‘Bedchamber?’ echoed Matt.
Caravaggio looked sly. ‘He is very charming. And stunningly handsome. Difficult for me to resist.’
‘I’ve no words,’ said Em.
‘That’s certainly a change for the better,’ said Caravaggio, rolling the canvas up again. ‘Now, there is a little more that I must tell you.’
Em grabbed the canvas. ‘Unless it’s specific directions to Remy’s whereabouts, save it.’
57.
NIGHT SWIMMING
‘So now we have the sacred chord, but we’ve lost our Conjuror.’ Em touched her fingers to the scabs that were forming under her hair. She was starting to feel claustrophobic, cooped up in The Visitors.
Caravaggio put his hand on Em’s shoulder before she left the kitchen. ‘This is important.’
‘Oh, for f—’
‘My dear,’ said Flo mildly. ‘Language.’
‘Luca may actually want me as badly as he wants this canvas.’ Caravaggio’s voice dropped to a throaty whisper. ‘The one person he ever loved, Sebina, was taken from him as punishment for his failure to catch and bring me back to Rome on the day that I was supposed to die.’
Em stared at Caravaggio. ‘That would explain why he’s so fixated on catching you. It’s not just about what you stole from him. It’s also about who you stole from him.’
Did the fact that Luca had loved and lost make him more human? Or had it only served to bury that emotion deeper beneath his demonic nature? Em decided she never wanted to come close enough to the nephilim to find out.
She felt a tug on her jacket.
‘Ambuya wants to talk with you,’ Flo said, directing Em to the bedroom.
Ambuya patted her quilt. Em sat.
‘My child,’ said the old lady. ‘Don’t trust the artist. His secrets are many.’
‘We don’t,’ said Em. ‘Believe me.’
She rose from the bed again, but the old lady pulled her back.
‘There’s more, girl. You’ve spent the last months resisting the truth that be fermenting in your own mind.’
Em felt the intensity of Ambuya’s stare travel beneath her skin and into her mind. The only person who could do that so quickly was her grandfather, Renard.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said uncomfortably, shutting off as much as she could from Ambuya’s probing.
The old woman pulled herself up against the white pillow and set her hands on the top of the quilt. ‘Lord’ sake, girl, I already got most of your secrets when you were asleep. For someone with a mind blessed by the heavens, yo’ sure are dumb.’
Em bristled. ‘I’m not—’
‘Your dreams,’ said the old woman. ‘You’re ’fraid to read them ’cause then you’d have to deal with the guilt that the deaf boy still loves you and you may no longer love him the way you once did. Lust maybe.’ She grinned. ‘But that ain’t love. You may be finding space in your heart for another and it’s scarin’ you.’
Em leaped up. ‘How dare you! How … how do you know about my dreams? About Zach?’
‘It don’t matter how,’ said Ambuya. ‘Am right. Ain’t I?’
Em exhaled audibly. Ambuya nodded, satisfied.
‘You figure out what that boy says to you in them dreams,’ she said. ‘And then you find our Conjuror.’
‘But he’s doesn’t say anything,’ Em protested. ‘He just … waves.’
‘You sure ’bout that?’
The Reverend Gaines handed Ambuya a cup of water. She sipped, coughed, then looked at Em. ‘What you doin’ still here, girl?’ she said sharply. ‘Git!’
Back in the kitchen, Caravaggio and Matt were enjoying huge slices of chocolate cake. Em’s head was throbbing as she sat down.
‘I need to tell you both something,’ she said.
‘About time someone else had something to confess,’ said Caravaggio, grinning.
The words spilled out of Em in a rush. How Zach had been in her head a lot since they’d returned from Spain, and she’d been dreaming about him off and on ever since.
‘But the last two or three times,’ said Em softly, ‘the dreams have felt more emphatic, more deliberate.’
‘And you didn’t think that this was important to share?’ said Matt.
‘Not really. I just figured he’d decided to forgive me and was rebuilding the connection again. Letting me sense his presence like I used to. It’s not like we’re communicating in any tangible way. It’s all vague and kind of … well, sometimes it’s kind of erotic.’
