“What’s happening?” Nico asked, and he spoke aloud. He looked down at his hand and lifted it; Volpe had let his control slip. In his other hand, Nico still clasped the knife that had slashed Geena’s arm and his own palm, and he moved to throw it away. His muscles cramped, and it felt as if the bones of his arm had fused into glass. One wrong move and they would shatter.
“No!” Volpe roared. For a second his voice was as loud as the increasing disturbance in the chamber. He dragged Nico to his feet and took control again, complete control, and Nico was shoved deep like a body being stuffed down a well. “It’s all wrong!” Volpe screamed, but this time the chaos around him was louder.
Still he let Nico see, and hear. Behind what was happening all around them in the chamber—the violence of an earthquake, with the echoes of something very different—Nico felt a simmering fury waiting to burst from the man who had stolen him away.
The fire in one of the braziers went out suddenly, and Nico thought of that buried chamber, the wall collapsing, and the stinking waters finding their way inside. But there was no water here, only dust and chaos. The air itself shook, bounced from wall to wall, a series of shock waves crossing and colliding, and Nico’s teeth thrummed in his jaw. His hair stood on end as he turned to run for the door.
“It didn’t work!” Volpe screamed. Nico froze again, muscles cramped, and he became a statue while everything around him seemed to move. “They’re already here!”
Nico tried walking, and slowly the blazing pain in his limbs lessened. Its dilution matched the reduction in the violence around the room. Two braziers were out now, but the other two still guttered heroically, their flames soft and blue as if there were not enough oxygen in the air.
“What … happened?” Nico rasped, and then the fury he sensed exploded upon him, and from him.
“We were too late!” Volpe growled. And Nico found himself running at full speed, head down, toward the solid stone wall.
Geena moved through the city, guided by nothing discernable or definable. Leaving the stolen boat tied to a wooden jetty, she ducked through a rose-smothered archway and emerged into a small square. There were a few people here, milling around a restaurant busy with the early dinner crowd—Americans, mostly. Europeans ate much later. The diners spoke in strangely subdued tones, and she felt oddly unnerved by their presence. She skirted the square and hoped they did not see her. There was no fear that she would be recognized—the chance of her knowing anyone here was remote—but she felt involved in something so bizarre that the company of casual strangers seemed repellent. They would nod a greeting or comment on how warm it was, meals still heavy in their stomachs and eyes softened with wine, and somewhere Nico was in terrible danger. His life hung in the balance; she was certain of that. She might well be his only hope. Muttered platitudes had no place this day.
And still she sensed something following her. On the canal, she had paused in her paddling a dozen times—once to move aside as a water taxi chugged by, the rest simply to drift and listen. The dip and splash of the oars soon became soporific, but she needed to remain alert. She never heard anything behind her that indicated pursuit, nor did she see anything. And that convinced her more than anything that she was being followed, though not by anyone she could see. It felt as if someone remained just out of sight, always hidden behind the last turn in the canal.
She had checked her cell phone, floating in the middle of a narrow canal that was usually bustling during the day. Two more texts from Domenic, the last one over an hour before, and she guessed he’d given up for the day. No more voice mails. If he’d found her trail and was somehow following, surely he would try to call her, ask her to wait for him? Surely he’d let her know?
She left the square and headed along a narrow alleyway between buildings. At the first doorway she stopped and crouched down behind some rubbish bags. She smelled rotten food and musty clothes, heard the secretive rustlings of some of Venice’s huge rat population, but no one entered the alley behind her.
“Nico?” she said softly, just in case. Speaking his name vocalized a truth she did not like—she was a little scared of him. It was a repulsive idea, because she was certain that he needed her now more than at any time in the past, but all this strangeness surrounded and came from him. Something he’d done down in that Chamber of Ten had initiated this—touching that urn, and the slick material it had contained—and though she could not find it in herself to lay blame, she did attach responsibility. She wanted to help him, but she was quietly terrified that he would not be willing, or able, to help himself.
No one followed her into the alley, and neither did she receive any more flashes from Nico. So she moved on, simply because remaining still no longer seemed a good idea.
She came to a canal with a narrow footpath along one side, where three people sat drinking outside a set of open French doors. She knew this to be a small hotel—there were many in this district, family-run places that spent most of the year filled with tourists who knew the better places to stay in Venice. She heard two American voices, and heavily accented English from a woman who might have been the owner. There was a small table between them, several wine bottles on its surface, and they each nursed a glass.
Geena passed by, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible but feeling conspicuous. As she drew level, the Italian woman said in English, “Have you heard about the Mayor?”
“What about him?” one of the American men asked.
“Dead!” the other American said, his voice slurring heavily. He lifted his glass and took a drink, and his companion glanced wearily at him.
Geena froze, wanting to eavesdrop but without getting caught. The Mayor was dead? Had he died in the collapse of the building in Dorsoduro? She patted her pockets as though searching for something.
“But how did he die?” the less obviously intoxicated American asked.
“Stabbed to death,” the drunk man said, the seriousness quelling his drunkenness a little.
“In his house,” the Italian woman said. “His wife and daughter found him just before dinner. Tragic.”
Geena hurried quickly away, losing herself amidst the people bustling this way and that. The Mayor, dead? Who would have done such a thing? Why? Her mind was running, trying to decide if these were all pieces of a larger puzzle. Murder and disaster had struck Venice in a single day, and she could not help feeling as though chaos was spreading throughout the city. She looked at the faces of the people she passed and they all seemed troubled to her. Uneasy, as though they sensed dark forces working against them, just out of sight.
Or maybe you’re just projecting, Geena thought, and managed a small smile. But what if she wasn’t merely being self-indulgent? Could all of these things really be unrelated? Memories of the flashbacks she’d been following mixed and merged. Whatever Zanco Volpe had been—magician, murderer, manipulator—he had been first and foremost a politician, dedicated to the city he both loved and secretly controlled.
Stabbed to death, the man had said.
Though she fought against it, and ghastly though the idea was, she had little trouble imagining the knife in the hand of the man she loved; the hand now controlled by Zanco Volpe.
Volpe gave him back his nerves, but kept muscle and bone. He let him feel the pain that damage to his flesh caused, but retained mobility and impetus, exerting a terrible control that left Nico helpless in his agonies. It was a terrible, vengeful torture, and all the while Volpe kept shouting out the reason: