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Chapter Forty-Four

LUNA

The limo moves and I’m faced with Serafina.

“Are you all right?” she asks suspiciously. “You just disappeared.”

“Yeah. It’s fine. Carmine,” I scoff. “Power, not magic, he says. Whisking me off is just a ‘thing’ he does.”

“But you’re okay.” She’s not asking. She’s checking her facts. “It’s still a hundred percent you?”

“Yes. It’s me, and…” I take a deep breath and speak on the exhale.

With Serafina right in front of me, I’m ashamed I ever thought it.

“I’m so sorry. I was so mad at you. I woke up and there was blood everywhere, and you were gone and he was gone and my mother was calling me stupid…

” She’s looking at me sideways as if she can’t understand what I’m talking about.

“He fed you an orange. I saw it. I really thought he took off with you so you guys could… you know.”

“Me? With a disgusting strigoi ?”

“I feel terrible for doubting you.”

“It is you!” She throws herself off the opposite seat and engulfs me in a hug. “Only you could find a way to be sorry for that.”

“I am so sorry,” I mumble with my face squished against her shoulder. The car stops three blocks away in front of a slick high rise on Malcolm X Boulevard.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” She knocks on the glass to get the driver’s attention. “Take us around the block. Please, I need a fucking minute.”

The car moves ahead. Serafina lets out a long breath then throws her hands up. “That motherfucker! Now I know why you kissed the ring. He’s charming, I’ll give him that. Oh yes, I should have seen it coming the minute he said, ‘Don’t mention this to Luna.’ No way. Red flag.”

“Don’t mention what?” My blood has turned to ice.

“He said you’d try to stop him, and of course he had me.”

“Had you what?”

“Like this.” She holds up her pinkie and makes a spiral motion around it—wrapped around his finger.

“I saw what he did. He killed—” She breaks apart so hard and so fast, she takes a split second to choke on her spit.

“So many. And I thought, maybe I shouldn’t trust this monster to bring me anywhere.

But the Scangas kept coming and he kept killing and I just wanted to go home.

Do you know what I mean? He promised to take me home. ”

“To Romania?” A line of raindrops courses down the window.

“He said, ‘To my family. To where I belong,’ and I believed him. He spent days telling me he had a secret about me and I was special yada yada, as if I was just gonna collapse into a puddle like.” She flicks her hand in my direction.

“Said he was taking me to my mother’s family, and I believed him.

I kept it secret because he asked me to. ”

Her face melts into tears and she drops her head into my lap, sobbing against my thigh. I stroke her hair out of her face.

“I’m not what they say.” Serafina pleads with me to just believe her. “I’m a regular person. I am not a fucking werewolf!”

Stroking hair away from her wet cheeks, I don’t tell her she’s wrong.

Once a person believes in vampires, it’s a short journey to werewolves.

After that, it’s easy to connect her snarling and growling to her stripping off her white dress on Armistice Night, to her climbing to the door ledge in an old castle.

I have no education in monster and fairy stories, but I know the dangers of the scrub and desert.

I know the creatures that hunt by moonlight.

If Serafina’s anything besides fully human, it’s a wolf.

“He was telling the truth. You are special.”

“He never said the word ‘werewolf,’ okay? Kind of an important detail. And I lied to you and said it was nothing when you asked what I was doing with him in the middle of the night.” She pulls off my lap and puts her forehead to her knees.

“And yes, Luna Americana, you were right to ask. And now I’m so messed up in my head I can’t even run out an open door. ”

The limo stops in front of the high-rise again.

“You still love him,” she says, sitting straight now, wiping her eyes with her wrist. “Does he love you?”

“I don’t think so. It’s like a painting on a wall that looks like the thing behind it. And like, it’s done so you can’t tell the painting from the real thing.”

“ Trompe l’oeil ?”

“That’s how he loves me. It looks real, but it’s not.”

The door opens.

Serafina pauses. “Because he’s a monster?”

“He’s not. I mean, he is, but not that way. I mean, he’s murdered people. So, I don’t know.” I’d gotten used to that, or decided not to think about it as a matter of survival.

“Why did they stake him, Luna? The witches he kept, the way he kept magical things. They staked him because he was nice? They were happy? This guy raised Laro, that sicko who killed Domenico. We don’t know what was going on.”

“ Signorina ,” the driver says, his gloved hand reaching into the car to help her out. “We need to take you across the street.”

“I can’t,” she whispers. “I just can’t.”

“Do you want me to go first?” I start out, but she grabs my arm.

“It gets worse every time.”

I remember how she admitted she couldn’t leave the house after Covid. How the outside terrified her.

“How did you get to the meeting?” I ask.

“I closed my eyes and sang the Italian national anthem. But that’s not going to work this time. I know it. It’s not enough.”

“ Signorina ?” The driver bends down. He’s wearing sunglasses. I don’t want to know what’s behind them, because there’s a black hole where his emotional space should be.

“They’re going to put me in some kind of trance.” She’s squeezing my hand hard enough to hurt. “They did it the first time, from the airport, and I don’t want to. I don’t like it.”

“Okay. We have it. Sing for me.”

“ Signora ,” the driver says, reaching into the back seat. “Please excuse me.”

“You’ll wait,” I say with Carmine-level command, yet I’m surprised when he listens.

I tell Serafina my story quickly, in a voice that’s almost a whisper.

“My father took me on the Cyclone once. It’s a roller coaster.

It’s ancient. Made of wood. It creaks. Like, it feels as if it’s going to just give out.

But I begged him to go on with me. He said I could have ice cream or roller coaster and I picked roller coaster.

So, we were going up and up, and I was so scared.

I was crying, ‘please I want ice cream instead,’ but it was too late.

We were going up forever and down forever.

My dad started singing, ‘Happy Birthday,’ and?—”

“It was your birthday, or his?”

“Neither. But I sang it with him, because that’s what you do .

We sang so hard. The rest of the cars… they must have thought it was my birthday because they started singing it.

And then we got to the top and all I could hear was dear meeee …

For ten seconds, I forgot to be scared, and then it was fun. ”

“Are you done?”

“Yes.”

“What is the point of this?”

“Let’s sing something together.”

“Like what?”

God, what songs would we have in common? I try to think in Italian and come up with something I can sing a few lines of. “I’ll start. Che sera, sera… whatever will be…”

She sings the next line in Italian, and I just do the English right with it.

She closes her eyes and braces her arm against the car frame. Gently, I guide her out of the limo, holding her tightly as we walk and sing, meeting on the chorus. Hugging and crossing while singing is slow work, but the cars wait—probably because we are flanked by two terrifying, shadowy figures.

I look up at the edges of the buildings against the night sky.

Mom took me out of New York when I was twelve and we didn’t return.

Was I ever on this street? The sight doesn’t seem familiar, but the beat of emotions from every direction reminds me of how overwhelmed I was.

How often I was sobbing or screaming. How old was I before I learned to shove it all away?

They’re arrows on the outer skin of my perception. Each one is a little bite. Every prick of attention opens me up a little. Of course I screamed and cried. I was drowning in magic.

“We’re inside,” I say when we’re in the lobby.

She opens her eyes and lets me go.

Without a word, Sam, the blond Beverly Hills lawyer, leads us to the elevator. The last time I saw her, she was in an elevator going down, and when she turned around, she was a man.

“Same person,” Serafina says, chin high and confidence back to normal now that she’s inside. Judging from the shape and movement of her emotions, she’s found a crack in her grief to fit concern about me. “Sam and Sam, same. They change all the time.”

“Ah.” I don’t want to stare, but I can’t help it.

Sam, the man, looks down at me and nods. I can either look away or speak.

“You’re not fraternal twins?” I ask him.

“I’m the same person you met in our Beverly Hills office.”

“So, you’re both?”

“Yes.” He looks back up, watching us in the light-up numbers in the shiny brass panel above the door.

My hand touches Serafina’s. Her pinkie hooks in mine.

“Man and woman?” I ask the back of his head. “Equally?”

“Yes.”

“Which do you like better?” I lean close to my friend. Our eyes meet in the polished metal.

“Both. Neither. They each have their upside.”

“Those your only two options?”

He turns to meet my gaze. “I have a form that’s both at the same time.” He faces the doors again. “I do like that one.”

“Are you really a lawyer?” Serafina’s not so beaten down that she doesn’t seethe through a simple question. I hope she never changes.

“A few times over, on four continents.” The elevator dings, and the doors slide open. Sam steps between the doors and turns to us. “I don’t have to wear heels in this form, so if you run?—”

“You should practice.” Serafina waves him off as she passes him. “You never know when you’re gonna get chased.” Past him, she steps backward into a large living room and opens her arms. “This is where they’ve been keeping me.”

I get out of the elevator and walk into a room right out of a movie.

It’s magical, with warm, frosted lamps lighting just enough of the wood floors and leather cushions.

Shelves are stuffed with old books and knickknacks I can’t take in all at once.

The windows stretch from floor to ceiling, overlooking Central Park longways.

A person could stand here and narrow their attention to just the trees and the southern edge of the park in the farthest distance.

They could pretend they’re flying from someplace far away.

I smell the orange a moment before seeing it nestled in an oblong bowl of fall fruit. I pick it up, hold it tightly. Nothing comes from it. No powerful memories or enchanted arousal. I press it to my chest like a stethoscope. I feel nothing in my heart or between my legs.

How far are we from Carmine now? There’s no way to tell. I lived in Brooklyn and I was too young to know one side of town from the other.

All I know is, he’s too far.

I can’t wait until this is over. I want him to take my blood. I want it so bad.

“Jesus.” Serafina’s looking at me with a tight brow. “He really did a job on you.”

I swallow. She’s right. I can’t even defend him.

“He cut me into pieces,” I say.

“Fucking strigoi .”

“I am incapable of being mad about it.”

She seems to know what I mean. I want to be pissed off, but he cut the connection between my heart and my head. The anger is strictly intellectual, so it’s shallow and powerless.

“I may kill him for both of us,” she says.

“Mrs. Montefiore?” A tall, ebony-skinned figure stands in the doorway, a creature of beauty and magic, holding a ball of light from a string. “The Goddess Vesuvia welcomes you to her Citadel at the Far Edge of the Western Sea.”