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Chapter Ninety-Two

LUNA

After I take his arm, Carmine places his opposite hand over mine. The tremors are small. They come from the shoulder.

I just gave him blood last night and it’s already wearing off.

“You’re not okay,” I say as he guides me into the living room and closes the doors. “Do you need more?” I assume he knows what I’m talking about. “I have plenty, fresh outta the tap.”

“Hush for a minute.”

I don’t want to hush. I want to be of some service to someone I love. This hole inside me needs to be filled.

“Sit.” He leads me to a tangerine wingback chair catching the last shaft of afternoon sun. He sits kitty-corner on the arm of the couch, just out of the window’s light. “I want you to be calm.”

“That just about guarantees I won’t be.”

He fingers the orange, turning it over in his hand before settling on a place to start, but doesn’t.

“When I held a house full of witches in thrall,” he says, “there was a reason. That’s what I told myself.

It was justified. A good thing. I made a deal with them and kept it.

I took their will as the price of a service.

They consented, so.” He pushes his thumb into the rind, and I feel it as a bubbling warmth between my legs.

We look at each other, and I smile, leaning back to surrender to his control.

“That’s how you convince yourself what you’re doing is moral. ”

“Carmine. You’re a vampire. Since when do you care what’s moral?”

He pushes the skin harder, pressing his lips together in concentration. I feel his intention and the frustration of not being able to go through with it.

“They asked to be in thrall. It was done. I benefited.” Another thumb of pressure and I feel it as if he’s touching me. “They benefited. If that’s what they had to agree to to protect them, then…”

I sit a little straighter.

“So it was a sexual abuse protection racket?” The flow between my legs increases as he peels. The bottom is about to drop out of my world and he’s trying to get me off with an orange. I grab it from him. “I know you’ve murdered people and you’re the law, but that’s too much.”

I feel my own fingers on the fruit skin, but I ignore it.

“Protection rackets were useful.” He smirks at my righteousness. “This wasn’t one of them.”

“Good.” I hand back the orange. He puts it on the side table.

“Your mother says there was a demon in Naples.”

“When I was a kid and Mom said there were demons, I thought she was crazy. Then she told me about the twig on the door at the villa, and I figured… that tracks.”

“This demon’s name is Amon,” Carmine says, watching me carefully.

“So he’s real. Great.”

“He isn’t happy where he is. He wants to live.

He wants flesh. And not just to possess it.

He doesn’t want to wear someone else’s suit or live with the decisions they already made.

That’s false to him. He wants to come from a woman, be held in her arms, grow into the man he chooses to be, and then he wants to die. ”

“So, he wants to be human.”

“But a human fetus cannot house a soul, so it cannot be possessed. Amon’s been trying this for millennia.

He discovered that he can turn his consciousness into DNA and implant himself in both sperm and egg.

Then all he has to do is fuck his way into the world.

He possesses the men. He changes their sperm DNA. ”

“And the egg?”

“He implants at conception.”

“Wow.”

“But… a fetus cannot house a soul, so the human uterus expels him right away.”

“A human uterus? As opposed to… what?”

“A Strega.”

“I’m not human?”

“Maybe Strega bodies mistake him for their magic. I don’t know.”

“I am now absolutely terrified of the end of this story,” I say.

“It’s not over.”

“That’s why I’m terrified.”

He laughs ruefully. “He haunted them. He possessed men, hunted Strega, and raped them.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” I look away, waiting for him to say that’s enough of that. But he doesn’t—as if he’s not in the mood to sweat the small stuff. “Did it work?”

“No. Strega are not easy to force, and they know how to end a pregnancy. So in that time, they saw he could not enter a human in a vampire’s thrall.”

Like that, it clicks. “That’s why they came to you.”

“Yes.”

“You cockblocked him!”

“My Goddess, Luna.” He smiles, rubbing his eyes. “Why did you pluck my string, when I would have loved you anyway?”

I’m barely listening to him. All the little compartments in my brain are filling up. “Mom told me Dad was different sometimes. He was possessed. He was a demon. He wasn’t himself. Wait. Am I?—?”

Do I dare finish?

“If you’re part demon, I’m a northerner.”

My hand speeds to my chest. “Praise Jesus fuck motherfucker, thank God.” I’m bent at the waist with a closeup of my knees. “I really thought you were going to tell me the vaccinations turned me demon. Please give me chicken pox and polio instead.”

He leans into the sun to take me by the shoulders and pull me straight. “Do you understand how vulnerable you are?”

