by Nichole Van
Oooooh.
I had such a crush on Chiara D’Angelo.
Anyone who spoke sarcasm as a native language was a friend for life.
Besides, Chiara was petite and darling and had enough personality to fill a football stadium. I liked hanging out with people like Chiara. They were skilled talk-ists and didn’t shy away from navigating tricky social situations. All I had to do was sit back and be swept along in their wake.
As was typical, Michael did not find Chiara’s sarcasm off-putting. This was the man who regularly went toe-to-toe with TV pundits. His skin was sarcasm-proof.
Michael did, however, continue to death-stare Tennyson as he spoke. “As I said, Senator Hawking is concerned for Olivia’s health and asked me to specifically ensure her safety. I am here in an official capacity.”
“My mother didn’t mention this to me,” I spoke up. “Your presence here isn’t helping things, Michael. You are free to go.”
Michael didn’t even look at me as I spoke. Nor did he respond to my demand. Of course.
Tennyson’s hand tightened around mine.
“What does your boyfriend think?” Michael asked instead, still drilling Tennyson with his gaze. “You all seem so shocked to see me here. I figured Mr. Psycho here would—”
“Tennyson. His name is Tennyson, Michael.”
“—would see me coming with his supernatural powers and warn you. Oh, wait—” Michael snapped his fingers. “—that’s right, he didn’t know because he doesn’t actually have supernatural powers because they Do. Not. Exist.”
To be clear, Michael wasn’t always this big of a douche. He was a personal assistant to the most powerful woman in Washington, D. C. and obviously had ambitions for a career in politics himself. All of which meant that Michael’s social skills were typically smoother.
Something was up. Obviously some part of this situation was pushing all the wrong buttons for him.
“Is he always like this?” Chiara asked me, thumbing at Michael.
“Pretty much.” I shrugged.
“He’s insufferable,” Jack said, his posh British accent effortlessly condescending.
Jack bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Harrison Ford—classically handsome with wavy brown-auburn hair and wide-set blue eyes. It was obvious why Chiara had fallen for him. He had an arm around her and given the way his eyes lit up every time he looked at her, their affection was clearly mutual.
“Being attentive to my job hardly makes me insufferable.” Michael pulled down on the left sleeve of his suitcoat. “Moreover, you haven’t answered my question.” A pointed look at Tennyson.
“Who uses words like moreover in casual conversation?” Chiara asked no one in particular.
Jack raised his hand.
Chiara shot him a withering look.
“You did ask, darling.” He grinned at her. “Moreover, I think you’re beautiful when you’re irritated with me.”
She elbowed him in the ribs. He grunted.
“Our goal here is to drive Michael away,” Chiara fake-whispered. “You’re not helping.”
“Got it. My apologies.”
Silence.
Michael continued to stare at Tennyson who responded by holding my hand more tightly and keeping me close to him.
“Well?” Michael asked. “Why didn’t you see me coming?”
Tennyson snorted. “You clearly don’t understand how this works. Precognition is hardly the same thing as omniscience.”
“Convenient,” was Michael’s reply.
“Besides, Olivia and I were a little . . . preoccupied.” Tennyson added a healthy dollop of innuendo into his tone.
Whew. Was it hot in here?
Tennyson squeezed my hand again and turned to me. “Do you want us to toss him out, cara mia?” He lifted his chin in Michael’s direction.
All eyes swung my way. I froze.
My brain was still trying to recover from preoccupied and Tennyson’s term of endearment—cara mia. I knew very little Italian, but given my fairly unhealthy obsession with The Addams Family as a teenager (once again, in my Goth phase), I knew that cara mia meant ‘my dear’ in English.
I knew Tennyson said it under the guise of Pretend Boyfriend, but that didn’t stop my feels from melting.
Hot Guys should not be allowed to speak Italian. They just shouldn’t. For the protection of feminine hearts everywhere.
