Watch out for those who say
They’ll take care of you
Look out for the dagger
Hidden in the velvet sleeve
“Alvise! It’s me . . .” Micol’s voice carried through the door. Alvise jumped up, alarmed. He grabbed his bow and arrow in one fluid movement and yanked the door open.
Micol tensed, and her hands sparked red and blue. She let go of Sean’s sleeping bag, and it fell in a blue heap on the floor. “Put that thing down! Nothing dangerous going on! It’s just me.”
Alvise breathed a sigh of relief and lowered his bow and arrow. “Come in,” he gestured and stepped aside, letting Micol in. The only light in the gloomy room were the embers glowing in the fireplace, red and orange in the semi-darkness. “What’s wrong?”
“Can I sleep here? My room is . . .” She shrugged. “Scary.”
“Every room in this place is scary. Sure,” he said and sat on the four-poster bed once more. He patted the space beside him.
Micol gaped. “In the same bed?”
“You don’t want me to sleep on the stone floor, do you?”
“But . . .”
“I wouldn’t touch you, Micol, if that’s what you’re worried about. Believe me.”
Micol blushed and crossed her arms, stung. “Right. Clearly, I’m completely revolting!”
Alvise laughed. “You’re very pretty. You’re just not my type.”
Micol studied his face. He arched an eyebrow.
A light bulb went off in her head.
Alvise, the boy all her friends used to be mad about, the boy who always had a cluster of girls fawning over him at every social event. But he never really gave much attention to any of them. He just didn’t seem to be interested . . .
She blushed even deeper. Of course.
“Oh!”
“Penny dropped?”
“It did. You’re lucky. It would have been the floor for you!”
“I’m lucky indeed. Also because all I have to keep me warm is my jacket and this dusty old thing,” he said, lifting a corner of an ancient blanket he’d found in the room. “But now I can share your sleeping bag. Maybe you’ll make me change my mind . . .” he said in mock-seductive tone. Micol rolled her eyes and lay beside him on the bed, spreading the unzipped sleeping bag over both of them.
“Your feet are freezing!” he complained.
“Sorry, I forgot to pack socks before I jumped into the iris!”
He smirked in the gloom. The way they used to fight constantly at Palazzo Vendramin was so far away. It seemed impossible that only a few days ago they could barely be in the same room without wanting to gouge each other’s eyes out.
“Alvise . . .” Micol whispered.
“Yes?”
“We don’t really know what we’re doing, do we?”
Alvise shrugged. “Thing is, I never really know what I’m doing. I go where Lucrezia tells me, do what I need to do, come back when she opens the iris for me. I never looked beyond slaying what I had to slay. It was hard enough having lost my powers . . .” He pursed his lips. “With all this happening to the heirs all over Europe – all over the world, probably – we had to try our best to survive, that was all. Keep doing our job and survive. I thought there was nothing else we could do. And then we were sent here.”
“To help this bunch of weirdoes.”
Alvise laughed. “Well, Niall is not a weirdo.”
“Niall is spoken for. Get him out of your head.”
He laughed again. “Seriously, though. All we can do is keep going.”
“They say they’re going to kill the King of Shadows.”
“I think it’s likely the King of Shadows will kill us,” Alvise replied sombrely.
“Probably. I just hope we can inflict as much damage as possible . . . maybe we won’t save the day, but perhaps we’ll start a little hope . . . You know, like those primroses in your garden? All around the fountains. It’s January, and they’re starting already. I can see them pushing through the soil. Maybe we can be a bit like that . . . and someone will take it from where we left.”
Alvise was quiet for a moment. A sixteen-year-old girl talking so fearlessly, so generously, about her own death. Her brothers would have been proud.
“Maybe you’re right. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I know where my duty lies, anyway,” he said.
“You’re so brave. To do all this with no powers. I can’t imagine . . .”
Alvise shrugged his shoulders again. “I’m not brave. I just do what I need to do. Lucrezia . . . now, Lucrezia is brave. She’s my heroine, Micol. She’s . . . she’s the best among us all.”
Micol didn’t say anything. She could sense that Alvise was about to talk about his sister, and she didn’t want to break the spell.
