by Camilla Monk
I tensed as he opened the rusty lid. Nothing ghastly popped out, though. All the can contained was a roll of really old, frayed linen. Faust took it out and unraveled it, revealing an endless strip of characters, painted on the narrow band of fabric. The same proto alphabet that covered the table and was inking all around Faust’s right wrist. “You can touch it; it’s harmless,” he said.
I poked it once, snatching my finger back just as soon. “What is it?”
“An embalming spell. Preserves one’s external appearance while the rest rots as it should.”
I recoiled. “Why did you make me touch that?”
“Don’t worry, I told you it’s harmless. There’s a whole ritual to perform for it to work, and this one’s been used already, anyway. I don’t think it could work again.”
My stomach heaved. “Used?”
He unrolled more of the linen and coiled some around his arm. “You wrap it all around yourself during the ritual, like for a conventional embalmment.”
I eyed the brownish stains spotting the fabric. God, I was going to be sick. “Put it back in the can. It’s gross. Why do you keep that anyway?”
“It’s a souvenir,” he said, coiling the bandage back in the coffee can before he went to place it exactly where he’d found it on the shelves—unbelievable. He knew every corner of that attic like the back of his hand. How long had he lived here to get to that point? He returned to sit next to me. “The owner was an interesting man who lived to see twenty-two popes. He didn’t understand, however, that there’s no point in wishing for immortality.” He sighed. “Time can’t be stolen, only given.”
By Chronos, I mentally completed. I gazed at Faust’s features, those of a man only a few years older than me, yet who carried the weight of an eternity in his eyes. “What happened to that guy?”
“He tripped on a halberd. Pierced his heart.”
I cast him a dubious look. “I’m not sure I wanna ask . . .”
Faust gave a sorrowful sigh, petting the black kitten who’d come out of its hiding spot under the couch to settle on his lap. “I was holding the halberd.”
A shudder cascaded down my spine, and I inched away from him. “You killed him.”
“In my defense, he had it coming for a long time,” Faust whined.
All his joke achieved was to make my jaw tick from aggravation at his antics. “That’s what you’re planning to do to Montecito and Lucius? Get rid of them before they figure out how to use the table?”
He gave a guilty wince. “The idea crossed my mind, but there’re a few things I’d like to understand first. I’ve dealt with her kind before, but she’s not exactly the usual fare.”
I shifted to sit cross-legged on the busted leather cushions, allowing curiosity to override my concerns over Faust’s general lack of regard for human life—or laws. “Her kind?”
He nodded, scratching the kitten curled on his lap to a steady purr. “The power you call ‘Magic’—it’s not a good word for it, but let’s go with that for the sake of clarity. In any case, there’s not much of it left in this world, and what you call ‘witches’ or ‘sorcerers,’ I would call scavengers. They scrape the earth for what little remains of that power, in artifacts, in ancient spells transmitted from one generation to the next,” he explained.
“Archeology with a twist,” I summarized. “And your power; it’s the same kind of magic?”
“In short, yes. Lady Montecito isn’t the first one to bang at the walls of reality to get a glimpse of what lies on the other side—and she certainly won’t be the last—but she seems unusually skilled at it. You said you saw a ribbon of smoke when Lucius tried to capture you?”
“Basically . . .”
“Would you say it was a weapon? Did it touch you, or anything else around you?”
How the hell could he know? “Actually, yeah. It sliced through a column like butter, and after that, he tried to throw it at me, but I think he missed. It did nothing . . .”
Faust’s lips went thin as I recounted this. “Telum Tenebrarum,” he said in Latin, with an accent I could never copy even if I spent the rest of my life studying it. Faust was a native speaker of a dead language, I realized. It was just a detail, a grain of sand amidst the flow of weird I was continually struggling to process. But, somehow it impressed me almost as much as his ability to stop time. I ran his sentence against my meager Italian vocabulary. Got nothing. “What does it mean?”
