Caravello screamed shrilly, and Volpe stood and pressed the tip of the knife beneath Caravello’s chin.
The old Doge laughed. “A knife, Volpe? Do you really think—”
“A knife smeared with the blood of the new Oracle? Yes, I do think. The magic of Akylis cannot withstand the power of the city itself.” And he pushed, pressing down on Caravello’s head with one hand and shoving with all his might with the other, plunging the blade through the old man’s throat and mouth cavity and into his brain. When he felt the gush of rancid blood around the knife’s hilt he shoved the body aside and stepped back.
The Doge was trying to talk, but the knife held his mouth pinned shut. Volpe knelt before him—he wanted to be the last thing Caravello saw before he died. The corpse started to wither as though the centuries had begun to catch up to it.
Geena breathed hard, each exhalation a grunt building toward a scream.
“We have to leave here quickly and silently,” Volpe growled, and he drew back again, giving Nico control. “I used what magic I could spare to turn attention away, so that we would not be interrupted. But I cannot sustain it.”
Nico slumped before the still-twitching body of the old man, finding his strength. He could feel the slick blood on his hand now, and smell its rankness, like something left in a gutter to rot in the midday sun. Shocked at what had happened, still trying to come to terms with what it meant, he stood and turned toward Geena.
She was standing in the fading sunlight on the top of the steps, moving slowly sideways across the face of the church.
“You … killed … that man,” she said.
“Volpe killed him,” Nico said. “Geena, there’s so much—”
“Caravello,” she said. “He wore tights and a codpiece, and the canal was …”
“Red,” Nico said, and he suddenly understood. “How much have you seen?”
“I have no idea,” Geena said.
“We have to go. He told me … We have to leave now, before anyone can ask what happened here.”
“What did happen here?” He could see that she was descending into shock. Her eyes were glazed and fixed on the dead man. But behind the shock, she was also struggling to comprehend what she had seen, fighting with reality.
“It’s all real,” he said.
“Yes,” Geena said, nodding, and letting the tears come.
“Come on.” Nico grabbed her arm, making sure he’d placed himself between her and Caravello’s corpse. The old Doge was a sad bundle in the shadows, dead, and with Nico’s fingerprints all over the knife jammed in his skull.
“Where to?” Geena asked.
“Anywhere but here.” They were together again, and yet their world had changed almost beyond recognition. Whatever happened now, Nico was determined to protect Geena from the future.
“But first we have to hide the body.”
While Geena kept watch to make sure their crime went unseen, Nico—or the man speaking with his voice—forced the door of an abandoned taverna just off the courtyard by the church. The windows were dark, all the chairs up on tables, and the old wood around the lock, softened by decades of damp, gave way easily.
“You saved my life,” Nico said as he hurried back to help Geena lift the body.
“I saved Nico’s life,” she replied as she took the corpse by its feet. “I don’t know who you are.”
“Still denying? Still doubting?” he replied, hooking his hands under Caravello’s arms.
“I just don’t understand.” She handed him Nico’s phone. “But this is for Nico. I can’t be out of touch with him again. I just can’t.”
They carried the body inside and set it on the floor behind the bar, then left swiftly, both of them glancing around nervously as Nico pulled the door tightly shut behind them.
The deed had been done largely in silence. Now, though, as they hurried away, Volpe spoke to her again, using Nico’s mouth.
“Accept what you know, and what has happened. It’s much easier than fighting. That way, what you don’t understand—”
“I don’t understand how you can be two people, and how what we did down in that chamber could lead to this. If you’re even real, how could you have survived down there? Why did our opening the door cause the chamber to flood? Why were those ten Council members entombed there? How is it that you can speak enough modern Italian for me to understand you? Why did you do those things? Those terrible …”
Geena shook her head and stared at Nico, shivering. There was a stranger behind his eyes. Even though he was bruised and cut, she could still see it was not him. It was his hair and eyes, the mouth she had kissed so often, the hands that had caressed her and held her when she was upset or sad. But someone else watched her from inside.
He ducked into a café and steered her to a table. They did not speak again until they had ordered and the waitress had brought them coffee. Geena drank hers down. It burned her lips and tongue, but she didn’t mind. She couldn’t stop herself from shaking, and shock was settling in. Before today, she had never seen a person die.
“Thank you for saving my life,” he said. Volpe.
Geena closed her eyes and remembered launching herself at that man with the two swords, and how the unreality of the scene had buffered her against the danger she was placing herself in. It had felt like a dream, so unreal that the action had seemed wholly logical and normal. The old man had been about to kill the person she loved, and there had been no hesitation at all. But was that the only reason I did it? she thought. Probably not.
She watched Nico stand. He didn’t walk like Nico, and his voice was someone else’s. That’s Zanco Volpe. A dead man.
“I’m not without honor,” Nico said in that other person’s voice. Geena drank more coffee and turned away.
“I can’t look when you’re talking like that, and you still …”
“Look like Nico.”
She nodded, setting the cup on the table and hugging her arms.
“Everything has changed,” he said in his deep, unreal voice. It was like an echo from history. If a mummy could speak, it would sound like this.
“Let me speak to Nico,” she said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded but unable to smile.
She heard a sigh, and then Nico’s hands rested on hers.
“Geena,” he said, with a tenderness that could only have been him—Nico speaking to her now, not Volpe. “You have to believe.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” she confessed, keeping her voice low.
She glanced at the other people in the café, all of them seemingly content with their lives in that moment. The fading light of the end of a long summer day cast a golden glow just outside the windows.
“I’ve learned so much,” Nico said. “It took me a while to believe Volpe, too, but now there’s no alternative.” He sounded almost happy. She heard his pain, and his fear, but …
“You sound pleased,” she said.
“I am,” Nico said. “Geena, I’m not insane, and neither are you.”
She had seen Giardino Caravello over six hundred years before, boarding a boat and being driven from the city. She had seen him today, wielding two swords to kill Nico. She had pushed him over and started the final series of events that ended in his death.
“Please let him explain,” Nico said. “I think he will … he says he will. I think he needs us now.”
“Tell me one thing first, Nico,” she said. She studied him so that hopefully she would see any lie in his eyes. “Did you kill the Mayor?”