Page 7

Chapter Seven

Next to me, I feel Paolina slip and catch her before she falls. The stone floor of the sewer is treacherous.

It’s too dark. The floor is slippery. We are lost.

“Grazie, Captain,” she says warmly.

“That’s enough of that.”

It may be morning. It could be midnight. We are too deep for the street grates, but not the deep grates that don’t lead outside. The only sound besides Agata’s sobs is the constant trickle of water from them.

“We have to stop.” Paolina comes to the front of the line, where I’m feeling along the wall, and whispers, “Tinoro’s asleep on his feet. Isabella slipped and almost fell into… I don’t know. Someplace deep.”

We hit a corner and stop to eat bread in the silent dark. I feel around for Tinoro and find him at the end.

“Hey,” I whisper. He doesn’t answer. “The gun.”

“That thing,” Agata says. “That murdered Lucia. It was?—”

“Hush,” Paolina hisses.

“Give it to me.” I feel the steel tube across Tinoro’s lap, but the moment I touch it, he pushes me away. “I need to load it.”

“Do you think that monster needs light to see?” Agata asks.

“No.” Paolina’s whisper is as hard as the floor. “It doesn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I know monsters.”

“It was that Bourbon bastard who gave them permission,” I add, then lower my voice for Tinoro. “Let me do it.” I put my hand on his cheek. It is cold to the touch. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Yeah. Fine. I’m fine. We protect the women, yeah?” He loosens his hold on the rifle.

“Of course.” I load the rifle in the dark, by touch and scent.

“Was it the Bourbon bastard?” Paolina says to me. “You think God didn’t have a chance to put Jesus in his heart and stop him? He let the walls be breached. He owns these murders. Every broken bone. Every rape. God allows it. The serpent has won.”

“We haven’t seen one of his kind since I was a child,” the innkeeper says.

“Demons live in the bodies of men.” Agata agrees with Paolina.

“That thing isn’t a demon,” Isabella says. “It is flesh and blood. It was one of them that came out of Vesuvius.”

Agata makes a deep squeaking sound.

Paolina hisses. “Stop.”

“They left a trail of bodies behind them,” Isabella continues. “They turned men into bloodthirsty animals who fucked their own daughters to death.”

Agata grabs Tinoro, sobbing. I hear him kiss her and whisper comforting words.

“Enough,” Paolina growls to Isabella.

“You, of all people, know what sucked Lucia dry.”

“You’re trying to scare us.”

Tipping gunpowder into a barrel I can’t see, I have the feeling Paolina isn’t including herself in the us .

“We aren’t so delicate,” Isabella snaps.

“Maybe I am.” I say it as a joke, but the old lady doesn’t take it that way.

“He had you under his spell.”

“I was in control, Isabella.”

“You would have done anything he told you.”

She may be right.

No. She is right. I felt my own will drain from me and hoped it pleased him. He’ll do it to me again, if he finds us.

“How does he die?” I stuff paper in the barrel and find the tamper in the dark. “That’s all I want to know. If he comes back here, how is it done?”

Isabella recites the ways. “A stake in the heart, preferably from a hawthorn tree.”

“Don’t have a stake from any tree.”

“Fire.”

“How much char cloth do we have left?”

“Not a lot,” Tinoro says.

“Completely separating his head from his heart,” she continues.

“So, I shoot him in the neck?”

“If all you want to do is shoot him, you didn’t have to ask me how to kill him, now did you?”

“We don’t have to kill him,” Paolina says. “We just have to fight him long enough.”

“Yes.” I nod at the obvious wisdom in this. “Tinoro and I can fight him while you run.”

“No.” Her voice is hard. I have never heard it so decisive. “I will fight. I know how.”

“Stop it,” Tinoro growls. “Even if he was just a man, you couldn’t.”

“Neither could you,” she spits back. “I’ve fought off men as big as him with my bare hands. What would you do without a cheese knife or your precious gun?”

I hear him get up to go piss in the bloody water flow.

Paolina scoots close to me. “Do not die protecting me.”

“As you wish.” I close the flashpan and clamp the fuse.

“Promise. Swear it.”

“He’s coming,” Tinoro says in a screaming breath. I stand, but hear nothing. “Give me the gun, Carmine.”

“You can’t hold anything straight right now.” I lean into the way we came, calculating where the neck should be on a man a full head taller than me. “Paolina. The steel flint is in the kit.”

She rustles in her skirts. The steel flashes against the rock.

“You still want out of Rome?” I ask her.

“Yes.” The fuse lights on the first try.

“I’ll come with you. If you want.”

She puts the fuse in the lock. “Let’s get out of here first.”

I hear him.

It’s too dark.

One shot in the neck will take off his head.

Forty seconds to reload in broad daylight.

One shot.

“Show yourself!” I add boom to my voice. Real authority, even as my heart is gripped with terror.

I don’t fear death. I fear leaving these people behind for it. I fear being this thing’s puppet, because Isabella was right. He will have me. He will steal my soul and I can’t do anything about it.

No. Never. I’ll die before that happens again.

But what I want is irrelevant. His spell is an umbrella over us. I drop the gun before I have a chance to choose death.