* * *
By morning, Nonna and I are both exhausted. We’ve spent the entire night trying every spell that either of us can think of to help my mother. She hasn’t responded to any of them. Even the St. Raphael spell, which worked before, has no effect on her now. I remember that Brice responded once to the St. Michael spell, and then didn’t respond to it again.
Nonna says that perhaps the virus is evolving quickly, so that anything that works once will not work again, because the virus will block it. I hate the virus.
We eat a breakfast of cold cuts and then we go to sleep. Well, Nonna goes to sleep. I call the prison and request that my father call me back. I say it’s very important, and he needs to call me as soon as he has phone privileges. I say the name Calabrese at least seventeen times during the call. I know that my last name carries weight. I know that even though my father is locked up, my family has ties to all kinds of things in the city. People are afraid of us.
So I’m not surprised when I get a phone call back within twenty minutes.
“What are they for, Daddy?” I say in a sweet voice. “What are you going to use all those berserkers for?”
“This line isn’t secure, and you know that.”
Fine. Play that game, I think. “Whatever it is, I’m not going to let you get away with it.”
A sardonic laugh. “Now you really do sound like your mother.”
“Want to hear what she sounds like now?” I go down the steps, still carrying the phone. I hold the receiver up to the cage. “Say hi to Dad, Mom.”
She grunts at the phone, reaching out for it.
I put the receiver back to my ear. “What kind of psychotic sicko are you, anyway?”
“Oh, what was I supposed to do with her? She was going to ruin me. She was going to ruin everything.”
“I’m going to ruin everything, Dad. And before you start in on loyalty again, just understand that I could never be loyal to something like you.”
“But you’re loyal to that bitch who sent me away?” There’s rage in his voice now. “You pick her, when I’m the one who provided for you for all those years? I’m the one who kept you safe and made sure you had Barbie dolls? And she tried to destroy all that. And that’s who you’re loyal to?”
I can hardly process the sheer idiotic selfishness of a comment like that. My father sounds like a five-year-old. No. He sounds like Vincent. He’s nothing but a small-minded jerk. He’s hard and cruel. And I can’t believe I ever wanted to be anything like him. “You’ll pay for what you did to her,” I say quietly. “And what you did to me. And what you did to all of them.”
Especially Brice.
My father is laughing. “You? You’re going to teach me a lesson? Who do you think you are, little girl?”
“I’m Lucio Calabrese’s daughter,” I say. “And people tell me all the time how much I’m just like him.” I hang up the phone.
I need to rest. But not for too long. I set an alarm to go off in three hours and lay down. I’m asleep almost immediately. I dream about berserkers surrounding me on all sides, scratching and biting me. I try to say spells at them, but my lips have been sewn shut. My father is standing outside the bars, laughing and laughing.
I’m relieved when the alarm goes off and wakes me. It’s time to get down to business.
Chapter Fifteen
“What’s up?” Brice says. “Why’d you want to meet me here?” He comes into the dugout at the baseball field behind the theater. He sits down next to me on the bench.
Seeing him somehow wipes out half the bravery and resolve I’ve stored up. I fling myself into his arms, and for the first time in five years, I’m crying like a baby. The sudden tears are wet and hot on my cheeks. I can’t speak as sob after sob wracks my body. Brice pulls me close, stroking my hair. “What’s wrong?” he whispers.
It’s a long time before I can talk, but suddenly, as quickly as it came on me, it’s over. I wipe at my face and pull away from Brice, struggling to steady my breathing. “I need to break into a high security prison and kill my father. Do you think you could make me some charms to help with that?”
Brice stands up, his eyes widening. “What?”
“My father,” I say again. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Olivia, no. You can’t just kill someone.”
“You don’t understand.” I tell him everything. The charms he’s made to make people turn into berserkers. Insisting I keep selling them. The berserkers in the subway tunnel. My mother. What he said to me this morning. “He doesn’t deserve to live.”
