The Toil and Trouble Trilogy, Book One

by Val St. Crowe

  * * *

  I get to the deli late the next day. It’s nearly noon, and all of the other guys are already there. My uncle Guido, who’s running the business while my dad’s in jail, greets me with, “About time, Olivia.” He is sitting at the head of a table set up in the back room of the deli. This is where we do all our strategizing and business.

  I sit down in an empty chair, feeling annoyed with myself for sleeping too late. It hasn’t been easy getting the guys to accept me as serious about being part of the jettatori. I’m a girl, and even though my father doesn’t have any sons and power is handed down through bloodlines, they don’t think I’m capable of doing what they do. I have to prove them wrong. I want to run the Calabrese family. It’s my birthright, and it’s the only thing I’ve wanted to do since my mother died. “Sorry,” I say. But I don’t sound sorry. You can’t admit you’re wrong if you want to save face with the guys. I slouch in my seat.

  “We thought maybe dealing with Joey yesterday was too much for you,” sneers my cousin Vincent. Vincent is Guido’s son. He is my competition. If anything were to happen to Guido, God forbid, either Vincent or I would be the next logical choice to take over. Vincent knows I’m a threat. He hates me.

  I have another flash of Joey’s dead body. It bothers me, but I don’t let it show. “Bastard got what was coming to him,” I say.

  Tommy, who owns the deli and is my second cousin, claps me on the shoulder. I’m sitting next to him because he’s the closest thing I have to a friend around here. “Shoulda seen her. She was brilliant.”

  Tommy helped me with Joey’s body yesterday. But no one helped me shoot him. I killed him myself. The fact that it makes me sick to my stomach is no one’s business. I’ll get used to it. I have to.

  “Glad to hear it,” says Guido. “You got a lot of Lucio in you, kid.” He grins at me.

  Lucio is my dad.

  “So,” Guido continues, “now that we’re all here, we’ve got to talk about the docks. There’s cops swarming the place.” He gets up from his seat and begins to walk around the room. He likes to walk while he talks. I try to focus on Guido and what he’s saying and not what I can see through the window behind him. It isn’t that the back alley behind the deli is interesting, it’s just that I’ve always had a hard time sitting and listening while people talked at me. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t mind dropping out of school too much.

  Guido’s voice starts to take on a droning quality, however, and before I know it, I’m not listening to a word he says. Instead, I’m thinking about Brice and what happened the night before. Brice is a berserker. The berserker virus is sexually transmitted. Brice and I didn’t have sex, but we were awful damn close. His...dick was touching me. Through a condom, sure, but condoms aren’t protection against the berserker virus. It isn’t like AIDS or something. It’s a magic disease. Am I going to become a berserker too?

  It takes a month for the virus to gestate. In twenty-eight days, I’ll know. One way or another.

  Something moves outside the window, but I’m not focused on the window, either. I’m focused on figuring out what I’ll do if I become a berserker. The virus can be contained with benedetta magic. The rituals will strengthen your body, like your magical immune system or something, make it so you can fight the virus back. But all the rituals can achieve, the best it can be, will be that I’ll be absolutely vicious and crazy, out of my mind, for one hour a night. If I’ve contacted the virus, my best case scenario is that I’ll become a berserker every night at midnight. My worst case scenario, if I don’t have the rituals, is that the virus will get worse and worse, making me a berserker for longer and longer periods, until eventually, I’m a berserker all the time. That was why I did the ritual for Brice. The earlier you start the treatments, the better chance you have at stopping the virus from getting worse.

  There is more movement through the window, and this time I realize someone is out there. With a gun.

  “So we’ll have to divide and conquer, laying low,” Guido is saying. He walks in front of the window.

  I get to my feet.

  I’m too late. There’s a muffled bang. The shooter must have a silencer. The window shatters. Glass tickles against the floor.  And Guido crumples to the floor.

  A brick sails through the broken window. It lands on the table in front of me. There is a piece of paper wrapped around it. I pull it off. “For Joey,” it says.