He’s so fucking serious. Too serious. It’s frightening. He’s been telling me that I’m powerful and skilled and a real person with real worth. I liked it. I almost believed it.

Now I’m vulnerable and I don’t like it.

“Why? I have a protective coating of thrall.” The joke drops from my lips and disappears before it hits the shag carpet. He lets go of me and leans back into the shade.

“Not if I die.”

“Oh, this is you worrying about tonight.” I wave off his concern as if he’s got this. Easy peasy.

“I can’t just go hunting for a way to save my own life. I was so focused on regaining what I’ve lost, I didn’t see the whole picture. I only saw the knife. When Charles took you into the liminal and he put his hands on you, my mission changed.”

He takes a deep breath, looking at the ceiling. I don’t like how serious he’s being, and he was already a serious guy. In the silence, I fear something worse than a change of plan.

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Charles has to be removed as a threat.”

“Come on, man. For touching me? You sank his boat and ruined his bridge.”

“Yes, for touching you. Because now he knows he can, so he’ll think he should, then he will.

He’ll do it again, first chance he gets.

” He sits straight and picks up the orange.

I have an immediate physical reaction, and he puts it down as if he’s thought better of manipulating me.

“Once I saw Laro with Charles in the liminal, I knew he’d tell his uncle why I was here.

This morning, I got a note from my son, through your mother. There’s a trap in the labyrinth.”

“Are you sure Laro’s telling the truth?”

“No. But that’s also solved by removing Charles.” His thumb tremors, as if that one digit is trying to remind me that he’s not at one hundred percent.

“You should get the knife first, then kill him.”

“What if I don’t make it out? I won’t be able to protect you from him, or anything. So before I go in, he has to be gone. The knife will be there once that’s done.”

“I’m not going to talk you out of murder.”

“I can’t imagine a more fruitless argument.”

“Will it be hard?”

“Yes. He is a king, stronger than most, and most are hard to kill. At the very least, I’ll be able to incapacitate him for the length of your natural life.” He leans forward, elbows on knees. “I wondered if the goddess put us together so that you’d inspire me to kill him.”

“Same as our God.” I scoff. “Getting us to do what he won’t do himself.”

“You blaspheme two gods at once.”

“I’m just efficient. You’re all ‘king does not fight king,’ but you’re going to do it anyway.”

He smiles, then looks down. “That’s the smallest sin I’d commit for you.”

I lean forward and put my hand on the back of his neck. He’s doing this for me, and my job is to talk him out of it, but I won’t waste our time attempting the impossible. He shouldn’t, but he will, no matter what I want.

“What do you need me to do?” I ask.

He reaches back and puts his hand over mine. “Make a choice.”

“Oh, yay!” Delighted to have a bit of agency, I clap once and sit back, tucking my feet under me and folding my hands together. “Lay it out.”

Sitting back, he picks up the orange and hands it to me. He looks me up and down with a gaze so piercing and tender, it both cuts me open and loves what spills out.

“Peel that for me, would you?”

“Sure.” I roll the orange round until my thumb finds the indent he made. “I think you should worry about getting in and getting out instead of—” When I push into the rind, my whole body feels it. I am one shuddering mass of sexual energy. I pull my thumb away. He’s smiling.

“You’ll react that way as long as I live.”

“You’re the worst.”

“I didn’t tell you to stop.”

“Worst,” I whisper. His command is my law, but I do it slowly, so I can hear him over the pool of arousal gathering between my legs.

“I need to know you’re safe. ”

“Okay.” Not knowing what each move will do, I hook my finger between rind and pulp, releasing a warm wave from my chest to my spine, and separating the skin bit by bit.

“The first, best option is for Nunzio to take you to JFK. Silvia and Etta Gargiulo to meet you at the airport in Rome. They’ll take you where even I won’t be able to find you.”

“And then?” Two fingers under the peel, all I have to do is pull it away.

“You’ll know if I’m gone when the thrall is lifted.”

When? Why not if? Why is it all a foregone conclusion?

“No, I mean… when you’re done and you have the knife. How will you find me?”

His posture is so relaxed in that chair, elbow on the arm, two fingers holding up his jaw, that I don’t have the sense to be worried.

“Go on,” he says with a short flick of his eyes to the orange.

Before an oppositional thought enters my head, I rip away the skin, gasping and lifting my butt off the chair.

“I’m either going to be coming all day long or die of scurvy.”

He smirks, but I don’t get the laugh I hoped for. So I pull the orange apart. The acid-sweet scent floods my nervous system with arousal.