Chapter Fifty-Two
There’s an explosion of green-gold.
I hit the floor with a wheeze. The devil doubles over me, rubbing his mouth like he’s cracked a tooth. I touch my neck, but there’s no wound.
“You won’t.” Lupa storms into the room from a door that wasn’t there before.
Her red dress has become more ornate, silver brocade peering out from the slashes on her sleeves, a gossamer net pulling back her thick hair.
She looks like a queen. As I think it, a silver-and-pearl diadem appears on her head.
She looks at me and winks. “His soul belongs to me.”
To her?
How?
Lupa snaps her fingers, and my pain vanishes. A gentle hidden force lifts me under my armpits and sets me on my feet. I touch my shoulder, tracing the ache of the snapped bone. ’Tis whole and hale. My lips part softly.
The devil scoffs. “Impossible! You collect souls for me. You cannot take them yourself.”
A satin-and-silver padded chair appears across from the devil’s throne. Lupa sits on it, grabs the armrests, and crosses her legs.
“Once, Virgil wanted to make a bargain. He was willing to offer me his very last scrap of soul for it. I sensed it was the end of something, but I didn’t know what.
I took it from him but refused to give him what he asked for.
The bargain was made, but incomplete.” She touches her bodice, the place over her heart.
She pulls her hand away and draws out a glittering golden orb.
Her eyes meet mine, chagrined despite the ancient power pooling in their depths. “I shouldn’t have kept it. Stealing is a crime.”
My mouth twitches. The cakes she loved, the coins from my purse. Lupa was always a thief. “You can keep it.” I wag my chin toward the devil. “As long as it helps you get rid of him.”
Lupa smiles with every single one of her pointed teeth, and swallows the glowing orb whole. A frisson of power pulses, shaking the devil’s portrait.
He rights it with a clawed finger, frowning. “You’ve defied me. And for what? A soul is as common as a worm. I’ll get another soon and make my way to Florence.” His features shift, become uglier and not entirely human. “I should make you a worm for this.”
Before I can shout—before I can warn her—the devil draws a sword from a scabbard he wasn’t wearing a blink ago.
And cleaves Lupa in two.
There’s a burst of intense green. I block the glare, a scream tearing from my lungs that rattles every window in the palazzo.
The sound is still fading when the green glow diminishes.
When Lupa stands.
When I see she’s caught the devil’s blade in her clawed hand.
Gold gathers where the weapon touches her. It sweeps down her arm, building faster and faster, almost too bright to look at.
The devil’s face waxes pale, Lupa’s gleam refracted in his widening eyes. “No.”
The gold arrests me—prophetic and strange. Have I slipped between the pages of a poem, one painstakingly hand-copied and passed forward century after century? “Lupa, what’s happening?”
The devil staggers back. “This mortal named you?”
“Names are different for demons,” Lupa says.
“Secret. Private. Giving away your name gives someone power over you. Earning a new name, though…” She lifts her arms, growing taller and taller.
Her horns appear, curving over the crown.
Golden flames lick the hem of her dress. “A new name gives you power.”
The devil stares at Lupa’s gold gleam with smoldering hatred. “You tricked me!”
“A mortal’s soul, freely given, is more powerful than a thousand souls stolen.” Lupa’s horns brush the ceiling now.
But the devil is growing larger too, his beautiful eyes burning crimson like the heart of a fire. “You think this is enough to best me? I was king of hell when you were still slithering on your belly.”
Lupa grins unexpectedly. “Who said I was working alone?”
She punches through the ceiling.
A cloud of black pours in from the hole. The cat-demons, a screaming, endless horde of them. The devil shouts and lifts his sword again, but it does nothing. Each one he cuts down rises up whole in a moment.
The room flickers once. Twice.
And then I’m blinking at the top of a tower overlooking a raging river.
Half the walls are missing, and an awful wind tears at my limbs.
The sky is red; jagged, silent lightning streaks across it.
The only thing left from the devil’s throne room is his portrait, but the image has become a black, swirling vortex.
The throne room was an illusion, just like the ballroom.
Behind me, there’s a door. The clamor of approaching hooves and feet and paws builds on its other side.
“You call yourself a king, but you’re only a demon like the rest of us.” There’s another flash—lightning?—no, Lupa in a full suit of gold armor. She snaps down her helmet’s visor. “Some of us think it’s time for a queen.”
The devil roars and charges with his sword.
Sparks catch when Lupa parries it with one of her own.
The door shatters behind me.
The demons froth like dark, raging rapids, so fast, I can’t make them out.
I throw myself down and crawl into a corner where the floor meets one of the remaining walls.
I want to escape down the stairs, but I’m afraid I’ll be knocked off the tower if I stand.
Among the demon horde flicker scraps of gold.
I gasp when a woman appears, a baby with red-gold hair clasped in her arms. She looks at me, and I know her smile as well as my own heart.
Leonardo’s stepmother.
Madonna santa. The trapped souls have come to fight for Lupa’s side too.
“Do you trust me?” Lupa seizes my front. She’s panting hard, weeping sluggish gold blood from the armored plates along her side. She sees me look and smiles tightly. “He can’t kill me. He can only take me from this body.”
“What about the souls?”
“He can unmake them, but they knew that was a possibility. I gave them the choice the Medici didn’t.
” She nods toward what’s left of the devil’s portrait.
“I need you to find that in Florence and destroy it. It’s a portal that lets him use his magic on earth.
” Her clawed fingers slip under my chin, bite into the delicate skin.
“Will you do it? If I win, I will free the stolen souls. You’d get Niccolo back. ”
I stare at this demon drenched in gold. Who tricked me. Who saved me.
I nod, eyes burning. “Yes. I’d do anything for that.”
She yanks the gold orb from her chest and blows it to me.
I gasp when it breaks against me and scatters like the seeds of a dandelion. The little pieces sink into my skin, a dusting of embers without the sting. I blink, lifting my arm as it starts to limn with gold.
Just like Niccolo’s trapped soul.
Just like Lupa.
Who shoves me off the tower into the burning sky.