—” He swallows down the emotion. Takes a breath and adds more quietly, “For a very long time. But you can’t feel too deeply here. ’Tis dangerous.”
The fog writhes between us, an unnatural cold leaching warmth from under my surface. “The Medici told me you were desperate to escape your life. That’s why you became a host.” I don’t think it’s true—I don’t want it to be true—but I have to know.
Niccolo draws in a sharp gasp. Then he’s squeezing me so hard, I can’t breathe. “No. Life was hard, but not because of you. Never because of you.”
The words crawl into my chest, into my heart, where a crack I’ve carried for years finally fuses. I nod, unable to speak.
Not letting me go, Niccolo turns so we’re standing side by side, looking at up at the sky.
Lightning crackles along the gray clouds, silent and unsettling.
“The Medici lied. They said if I agreed to work with them for a few years, they’d give back Casa delle Volpi.
I agreed because it seemed simple. A few years of my life for everyone’s else well-being.
I didn’t realize they were lying until it was too late, and when I did… they threatened you all.”
“But why wouldn’t you tell me?” The old hurt squirms its way to the surface again. Second son. Second best. “I begged you to. I could’ve kept a secret.”
“They were working with demons,” Niccolo says.
“I couldn’t let you face that too. When I came to the workshop, there was a guard around the corner.
I said the meanest things I could to keep you away.
I couldn’t risk you following me and running into him.
I’ve regretted it ever since.” His gaze drops.
“That’s why I asked the printmaker to create a new version of Dante’s Inferno.
I thought you’d find the note and put it together. ”
My hurt grows bigger, biting me with sharp teeth, refusing to let go. “You should’ve told me yourself, damn the guard!” If he had, everything would’ve been different. We could’ve fixed it together like we were meant to.
“Virgil—”
“I thought you had died, Niccolo. Do you have any idea how your disappearance has weighed on us? I blamed myself for it.”
He flinches. “Why?”
“What did you expect me to do when you never came home after I told you to leave?” My voice goes hot and high, and I’m too loud for this silent city, but I don’t care.
How could he think he could disappear without a word and everything would be fine?
How could he decide that tearing our family apart was what needed to be done? I deserved a say. We all did.
“I didn’t expect you to do anything. I was taking care of it!
” His face shutters. His glow is suddenly grayer, darker.
The last bit of color clinging to the landscape before a too-early winter sunset.
“But I was wrong. I’m sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing.
” He laughs unexpectedly. “Papà really fucked us over, didn’t he? ”
Father. I inhale sharply and search the piazza, as if his shade already lurks to tell me how disappointed he is in me yet again.
Oh God, is screaming at me from beyond the grave possible now?
Have we moved from a place of metaphor into horrifying possibility?
What if he haunts me forever in this afterlife?
“Virgil.” Niccolo’s hand is on my shoulder. “He’s not here. I promise.”
I nod once, grateful for the reassurance, even more grateful that I didn’t have to voice my fear out loud.
Niccolo speaks again. “I know Papà was unforgivably cruel to you, but he got to me, too. When he died—when I was suddenly in charge of everything—I thought I had to do it alone, because he had told me so in a thousand different ways. When I turned away from you, I knew I should go back and tell you the truth, but I didn’t know how to apologize for hurting you.
” His eyes bore into mine, green at the edges and sunbursts of copper around the pupils.
I could be looking at myself. “I’m apologizing now.
I shouldn’t have shut you out. I was wrong, and I’ve very much paid for it.
Can you forgive me? I love you so much. I never, ever meant to leave you. ”
Years of guilt, years of tying myself in knots over things out of my control. Trying to control them anyway and blaming myself when they didn’t work out. Pushing people away because I thought the brokenness in me was my fault and not the fault of the world that broke me.
I thought I was doing the right thing too. We both did.
“Yes.” I wrap him in my arms, ribs creaking. “I forgive you.”
He hugs me back, body slack with relief.
My throat is tight—almost too tight to speak through. “In Florence, your body—”
He sighs and scrubs a hand over his chin. In this world, his ring is missing. “I know.”
I think of the stranger wearing his face, how cruelly he laughed at us. The fear and rage and terror in his eyes when I spoke his name. “You don’t remember who you are, and the Medici use you to do their dirty work. They’ve forced you to kill people—”
He shudders and presses a burning-hot finger to my cold lips. “You can’t feel like that here.”
“Feel like what?”
“Demons hunt souls.” Niccolo’s voice is low and quick, but even he can’t keep the thread of panic from it. “Feeling too much, acting too human, it’s like lighting a bonfire for—”
He stops abruptly.
