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Chapter Ninety-One

LUNA

While I recount the events of the previous night, Mom eats like a woman low on blood, interjecting and correcting between mouthfuls. I skip everything between arriving at this house and waking up in the late morning. Nobody needs to hear all that.

“And then Mom in the bed, in thrall.”

“To Laro?” Nunzio’s eyes are wide. “And he brought you here?”

“He knew the front door code.” She pushes away her plate. “All this time, I thought there was a chip in my head to control me. I had no idea what being controlled felt like. None whatsoever.”

“Why here?”

“He sleeps in some deep subway tunnel. He didn’t have anywhere else to keep me. Nowhere comfortable. Which… I don’t guess he’d normally care.”

“But you touched his coil. You changed it,” I say.

“That’s…” Nunzio shoots up to gather plates. “Great. I’ll clean in the kitchen.”

Mom laughs.

“It’s not that.” I pull him down to sit. “Don’t make it weird.”

“Me?” He presses his fingertips to his Kelly green, argyle sweater vest. “ I’m making it weird?”

“Have you seen what you’re wearing?”

He gives me a gentle vaffanculo, hand to inner elbow.

“I’ll tell you”—Mom shuffles her cards—“that poor kid. When I knew him before, he was over four hundred and still…” She makes a whooshing card bridge.

“Way too attached to his father. He wanted to do everything Daddy did, and couldn’t.

Not that I could conceive of the specifics at the time.

” She puts the deck in front of Nunzio. “Cut.”

“I don’t wanna be rude.” Nunzio cuts.

“How can I read cards when I’m blind?”

“Kinda.”

She flips a card. It’s a simplistic green smiley face. She does not turn her face to it, but lays her hand on it.

“Laro was jealous of me. Little me. I took his father’s time and attention. He was a full blood-sucking vampire and I was a threat to the one thing he loved. His father. I thought Laro was my friend.” She slides it inside the deck and combines the two stacks. “He despised me.”

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“You keep trying to exonerate me, Lunagirl.” She shuffles. “And I appreciate that. So…” She slaps the deck before me. “Three.”

“How can you see the cards?” I ask, cutting three stacks.

“Present.” She touches each pile then flips the middle one. It’s a golden spiral with a hand reaching for it, again in a more simplistic rendering than any other reading.

Mom touches it and smirks. “As he was finishing with the blood-lock, I found his coil. Gorgeous thing, just protecting his love from ever existing, and I remembered what you told me. So, I grabbed it. It was fucking fragile. Poor kid.”

“So, he loves you now.”

“Enough to be very angry at Charles for doing this to me. And I’m in thrall.” She plays with the cards without flipping any. “You’d think one would cancel out the other.”

“I’m sorry. It doesn’t. I know how all this feels.”

“Do you? Carmine feel like a son to you all of a sudden?”

“Uh, no.”

“I know Laro’s a problem up and down. I see him for the fucked up little shit he is.

And I’d do anything for him.” She puts her palms on the table and leans back.

“Forget that. Not relevant. I can’t tell you anything he explicitly told me not to tell you.

But I can tell you what I know. What the cards tell me.

” She feels for the stacks. “It took a few tries to find the right command. In the end, he told my hands to see what my heart could feel, and it worked.”

“So you read them with your touch?” I realize the pictures are simplified so a blind woman can read them with her hands.

“Yes. I need practice. Past or future?”

“Past.”

Mom feels for the leftmost stack and flips one. It’s a sprig of rue on fire. She flips another. A girl by a tree. Mom fingers them, frowning.

“That’s our fig tree,” Nunzio says.

“No shit.” She sits back hard, as if she doesn’t like this at all.

“Vampires can control demons to use their powers—for moments, sometimes minutes, before the demon escapes. Humans can’t control them at all, obviously. Even Strega are controlled. That fire, when you consider that the hearths didn’t consume, did you ever wonder where it came from?”

Of course I did.

Did I?

Is she going to call me stupid? She should.

“Anyone who wanted to stake him would have brought fire,” I say.

“Smart girl.”

“What about the future card?” I ask.

She feels for the third stack, flips it, and runs her fingertips over a woman with a voice of fire.

“I know already,” Carmine says from the doorway. He looks poorly rested, but well-fed. He still loves me. He isn’t forced or compelled. He loves me.

“Big one,” Mom says.

“Hello, little one.” He takes an orange from the bowl. Drops it. Picks it up with his other hand. It stays. “Nunzio, I texted you some instructions.” He seems very cold and distant, watching Nunzio grab for his phone.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Carmine, like an old school gentleman, holds out his right arm to me. “Come.”

Like a woman in thrall, I obey.