The Romeo Catchers

by Arden, Alys

  Observe.

  I swim across slowly, careful to feel my way and avoid snagging myself on any dangers unseen in the dark water. Waves begin to knock us as I paddle forward, and the dog continues to yelp in a sharp, uninterrupted string.

  “Spot!” a tiny voice shrieks. “Spot!”

  I jerk to the left. A girl?

  More copters pass overhead, making it impossible to hear.

  “Mister! Mister! Mister!”

  “I’m coming!” I yell, more waves pushing over my head and into my mouth. Between the copters, the barking dog, and the splashing water, it’s hard to hold on to her voice. “I’m coming! Just keep talking!”

  Adapt.

  The waves become stronger; I dive through the water, take two long strokes, and hoist myself into the drowned bed of a Ford F-150. I pull the dog in, wipe water from my eyes, and try to stand.

  “Help!”

  My head turns sharply, and I see her—a few houses down the street, a young black girl in a pink dress, clinging to a tree branch that has bowed into the water.

  “I’m coming!”

  A rumbling sounds from beneath the truck, and I feel the whole vehicle lift gently from the ground. I pull the dog onto the top of the cab, knowing it’s probably too slick for her paws, but there’s no more time. The water’s coming.

  “Help us!”

  Dominate.

  Without thinking, I kick off the side of the truck and dive toward the tree. Fifty yards, Isaac. It’s just fifty yards.

  My arms pound the water.

  Dominate.

  “I’m com—” I try to yell, but water rushes into my throat, and suddenly I’m being hurled underwater.

  I flail, trying to break the surface, and when I finally do, I barely hear the girl’s voice over my own gasping.

  I kick and punch against the waves. I know if I lose her voice, I’ll lose her for good. When I see the pink dress again, in the water, the waves try to take her, but I grasp her ankle.

  I pull her close, swing her over my back with my right hand, and grab the closest anchored object with my left—a thin tree. “Hang on tight!” I yell.

  Her skinny arms circle my neck in a near choke hold. I feel the tree shaking loose from the ground. “Tighter!” I yell.

  “Jade!” she shrieks.

  The debris sweeps past us faster and faster, and I know the breach isn’t over. I knock away a mailbox that’s coming straight at us and search for some kind of safety to get us to.

  “Jade!” she shrieks again.

  “Hang on!” I yell as the next wave of water comes tunneling toward us, crashing into my mouth and over our heads. Her tiny arms wrap tighter around my neck as it sweeps my feet. I kick and fight, trying not to let the current take us. Just as it pushes us under and her tiny arms wrap tighter around my neck, I see her. I see Jade.

  CHAPTER 30

  Forever the Alchemist

  My eyes blinked open into the darkness, the void extending my false identity for a moment longer. Then I remembered I wasn’t Niccolò Medici. I wasn’t a nobleman born of the Florentine elite. I didn’t have a sister or two brothers I loved deeply, nor did I have a burning desire to aid humanity. I was just a witch girl lying on the floor in the dark, stalking a vampire boy’s dreams. Just a French Quarter Rat with dream magic who knew it was way past curfew but whose curiosity had not been satiated. The human Nicco was such a stark contrast to the monstrous Medici, it was impossible to turn away. I wanted to know more. I needed to see him.

  I curled onto my side, pulling my coat over my shoulder. I wasn’t ready to go back to my own life yet.

  I wasn’t ready to let go of him.

  “Tanti auguri! Tanti auguri, figlio mio!” my father says. “How has it been twelve months since I’ve last kissed you, my son? Have you grown? You are nearly as tall as Gabriel!”

  I match my father’s hug as best as I can, but at eighteen I don’t have close to his width.

  “Nor can I believe it’s been an entire year, Father. Yesterday it felt like we’d been gone for an eternity, but now that we are home, it feels like we only just left.”

  “The more of the world you see, Niccolò, the faster time will go,” he says. “We will have the grandest celebration for your birthday, but first I have a surprise for you, to help you settle back in the palazzo.”

  The way he uses the word “settle” scares me. “Gabriel already told me of your surprise, Papa: you have brought Maddalena Morosini over from Venezia.”

