Matt and Rémy stared up at the image on the big screen. The angel was wrapped in flowing white gauze, his back bare and his black wings forefront in the composition, suggesting sensuality and mischief.
‘According to these notes,’ continued Em, ‘the painting was a private commission for Cardinal Francesco Trastámara—’
Matt raised his hand to cut her off. ‘The family who owned that village and palazzo in Spain where Rémy and I almost died last summer? The godfathers of the Camarilla?’
‘The very one,’ continued Em, her eyes sparking with interest. ‘It says here that there were two versions of the painting. One is in a private collection in America, and the other has been missing for centuries. It’s believed to have been one of the paintings stolen from the artist in the final days of his life.’
‘Who’s the artist?’ asked Rémy, Em’s adrenaline chiming in his head like tubular bells.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Matt, shaking his head.
‘We have a winner,’ said Em. ‘The artist of Rest on the Flight into Egypt is Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio.’
29.
ARMED AND READY
‘It can’t be a coincidence that your mother had a copy of a Caravaggio hanging above her desk,’ said Em, ‘and he keeps popping up in our lives.’
‘I don’t think it’s a copy,’ said Rémy, his eyes still on the painting displayed on the screen.
Em stared. ‘You think your mother had an original Caravaggio hanging in your flat in Chicago?’
‘Hear me out,’ said Rémy. ‘We know my mom discovered the portrait of Cardinal Oscuro and the monster Don Grigori in the archives of the Dupree Plantation. Right?’
‘Hardly likely to forget those two,’ said Matt with feeling.
‘She could have found, and taken, this picture at the same time,’ Rémy said. ‘The Duprees were art collectors. They had hundreds of paintings tucked away in their mansion.’
‘Possible,’ said Em, not yet convinced.
‘What if my mom took it for insurance, to protect me?’ Rémy went on. ‘She knew Grigori and the Camarilla wanted to kill us—’
‘Because,’ Em cut in, ‘the prophecy your mum discovered says a Conjuror is the only one who can stop the Watchers coming into the world to create their Second Kingdom.’
Rémy nodded. ‘What if she knew this painting was crucial to that plan and she took it to trade for my life and her life some time in the future?’
‘She also may just have liked it,’ said Matt glibly.
Flipping quickly through the pages of his mom’s journal, Rémy found what he was looking for and slid the page in front of the siblings. It was a torn catalogue page, folded and taped to the back of the journal.
‘What are we looking at?’ asked Matt, slipping his shades up into his hair, his eyes flashing from steel grey to a cold blue.
‘It’s the inventory of artefacts in the Dupree Plantation archives when they were sold.’ Rémy tapped his finger at the middle of the list. ‘Look. There.’
In the middle of the inventory was a long list of paintings, including The Cardinal and His Disciple, the double portrait now hidden somewhere in Rome. Beneath that was typed, Rest on the Flight into Egypt and a notation, unaccounted for, assumed lost in passage.
Em looked at the image on the screen again, at the angel’s youthfulness and its black-feathered wings. ‘So this painting travelled to America on a slave ship, along with the double portrait and whatever else the Camarilla was trying to hide,’ she said.
‘We know why the double portrait is important, but what’s so important about this one?’ Matt wondered.
‘Is it because Caravaggio is the artist?’ asked Em.
‘I don’t know,’ said Rémy. ‘But whatever the reason, I need to go home and get it.’
A soft yellow light began pulsing from the centre of a Turner painting on the wall: Rome, from Mount Aventine. The painting dominated the alcove where most of the paintings that Orion agents used to fade in and out of European galleries were hanging. Instantly an alarm clanged through the church. Someone was trying to fade in from Rome without Orion’s permission.
Matt scrambled to his feet, grabbing a pen and a sketchpad from the table. Em ran to a keypad on the wall near the altar and silenced the alarm. Rémy took a position next to Matt in front of the Turner.
‘Ready?’ Matt asked.
Rémy’s world had shifted on its axis the day his mom had died, and it appeared it was going to keep on tilting. He watched a winking light in the middle of the painting get brighter and brighter. With his harmonica cupped at his lips, he mumbled, ‘This bad-ass ready to slay wit’ da blues.’
