Light fixtures were dark. Ceiling fans did not turn. Dust covered the room. Over the stale smell of old beer, she could smell the stink of rotting flesh and knew the smell came from her own body as much as Caravello’s.
How did I come to this? she thought. None of this is …
Real? Possible? She shoved away the denials. The life she had known had felt strong and vibrant to her, but in truth it had been fragile and ephemeral. She had to tell herself that it could be reclaimed; that it waited for her, just out of reach. But if she ever hoped to have that life back, she and Nico first had to live, and she would do whatever was necessary to make certain of that. To protect him, above all.
Nico—no, Volpe—pulled out a chair and sat down, the legs scraping on the dusty wooden floor.
The knife, he thought.
She swayed to a halt, brought up short. Get the fuck out of my head.
He could use Nico’s ability after all. Or perhaps he and Nico were working together for now.
We are, Nico said, reading her thoughts. We have to.
Geena erupted in a fit of coughing, but in its midst she managed to give Volpe the dulled blade. He took her hand and sliced the blade across her palm. She tried to scream but only coughed hard, black spots swimming at the corners of her eyes.
“Bastard,” she said, clutching her bleeding fist against her chest.
But then an image rose in her mind, of the Council of Ten slicing their own palms as part of some spell of Volpe’s, and she knew this was magic. Blood magic.
Volpe held up his own hand, Nico’s hand, and cut the palm, blood running down the blade of the knife. He held his fist above the splash of Geena’s blood already on the floorboards. For a moment he seemed to sag again, his eyelids drooping, and she thought he might pass out. His breath rattled with phlegm.
“Wake up!” he said, and it was Nico’s voice, Nico’s panicked gaze.
Replaced immediately by Volpe, blinking and shaking himself. He looked at Geena. “Paper? An old tablecloth? Did you see anything in the kitchen?”
She shook her head and hugged herself, shivering with the chill of her fever. Pain had begun to make a fist in her gut, and she knew that to speak would be to give it voice.
“Behind the bar, then. A rag. A napkin. Anything?”
“Maybe,” she managed to say.
Geena tried to rise and her legs went out from under her and she sprawled on the floor, little trickles of their blood spreading toward her, where her cheek lay on the coolness of the wood.
“I’ll find something,” Volpe said. “I need his eyes, anyway.”
“His … eyes …?”
“They saw us in health. All the better to restore us, having those images.”
Taking a guttural, rasping breath, he staggered to his feet and stalked across the room. She watched him go to the bar and vanish behind it. When the noises began—wet, squelching sounds—she closed her eyes, but that only made it worse, made the sounds clearer and her imagination more vivid.
She gagged, managed to keep herself from throwing up, but then began to cough. Blood and bile filled her mouth and she spit it onto the floor, but the coughing continued until the black spots at the edges of her field of vision darkened and spread, and then the whole world tilted and …
… How long? she thought as she opened her eyes. She knew she’d been out, but for how long? If Nico heard her thoughts—or Volpe, for that matter—neither of them replied.
She tried to lift her head and the darkness swept in again and she was …
… blinking … careful this time. What did she hear? Murmuring, so softly, like whispered sins coming from inside a confessional.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes wide and gave herself a second to focus. Nico sat cross-legged on the floor perhaps four feet from her, on the other side of the blood he—no, Volpe—had taken from both of them. She blinked, studying his face. She knew it intimately, had traced the lines of that face with her fingers and her lips, had gazed into those eyes and thrown herself open to the man.
Tears of blood streaked Nico’s face. The disease, taking its toll.
But it wasn’t Nico. Exhausted as he must be, Volpe did not want to die for eternity. With horrible tenacity, he seemed to be hanging on inside of Nico, propping up the body around him like a boy in his father’s old suit. The body seemed to be shrinking in upon itself. The blotches on his throat had gone black now and spread, and his neck had bloated hideously.
A bar rag lay spread out on the floor in front of him and with one blood-wetted finger, he dabbed and scrawled something she could not see from this angle.
“What is your name?” Volpe gasped. “The name you were born with?”
Though she was confused and curious, she did not have the strength to ask why he needed to know.
“Geena Louise … Hodge.”
Volpe nodded. “Geena Louise Hodge. Nicolo Tomasino Lombardi.”
He dipped his finger in the blood again and again, smearing the cloth. A gelatinous mush quivered in the midst of the spilled blood, and it took her a moment to understand that these were Caravello’s eyes.
She hadn’t the strength to vomit.
The murmuring, the whispers, were coming from Nico’s lips, and it took her a moment to realize that Volpe was chanting some sort of rite. Spellcraft, she remembered he called it. Meant to heal them.
But the darkness encroached again. She fought to stay conscious.
Nico, she thought, an abyss of sorrow opening up to swallow her. I think I’m going to die now.
His reply was weak, but he was there. We live or die as one.
“Quiet, you fools,” Volpe growled. He took a rattling breath and continued his strange song.
Geena saw the rats before she heard the skittering of their claws upon the wood. They skittered toward Volpe as though dragged upon strings. When they reached him, they waited, quivering and squealing but frozen in place.
“What are you doing?” Geena asked, coughing. “Did you call them?”
“Our lives are fading,” Volpe rasped. “If we’re to survive … we have to steal life from elsewhere.”
When he had finished scrawling on the bar rag, he reached out a shaking hand and picked up one of the rats. It did not scratch or bite; it gave no resistance save those screams. Volpe placed it in the bloody mess on the floor, pressed the point of the knife to its belly, and slit it open.
Geena closed her eyes and drifted again …
… disoriented, eyes fluttering open, she saw that the second rat was already dead. Small mercies; she had not had to witness it. The smell of blood filled her nostrils and she felt it sticky on her cheek. It had trickled along the wood and pooled beneath her head.
Volpe sat unmoving, slumped down upon himself. If not for the phlegmy rattling in his throat, she would have thought he had died.
Dying, Geena thought. The three of us are dying.
Even as despair overcame her and bloody tears began to clot her eyes, she saw Nico’s body twitch. One of them—she no longer knew if it was Nico or Volpe—raised his head. He lifted up the bar rag and began the chant again, though now it was little more than a low gurgle. She could see the rag now, arcane letters and strange sigils scrawled in blood upon it.