  “Sì, it’s true, but she is certainly not the surprise I intended for your birthday.”

  “Bene. I don’t want any distractions.”

  “Niccolò!” he says with fatherly disappointment. “What is the problem with Maddalena? Gabriel tells me you were quite taken with her when you met in Venezia. So much so that she met up with you again in Paris! So much so that the two of you disappeared for three days, nearly causing her brother to challenge you to a duel!”

  My cheeks grow hot, and I wonder if Gabriel has also reported back to Father each of my shits.

  “Is your life something you risk for a girl you do not love?”

  “I would have won.”

  “No doubt, my son, but killing your future bride’s brother is not the path to a healthy courtship!”

  “Bride?” I do not try to hide my horror.

  “Do you deny your feelings for her?”

  “I like her fine—she’s exceptionally beautiful, and charming, and she could outwit even the surliest curmudgeons at the French salons. And has quite the capacity for philosophy, and—”

  My father smiles.

  “But—but I am not interested in love, Padre, and certainly not in marriage! I want to focus on my work. The trip abroad has given me such a renewed interest in my craft, I can think of nothing else! Besides, Gabriel is five years my senior, and he is still not married!”

  “Sì, well, sometimes I think Gabriel Medici out in the world as an eligible bachelor does more good for our family than having him actually married to one poor woman.”

  We both laugh, but I am absolutely serious. Love is not something I desire. I just spent the last year observing how love crushed León. Love had, in fact, been the reason for our yearlong trip abroad.

  Tuviani did return to Firenze with us and stayed as my father’s personal guest to Giovanna’s wedding. That night, and for many after, he had León’s and my complete attention—not just for knowledge of medicine and anatomy, but also for his intriguing anecdotes of his younger years. He’d spent very little time at his first university before going out on his own, wandering from school to school, from Lisbon to Moscow, and from Uppsala to Crete. He stopped in every mountain and seaside town in between to gain the folk secrets of the gypsies and the back-kitchen recipes of le vecchie streghe. A true Renaissance man of experience.

  “It’s the things you learn in life, not in school, that you will remember when you are older, Niccolò,” he said at dinner after the wedding.

  Sometime after too many glasses of wine and too many dances, I realized León was missing. I spent the rest of the night looking for him, eventually enlisting my brothers to help.

  It took hours, but we finally found him sitting on the bridge on the outskirts of town, in a near-catatonic state, partly induced by the barrel of wine we’d drunk, but mostly due to the nuptials.

  In all the years since he first laid eyes on my sister, he’d never spoken to me of his relationship with Giovanna, but that night, sitting on that bridge, he cried over it. We three sat next to him, our legs dangling over the edge as the river filled with his tears. If there was a medicinal cure or a magical concoction that could have taken away his pain, I would have walked to the moon and back again to fetch it for my friend.

  Love took a piece of León that night.

  One year later I can still see the effects. He is just as brilliant, just as kind, and just as grateful for everything he has, but there is also an emptiness, like a tiny hole has pierced
his soul, and a part of him leaks out each day—not enough for the average passerby to notice, but enough for me to see, making it my duty to follow him around with a bottle, collecting the lost parts of him so they will be there waiting when he is ready to be whole again.

  So that is how I decided that we both needed an adventure.

  If I was ever to have words fit for the paper on which my poems were written, I needed to see things, touch things, feel things that were outside of my everyday existence. Gabriel had never been able to get me on one of his diplomatic trips, nor could Emilio get me on one of his less-than-diplomatic romps, but the thought of learning all the secrets of the European greats thrilled me.

  And I just knew that if we searched hard enough, we’d find the cure for León’s heartache.

  Gabriel volunteered to be our guide, and who has been in love more times than Gabriel Cosimo Medici? Who is better equipped for dealing with broken hearts?