Caravaggio licked icing from his fork. ‘I, for one, would like to hear more about those dreams.’
Matt slid his plate away. ‘Ignore him. What else do you remember?’
‘They always end with Zach waving goodbye,’ Em said. ‘But Ambuya just forced me to think. What if he’s not waving? What if he’s signing a message, or a warning?’
‘Signing?’ said Caravaggio in surprise. ‘What is this signing?’
‘Zach is deaf,’ Em explained. ‘He uses sign language. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I guess … it’s been a long time.’
‘Where is this charming Zach now?’ asked Caravaggio, tucking his hair behind his ears. ‘And why is he sending you messages?’
‘He’s in New York. He’s interning at the Museum of Modern Art, and I don’t know why he’s sending me messages in my dreams. Maybe he learned something about the Second Kingdom and he’s been doing some research on his own to help us?’
‘You need to remember what Zach was signing, Em,’ said Matt.
Em relaxed, focusing on her breathing, letting her rational mind fade to the background and her imagination take control. She unreeled her last dream like a movie in her head. Back at the Abbey, in the bay, treading water. The sun reflecting off the waves in white light. Zach on the end of the jetty. Signing, not waving. Signing…
She opened her eyes and wrote on a clean page on her sketchpad what Zach had signed.
Hadrian’s Tomb.
Caravaggio flinched. ‘Rome,’ he said uneasily.
Not for the first time since she’d met the artist, Em sensed his fear.
58.
DARKNESS VISIBLE
Crouched over the bedrock of Rome’s first citadel, Luca was brooding. The landscape of the Roman Forum, its freestanding Corinthian columns, crumbling walls, broken statues, and triumphal arches sprouting weeds from their foundations, made his mind wander along a dangerous path. What if his destiny was merely an oracle’s reckless counsel, not divine prophecy at all?
It had been easy to lure the Conjuror to his lair. His acolyte would be justly rewarded. He knew the Calder twins and the artist – the traitor to his oath and the bane of his existence – would join the Conjuror soon. Yet he was troubled, restless, at odds with himself.
Grabbing a plastic bottle, which rattled in the breeze at his feet, he crushed it in his hand and flung it out over the ancient ruins of the Forum. The bottle’s mangled shape whistled across the dirty night sky. In this century, the heavens never truly darkened.
But the skies would darken again when the time came to exact his price for Sebina’s pleas as the bronze bull had rolled into the temple, he thought savagely. For every anguished cry when they sealed her inside, when they had wheeled the bull into the temple’s fires, they would pay. They would pay, but they would not see it coming.
The spotlights illuminating the Forum flickered as Luca exhaled. The momentary gloom brought out Luca’s radiant aura among the ruins, had anyone been looking. Though no one was. The gates had been locked hours ago. And even if the humans saw him, they’d never remember what they’d seen. It was one of the tricks of his kind.
This part of the city had risen from a fiery swamp, an ancient burial ground of the Sabine people. Luca looked across the Forum and saw it as it once had been: triumphant, glorious, proud, packed with the devout and the damned, walking among the divine.
He pushed off the column and walked along what was left of the V
ia Sacra, which led from the centre of the Forum all the way to the bowl of the Colosseum. He studied the cracked, uneven paving as he walked, shutting out the twenty-first-century traffic to let the voices of his beloved eternal city fill his imagination.
He heard the cries on the night the flame on the citadel was first lit, the army of the Gauls approaching. One after another, Rome’s six sister hills ignited their fires, alerting the Republic to the danger. But no one saw Luca or his kind coming. He recalled legions of Roman soldiers marching in triumph into the citadel, the chants of thousands of spectators celebrating their victory while priests in white robes paraded to the temples of Vesta and Saturn and Jupiter. Still no one was looking at Luca.
Shoving his hands into the pockets of his long coat, he walked past the crumbling grotto where Julius Caesar had fallen. He passed two plebeians pushing carts and picking up the detritus of the day. They weren’t looking either.
He stepped off the cracked travertine pavings and on to a grassy knoll, his coat brushing the top of the grass like a breeze. At Vulcan’s shrine, two lovers laughed loudly as they scrambled over the closed Forum gate and on to the Via del Corso. Still no one saw him. No one looked at all.