“Tossing me out would be a bad idea.” Michael made a tsking noise. “I am here as a representative of Senator Hawking and, by extension, the United States government. I recommend you not cause an international incident by physically harming me. I would hate to involve others who might be less . . . discreet, than myself, namely the Secret Service.”
Sigh.
Michael did have a point.
“Seriously? Are you okay with him here?” Tennyson asked me. “If nothing else, I don’t want Michael blabbing about our conversation.”
Michael had many flaws, but being a blabbermouth was not one of them. “It’s fine. Michael will keep quiet. He’s bound by a strict confidentiality agreement, if nothing else.”
“Would you all please stop talking about me in the third person?” Michael grunted.
“He does find it incredibly irritating,” Tennyson said to everyone but Michael.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Michael leaned toward Tennyson. “I thought you just saw the future. Now you’re claiming to read minds?”
“Tennyson is an empath. That means he feels others’ emotions.” Chiara’s expression was bland but her tone said, Stop being such a dumb ass.
Michael sat back with a grunt.
Tennyson lifted his free hand and started ticking off fingers. “Irritation. Frustration. Annoyance. Jealousy. And a smidge of attraction. Those are your emotions. Not sure who the jealousy and attraction are for.”
Michael appeared unmoved. “So you say.”
“Oy vey. This could go on all night.” Chiara threw her hands in the air. “Let’s get down to business.”
She angled her body toward Tennyson and myself, clearly indicating that she was done dealing with Michael.
“So, to get started,” she said, “Olivia adds new information to our current paradigm. We know we need to permanently close the scars in reality. This will seal the Chucky-slime in the shadow world. The Chucky-slime attacks Olivia and causes internal injuries, correct?”
“That’s right.” I nodded. “Though I call it a daemon, not Chucky-slime.”
“Latin for demon?” Jack nodded his head. “I approve of the comparison. It was certainly demonic in ways. Daemon it is. And you see all the scars?”
“Yeah,” I nodded.
“How many do you see right now?”
I looked around the room. The scars hung here and there. One against the ceiling, several near the walls, two behind Michael’s chair. Not to mention the massive one outside near the tumbled tower.
They all hung in place, floating and inert.
“From where I sit, I can see seven others in this room, plus the enormous one outside where the tower once was.” I pointed toward the french doors.
Given how everyone froze, this was Big News.
“There’s one outside?” Tennyson asked.
“By the tower where Dad . . .” Chiara’s voice trailed off.
I nodded again.
“Whoa. That’s . . . interesting.” Tennyson let out a gust of air.
“There wasn’t a scar there for me,” Jack said. “Though when I was a ghost, the tower ruins always had a deep heaviness—”
“You were a ghost?” Michael guffawed and pretended to wipe away a tear of hilarity. “Man, this just keeps getting better and better.”
Jack adopted what I could only describe as a haughty, lordly sort of look. Probably left over from his life as an actual freakin’ British lord.
But that was a long story . . .
“And you see the scars everywhere?” Chiara asked.
“Yes. More
or less.” I outlined how the scars were scattered around the world for me.
“Trying to understand these scars is killing me.” Chiara chewed on her lip. “Why are there so many all over the world? Are they created any time someone interacts with the shadow world? Does Olivia literally see all the scars ever created? Or is she like Jack and only sees a subset of scars?”
“Like those only created by us D’Angelos or something?” Tennyson added. “That’s possible. Heaven knows, D’Angelos have traveled to a lot of places over the years.”
“More importantly,” Chiara continued, looking at her brother, “how are we supposed to heal the scars and stop the daemon from killing Olivia and you?”
“Exactly.”
Silence for a beat.
Michael had been following our back and forth like a dog watching ping pong.
“Of course,” Michael’s sarcasm cut through the room. “Of course, the ‘daemon’ is killing Tennyson, too.”
“It’s not too late to toss him out, cara,” Tennyson said to me.
“Indeed. A bout of fisticuffs is always welcome.” Jack’s returning grin was decidedly eager.