  One month in Venezia turned into two, and then we spent a third entirely in Sicily. My letters made Father so excited, he arranged for us to tour all of the magnifiche capitali of Europe, presenting me to all of the great families of the continent. We went through Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, the forests of Germany and hills of France, and across the sea to London. His generous trip had a twofold mission, and Gabriel saw that both were equally satisfied: we were to observe all of the European advances in botany, astronomy, and alchemy, note all of its medicinal discoveries, and unearth all of Europe’s magical secrets. But also in meeting the great families, entertain as many queens’ daughters as we could, which I grew quickly bored with. They were a mere distraction from a great cause. Except . . . when Maddalena turned up with her brother in Paris.

  Paris captivated us for three months. We visited surgeons at La Sorbonne and smoked Egyptian hashish at salons with charlatans at night, and at some point the hole in León’s soul shrank and shrank, and his smile began to gradually come back.

  “Well,” my father says, “that is just the thing I want to hear, Niccolò, that you are ready to dedicate yourself to your work.” He beams with excitement. “Although, I am sure my brilliant son can do this and also find some time for Maddalena Morosini, who might be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. And if you ever tell your sister I said that, I will cut off your fingers.”

  I smile and hug him again, finding myself not so frustrated that he invited Maddalena over from Venezia.

  “I hope in your grand sojourn you have learned deeply from many institutions, have found great inspiration from our friends abroad, and are ready to hone your talents here in Firenze.”

  “That is exactly what I am trying to tell you, Father. I am eager to find focus on my work.”

  He removes a candelabra from the wall. “Then you must follow me now for the real surprise.”

  My father’s cryptic tone is usually reserved for battle tactics with Emilio or banking strategies with Gabriel, so it is with great enthusiasm and curiosity that I walk by his side as we make our way through the palazzo, twisting and turning down staircases, moving deeper and deeper underground.

  He dismisses the guards as we go, and soon the tunnels are completely dark, save his candelabra. There is no one but us, hurrying past empty dungeons from centuries past. I’ve only been this far underground once before, when I was about ten—playing a game with my brothers in which the basic premise was them leaving me alone in the dark and waiting for me to find my way back, crying and nearly pissing myself with fear.

  Our footsteps grow louder the deeper we go as all other sounds fade away, and it feels like we have left the planet and entered the nighttime sky, for there could be no other place as dark. I marvel at how my father is able to navigate. His authoritative steps make it seem like he’s traveled the route a hundred times before.

  We come to a set of metal doors so large one would think they’d be only fit to guard a fortress. He holds the torch out to me. “Happy birthday, Niccolò. Your family and your destiny await.”

  I shine the fire closer to the metal—the doors are not embossed with the Medici coat of arms, but three interlaced diamond rings, which I know to be a favorite marker of Cosimo the Elder.

  “I don’t understand, Father. This palazzo wasn’t yet built when the elders ruled Firenze.”

  “The palazzo above wasn’t, but the palazzo below was.”

  He opens the doors, but on the other side, there is only another tunnel. A path is lit by torches mounted on the rock walls.

  As we continue, more tunnels branch off, but we do not venture off the path, and I truly feel like the tunnels were lit by the gods of antiquity and we are journeying a secret path to Elysium.

  And then my father stops. We are at a dead end, a wall of rock. Again he looks to me.

  “Go on,” he says. In the light of the flames, I can tell he is trying not to smile.

  “Father, I know that you hold my talents in high esteem, but walking through stone was not a subject covered in our curriculum.”

  “Which is why, now, you will learn from me.”

  Just as I begin to laugh, he walks forward, and with a turn he disappears.

  “Madonna mia!” I step forward with caution, hand extended. When I am close enough to touch the wall, I see the invisible path off to the right.

  My hands swat back and forth as I pass. “An optical illusion,” I whisper. A simple trick of the eye, but one that takes a true master of paint and stone and sculpture.

  The trick is immediately forgotten as I turn the corner and enter a space so cavernous I can hardly understand how it exists. The underground hall must be bigger than the grand hall aboveground in the palazzo. Bigger than San Lorenzo.

  There is no natural light, but the arched ceiling is painted midnight blue and is covered in fragments of reflective glass. It takes me a moment to realize it’s a twinkling depiction of all the major constellations and the planets glowing among them. A masterful nighttime sky.

  “I see Galileo has left his mark here.” I nod up to the four moons of Jupiter painted among the stars.

