by Brenda Drake
I look back. Horus is faster than us and is catching up.
“We’re not going to make it,” I call after him.
He glances back at me. “Don’t slow down.”
My Vans slap the cobblestone road. Marek makes it first and hops in the back seat.
“Come on,” he grunts.
I climb into the front passenger seat, and Sid takes off before I get the door closed. I slam it shut. Wiping the tears from my face, I watch Horus through the window until I can’t see him any longer.
“We left her with them,” I say. “They killed Cain and that man, and we left her there.”
Marek sits at the edge of his seat and massages my shoulder. “We had no choice. Besides, the police are there. She’ll be okay. If we stayed, they’d detain us for questioning. We don’t have time for that.”
“How can Inanna be so cruel? She just killed them like that. No emotion.”
I’m pretty sure Sid flinches when I mention Inanna. He takes a sharp turn, the Fiat shimmying a little before righting.
My hands shake, and I fist them. “Now what? All our things are in that hotel. We don’t have the money. Or your grandfather’s bag.”
“I have the money and everything from his satchel. Also, got your passport. See?”
I glance back, and Marek lifts his shirt, revealing one of those concealing travel bags. “It was my gramps’s”
“You took my passport?”
He nods. “You left it in your suitcase. If someone broke into our room and stole it, you’d be screwed.”
A thought crosses my mind, and I twist to face Sid. “You’re awfully quiet. How did you know to come for us?”
“Had a missed call from Shona.” Instead of paying attention to the road, he studies me with his heavily made-up eyes. “By the look on your face, you don’t buy that.”
“No, I don’t. You know who they are, don’t you? Inanna, Bjorn, and Horus—” A gasp cuts off my words. Strolling in the middle of the road. Hands stretched out at his sides, palms up, is the man who passed us on Antonia’s street yesterday. The man with the silver-streaked hair.
A strong wind blows trash barrels down the sidewalk, pushes over chairs and tables at an outdoor café, and causes water to spray up from a nasone fountain. Over his head, there’s a gray cloud following him. It’s not until the cloud dives, raining down on people who swat at it, that I realize what it is.
“Are those bugs?”
“Locusts, to be exact.” Sid whips the Fiat around and tears off back in the direction we’d just come.
Tiny insect bodies ping the car.
Sid slams his foot against the gas pedal, and the Fiat skids as it turns a corner, and another corner, and another, ditching the locusts and the man.
“Who was that?” I ask.
Marek asks at the same time, “Was he making that wind?”
“He was.” Sid takes a hard right. “It’s Pazuzu. Wouldn’t invite him to a party, that one. He’s no fun.” He laughs. “Or a funeral, come to think of it. Of all the gods to get power back, he had to.”
“The Babylonian demon god? Shut up.” I grab the side of my head. “Just shut up. This isn’t real.”
“Watch out,” Marek snaps.
Sid swerves, barely avoiding three guys messing around as they cross the street.
“Okay, girl. I’ll shut up.” He acts unaffected by his narrowly missing them. “But then you won’t get any information about what’s happening.”
Marek slaps the back of Sid’s seat. “Just spill it. What the hell is going on? First, they kill Cain and that doorman and now… I don’t even know what that was.”
Sid pulls the Fiat over and parks it next to a row of tall apartment buildings.
I drop my hands. “Why are we stopping? We have to get away from that man.”
“We’re far enough away from him.” Sid turns to look at me. “I’m surprised you hadn’t caught on, Analiese. What do the names Inanna and Horus have in common?”
My blank stare says I’m not in the mood for guessing games. “I don’t know. What?”
“Oh, come on.” He gives me an exaggerated pout. “You aren’t even trying. You and your father have a common interest. Something your brother and Jane aren’t interested in.”
I sit up straighter. “How do you know my family?”
“I’ll tell you after you answer my question.” He leans back in his seat.
“Stop playing games,” Marek warns.
A common interest? Dad and me.
I vaguely hear Marek and Sid arguing over messing with me or something.
Mythology.
“Inanna,” I mumble. “She’s the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and fertility and sometimes war.”
“What is she saying?” Marek sounds frustrated.
“Leave her alone,” Sid says. “She’s processing.”
Marek responds, but I’m not listening so I don’t hear him.
Sid laughs. “I’m not torturing her. Girl. Sometimes it’s best to let the mind figure things out on its own. It’s less of a shock that way.”
“Horus.” It rolls over my tongue so quietly, I’m surprised Marek hears me. “The Egyptian god of the sky.”
Marek gives me an incredulous look. “How do you know this stuff?”
“My dad,” I say. “He was obsessed. I thought it was cool to have a common interest with him. Guess he was into mythology because he knew gods existed for real.”
“So you know what they are?” Sid claps his hands once.
“Inanna is a goddess, and Horus, a god,” I say.
“Bravo.” Sid hits soprano on that last syllable. He glances in the rearview mirror “Your girl is smart. And Bjorn?”
I don’t even have to think about Bjorn. He’s easy. Even Dalton could get this one. Ancient literature has referred to the god by many names. It makes sense he’d use the most common one for our times. Even made a joke about who he is on a license plate.
