Foscari began to chant in a language Nico did not even recognize—something ancient and ugly—and the Doge’s grin widened. Aretino gestured for their hired killers to hang back. Nico felt his mask of courage begin to slip and Aretino must have noticed something amiss, for he narrowed his eyes and took a step forward.
Then he laughed softly, holding up a hand.
“Wait, Francesco. It’s over.”
Foscari pulled up and glared at him liked a dog rounding on his master. “What do you mean, ‘over’?”
“That’s not Volpe talking to us. It’s the boy, Lombardi. Volpe’s blown out his own candle already,” Aretino said, smiling at Nico. “Isn’t that right, Nico?”
Nico wanted to smash the old bastard’s skull against the stone floor until his brains leaked out.
Nico stared in horror at Aretino’s fading smile and the growing delight on Foscari’s face.
“Get the girl,” Aretino said.
“Allow me,” Foscari said, giving their lackeys a savage glance that made even those hardened killers fall back.
It was no choice at all. He saw Foscari striding toward the three columns at the center of the Chamber, caught a glimpse of Geena huddled there, knife glinting in her hand, and he knew.
“Do it, you bastard!” he shouted.
Aretino flinched in surprise. Thinking Nico had been talking to him, Foscari turned to leer at him.
And he did as Volpe asked. Closed his eyes. Deep breath in, let it out, another breath, let it out. It felt to him as if he were growing, as though when he opened his eyes he ought to be a giant. But when he did look, he had not changed physically. Inside, though … he bristled with vigor, alert to the slightest sound or shift in the texture of shadows in the Chamber. He could see skeins of light like spiderwebs throughout the room—gold and silver, green and red and black, purple as a bruise, pink as a woman’s secret flesh.
Volpe did not like to call it magic because it did not come from within him. But the power—the magic—it was there, all around them, and if he could only reach out and touch those skeins, weave them together with the right gestures, the right words, he could bend the world to his whim.
Nico had never been so terrified or so aroused.
“Hello again, Pietro,” Volpe said with Nico’s mouth.
Aretino swore. He lifted his hands, about to cast a spell. A whip-thin gunman behind him sensed the change, saw it all happening, raised his weapon, and pulled the trigger.
Even as the sound of the gunshot erupted in the Chamber, Nico twitched a finger, throat working a subaudible grunt that was in itself a spell so ingrained in Volpe that it required nothing more.
The bullets splashed against him, dampening his clothes where they struck, nothing but water now.
Foscari turned at the gunshot’s echo and threw up his hands, beginning a spell. Nico held up both hands, whispered words he had never learned, and the spells slid harmlessly away from him.
“This city is under our protection,” Nico said. “And this Chamber … this is mine, laid with magical traps five hundred years ago. Fools, indeed.”
Foscari roared and ran at him, drawing a dagger laden with curses.
Nico dropped to one knee, slapped his open palms on the stone floor, and shouted two words to trigger a spell Volpe had cast half a millennium ago.
A tremor ran through the Chamber, a groan from deep beneath the city, and dust rained down from the ceiling. One of the obelisks had shattered during the flood, and now the rest of them cracked, lines running through the identical Roman numeral X engraved upon each one, and split open. Arms thrust out, knocking black stone aside, and the Council of Ten emerged from their tombs draped in crumbling robes and flaps of withered skin.
In amongst the three columns, Geena began to scream.
The Doges’ hired killers swore and shouted and opened fire. A thick-necked brute bolted for the stairs. Aretino and Foscari began to cast spells. One of the dead men ignited in flames that blackened the ceiling and spread to the robes of another.
But the dead were swift. They were not slowed by bullets. In seconds they were breaking bones and tearing flesh, and the Chamber resounded with the screams of killers as the Doges’ thugs were slaughtered. Several of the Ten grabbed Foscari. The Doge held one by the face and it decayed in seconds, withered flesh sloughing off of bones as its age caught up with it, and then turning to dust.
Nico strode toward Aretino. He thrust out a hand, muttered a spell from
But the Doge had studied well in his centuries of wandering. He rasped the initial words of a spell to drive out an invasive spirit, and Nico felt as though he were being torn apart.
Nico fought, but as pain ripped into him, he feared that he was now so inextricably bound to Volpe that separation would kill them both.
Geena felt it happening, heard Nico scream inside of her head, and she saw what needed to be done.
With a roar of pain, Nico slashed his hands through the air and—as though he had cut the strings holding the Doge aloft—Aretino plummeted to the floor, crying out as the impact jarred broken bones. Snarling, sodden with canal water, he reached up to carve another spell from the air, but then two of the dead Ten attacked him. Geena had seen them waiting for the opportunity. From inside its tattered robes, one of them drew a long ritual dagger and hacked it down with inhuman strength, severing Aretino’s hand at the wrist.
Blood sprayed the two dead men.
Nico reeled backward and fell to his knees, but she felt the pain subside within him. For better or worse, he and Volpe were still joined.
A cry of fury erupted nearby and she twisted around to see Foscari struggling with a cluster of the Ten. He screamed words in some guttural tongue, some ancient Babel language she would never learn, and grabbed one of them by the throat. Like the other he had destroyed, it began to unravel and collapse in upon itself. But the rest had his arms then, twisting them behind him, trying to keep him from touching any more of them.