“Lucrezia wasn’t always like that, the way you see her now. She was a happy, cheerful little girl. She loved to dance. She loved our mother . . .” He paused for a moment. “When she turned thirteen and her dreams started, she was so frightened . . . but she took it in her stride. It was the year after our mum was killed. I had lost my gift, and we were in pieces . . .”
“Alvise . . . what was your gift? If you don’t mind me asking?”
Alvise smiled a bitter smile. “I don’t mind you asking, but what’s the point in telling you? Whatever I used to be able to do, I can’t do it any more.”
Micol was quiet. She sensed that Alvise didn’t want to talk about that.
“Lucrezia felt it was her duty to keep going, to help the family. My mum had been the Vendramin dreamer. Now it was up to Lucrezia . . . But then she started showing signs of something else, something that had never been seen in the family before. She could start these spirals, these golden things in the air . . . I had no idea what they were, but my father knew. And he made a mistake. He told the Sabha.” Alvise’s voice broke, and he hesitated, like recalling all this pained him greatly. Micol held her breath, and finally, he began talking again.
“The Sabha sent two elders from Germany. They came and examined my sister and saw what she could do, and then summoned my father and me.
“They told us they had a way to open up Lucrezia’s power, to let it develop fully. They said that it was like a river whose course was interrupted by boulders: they had a way to remove the boulders. It was a ceremony, and it would hurt a little, but it held no danger. Liars. They were all liars,” Alvise spat. He took a shaky breath. “My father was torn, but my sister wanted to do it. She said she wanted her power to help the family. Sometimes I think had I not lost my powers, she wouldn’t have felt obliged—”
“It wasn’t your fault!”
“No. It wasn’t my fault, but I can’t help wondering what would have happened had I been . . . myself. Lucrezia said she wanted to help us catch the Surari that killed our mother . . .”
“I would have done the same,” said Micol with total conviction. She wasn’t boasting; she meant it. “I’d do anything to catch my parents’ killers.”
“What happened to them?” Alvise’s voice had lost its edge and was replaced with sympathy.
“They weren’t young any more. They had me late in life . . . but they went out hunting again because so many things were seeping through. We did our best to convince them not to, but they wouldn’t listen. Our Gamekeepers had just been killed, and they wanted to track down the ones responsible. Of course it was Surari. They decided to hunt separately. My mother and Tancredi went in one direction, while my father went in another alone. I stayed with Raineri, since he couldn’t be left with no one to watch him. My father . . . when he hadn’t been seen for hours, we went searching for him. I . . . I found him.”
Alvise put a hand on her arm. “Mio Dio, I am so sorry.”
She sighed. “My mother was never the same after that day. Eventually she went off to hunt, alone, and was caught by one of the soil demons. I don’t even think she fought for her life . . .” She shook her head. “The funny thing is, I think it’s my fault, too. She was out for a long time and I didn’t go to check on her. I was home with Ranieri again. He was showing more signs of the ailment. I was scared to leave him alone . . .”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you remember. Just like you said to me, it wasn’t your fault.”
“It feels that way. But tell me what happened to Lucrezia.”
Alvise began slowly. “She had no idea what they had in store for her. What happened was so horrible none of us could have imagined.”
Micol held her breath once more. She thought of Lucrezia lying in her bed, her white-blonde hair on the pillow, forever prisoner, forever trapped in a nightmare. She thought of her screams of terror, of her constant whispering, her bloodless lips moving day and night, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. She was in hell, her body growing into a woman’s, but her mind forever the one of a terrified thirteen-year-old.
“I never thought the Sabha could do something like that. I was so naïve. I thought they were infallible. I thought they were good. That they would never harm a Secret heir.”
Micol nodded. “So did I,” she whispered. “What you’re telling me . . . it goes against all I know.”
“They all came to Venice, the whole Sabha. All except one – you know the way it works. They’re never all in one room at once, in case they get attacked. Lucrezia was wearing her long blue dress, the one embroidered in gold. She loved that dress.”
“Cosima often puts it on her,” Micol murmured, remembering.
“She felt she had to dress up for the ceremony,” he smiled bitterly and tenderly at the same time. “I remember she had pearls in her hair . . .”