An awful, icy feeling crawls over my shoulders. I turn slowly.
The demon-cat from before has returned and stares with gleaming red eyes. Another steps out beside it and sits on its haunches. Then a third.
Their eyes glow like embers, more and more of them burning from the gray each second. Surrounding us.
“Niccolo,” I say carefully. “What happens when demons catch souls?”
His ghostly gold light has dimmed to a barely there caul over his skin. Niccolo has mastered the art of repressing his feelings, but I haven’t. “Oh, the usual things you’d expect. Torture. Dismemberment. Boiled alive in a cauldron of blood.”
I nod, mouth dry. “And souls can’t die, so it goes on for eternity?”
“They get bored. Eventually.”
One of the demon-cats licks its lips and creeps closer.
It tasted my soul, and it wants more. And now there’s Niccolo’s soul beside mine, glowing with… whatever it is lost souls glow with.
Side by side, I can’t help but notice that my brother only has a few inches on me now, the head or so he once held above me no longer there. We’ve wronged each other. We’ve made decisions alone we should’ve made together.
But he’s still my brother, my volpone.
And we were always better at getting in and out of trouble together than we were apart.
“You must be wondering why I’m here,” I say conversationally as we edge toward an alley funneling into the endless gray. The one line from the piazza free of horrible little cat eyes.
“I was wondering, yes.” Niccolo’s voice stays light even as a demon swipes at his ankle.
“I need your help. I’m searching for a demon I met in Florence. She has a plan to destroy the Medici and needs me for it.” We can’t change the past. We were wrong about each other, but if we work together, perhaps we can finally set things right.
Niccolo lets out a horrified gasp. “You befriended a demon?”
“I can handle demons.” I fist my hands and turn my forearms toward him. Each one of my black marks looks freshly cut into my skin, even the oldest ones that faded to charcoal. “She’s not like the others.”
“You grew up.” His face grows sad. “I wish I had been there to see it.”
I bump his shoulder and smile, not wanting to tarnish however much time we have left with more dark feelings. “I had a good example of who to become. Even if he was a bit of an idiota sometimes.”
“Maybe a lot of an idiota most of the time.”
We pick up the pace. The cats all follow, some on foot, some flying from rooftop to rooftop. Behind, I hear the whump whump whump of something far larger than all the others pounding after us. I truly, sincerely hope that Niccolo knows where he’s taking us.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself! ’Tis the law of nature for older siblings to be bested by their younger siblings eventually.”
His mouth quirks. “Oh, is that so?”
“Yes. Giovannia’s become absolutely terrifying. Father should’ve made her his heir.”
His face splits into a wide grin. His glow is so bright now, it’s barely visible. “God, I wish I could see her again.”
Then he grabs my hand and we run.
The demons screech—the cacophony like nails on stone, discordant and jarring, the wrongness rattling my teeth in their sockets. The whump whump whump grows louder, shifting to our left instead of behind us.
The giant cat-demon bursts out from the next cross street.
I gasp, only Niccolo keeping me from stumbling. The cat-demon is somehow even bigger than before, its black wings big as frigate sails. It lowers its head and snarls, tail lashing and punching a hole in the nearest wall.
I duck beneath a flying brick and cut to the right. My bones grind in Niccolo’s too-hard grasp. My lungs burn, on the very verge of ripping.
The Arno River rises before us, a single, small boat bobbing at the end of a dock. But we’re too slow, the demons all too fast. Some already hover over the dock.
WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP!
Fetid warmth streams over my skin. I hit a cobblestone wrong. A sharp, splitting pain twists my ankle.
I fall. My scream turns into a choking wheeze as the air is forced from my lungs.
The cat-demon hisses above me, another wave of its putrid breath making me cough.
I only see the curved claw for a split second before it plummets toward my heart.
There’s socket-wrenching pressure in my shoulders, and then I’m blinking against the explosion of cobblestones, forced to my feet as Niccolo heaves me half over his back.
“Nearly there!”
My brother half drags, half throws me the last few feet onto the dock.
I flip over and scramble backward on my elbows, gasping for air, still waiting for another one of the knife-claws to pierce my ribs.
But the giant cat-demon has stopped. It paces at the dock’s edge, paws a millimeter from the wood. It hisses, tail lashing furiously.
“They can’t come here,” Niccolo pants.
“Why not?” I wheeze out.
A deep chuckle answers from behind.
“Because this dock belongs to me.”