“Spear of Shadows,” he said slowly. Wrinkles appeared on his brow, that vanished just as fast as he chuckled away whatever dark thought he’d been entertaining. “But I’m just trying to scare myself. It’s been a very long time since a practitioner went that far, and while I think highly of Lady Montecito, I don’t think she’s that talented. Could be a much simpler spell, or even a whip sword you mistook for something else in the dark.”
“My eyes work fine . . .” I replied tartly. “But you said someone had done it before, that smoke spear thing.”
Faust nodded. “Yes. The man I told you about, in fact. But he wasn’t able to complete the spell, in fact.”
My eyes narrowed. “Because of the halberd?”
He gave a sheepish shrug. “Among other things. The entire city of London was in flames, and it was overall . . . a very complicated night.”
My mouth fell open in dumb shock. “The entire city? When was that?”
“1666.”
Of course. The fire. In 1666 . . . I massaged the bridge of my nose slowly. I thought I’d more or less gotten over it, but the age difference was still proving to be a major issue during this second date of ours.
Noticing my prolonged silence, Faust tilted his head, his brow wrinkling in concern. “Emma, are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m just . . .” My throat was too tight. I gave up, and I waved at him, the attic, all of this, knowing all too well he couldn’t even see my hand. I sighed. “Nevermind. Look, now that I’ve figured that Montecito and Lucius basically eat children for breakfast, what do I tell Lily? She’s never gonna believe any of this, but I need to find a way to get her away from Katharos.”
“She studies the table, right?” Faust asked.
I nodded. “With her douche boyfriend.”
“Dante Alessandri,” Faust confirmed. “Katharos hired him eight months ago. PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from Sapienza, summa cum laude.”
I raised an admirative eyebrow. “And here I thought all you did was drink and con tourists.”
He winked. “You forget my passion for gardening.”
My lips quirked, but I couldn’t bring myself to laugh with that weight in my chest. “He’s the one who helped Lily get her internship, and she’s . . .” I sighed, thinking of their fusional bubble thing. “Let’s just say I’m the last person she’ll listen to. Dante is her whole world right now, and of course, he’s team Katharos. If I try to tell him they’re dangerous, he’s just gonna laugh in my face.”
“She’s in love and living her grandfather’s dream,” Faust said softly, reading my thoughts. Before I could ask him what he knew about old McKeanney, he added, “We wouldn’t want her to land as hard as he did.”
My scalp prickled. “You know about that too?”
“That he jumped from the Residenza’s third floor? Yes.” His tone cooled down a notch. “A tragedy, especially when he was so close to locating the table.”
“I’ve been told it was suicide,” I murmured. A nameless fear swelled in my ribcage, laced with tar-black anger.
“The police found no evidence to the contrary,” Faust noted.
“But you?” I urged. “What do you think?”
He drew a slow breath, his jaw working as he carefully chose his next words. “I think that a man who spends fifty years studying a subject is bound to understand it sooner or later, and I wonder how well Professor McKeanney understood this.”
“You think he figured it wasn’t just all legends—the spells, the magic . . . and you.”
/> An enigmatic smile pierced through’s Faust’s beard. “He wrote an insightful paper about me. It’s a pity we never met.”
I let that sink in for a couple of seconds, mentally replaying Lily’s fond recount of her grandpa’s work about Faust. The old McKeanney I remembered had been just like her—one of the good guys, with a moral compass the size of a stadium, and maybe too soft for his own good. If he’d found out about Montecito, his first impulse must have been to pull out. But as I’d learned tonight, one didn’t leave the Residenza so easily. “Faust. I have to get Lily out of there.”
His smile widened, and for an instant, I thought it looked feral, determined—two adjectives I wouldn’t have associated with Faust’s easygoing personality so far. “Seems you and I are stuck together until we both have what we want, Emma.”
I considered him warily, my gaze lingering on the tattoo around his wrist. “Except I’ve got no way of knowing what you truly want because you’ll be waving your contract in my face every time I try to bring up the table.”