In the painting, the wide bluish-white Tiber river flowed under the arches of the Ponte Emilio, down to the busy markets of the Trastevere on its bottom left. The river was bulging as if someone was pumping it with air, expanding and stretching, yellows, blues and greys flooding the ancient city’s riverbanks. In a surge of sunlight and a rush of murky water, the arched bridge swung out of the painted space and dropped a drenched figure on to the alcove floor at Matt’s feet.
‘Speak of the devil,’ said Matt, stomping his boot firmly on Caravaggio’s sopping chest and pinning him to the ground. Rémy pinned the interloper’s legs before he could spring to his feet. Em grabbed a roll of packing tape and quickly bound Caravaggio’s hands together.
‘Is this any way to greet a friend?’ Caravaggio complained.
‘You’re not our friend,’ growled Matt.
‘Spy? Informant?’ the artist suggested. ‘Occasional lover?’
Matt growled louder, opening and closing his fists at his side. ‘You’ve been wandering in painted space for too long,’ he said. ‘You’ve an over-inflated sense of your own worth. You’re a liar and a thief and if not for your occasional intelligence-gathering for us, I would take great pleasure in—’
‘You Scottish are too quick to anger, too fast to find faults,’ said the artist reproachfully, struggling to his feet. ‘Let’s kiss and make up.’
Quick as lightning, the artist kicked out at Rémy. But Rémy was taller and younger, and pivoted away from the kick, charging his shoulders at Caravaggio, taking him down in front of the iron gate leading into the crypt. Matt swung the door open, and this time it was Rémy keeping Caravaggio on the floor with his knee on his chest.
The artist stopped smirking, raising his hands in the air. ‘I surrender.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Matt said angrily.
‘I thought it was time we joined forces and worked together to bring down the Camarilla once and for all.’
‘We offered you a chance in Spain to work with us and you chose to take off instead,’ said Rémy, pressing more of his weight on the artist’s chest.
‘I know, and that was rash of me, but I’ve had time to think,’ Caravaggio said, trying unsuccessfully to shift to a better position beneath Rémy’s knee.
‘I’ll ask again,’ said Matt. ‘What are you doing here?’
Caravaggio coughed, his face reddening. Rémy let up a little.
‘Answer,’ said Matt. ‘Or he’ll throw you into the crypt where you’ll still answer our questions, but you’ll be hurting more when you do.’
‘Wait!’ Em said, inserting herself into the mix. ‘I get that he’s an arrogant, deceitful dick, but he has been useful.’
With a grunt, Caravaggio rolled out from under Rémy and sat up. ‘You’re not going to hurt me,’ he said with confidence. ‘You’re bluffing. You boys threaten; she mollifies. You would all have lost your heads during the Inquisition,’ he added. ‘You are attori terribli … such terrible actors.’ He looked slyly at Rémy. ‘And you may be a Conjuror, but you’re weak.’
With both hands, Rémy rolled Caravaggio into the crypt. The artist howled as he crashed down the stone steps, swearing at them in Italian and English until he slammed into the ground.
‘Probably shouldn’t have done that,’ panted Rémy to the siblings.
‘But he was pissing me off.’
Down in the crypt, the artist moaned about cracking his forehead, but made no moves to scramble back up the steps.
‘He’ll be OK,’ said Em. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m good,’ said Rémy, hiding his emotions from Em with a jazz riff in his head until his muscles and his mind relaxed. He’d never been a fighter, but he wasn’t about to admit that to Em, and certainly not to Matt. His family may have been poor and there may only have been the three of them, and Sotto Square, his landlord, but he’d always been protected. Their wealth had been their love. He was adrift now in a world he was struggling to understand, and no matter how hard Em tried to comfort him, Rémy knew he had to be the one to adjust himself to his new situation. He changed the subject.
‘He’s not going to stay there for long, you know,’ Rémy said, looking down at the artist again. ‘He’ll draw his way out.’
‘Maybe,’ said Em, returning to the table. ‘But I think he’s staying. Whatever brought him here terrified him.’
‘Then a crypt in the Highlands of Scotland might be the safest place for him right now,’ said Matt, giving Caravaggio the finger as he slammed the iron gate closed.