“International incident,” Michael warned. “Secret Service detail.”
“We’re ignoring the peanut gallery. Focus you two.” Chiara snapped her fingers at Jack and Tennyson. “We also know that sealing the scars is the solution to stopping the daemon. We theorize that Dad died trying to harness the power of lightning to close the scars. How that was supposed to work, we’re not entirely sure.”
“There’s that. And there are some anomalies here that we haven’t considered, sis,” Tennyson said.
“Like what?”
“Like why is your GUT so much weaker than ours? And why does the daemon hurt Olivia when she has no GUT or any history of interaction with the shadow world?”
Chiara paused. “Who knows. Maybe the GUT manifests itself differently in men and women?”
“Or perhaps it’s like many genetic traits and isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. Perhaps it occurs on a sliding scale of sorts?” I chimed in.
“Good point.” Chiara tapped on her phone screen. “So the biggest question right now—what do we do next? After the events in July with Jack, we realized that critical information might be in the D’Angelo archive—”
“The D’Angelo archive?” I asked.
“The D’Angelo archive?” Michael parroted. “What is this? A Dan Brown novel?”
Jack growled at Michael, nostrils flaring.
Michael smirked because . . . douchebag.
“You seem to have a lot of unresolved anger, Michael. Want me to find you a nice dark void to shout into?” Chiara shot Michael a sweetly poisonous look before turning to me. “The D’Angelo archive is a detailed historical record covering hundreds of years of family history and the various ways our gift of Second Sight has manifested itself. We keep it precisely for situations like this one, where an aggregate of experience and understanding can be helpful in saving lives.”
“No luck with the archive, I take it?” Tennyson asked his sister.
“Not really. We’re having the same problem we always run into with the archive.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“As I said, the D’Angelo archive is thousands of pages of archaic, hand-written Italian created over hundreds of years,” Chiara explained. “We’ve digitized all the pages—meaning I scanned them in and turned them into photos to preserve them for future generations—but everything is still just images. The archive hasn’t been transcribed.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s not searchable. The text hasn’t been keyed in and indexed,” Tennyson explained. “In order to research something, like say scars and daemons, we have to read everything, page-by-page.”
“After July, we realized that getting the archive transcribed needed to be our primary goal,” Chiara added. “I’ve been working almost non-stop to find a company who will do OCR or optical character recognition for us. But it’s an enormous task given the age, language-problems and hand-written nature of the documents. Very few companies in the world are equipped to deal with something like this, particularly because it’s not in English. We managed to find a company in Milan that works with ancient Italian texts. Unfortunately, they’re in the middle of some project for the Vatican and refuse to even talk to us for six months.”
Tennyson shook his head. “It’s so frustrating. In Italy, it’s all about who you know, and the Pope will win every argument, every time.”
“Yeah,” Chiara agreed. “We’ve been trying to rally other companies, but most can’t accommodate the Italian aspect of the archive. It’s a quagmire that they don’t have the skill to take on.”
“And in the meantime, we need answers,” Tennyson added.
“You guys are killing me with all this.” Michael huffed, sitting back in his chair. “Do you even hear the absurd words coming out of your mouths?”
“Anytime you want me to find you that dark space where you can shout your repressed rage, let me know.” Chiara’s smile was sugary sweet.
“You tell ’em, darling.” Jack nudged her.
She gave her boyfriend a quick combo of an abbreviated eye roll and devoted look. It was unequivocally adorable.
I sorta hated the two of them in that moment. Such clear affection was rare to witness in the wild. It was usually only curated for chick flicks and sappy Nicholas Sparks novels.
But, again, I digress.
Chiara looked at me. “Jack and I have been digging through Cesare il Pompaso’s stuff trying to see if he has anything else of use.” She took pity on my confused look. “Cesare il Pompaso was one of the Enlightenment D’Angelos and a man very much in love with his gifts.”
“He was also mad as a hatter,” Tennyson said wryly. “He went mad before he went mad, if that makes sense.”