“Thor.” I stare at my trembling hands. The door attendant’s blood has dried on them. I need to wash them.
Wash them now.
“Is there a gas station with a restroom?” I can’t sit still. “Do they have those in Rome?”
My gaze flashes over the nearby buildings.
Sid swings a concerned look in my direction. “What’s wrong, honey? Too much to process at once?”
“Leave her alone,” Marek orders.
“I wasn’t—”
“I said stop.”
With a heavy sigh, Sid inspects his nails. “Whatever.”
I flip my hands over and back. My breath is raspy. “It’s all over the place.”
Marek practically flies out the back door and yanks open the front passenger one. He drops into a squat beside me and grasps my hands.
His are bloody, too.
Dried blood.
“Hey,” he says, and when I don’t look at him he goes louder, “Hey, look at me.”
“M-my hands,” I stammer. “I-I need to wash them.”
He squeezes my hands lightly. “I’ll be right back.”
The car bounces as Sid adjusts in his seat to face me. He rests an arm on the steering wheel. “Honey, you need a thicker skin. Because, girl, this shit is real.”
A thicker skin. As if that’s going to help me.
He makes as though he’s going to say something, and I hold my hand up, stopping him.
“No. I need a minute.”
He goes back to inspecting his nails. “Mortals. So dramatic.”
We sit in silence for what seems like an eternity, but the clock says it’s seven minutes.
Marek comes back to my side with a bottle of water and a fist full of paper napkins. “Here, give me your hands,” he says.
I lean out the doo
r and hold them out over the gutter. As the cold water runs over my skin, Marek gently rubs the blood away.
“How are you not freaking out?” I ask.
“I am,” he says. “It just doesn’t show.”
After he dries my hands, he removes the blood from his and gets into the backseat. He scoots forward and rests his arms on the front seats. “Now tell us what’s going on. No games. Just straight up, man.”
“God and goddesses exist.” I sound oddly catatonic.
“This may shock you,” Sid says. “Who am I kidding? You’re already there. I’m a god.”
“You’re from the Philippines,” I say. “You had someone to meet because it was a full moon. The boy moon. Your lover. Are you Sidapa?”
“I am.” He lowers his head, and it’s the first time he looks vulnerable. “I only see my love then. And don’t believe the stories. He’s not a small boy. When he walks the earth, he’s our age. I tricked the Sisters of Fates into aging me down, so we’d be the same.”
I try to wrap my mind around everything he’s saying, but it all seems so unreal.
“How can this be real?” Marek has the same questions as me, but he can voice his. He pulls his fingers through his hair. “Are there more of you?”
“All the gods from mythologies around the world. So, yes, there are more of us. A few millennia ago, we lost our powers. Well, not completely. Some of us still have a few tricks in our bags. We’re immortals, living amongst the mortals here in your world.”
I twist in my seat to see both Sid and Marek. “What do they want from us?”
He inspects his side mirror. “How should I know what Inanna and the others want with you? I’m an undeclared god. They don’t associate with me. Some immortals can be real bitches. All I know is that more of them are arriving in Rome every day.”
“What’s an undeclared god?” Marek checks behind him to see what Sid is looking at.
Sid’s eyes slide to me before he glances back at Marek. “We’re in the midst of a war between immortals. Two groups fighting for power. Both sides have compelling reasons that I should join them. I just can’t decide. My situation remains the same no matter who wins. Bulan will always only come to me on the full moon. His powers never changed. Not even when we lost ours.”
His eyes flick to the mirror again. “We can’t stay here much longer.”
A bus rocks over the brick road, heading in our direction.
“That’s your ride,” Sid says. “You’ve been seen with me, and this sweet ride stands out like a pink dress at a funeral. I’ll ditch it. See what happened to Shona. Find you later.”
“Okay. Thanks, man.” Marek steps out.
Before I open the Fiat’s door, I ask, “How do you find us?”
He drops down the visor and checks his makeup in the mirror. “It’s faint, but there’s this energy coming off one of you. Immortals are hungry for it. Like a feline to catnip. It means power to them. Don’t stay in one place too long. Capisce?”
“Come on, Ana,” Marek pleads. “The bus.”
“Energy? I don’t understand.”
“Girl. You don’t have time to understand.” He rubs the corner of his lips. “See that woman down the street? Tall. Expensive clothes. That’s Nyx. She senses it and is searching for the source.” He slams the visor shut. “Bye now.”
I give the woman a quick look. Definitely fits the goddess mold. Her gaze lands on me, and from this distance, almost a half a block apart, I can tell she suspects the energy is coming from us.
“It’s going to leave.” Marek doesn’t wait for me. He takes off for the bus.
The Fiat speeds off.
I sprint after Marek.
Chapter Eighteen
Marek makes it first and hops up on the step to the bus, blocking the door from shutting with his body. He shoves it back open.
“Come on,” he grunts.
I climb up and enter. He wrenches himself from the door and follows me down the aisle. After paying, I slip into an empty seat and he sits beside me, breathing heavily.
The bus takes off, and I search the street for Nyx. She’s gone.