Luca hunkered down to the ground, cracked his knuckles and plunged his hands and arms deep into the earth. The soil sifted through his fingers like water. The blood of martyrs that flowed into the trenches surrounding the Forum consoled him. The voices of the damned sang out to him, lamenting his grief.
Overhead, the spotlights sparked and hissed. Luca fought to keep his humanity buried. He thought of the kind of love he once had. The kind of love that made him impetuous, the kind for which he was willing to sacrifice everything. The kind of love that even after all these centuries he hungered for again. Now his vengeance ran as deep as his love once had, making a dangerous brew. He remained on his knees until the last bulb exploded above his head.
Rising again, he strode down the uneven ground outside the Forum and into the riot of traffic, where multi-coloured scooters swooped round the Circus Maximus like chariots of steel, their riders crowned with helmets instead of laurels. Luca darted among them like Mercury, winged messenger of the gods, sparks flying from the hem of his coat and the heels of his boots, scorching the scooters with the yellow flames and filling their riders with shock and confusion.
In front of Constantine’s triumphal arch, he raised his arms, opened his wings and soared to the highest spot on the monument. Perched on the bricks, he pondered the panorama before him. The bones of his city were like the carcass of a beast, its skeleton reaching up through the stones to breathe again. The Forum had once burst with life and teemed with death, its populace taught when to cheer, to praise, to punish. It would be so again. A kingdom of the Eternal. He and the Watchers would make it so.
And then he would exact his revenge.
59.
THE AGONY…
Matt faded into the room seconds after Em and Caravaggio, side-stepping the two of them fast enough to avoid a pile-up, his momentum carrying him across the marble floor on his knees.
When he looked up, his eyes exploded in stinging colours. He tried to grab his shades from his head, but he couldn’t make his brain speak to his fingers. Em and Caravaggio were little more than silhouettes across the room.
‘Seriously?’ he yelled, fumbling for his shades. ‘You had to bring us here? The Sistine Chapel? Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian AND Botticelli all in the same room? It’s like throwing a vampire on to a sun deck.’
The past unwound like a time-lapse film in front of him. The chapel was in organized chaos. A young boy dressed in a paint-smeared tunic and leggings pushed a wheelbarrow over his toes, the weight of it making Matt howl. Two men in leather aprons ran past carrying buckets of whitewash, sloshing on the wooden platform covering the floor. Matt zoomed helplessly in on a line of apprentices painting the brilliant sky on the curvature of the ceiling directly above him. Four grey-haired elders in fur cloaks and ermine coats stood round a long wooden table spread with cartoons and sketches, passionately debating the blueprints for the chapel’s frescoes. A team of young men mixed plaster in wooden vats. Children darted in and out, sloshing buckets of water into a row of troughs where the pews should have been.
The chapel was a cacophony of loud voices, scraping tools and sawing wood, echoing off the covered marble floors. And high above it all, on an ingeniously curved scaffold, stood Michelangelo himself, clad in a loose white shirt and leather trousers under a brown suede tunic. The pockets of his tunic were overflowing with paint rags and scrolls of drawings. He was red-faced and angry, barking orders to boys swarming up and down rows of wooden ladders carrying paint pots, trowels, water buckets and thick brushes to the master. His wavy hair sat high on his forehead and his face was full of sharp edges, cheekbones and a long pointed nose, an effect made even more pronounced by his full sculpted beard.
Matt’s eyes were fluttering faster than ever, the images swimming across his vision, but he couldn’t stop staring. This was Michelangelo. The Michelangelo. The greatest Animare ever known. The Obi Wan of the art world.
Every tableau, every figure, was pulsing, sending streams of colour and light directly to his eyes. It was as if he was absorbing it all. He wiped his hand across his face. Pink tears. Quickly, he pulled off his jacket and held it over his head. The thousands of ribbons of light diffused over him.
I need to get out of here, Em. Em? EM!
60.
