He dropped it onto the mess on the floor and blood began to soak into the fabric.
“I will not die,” he snarled, even as he slid onto his side, blood pouring from his ears and nostrils. He choked, coughed, and then reached out a hand, holding his palm open above the cloth and the words and the death he had carefully prepared.
As before in the courtyard, it all burst into flame, an instantaneous eruption of fire that consumed the entire mess. The blood that had trickled toward her ignited, flames leaping up and racing toward the pool of blood beneath her face.
Geena tried to scream through her ragged, swollen throat, and a wave of pain crashed through her.
Then, once again, the darkness took her.
XIII
THE SMELL hit her before she was even fully awake—a rancid stew of odors, of blood and death and illness. Geena recoiled as she drew herself up to a sitting position, her face and hair tacky with blood, her clothes stinking of disease. She glanced around the abandoned taverna in the golden gloom cast by street lamps outside and saw Nico lying six feet away.
“Nico?”
Her head throbbed dully as she rose to her feet, surprised to find she had the strength to stand. She reached up to touch her throat and found the pain had vanished, along with the swelling. Dried blood crusted on her face and around her ears and had stained her shirt, but when she experimented tentatively with clearing her throat, she found it clear.
“No way,” she whispered to herself in English.
Grinning in spite of the stench, she stepped around the bloody, scorched spot on the floor where Volpe had done his spell. Geena went to her knees beside Nico’s body and shook him.
“Wake up.”
He lolled his head with her jostling and she saw that the black swelling of his throat had vanished completely. Like her, Nico had dark bloodstains soaked into his shirt and traces where blood had run from his nose and eyes and ears. Whatever Volpe had done, he had made it just in time.
Nico opened his right eye just a slit before blinking and opening both of them. He ran a hand over his face and wetted his lips with his tongue like a drunk waking from a bender.
“What … what time is it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. I just woke up myself, but … It’s night.”
She let the words trail off. They had been unconscious in here for hours. Volpe might have removed all evidence of the murder of Caravello out in the church square, but she still felt as though it had been a miracle that no one had discovered them. Luck and timing.
“God, the smell,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
Geena laughed.
Nico stared at her. “What, in any of this, is funny?”
She dropped to the floor, taking both of his hands in hers. “You’re you.”
Nico blinked, glanced around curiously as though waiting for Volpe to usurp his control of his body again. When nothing happened he ran a hand through his hair and turned to smile at her.
“So it would appear.” He took a deep breath, his smile faltering.
He’s still in here, though. Aren’t you, Volpe?
Geena held her breath, listening for a reply. Nico had shared the thought with her purposefully and they both waited for Volpe to acknowledge it. When nothing happened, she let herself hope for a moment before Nico brushed it off with a wave of his hand.
“He’s still here. I feel him. Resting. But for now, I’m me.”
When she had first woken, Geena had been slightly disoriented. Now she began to recall the details of the ritual Volpe had conducted. There had been rats and death and chanting and blood. She glanced down at the palm he had sliced open and blinked in astonishment before looking up at Nico.
He actually healed us, she thought.
Nico nodded grimly. He needs us.
“He needs you,” she said aloud.
“As a host. But he knows that if anything happens to you, I’ll fight him.”
“But that fire,” Geena said. I thought we were both dead.
“No. It was cleansing flame, the same as he used out on the cobblestones. It purifies, but only burns what it is intended to burn.”
“It would have been nice if he had warned me,” she said, though she knew that in the condition they had both been in, it would have been difficult for Volpe to say anything to her at all.
Nausea twisted through her stomach when she thought about how close they had come to death, and the feeling of the sickness clenched inside her. For as long as she lived she would never forget the panic and helplessness of the disease that had ravaged her and brought her to the brink of death in a matter of hours.
“We can’t stay here,” Nico said. “We’ve been lucky so far—”
“Lucky?”
“Perhaps not. Even so, every moment we remain here, we are tempting fate. Eventually someone will notice the broken lock on the side door, or pass near enough to the building to smell the stink of Caravello’s remains.”
Geena shuddered. The stench made her stomach churn, but she doubted anyone passing by would smell it, at least not yet. Much as she wanted to get away from that stink, she knew they had to clean up first.
“Look at me,” she said. “Look at yourself. The owner of the building will have turned the water off. There may be enough in the toilet tanks to wash the blood from our faces, but our clothes are stained. We have to be careful not to be seen like this.”
Nico glanced at the side door and the table they—well, she and Volpe—had bumped up against it. Even if she did not feel the worry coming off him, she would have seen it in his eyes.
“What about Caravello? Do we just leave the body here?”
They both looked at the bar, knowing the Doge’s corpse lay behind it. His eyes … Geena thought. Nico glanced away, responding neither in thought nor word. She could feel that he shared her revulsion, but he also would not condemn Volpe for defiling the corpse, since it had saved their lives.
“He might not be as evil as the Doges, but he’s not your friend,” she said sharply.
Nico glanced up. “I know that.”
“Do you?”
“After what he’s done to my life? To our lives?”
She hesitated, then nodded, feeling the truth in his heart. This was the closest they would come to an argument. They knew each other too well for the kinds of misunderstandings that disrupted many relationships.
Cleansing fire, Nico thought, and she saw an image in her mind of the building going up in flames.
Geena stared at him, unnerved. “Isn’t that a little excessive? It’s just the body we need to get rid of.”
Nico went to the window and looked out. “We should get rid of any evidence we were ever here.”
“Without a body, it’s only trespassing,” she said. “Let’s not add arson to our crimes.”
Nico hesitated, then nodded in agreement. They wouldn’t burn the building, but they did need to destroy Caravello’s corpse to erase any trace of contagion. Geena glanced over at the bar again, imagining the eyeless corpse hidden behind it, perhaps still tainted with the plague.
There would have to be fire.
You cannot stay together.
Nico stood outside the taverna’s bathroom, keeping the door propped open to let the lamplight beyond the windows filter in while Geena used a swatch torn from an old apron they had found in the kitchen to wash the blood from her face. She dipped the rag into the toilet tank and swabbed at her cheeks and her throat, careful not to streak the porcelain. There was no way for them to clean up after themselves entirely, but they were trying to be as careful as possible.