  “Sì.”

  “This ceiling . . . The curvature would impress even Brunelleschi.”

  “They say he was quite impressed with himself when he built it.” My father chuckles to himself.

  “How—?”

  Flames whip around the room, and sconces all throughout the hall are suddenly lit.

  “What science is this?” I whisper.

  “Just like all of the greats are forever immortalized in our great halls,” my father echoes.

  The mirrored glass on the ceiling reflects the flames, casting even more light onto the enormous statues. I step to one of the long walls, and my gaze pulls to the frescos that extend down from the ceiling. They’re unfamiliar scenes of classical mythology, but with very recognizable strokes—the whimsical colors of Botticelli and the realism of da Vinci. Between the frescos are portraits of all the important Medici by Michelangelo and Raphael. And along both lengths of wall are the largest crypts I’ve ever seen, marble sarcophagi carved by Donatello and fit for kings.

  “Father, keep me in suspense no longer, I beg you.” I walk back to the center of the room where he is standing, watching me. “What is this place?”

  “The bones of our ancestors, Niccolò. One day I will be here, and you will too, resting with the greats.”

  “Unless, of course,” Emilio says, stepping out from a shadow cast by a gargantuan statue of Hermes, “he succeeds with his duty.”

  “He will,” Gabriel says from the opposite corner.

  They both move to stand at Father’s sides.

  “What—what is going on? What about the crypts at the basilica?”

  “Those are the crypts for the people, Niccolò. Here is where we protect our souls, our bones, and our secrets. This is where you will take your place in greatness.” He gestures to a set of doors at the end of the hall.

  I walk toward the door, and they follow behind me. As I draw near, it op
ens, as if they commanded it.

  I don’t know what I expect to find, but the ghosts of my grandfathers might have been a lesser shock. I freeze, paralyzed by the sight before me.

  The room is not as long as the great hall, but the ceiling is just as cavernous. It’s ablaze with light from fireplaces—shelves glitter with glass bottles and jars, and long benches on either side are scattered with more scientific instruments than I saw in all my travels, some whose purpose eludes me. It is perhaps the most sophisticated laboratory in Europe, if not the world.

  Standing in the middle, waiting for us, is León.

  “Welcome, my brother,” he says, and then turns to my father. “I’ve set up everything to your specifications, sir. With a few extras that I knew you would like, Niccolò.” He points to a set of obsidian knives.

  Emilio spits on the ground at León’s feet. “You dare to bring him down here, Father! Entry is by bone and by blood! And we all know he is neither.” He draws his sword and points it at León.

  My hand goes to the hilt of my dagger, as does Gabriel’s, but León just looks at Emilio and takes a breath.

  My father’s voice booms throughout the chamber: “Don’t you dare draw your sword, Emilio! I am the head of this household, and I have invited León into the circle. I trust him with Niccolò’s life.”

  “Well, we all know you hold nothing in higher esteem than Niccolò’s life,” Emilio says through gritted teeth, but he sheathes his weapon.

  “Watch your tongue, Emilio,” Gabriel says, his hand still on his blade.

  “Non capisco, Padre,” I say, already moving on from Emilio’s outburst. “What is this place?”

  “This is your new home, Niccolò,” my father says. “Yours and León’s, if you choose to accept the duty that falls upon you by your bloodline.”

  “As if one’s blood is one’s choice,” I say, slowly walking around, my hand grazing over brass scales, Galileo’s occhiolino, and his telescopes. The room’s contents seem equally split between astronomy, mathematics, and alchemy: an assortment of glassware and an apparatus for distillation is ready for minerals; maps of the world are stacked on workbenches, pinned down by metalworking tools; and spices from the Far East line four full shelves on the wall. Another shelf is tacked with botanist diagrams, and another has rows of jars sealed with wax, containing floating specimens—eyeballs of various sizes and a heart too big to be a goat’s. Some shelves rise all the way to the domed ceiling, which has openings that allow airflow back out into the caves; half are filled with books and half with scrolls. Empty tables await cadavers, and empty cages with wall chains await . . . I look at my father.