“Damn. This thing is pressing into my bone.” He removes the metal box he retrieved from the Sistine Chapel from his pocket.
“What do you think it is?” I ask, leaning over his arm to get a better look at it.
On the front side, the box has a combination lock. Fastened to the top is a gold cross made out of tiny skulls. A series of etched letters line the back panel.
“I think it’s some sort of cipher.” He turns it in his hand. “We need a keyword or phrase to crack it.”
A husky man a few seats up from us belts out a gravelly cough, breaking our concentration.
Marek tucks the box back into his pocket. “We need to find a safe place to examine this closer. Someplace where we can rest.”
People sitting in the rows around us make me uneasy. Any one of them could be dangerous. I would’ve never pegged Inanna as a ruthless, poison-syringe-holding killer.
I can quit. Leave Marek to figure out all this scary shit himself. I no longer want to know why I was on Adam Conte’s list. I just want to go home. Back to my regular and somewhat less crappy life.
Dalton would tell me to grow a pair. Which is insulting and sexist at the same time.
Fear has a habit of holding me down, keeping me from doing daring things. I can’t count how many times I didn’t do something because it seemed too dangerous. Dad used to say that living in fear wasn’t living. By not taking risks, I could be missing out on spectacular moments.
But this moment, here in Rome, with the Model Squad chasing us, is anything but spectacular. They killed both Cain and that doorman, and there’s no telling what they’ll do if they catch us.
“That man was dead,” Marek interrupts my thoughts. “There wasn’t a pulse. She said he was risen. How can that happen?”
“We resuscitated him. That’s all.” The nagging feeling that it all could be real sours my gut like I just drank spoiled milk.
He has this deadpan look on his face, and my breath skips. “I’ve been trying to piece it all together. The list, this scavenger hunt for clues, and now…and now our stalkers and all this bullshit about an immortal war. My grandfather held many secrets. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“What if it’s true—?”
More of the man’s coughs distracts me.
“That man with the locusts looked real to me.” Marek’s head turns to where I’m looking. “The only way to know the truth is to keep following my grandfather’s breadcrumbs. But if it’s too much for you, we’ll get you on a plane home. I completely understand if you want to go.”
The man coughs again, sounding like he’s going to hack up a fur ball. I wrinkle my nose at the disgusting noise.
I should go home. Try to forget all that’s happened over the last couple of weeks since that car hit Adam Conte and he gave me his bag full of clues.
Or more like a bag full of confusion.
But I couldn’t go home. Not without knowing my role in whatever Adam Conte tried to hide or protect. Whatever the meaning of that list, I’m on it, and so are my parents. Adam Conte might’ve had something to do with their deaths, or he may have known something about it.
“I’m staying with you,” I say.
He glances at the window, then at me, and smiles. “Okay, then. The first thing we need to do is get off this bus. Find a place to hide out for some time.”
The bus makes many stops before we exit onto a busy street with shops. We rush across uneven sidewalks, looking for a hotel, rain beating down on us. My Vans slap the pavement, water spraying up from the force.
The rain seeps through my jeggings, wet and cold. Thankfully, my bomber jacket keeps my top half dry. Marek’s hair sticks to his head, water dripping fr
om the slight curl at the ends. We come to a familiar landmark. The Piazza di Spagna. Standing on the cobblestones, I have a déjà vu moment. I’ve seen this place in many movies and did a model of it for my geography class.
A long, broad flight of stairs rises to a chapel at the top. If it weren’t raining, people would crowd the steps, sitting and lounging in the beautiful splendor of the square. In spite of the rain, there’re still a lot of tourists around, holding up colorful umbrellas to shield them from the downpour.
At the bottom of the Spanish steps is a large fountain with a sculpture of a sinking boat in the middle. Rain pings the water in the basin. I stop, emotions stilling me. There’s a photograph of my parents in this same spot during an anniversary trip. It’s a frozen memory of theirs, and I wonder what they were feeling at the time.
Marek turns back, and there’s a worried expression on his face. “Why are you stopping? There’s a hotel at the top.”
I give the fountain one last look and climb the elegant off-center staircase beside Marek. The magnificent twin-towered church gets nearer with each step up. I know this place well. I’ve been obsessed with it ever since I found that photo of my parents. It was their last day alive, right before they caught a flight to Lake Como, and they looked so happy.
We pass the pink building where John Keats, a Romantic poet, died of tuberculosis in the early eighteen hundreds. It’s a museum now, and I can see through the windows that there are a good many people inside. Probably trying to keep dry.
The Hassler Hotel is to our right as we make it to the top.
“Shouldn’t we stay somewhere less crowded?” I say between heavy breaths after the long climb.
Marek’s breathing is practically normal. He’s definitely an athlete. I probably should work on my aversion to cardio exercise.
“My bet is,” he says, “they’ll think we’d avoid tourist spots. Sometimes you’ll go unnoticed if you hide in plain sight.”
“Something your grandfather told you?”
His eyes dart in my direction. “Yes. As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Okay, so we hide out here. I’m tired and hungry, anyway.” I head in the direction of the hotel. It’s another hike up more steps and finally across a cobblestone drive.