Micol squeezed his hand in the darkness.
“They had her lie down on silk cushions on the floor. I could see her chest rising and falling fast. She was scared, but at that point, we had no idea. Then one of the elders pinned her legs down, and another her left arm. She called for my father. She didn’t understand why she had to be restrained. My father was horrified – I could see it – and he tried to go to her, but they stopped him. One of the elders held her right arm out, and straightened her hand. Another took a knife out of his robes and traced a spiral onto my sister’s skin. She screamed, her blood dripping on the floor . . . there was blood on her new dress . . . and then she passed out because of the pain. But it wasn’t over. Somebody took out a vial . . . and they poured liquid gold onto my sister’s hand. She screamed again. The pain was so strong she’d come to. And she didn’t stop screaming for hours. It was like she was possessed. And maybe she was. Even the elders didn’t know what to do. We brought her to her room, and we had to tie her to the bed. She would’ve hurt herself if we hadn’t. She kept going until dawn . . . and then she stopped screaming and started whispering. An iris opened in her room.
“The elders explained to us what the iris was for. They said that the ceremony had been successful, and they left. We waited for Lucrezia to wake up. She never did.”
Micol dried her tears with her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I know. I know you are. I’m sorry for having chased you away from her room. I’m always scared for her, scared someone will hurt her again.”
“That won’t be me. Ever,” Micol said fervently. She felt something wet on her arm, Alvise’s tears. With the protection of darkness, he’d let himself cry for his sister, at last.
“There’s something I don’t understand. You said daylight would kill her . . .”
“Yes. Not daylight as such, but being taken out of the Palazzo. We tried to take her to Switzerland, to the Jardin des Iles, you know, the famous clinic. Secret doctors work there. We thought they could help her. We took her to the canal and into our boat, started on our way to the airport, and it was fine, she was okay for a bit. Then motorboats started darting around us, and the gondoliers were singing and tourists were calling to each other . . . it was all too much. She had some sort of seizure. She nearly stopped breathing. We had to rush back. When we were inside her room again, in the silence, she started breathing normally again, and she stopped convulsing. It was terrifying.”
“Maybe the doctors of the Jardin des Iles could come to her?”
“They did. Three times, once a year. My father paid them well even though they didn’t want to come after the first time. They didn’t have a clue. They said that they had no idea what had happened to her or how to help her. They told us something terrible, Micol . . . That they had seen the gold ceremony, as they called it, performed before on bearers of the same powers, and this was what happened. To all of them. Nobody ever recovers.”
“Oh, Mio Dio! So they knew. The elders knew.”
“Yes. They knew what was going to happen to Lucrezia, that thing about being a bit painful and that was all a lie. They couldn’t tell us, of course, or we wouldn’t have let them.”
“But why? Why did they do this to her?”
“Because they wanted her power. They wanted her to be able to open an iris. That’s all they think about, our powers. We’re not human beings to them. We don’t matter. All that matters to them is what we do for the fight.”
“The bastards . . . I’m going to find them. I’m going to fry them all!”
“They’re probably all dead by now, Micol. And anyway, I should have protected her. I hate myself for having let it happen.”
To her intense shame, Micol burst into proper, sobbing tears. “I can’t bear it,” she said, her soft heart aching like never before, not even for her family – her parents had been killed in an honourable fight, her brothers by illness. But Lucrezia had been torn to pieces by the very people who were supposed to protect the heirs. “They destroyed her!”
“Yes. They did,” Alvise whispered, and hugged her. “But I haven’t lost hope, you know. I can’t lose hope that one day she’ll wake up and it’ll be all over.”
“She speaks, though. Does that mean that some part of her is awake?”
“She does, but I don’t think she’s even aware of doing it. It’s like her power speaks through her. She has kind of conversations with me, when she has something related to demon hunting to communicate, but that’s not really her talking.” Alvise drew a deep breath.
“If we survive this, Alvise, we must find a way to help her. There must be a way.”
“Sleep now. You need all your energy to . . . electrocute things,” said Alvise, helping her lie down and tucking her in.
Micol smiled in the darkness, her face still wet with tears. She held on to Alvise’s hand like a frightened child.