At last, the slow shuffling of feet thumping down stairs inside perked a shivering Luce to attention. Daniel exhaled and closed his eyes, relieved, as the brass knob turned. Hinges moaned as the door swung open.
“Who the devil—” The older Italian man’s wiry tufts of white hair stood out at all angles from his head. He had sensationally bushy white eyebrows, and a mustache to match, and thick white chest hair protruding from the V-neck of his dark gray robe.
Luce watched Daniel blink in surprise, as if he was second-guessing their address. Then the old man’s pale brown eyes lit up. He lurched forward, pulling Daniel into a tight embrace.
“I was beginning to wonder if you were going to visit before I kicked the inevitable bucket,” the man whispered hoarsely. His eyes traveled to Luce, and he smiled as if they hadn’t woken him, as if he’d been expecting them for months. “After all these years, you finally brought over Lucinda. What a treat.”
His name was Professor Mazotta. He and Daniel had studied history together at the University of Bologna in the thirties. He was not appalled or bewildered by Daniel’s lack of aging: Mazotta understood what Daniel was.
He seemed to feel only joy at being reunited with an old friend, a joy that was augmented by the introduction to the love of that friend’s life.
He escorted them into his office, which was also a study of varying degrees of decay. His bookshelves dipped at the centers; his desk was piled with yellowing paper; the rug was worn to threads and splashed with coffee stains. Mazotta set immediately to making each of them a cup of dense hot chocolate—an old man’s old bad habit, he rasped to Luce with a nudge. But Daniel barely took a sip before thrusting his book into Mazotta’s hands and opening it to the description of the first relic.
Mazotta slipped on thin wire-framed glasses and squinted at the page, mumbling to himself in Italian. He stood up, walked to the bookshelf, scratched his head, turned back to the desk, paced the office, sipped his chocolate, then returned to the bookshelf to pull out a fat leather-bound tome. Luce stifled a yawn. Her eyelids felt like they were working hard to hold up something heavy. She was trying not to drift, pinching the inside of her palm to keep herself awake. But Daniel’s and Professor Mazotta’s voices met each other like distant clouds of fog as they argued over the impossibility of everything the other was saying.
“It’s absolutely not a windowpane from the church of Saint Ignatius.” Mazotta wrung his hands. “Those are slightly hexagonal, and this illustration is resoundingly oblong.”
“What are we doing here?” Daniel suddenly shouted, rattling an amateur painting of a blue sailboat on the wall. “We clearly need to be at the library at Bologna. Do you still have keys to get in? In your office you must have had—”
“I became emeritus thirteen years ago, Daniel. And we’re not traveling two hundred kilometers in the middle of the night to look at . . .” He paused. “Look at Lucinda, she’s sleeping standing up, like a horse!” Luce grimaced groggily. She was afraid to start down the path of a dream for fear she might meet Bill. He had a tendency to turn up when she closed her eyes these days. She wanted to stay awake, to stay away from him, to be a part of the conversation about the relic she and Daniel would need to find the next day. But sleep was insistent and would not be denied.
Seconds or hours later, Daniel’s arms lifted her from the ground and carried her up a dark and narrow flight of stairs.
“I’m sorry, Luce,” she thought he said. She was too deep asleep to respond. “I should have let you rest sooner. I’m just so scared,” he whispered. “Scared we’re going to run out of time.”
Luce blinked and shifted backward, surprised to find herself in a bed, further surprised by the single white peony in a short glass vase drooping onto the pillow next to her head.
She plucked the flower from its vase and twirled it in her palm, causing drops of water to bead on the brocaded rose duvet. The bed creaked as she propped the pillow up against the brass headboard to look around the room.
For a moment, she felt disoriented by finding herself in an unfamiliar place, dreamed memories of traveling through the Announcers slowly fading as she fully awoke.
She no longer had Bill to give her clues about where she’d ended up. He was only there in her dreams, and the previous night he’d been Lucifer, a monster, laughing at the idea that she and Daniel could change or stop a thing.
A white envelope was propped against the vase on the nightstand.
Daniel.
She remembered only a single soft sweet kiss and his arms pulling away as he’d tucked her into bed the previous night and shut the door.
Where had he gone after that?
She ripped open the envelope and slid out the stiff white card it held. On the card were three words: On the balcony.
Smiling, Luce threw back the covers and heaved her legs over the side of the bed. She padded across the giant woven rug, the white peony scissored between her fingers. The windows in the bedroom were tall and narrow and rose nearly twenty feet to the cathedral ceiling. Behind one of the rich brown curtains was a glass door leading out to a terrace. She turned the metal latch and stepped outside, expecting to find Daniel and sink into his arms.
But the crescent-moon-shaped terrace was empty.
Just a short stone railing and a one-story drop to the green waters of the canal, and a small glass-topped table with a red canvas folding chair beside it. The morning was beautiful. The air smelled murky but crisp. On the river shiny narrow black gondolas glided past one another as elegantly as swans. A pair of speckled thrushes chirped from a clothesline one floor up, and on the other side of the canal was a row of cramped pastel apart-ments. It was charming, sure, the Venice of most people’s dreams, but Luce wasn’t here to be a tourist. She and Daniel were here to save their history, and the world’s.
And the clock was ticking. And Daniel was gone.
Then she noticed a second white envelope on the balcony table, propped up against a tiny white to-go cup and a small paper bag. Again, she tore open the card, and again found only three words:
Please wait here.
“Annoying yet romantic,” she said aloud. She sat down on the folding chair and peered inside the paper bag. A handful of tiny jam-filled donuts dusted with cinnamon and sugar sent up an intoxicating scent.
The bag was warm in her hands, flecked with little bits of oil seeping through. Luce popped one into her mouth and took a sip from the tiny white cup, which contained the richest, most delightful espresso Luce had ever tasted.
“Enjoying the bombolini?” Daniel called from below.
Luce shot to her feet and leaned over the railing to find him standing at the back of a gondola painted with images of angels. He wore a flat straw hat bound with a thick red ribbon, and used a broad wooden paddle to steer the boat slowly toward her.
Her heart surged the way it did each time she first saw Daniel in another life. But he was here. He was hers.
This was happening now.
“Dip them in the espresso, then tell me what it’s like to be in Heaven,” Daniel said, smiling up at her.
“How do I get down to you?” she called.
He pointed to the narrowest spiral staircase Luce had ever seen, just to the right of the railing. She grabbed the coffee and bag of donuts, slipped the peony stem behind her ear, and made for the steps.
She could feel Daniel’s eyes on her as she climbed over the railing and slinked down the stairs. Every time she made a full rotation on the staircase, she caught a teasing flash of his violet eyes. By the time she made it to the bottom, he had extended his hand to help her onto the boat.