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Chapter Thirty-Five

LUNA

In the basement of the burned house, Corrado sits at the long table, but he’s not eating lentils. He’s sallow, drawn, sagging, watching over Ferrante, who is laid on that table, still as death.

“Is he…?” I let the question falter at the end.

“Stasis,” Nunzio whispers, then raises his voice for Corrado. “I brought you figa . I’ll peel ‘em, but I can’t eat them for you.”

“ Grazie ,” Corrado says flatly, then turns just enough to put me in the edge of his vision without losing sight of Ferrante. “ Ciao , Luna.”

His hope is stretched thin under the pressure of the panic inside it. There’s nothing else. No love. No anger. No other shapes surround him. His emotions have been concentrated into these two hostile impulses. One will win.

People usually flatten before they explode, but that’s not what sticks in my throat.

Corrado’s emotional state isn’t exactly the same as mine. I can’t see my feelings the way I can see other people’s, but I can visualize what they would be, and the direction, the colors, the way they relate to one another.

Corrado’s shapes are exactly like mine would be.

The pain is deep and directed outward, to the source of our thrall, the source of the film tightening around it. Ferrante’s incapacity is causing Corrado’s panic, and Ferrante’s thrall is containing it.

If anything happens to Carmine, this is my future. I will be drawn, and pale, and racked with anxieties I cannot express.

“Corrado.” I put my hand on his shoulder. When he whips his head around to look at me, anger floods every other emotion. I pull back my hand.

“Carmine did this.” He pulls the sheet away from Ferrante’s arm.

I have seen burns. When I volunteered at the emergency room in Brawley, I saw a man come in from a meth kitchen, screaming and wild in an all-consuming pain that was so unbearable to watch, it was unimaginable to experience.

The arm was wet, bloody, with white fluid at the edge of where the blackened skin curled around itself.

This is not that. There is no skin. No redness. The arm is black and as dry and hard as morning firewood.

“Eat something.” Nunzio hands him an expertly peeled fig.

Corrado puts the whole thing in his mouth and squashes it in his jaw. Purple juice gathers at the corner of his mouth.

“Carmine wouldn’t hurt Ferrante,” I say.

“If he hadn’t made enemies of the Scangas, this wouldn’t have happened.” He wipes his lips with his cuff.

“Yeah.” Nunzio peels another fig. “If we do nothing, nothing happens.” He’s being sarcastic, but a vein of guilt about it grows around him.

“He didn’t protect him.” Corrado tucks the cover back over Ferrante’s arm.

“Ferrante was trying to negotiate with guys with flamethrowers. He told them the old king was back.” Corrado’s tenderness is for the man before him, not the old king.

“To keep peace. But Carmine was ready for war. He was…” Corrado shakes his head.

“Yeah.” Nunzio puts another peeled fig by Corrado, but it’s ignored.

“He was what?” I ask when it’s clear neither one of them intends to complete the thought out loud. Still, nothing. I have little to offer the official record, but the silence is killing me. “I heard gunshots and yelling, but I couldn’t move.”

“Dangerous.” Corrado picks away a missed shard of fig skin.

“Throwing guys. Like with…” Nunzio makes a pushing gesture. “Not even touching them. From ten feet away. Standing on top of the wall, he just picked up five with his mind or something, and let them drop like… boom.” He lets his head drop back again. “And the flamethrowers. Took care of those.”

“Only after one hit my Ferrante.” Corrado touches his vampire’s face.

“Red fire came right out of his hands.” Nunzio holds out his palms.

“What?” I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

“He made a wall of fire with it. Then he went around and personally made it so there wasn’t anything left to bury.”

Carmine did this. Carmine the wounded. Carmine the staked. Carmine the vampire who required his wife’s consent to bite her throat.

Consent that, in the end, I gave him.

“My blood made him that way,” I croak. Should I be proud or horrified? Whether I like it or not, I’m both. “My blood killed those people. Don’t blame him.”

My brain is disgusted with the sounds my mouth is making.

“The Scangas came here for a war, Luna.” Nunzio picks up the peeled fig and seems to consider eating it. “They got a war. Domenico brought them here. He knew what would happen. Laro just got to him before he could see it.”

“I’m sorry.” Now my mouth is disgusted. It resists what my mind is forcing through it. No one here forgives me. I didn’t do it. I just sat still long enough to be drained. “How do you guys stand it?” I sit across from Corrado—the vampire in stasis making a barrier between us. “The thrall?”

“Does it hurt everywhere?” Corrado asks.

I nod. He looks to Nunzio, who puts up his palms to keep away our questions.

“I just got made. You guys got dragged down into I don’t know where,” Nunzio says.

“I feel him inside me.” I press my fist to my sternum, and Corrado nods with empathy.

“He’s there, but the fact that he’s away from me, it hurts.

The distance… like, almost so bad it’s physical.

I want to take my heart out of my chest. And I know, in my head, that it shouldn’t.

I barely know the guy. He’s a fucking vampire, which is already…

hello, I shouldn’t want him so bad. And he was so cruel. I shouldn’t even feel a tenth of this.”

Nunzio eats the fig with a look that asks if I’m stupid or blind, when he knows I’m neither.

“You let him walk out of here with Serafina,” I say. “How do you know he’s not going to hurt her?”

“I gotta explain thrall again to you? Now ?” Nunzio sees right through me to the change Carmine’s made inside me, as if he shouldn’t need to explain this. He doesn’t.

“We have to find him.”

He gives Corrado the peeled fig. “We’re staying here.”

“Like hell.” I stand.

Nunzio stands, and he and I square off. He’s a big guy. I should be scared, but he’s been tasked with protecting me. He won’t touch a hair on my head.

“He looks a little better, don’t you think?” Corrado says from another world away.

“Take it up with him when he gets back,” Nunzio says to me.

“What if he doesn’t come back?” I practically choke on the idea.

“He’ll be back for your blood.”

That’s right, of course. Serafina isn’t a Strega. It was my blood that made him powerful enough to make fire with his hands, to throw men without touching them.

Corrado sits straight as an arrow, as if realizing something.

“Your blood.” He says two words because he doesn’t need to say more. What runs through my veins could heal the center of his universe. “I wonder if?—”

“No.”

“Just a drop.” Corrado comes toward me with his hands up as if he means no harm, but he’s not thinking gentle thoughts. Part of him is being silenced for a greater purpose. This is the mafia soldier who beat men for money.

What does my consent mean against this level of desperation? What wouldn’t I do for Carmine if the roles were reversed? I back away. The roles aren’t reversed. I do not consent.

Nunzio fingers a ripe fig, pretending the conversation is of no consequence.

“Corrado. Buddy. I don’t want to have to kill you.” He drops the fig into a bowl. He says the rest in Italian, and though I don’t understand it, the words come out more slowly, with definition around each syllable. Nunzio’s emotions have never looked so icy.

Corrado sits down with his hands out again. He won’t do me any harm, this time.

“We’re gonna go.” Nunzio stands. “Don’t get up.”

“We’re good, right?” Corrado asks.

“Yeah. We’re good.”

They bump fists, and we go.

Once we’re outside, I ask Nunzio what the fuck just happened.

He shakes his head. “We gotta keep an eye on him.”