He ducked his head, his shoulders shaking with quiet laughter. The kitten on his lap stirred and stared up at him with big emerald eyes. “And I have no idea why I can’t still you, or what you did to that poor Lucius for him to come apart like that. Don’t you think that makes us even?”
I had things to reply to that and still more questions than I’d ever had in my life, but I was also numb, drained—and okay, maybe a little sleepy because of Faust’s magic peanut butter. “I can work with that,” I agreed, quoting him.
He flashed me what I now mentally dubbed his happy-hobo-grin. “See? We’re making excellent progress already. Now, why don’t we try to get a little rest? We have a lot to investigate when dawn comes.”
“I’ll take the couch,” I announced, eyeing the busted cushions with a pout. “Do you have . . . like, a T-shirt or something? Clean,” I thought it useful to add.
He got to his feet and padded to a wardrobe whose dark wood had seen more than a few decades—or centuries—of use. “Of course. The bed is yours, by the way. It would be ungentlemanly of me to have you sleep on the couch. I’ll share it with Confucius.”
I blinked and looked in the direction of said couch. The cats were gone, presumably to do cat stuff in the night, but the black kitten he’d petted earlier remained, half-buried in the cushions.
“He never goes out with the others,” Faust noted while rummaging in his wardrobe. He eventually produced a white tee and grinned. “My favorite.”
I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus them on the embroidered design, a few lines in Italian under a drawing of Jesus on the cross. “Prima . . .”
“Prima ero cieco, e ora ci vedo,” Faust recited. I was blind, but now I see. “John 9:25. Love it. Reminds me of that time Vespasian spat in my face.”
I took the garment gingerly. “Your friends are weird. I’m not really into Bible stuff, though.”
Faust shrugged. “It’s a great comedy. Probably the best ever written.”
I rolled my eyes while shimmying out of my jeans. “Sure . . . Now, gimme that and turn around,” I ordered, reaching for the T-shirt in his hands.
His face fell. “Do I really have to? It would make no difference.”
“Do it.”
He complied with an exaggerated sigh while I shrugged on his T-shirt and placed my clothes in his armchair. “I’m still imagining you, you know.”
“Come on . . . creeping on a girl a hundred times younger than you. Shame on you, old man.”
He turned around, his palms raised in surrender. “What can I say? I like to pick them young.”
I shook my head with a muffled laugh and let myself fall on his bed in a concert of squeaky springs.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
Well . . . his bed didn’t smell clean, but I detected no suspicious stench or icky crusty stains either. Good enough for me at the moment. I jerked my hips to test the bounce of the moaning, rolling, living thing under me. “This is worse than my fifty-bucks folding mattress back in New York, but also weirdly cool,” I admitted.
“I knew you’d like it.” I registered a click, and the lights went off. Faust’s voice drifted across the attic, deep and soft. “Dream on, Emma.”
I managed a weak smile in the dark. Aerosmith, uh? “You too, blind man,” I replied.
“Ti fidi di lei?” You trust her?
“Non penso che stia mentendo, ma penso che c'è qualcosa che non mi sta dicendo.” I don’t think she’s lying, but I think there’s something she’s not telling me.
“Era ieri alla Villa Malespina. Dovresti chiederlo a lei.” She was at the Villa Malespina yesterday. You should ask her.
“Sai che non posso farlo . . .” You know I can’t do that . . .
A sigh. Faust’s voice. The other one sounded like that Silvio guy. They filtered through the fog in my brain. I lay in bed, tucked under Faust’s Spiderman duvet. The heavenly scent of coffee wafted to my nostrils, but I couldn’t move my head—a warm weight pinned it to the pillow. I yawned and got a mouthful of fur as a tail slapped my face.
A chair scraped the floor. “Oh, she’s awake. How are you today, Emma?”