…AND THE ECSTASY
Em was faring better than Matt, but only because she was able to perceive the power of the frescoes through the filter of her Guardian abilities. Even so, she found herself sobbing. Matt had dragged himself against the wall, twitching and shaking as if someone was prodding him with a Taser. Em’s head hurt from her brother’s pain, but the desire to look around overwhelmed her.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the three hundred Ignudi in particular. Michelangelo’s nude figures depicted the gods and goddesses whose prophecies and mythologies had shaped Christianity. Painting pagan myths and their heroes in these frescoes was audacious in the extreme, blasphemous, even, to many.
One figure seemed to be whispering to her. A male, muscular and beautiful, his sandy-coloured hair curled at his shoulders, his wings tucked behind his back. His head was bowed, his right hand reaching behind, a garland of laurels linking his space to the figure next to him. Standing beneath the fresco, Em sketched him in a daze, copying him exactly as she saw him.
An icy chill gripped her chest. Slowly, she looked up from her sketch. She felt a combined surge of desire and terror. The figure’s eyes were striking and soulful, malevolent and mischievous. His irises swirled with the constellations. As she sketched, he leaned out of the painted space, his hand reaching for her wrist.
I need to get out of here, Em. Em? EM!
The pain in Matt’s voice slammed Em back to reality. She ripped her gaze away.
The figure’s hand retracted.
61.
STUCK BETWEEN A SATYR AND A HARD PLACE
Rémy was slowly suffocating. The weight on his limbs and chest was getting heavier and his breathing was shallow and painful. This is what happened when a regular person was bound in a painting. Or maybe not a regular person, but someone who wasn’t an Animare, anyway.
The soft violin music from the woman in the corner of the canvas was grating on his nerves. Perhaps that was part of the plan. Stuck inside the grotesque painting, Rémy had lost track of time completely and was beginning to lose hope. He was, however, sure of one thing. Whoever had bound him inside this painting hadn’t lured him here just to kill him. He could have done that swiftly enough in Chicago. For the first time, Rémy wondered if Luca Ferrante and his sidekick, the dude in the camel coat, might have other plans for him.
‘Can you hear me, Conjuror?’
Rémy turned his head with an effort. An old man on a three-legged stool beside the satyr was looking at him.
‘I
can hear you,’ said Rémy, a surge of hope charging through his heavy limbs.
The old man stood. ‘I am Tiziano,’ he said. ‘The artist. Although of course I am merely his image, the representation of his satisfaction with his work.’
‘What is this painting?’ Rémy gasped.
‘The Flaying of Marsyas. A foolish satyr who challenged the god Apollo to a contest.’
Rémy guessed the figure gently slicing at the flesh on the chest of the satyr was Apollo. The laurel crown on the young god’s head glinted with specs of white paint.
‘Guessing he lost,’ said Rémy, watching a carving of wet hairy skin fall to the ground from the satyr’s hip bone. ‘What was the contest?’
‘Marsyas found Minerva’s musical pipes.’ Tiziano gestured to the pipes hanging mysteriously above the gasping satyr. ‘And he regrettably challenged Apollo, Minerva’s husband, to a contest.’ He rubbed his hands together gleefully as more skin dropped from Marsyas. The satyr screamed. Rémy’s stomach churned. So did his mind.
‘That’s a shame,’ he managed. ‘I believe I could do better.’
Apollo lifted his knife from the satyr’s skin and turned his baleful stare towards Rémy.
‘You are human,’ he said. ‘Likely a slave, and certainly a prisoner in here. Don’t be foolish and issue a challenge you cannot possibly fulfil. Your death will come soon enough.’
‘If that’s the case,’ said Rémy with far more confidence than he felt, ‘then what do you have to lose?’
The rustling of the fetid wind through the trees and the faint notes of the young woman’s violin floated through the barbed seconds. Rémy knew he was in this painting to keep him in a kind of stasis until he was needed. But by then it would be too late for Em and Matt. For Sotto and Two. Maybe for the world. He sucked in more air. It tasted like rotten eggs from the paint. He needed to escape this painting and do what he let himself be captured for in the first place. Destroy Luca and the Camarilla. His choice.
Nephilim Page 14