30.
DROP SOME KNOWLEDGE
Matt brought three fresh coffees from the kitchen.
‘Thanks,’ said Rémy, warming his hands on the steaming cup. ‘Damn, it’s cold and damp in here.’
‘Welcome to Scotland,’ said Matt. ‘Land of freedom and frozen balls.’
‘Listen to this, Rémy,’ said Em, her fingers flying across the keyboard. ‘After your mum took you to Chicago, the Dupree family archives were sold. The company that bought everything and shut the archives down was called Imperial Galleries. They have headquarters in London, Rome and Madrid. And,’ she added with a grin and a dramatic flick of her fingers, ‘one of their subsidiaries is Old Worm’s Cabinet of Curiosities, where you tracked down the double portrait last summer.’
‘How did you find that out so fast?’ asked Rémy, sounding impressed.
‘Learned from the best,’ said Em. A surge of melancholy washed over her when she thought about the coding and computer tricks – some legal, some not so much – she’d picked up over the years from Zach. His tousled blond hair touching her ear as he leaned on her shoulder, his breath warm on her neck, his fingers pressing on top of hers as they’d chased code through cyberspace on one of the many computers he’d built from scratch.
Em sighed and typed a long string of code.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ she said, honing in on her prey. ‘According to INTERPOL—’
‘You’ve hacked into INTERPOL?’ Rémy cut in, coughing up coffee.
‘Not exactly,’ said Em. ‘Orion has a semi-legit portal to their files. Two Animare and their Guardians are on INTERPOL’s Stolen Art Unit. Seems there is a file on missing works of art that have at some point in their provenance crossed with Imperial Galleries.’
Rémy put down his mug and stood behind Em. ‘Can you see who owns the galleries?’
‘Should be able to.’
Em scrolled through a page of code, tapped a few keys and a list of three names appeared on a page of Imperial Galleries’ letterhead. She frowned.
‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘Lucius Ferrante is listed as the company chairman, but that can’t be right.’
‘Who’s Lucius Ferrante?’ asked Rémy. ‘Sounds like a celebrity chef.’
‘In ancient Rome, Lucius Ferrante and his cult of followers were said to be more powerful than the emperor.’
Rémy looked blank.
‘Roman scholars also considered him to be the father of alchemy because of his experiments with turning base metals to gold,’ Em prompted.
‘OK,’ said Rémy, stretching the syllables.
‘Weren’t you paying attention to Snape in Potions class?’
‘Don’t encourage her,’ said Matt, shaking his head.
‘Plato mentions him a few times in his writing, so we’re talking a long time ago,’ Em continued. ‘Think of Lucius Ferrante as the Rasputin of Emperor Hadrian’s Roman court. The power behind the throne.’
‘And the scary eyes,’ added Matt, checking out his own reflection in his sunglasses.
‘Like Rasputin, Lucius Ferrante wielded a strange control over the emperor’s wife and sons,’ Em went on. ‘He was possibly one of the empress’s lovers, or maybe one of her sons’. His apocryphal writings influenced The Book of Enoch, which was banned from the biblical canon because it was too out there.’
Rémy was about to interrupt, but Em held up a finger. ‘But he’s most renowned for compiling ways of moving between the natural and supernatural worlds.’
‘Still having a hard time with that myself,’ Rémy admitted.
‘You must have known when you were a kid that your musical talent was beyond normal,’ Matt said.
‘It’s hard to remember what I thought when I was a kid. I don’t remember much from the years directly after my dad’s death. And a lot of my adolescence was shrouded in secrets that I thought until recently had to do with my mom’s mental illness. On good days, I thought I was a child prodigy.’ Rémy paused. ‘On bad ones, a freak of nature.’
Matt and Em glanced at each other. ‘Freak of nature’ was a label all too familiar to them.
‘So what happened to this Ferrante dude?’ asked Rémy.
‘Hadrian tried to burn him at the stake,’ said Em, with some relish. ‘He tossed all his work on to the flames with him, but one of Ferrante’s lovers stepped into the flames and rescued him, carrying him “unharmed from a fiery death” and “raised him up to the heavens”, end quote. Of course, this miraculous event only made his cult stronger, and he became an even bigger threat to the emperor.’ She paused. ‘Now this is interesting…’
Her fingers clicked from one site to another, her concentration palpable, the air around her ticking with electricity.
