Chapter Fifty-One
The ballroom disappears like the view beyond a rain-slicked window.
I blink away the grayness and find myself in an opulent throne room.
Dark walls and ornately carved chairs and tables dominate the space, the furniture too large to be comfortable.
A portrait hangs across from the throne—its golden frame the only spot of color.
It depicts a snarling, scaled creature with cloven hooves and curved horns.
The devil reclines on his throne and gestures for me to do the same on one of the chairs beneath him. I move to a seat, except my foot catches on an object.
A demon with too many legs sleeps sprawled under the chair. It’s one of perhaps a dozen at the edges of the room. I watch the drowsy rise and fall of their sides, freezing like I’ve stumbled into a den of slumbering wolves. One more noise, one more step, and they’ll wake up and tear out my throat.
“They’re in Florence right now, aren’t they?” I whisper. Their bodies sleeping here; their souls, or whatever passes as a soul for a demon, down on earth. The opposite of Niccolo.
The devil frowns, annoyed I’ve guessed right.
His appearance has changed. His skin is fairer, his hair now a cascading gold curtain.
He reminds me of angels painted in the churches, blond, beautiful, terrifying.
The part of me that’s all instinct and no thought doesn’t know whether to shiver from fear or desire.
He wants you to find him agreeable, I remind myself fiercely. He doesn’t want you to fight him.
The devil smirks deliberately, and I flush, knowing he can see all my thoughts as plain as written words. “Do you think me a fool? Of course I know the Medici are liars. All humans lie.”
Flames suddenly erupt at the throne’s feet. I inhale sharply, shoving away from the table. Where’s Lupa? I don’t like the final look she gave me. “Why not take away their power, then? You’re a king. Surely you can outwit them.”
The devil’s cold eyes pass over me, a feeling like walking under icicles gathered thick and dangerous on winter eaves. “Who says I haven’t?”
He snaps his fingers, and the image out the window changes. The river of souls that ferried me here. But the water looks different this time. No longer calm, but foaming white, rising higher and higher each second.
“I don’t care about the Medici’s lies, because I led them to believe they could control me. Portraits, hosts, tethers, bargains. They think they’ve won, but they’ve always been wrong. For generations, they’ve helped me accumulate the souls I need.”
I take a step back. “Need for what?”
“To pass between worlds. Earth is wasted on you lying, small-minded mortals. I’ve lived for centuries and judged your sins.
” A sly, curving smile lifts his mouth. Pointed teeth break his human facade, a crack in his elegant armor.
“Your mortal lives are but a spark in the infinite darkness, and you spend your brief time lying and cheating and killing for scraps of power. You are born into beauty and wonder, and devote yourselves to ugliness and cruelty. It is an outrage!”
He gestures to the window, which has become an image of the ballroom with its rotting splendor. “Tell me, if you could be here or on earth, which would you choose? Would you fight fang and claw for another second of the sun on your skin?”
It’s not the sky I see but him. His red-gold hair all fire in the sunlight. It’s a question without an answer. If I could bask in the light of Leonardo’s love for a single second longer, I’d do anything.
The ballroom fades, the river view returning.
“That’s what I thought.” The devil stands.
His shadow hulks huge and horrible on the floor—all claws and horns and fangs.
It doesn’t match his human appearance. I shiver, a tendril of fear snaking around my heart and cinching tight.
“I’ll visit the Medici first. I want them to know what they’ve done before they drown. ”
The river surges from its banks. I fly to the window, remembering the eternal drowning power of the soul-filled waters.
But the land stays dry. Water wells from the riverbed but disappears as soon as it touches the banks.
As if it’s going somewhere else.
Flooding a place I can’t see.
“Or before they get torn apart.” One by one, the devil touches the bodies of the sleeping demons. They jerk awake and disappear with a crack of fire.
Into distant skies.
The edges of my vision spot with black. Leonardo. My family. Thousands of innocent people, all there and unable to protect themselves.
“I’m taking Florence at last.” The devil’s human illusion dissolves like paint in water. A muscular body covered in scales and fur, legs ending in cloven hooves, hands curling into sharp claws. “Your soul is the very last one I need to get there.”
The devil towers over me like a stained glass window. He doesn’t touch me, but he doesn’t have to. His power is a vise, and I’m a grape betwixt two thick fingers. Any more pressure, and I’ll burst.
“How does it feel, knowing your friend betrayed you?” A flame-slicked smile leers.
It takes me an agonizing moment to understand he means Lupa.
Lupa, with a dark trickle running down her chin in the workshop’s corner.
Lupa, her eyes flashing pupilless and predatory in the dark.
Her too-sharp nails and too-pointed teeth.
I think of the she-wolf I named her for, how she rose, ghost-pale and growling.
How my brother and I fled before the promise of danger became real.
Didn’t Verrocchio tell me not to trust her?
Even though my mouth is dry, even though my entire body quivers and I have nothing left, I spit at his feet. “You’re lying. No better than a mortal, are you?”
The devil rears back, flames burning in the sockets of his eyes.
And the world becomes pain.
A headache cleaves my temples. Nausea surges in my gut, then sick splatters my feet. His power overwhelms me. I scream, falling to my knees, every nerve inside me shredding.
“I have seen your sins, Virgil Pitti, and you disgust me! You are sick with envy, gluttonous for recognition. You let fear make you small and mean, a rat biting at the hand that moves to crush it. You are nothing. No one. The world is full of millions like you.”
I curl into a ball beneath the weight of that horrible voice. Fire rages all around me, inside me, the soul-blackening truth of the smallest parts of me impossible to run from.
Everything he says is true. I let fear turn my heart to ice. Put up walls to keep everyone out even as I was desperate to let someone in. Jealousy festered in me like an oozing wound. I wasted my time dwelling on the ugly, cruel darkness.
But would I have ever recognized the light without it?
Even though my bones still shudder, even though I’m drenched in stinking sweat and fear tears through my veins like glass, I lift my head.
“You’re right. I was nothing.” His stare burns, but I don’t see it. I’m a world away, inside a future that’ll never come to pass, in an ivy-faced home filled with art. The freckled, smiling boy at the center of it all. “But I was still someone’s entire world—something you’ll never be.”
And then the devil roars.
The sound is a furnace blast, a scorching wave of sorcery. The blistering pain welts my skin, peels it from my very body.
It lasts only a second. I return to myself with a sob, still clutching my pounding head. The devil’s monstrous form shrinks to a man with golden hair and a livid red face.
“You insolent mortal!” His scream lacks the echo of power, the skull-crushing might of his rage.
He lifts me by the collar and slams me against the wall.
I cry, shoulder crunching. He puts his face close to mine, his breath meat-rancid like a dog’s.
“I’m going to relish swallowing every shred of your rotten soul. ”
His fangs plunge into my neck.