Brice is quiet for a long time. He sits back down on the dugout bench next to me. “You’re saying that you think I have the strain of the virus that your father created.”
I nod.
Brice swallows. “So I’m going to turn into one of them. All the time. And nothing will be able to stop me.”
I don’t say anything.
“I wish I’d never slept with that stupid actress,” Brice mutters. He reaches down on the ground, picks up a handful of gravel and hurls it at the cage surrounding the dugout. Some of the gravel goes through the holes in the chain link. Some of it strikes the metal with a ringing sound. “I guess she used charms to get parts in plays. Some people do that, you know. They use magic to be irresistible, to be attractive, or to be talented. She seemed like she knew so much about the business. And I was drunk, and I wanted—”
“You don’t have to make excuses to me. I don’t blame you.” I blame my father. He did all of this.
“I don’t even remember it,” Brice says.
“It’s not your fault. It’s my father’s fault. And that’s why he has to pay. Because his stupid virus stole things from us. We can never, ever—”
“Have sex? Big freaking deal, Olivia. I’m turning into a goddamned monster here.”
“And that’s why I’m going to kill him.”
“I’ll still be a monster, even if you do. It won’t fix anything.”
He just doesn’t get it, does he? “It’s not about fixing things, Brice. It’s about justice. It’s about knowing that he suffers. It’s the principle of the thing.”
“I’m not helping you kill someone,” Brice says. “Especially not your own father, even if he is a jerk.”
I don’t believe this. I thought Brice would want to see my father dead as much I do. “You said that killing someone for a good reason was different than killing them for no reason at all.”
“It is different,” Brice says. “But it’s still not right.” He balls his hands up into fists. “It’s one thing if you already did it, you know? And it’s something about you I have to accept. It’s another thing entirely for you to come to me and ask you to help you do it. That’s...I can’t do that.”
“It’s not like I’ve killed a whole lot of people, Brice. Really, it’s only just one person. And he killed my cousin. And—”
“You killed Joey Ercalono? That was you?”
Damn it. I get up and go to the edge of the dugout, leaning against the chain link cage for support. For some unexplainable reason, I feel like I might start crying again. “It was right before opening night. Right before we... I wanted... You helped me not think about it.”
“Oh,” says Brice sarcastically, “well that’s just great.”
I turn around, glaring at him. How dare he judge me? How dare he make this into something about right and wrong, when his mother isn’t in a cage in his basement and his father isn’t some kind of psychopath? “I’m going to kill him. Either you’ll give me charms, or I’ll use Calabrese charms.”
“And risk the virus?”
“I don’t think exposure for a few hours will be enough,” I say. “I think I’ll be fine. Besides, getting him out of the way is the first priority. After that, it’s not as important.”
Brice shakes his head. He hits the wall of the dugout with a fist. “God damn it, Olivia.” He turns to me, and his eyes blaze into my own. “If I help you, I
don’t know what it will mean, for us. I don’t know if we’re, like, murderers together, if I’m ever going to be able to touch you again.”
I feel that like a blow to the stomach. It practically takes the wind out of me. It hurts, and I don’t think much about the next thing out of my mouth. “Well, it’s probably not a good idea for us to be touching each other anyway. It’s just too much temptation.”
“Right,” he says. “Right.” He sucks air in through his nose. “I guess you brought some charms with you for me enspell?”
I nod.
He holds out his hand for them.
I pull them out of my pocket and give them to him.
He takes a few seconds to pump little blue sparks into both and then hands them back. “One of these will make you invisible. The other will make it possible for you to unlock anything you need to unlock.”
“Thank you,” I say, putting them back in my pocket. We stare at each other for several seconds, neither of us saying anything.
Brice pulls his gaze away from mine. “I have to go,” he tells the gravel floor of the dugout. “I’m getting ready for that big audition.”
I nod. “Of course you do.”
When he walks past me, he doesn’t even look at me. I feel like something inside me is twisting in on itself, and it hurts. But I just do my best to ignore it.
The Toil and Trouble Trilogy, Book One Page 40