‘There’s a reference in Orion’s database that Lucius Ferrante’s writings became part of the lost apocrypha the Book of Songs, which first prophesied the Second Kingdom. Parts of that book ended up in the Book of Revelations in the Bible.’
‘Wait,’ said Rémy. ‘My mom has a note that the first reference to the Second Kingdom she could find was in a page from an ancient manuscript—’ he flipped to a page in the old leather-bound journal – ‘called the Book of Songs. It describes the prophecy. “Behold the Watchers, God’s angels that fell from chaos. One day their kingdom will rule the earth … only a Conjuror shall cull them.”’
‘I knew we were on to something,’ said Em in triumph.
Rémy smiled widely, and Em noticed for the first time that he had dimples.
‘Do any of your sources tell us what happened to Ferrante, Em?’ Matt asked.
‘Eventually captured and locked away in a dungeon somewhere. No record of him after that.’
Matt took the journal from Rémy and looked at Annie Dupree Rush’s notes.
‘So Lucius Ferrante first writes about the Second Kingdom during Emperor Hadrian’s reign,’ he said. ‘And ten years ago a company in his name buys the artefacts from the Dupree family archives.’ He combed his fingers through his tangled hair. ‘I appreciate the connections, Em, I do, but I’m not sure how they help us stop the Camarilla.’
‘They help you,’ said Caravaggio, lunging from the entrance to the crypt and thrusting his blade at Matt’s throat, ‘because Lucius Ferrante, or Luca as he is sometimes known, was … is … a nephilim. The offspring of a fallen angel and a human. The immortal Imperial Commander of the Camarilla, anointed to protect their cause and fulfil their prophecy.’
31.
MUSHY PEAS
Matt pitched forward, grabbed Caravaggio’s forearm, twisted it and threw the artist to the ground. The knife clattered at Rémy’s feet.
‘Seriously,’ said Rémy, picking up the knife and pointing it at the artist. ‘Don’t you ever play nice?’
Ca
ravaggio sat up on his elbows, the gash at his forehead swelling. ‘Force of habit.’
Matt dropped his shades to cover his kaleidoscopic eyes and hauled Caravaggio to his feet. He tore off the tape at his wrists and shoved him roughly on to a chair.
‘I am hurting,’ Caravaggio grumbled.
‘Put this on your forehead,’ said Em, impatiently handing Caravaggio the bag of now slightly less frozen peas that Matt had used earlier. She leaned in close and put her hands firmly on the artist’s knees. The artist tilted his head to speak, but Em raised a finger to her lips, and nudged him back against the chair with the palm of her hand resting on his shoulder.
‘I’m willing to ignore all the self-serving lies you’ve told us in the past,’ she said, ‘because when you faded here, you were terrified. I felt it. But if you want our help, we need to know everything you remember about your death, and everything you can remember about your life. No more flirting, no more attempts to seduce my brother…’
‘Jesus, Em,’ mumbled Matt.
‘If the condom fits.’
‘Can we save the sibling shaming for later?’ Rémy enquired.
Rémy’s emotions were screeching like out-of-tune guitars in Em’s mind. He wasn’t so much on edge, she thought, as hanging from a crumbling cliff one-handed. She squeezed Caravaggio’s shoulders, increasing her psychic pressure, sending a calm soft blue under his skin.
‘We need to know what scared you and why,’ she said gently.
Caravaggio closed his eyes. Em felt his muscles relax beneath her hands.
‘When I first came to Rome,’ he began, ‘poverty blinded me. My hunger fed my work, my form was lacking, my figures clumsy, hands out of proportion, eyes dead. But then I met my saviour. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.’
‘Em, we don’t have time for his life story,’ hissed Matt.
Em silenced her brother with a look. But Caravaggio had tensed and his eyes had flown open. She couldn’t tell if he’d seen something and didn’t want to share, or if his memory had shut down again. He wriggled away from her hands and stood up, his hands rubbing at his temples.
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