“True. Anyway, we haven’t found any smoking guns in his writings yet. Though he spent quite some time trying to get his GUT to show him the supposed original meeting between Giovanni D’Angelo and the zingari—”
“Zingari?” I asked.
“Gypsies,” Chiara translated the word.
“Ah, of course. That was just what this whole scenario was missing—gypsies.” Michael’s tone was utterly snide. “Please tell me this original meeting involved a curse or something.”
“Eh, I think we’ve ruled out the curse angle, but thanks for asking, Michael.” Chiara turned her gaze to mine. “As I was saying, Cesare il Pompaso chased the zingari thing for a good while. I think he was hoping that witnessing the scene would provide some insight. But he could never get his GUT to show him that meeting. I took some notes on it.” She tapped on her phone for a moment, reading. “Yeah, so eventually he decided that the scene was un-seeable. As the origin of our GUT, he felt that it was protected from our Sight somehow.”
“Or the meeting is simply folklore and never really happened,” Tennyson said.
“Exactly.” Chiara lowered her phone. “I think we all feel like the gypsy tie-in is loose at best now.”
“Come now. I don’t think you’re giving this gypsy curse angle the gravitas that it deserves,” Michael smirked.
“Seriously. I can dispatch him quickly and easily,” Jack said to me.
“Unfortunately, he’s not lying about the international incident or the Secret Service thing,” I leaned toward Jack.
Michael snapped his fingers. “I’m waiting to hear about the curse, people.”
Chiara made an exasperated noise. “It’s pretty standard stuff as far as gypsy curses go.”
“I will be the judge of that.” Michael beckoned with his fingers. “Or is it hard for your little self to talk about?”
Given how fast Chiara’s spine straightened, Michael must have struck a nerve.
“What did you say?” Her voice was deceptively quiet.
Jack placed a hand on her arm. “Shall I fetch a length of rope from the kitchen?”
Jack’s eyes lit up. “It is very dark and dungeon-like down there.”
“I could find us some shackles, too.”
“And a body rack?” Jack looked far too eager.
Michael rolled his eyes. “International incident.”
Jack smiled, slow and decidedly wicked. “It only becomes an international incident if they find a body.”
Chiara chuckled and leaned into Jack. “Have I told you how much I love you?”
“Not for at least thirty minutes—”
Michael made a gagging noise.
I laughed.
Chiara looked at me. “So about the curse. The D’Angelo archive records that it all started when our illustrious ancestor, Giovanni D’Angelo, ate a rotten lamb shank.”
Michael snorted. Chiara held out her palm before Michael could comment, stopping him.
“Wait for me to finish. Giovanni, of course, got sick after eating the lamb shank. The lamb-shank induced illness meant that Giovanni was sick in bed when the podestà of San Gimignano—”
“Podestà?” Michael frowned.
“Like the mayor of the town. Anyway, the podestà called the other town leaders together in the upper floor of the Palazzo Comunale—the town hall—to resolve disputes. This resulted in the Ardinghine family being awarded a small tower in Giovanni’s section of the city.”
“You’re losing me here,” Michael said.
“Don’t care. You asked. My ‘little self’ is telling you the story. The loss of the tower significantly reduced the dowry of Giovanni’s eldest daughter, Gianna, canceling her much-needed betrothal to the wealthy heir of the powerful Becci family. In the summer of 1293, Giovanni finally married Gianna to a younger son of the lesser Ficarelli family. Only to discover—again, too late—that the Beccis had allied themselves with the Ardinghines, leaving Giovanni by the wayside when the Guelph league made a bid for power.”
Michael opened his mouth. Chiara talked right over him.
“Basically, Giovanni found himself out-played and out-maneuvered, pushing him to the brink of bankruptcy. With five daughters still to dower and marry off—and no sons to use as leverage for acquiring a dowry and power—Giovanni became desperate. He turned to the zingari—dark foreigners with bright clothing and pagan gods.