Like an extra in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“Take the cat off,” I mumbled, while whoever sat on my cheek wiggled, settled back, and kneaded my shoulder with sharp claws. I reached with a sleep-numbed hand to shove the intruder away and glimpsed a fat black and white ass running off to jump on Faust’s cluttered sideboard. “Yeah . . . that’s right . . . fuck off.”
Faust walked to the bed as I stretched with my usual morning Chewbacca groan. “There’s coffee, Rice Krispies, and beer for lunch if you’re hungry.”
“Lunch?” I croaked.
“It’s almost noon,” he noted, but I sensed no reproach in his voice.
“Okay . . . thanks.” I scratched my thigh under Faust’s T-shirt, jumped out of bed, and padded across cool floorboards to a small laminate table.
Silvio sat on a stool, contemplating two half-empty coffee bowls, the glossy black screen of Faust’s iPad, and a couple Playmobils someone seemed to have forgotten there. I registered rustling behind me and turned around to see Faust rummaging in his fridge door for a bottle of milk. He opened it, took a cautious sniff, and nodded to himself. I cringed. He returned to the table with the milk and a box of cereal.
I assumed that third empty bowl was for me, so I dragged it to me and poured the Rice Krispies, watching them rain with bleary eyes. Faust must have recognized the sound—a grin peeked through his beard. “I like to eat mine with a serving of Faxe.”
“What’s that?” I asked between two mouthfuls. Thank God, the milk was still good.
“A rather strong Danish Lager sold in one-liter cans. Tastes like wet cardboard, but you’ll get a memorable hangover for 2.50 euros. You can’t beat that.”
Silvio’s silver mustache twitched from a gravelly chuckle. “Faxkrispies . . .”
Faust’s head bobbed eagerly. “Exactly.”
I kept a deadpan face as I ate, even though it was actually a little funny. They were kinda cute together. Faust with today’s thoroughly wrinkled red Salvation Army T-shirt, Silvio with his sunglasses, black Adidas tracksuit and golden Stan Smiths. Like an old couple. Of losers. Plotting stuff while I slept.
I sipped the last of my milk with narrowed eyes. “So, what’s the plan? How do we get Lily away from Katharos? Do we kidnap her or something?” I was only half-joking. I’d gladly snatch her in Silvio’s minivan and drop her at the airport at this point.
“I’m glad you asked,” Faust announced, clasping his hands.
“Hang on. Are we seriously doing it?”
“No.” Silvio shot me a leery look from behind his sunglasses.
Faust shook his head. “She’s fine for now. She’s with Dante at the Villa Malespina, working on translating the table, I assume.”
“How do you know that?”
Silvio held out the tablet for me to see and ta
pped to open some kind of multi-screen video feed. I watched, wide-eyed, as Lily climbed in Dante’s SUV on one screen and out in another. A third screen had her walking through the villa’s gates and waving at the security guards. My mouth worked in stunned silence until I managed to squeak, “Are you guys CIA or what?”
Faust’s eyebrows shot up, before he clarified, “Oh no, no. It’s just . . . a network of friends willing to help in exchange for a little something in return.”
When my face remained pinched in incomprehension, he took on a grave expression and said, “It’s bums with phones, Emma. The second and third most common commodities in any big city.”
“What’s the first?” I heard myself asking, as I tried to process that Faust and his mysterious—and somewhat edgy—Uber driver oversaw a network of spy bums to do their dirty work.
“Pigeons.”
Okay, he was still as crazy as last night, but at least there was a method to his madness. I went to rinse my bowl at the sink, holding it under the tap as it spluttered icy water. “What’s next, then? Montecito and Lucius are probably looking for the two of us all over Rome right now.” And if they managed to find me, Faust and his time-freezing trick were my only chance to survive my vacation in Rome. Now that I was able to assess my situation in broad daylight and with pot-free neurons, it was becoming clear that I stood so deep in shit I was going to need waders. I returned to plop myself in my chair, and told Faust, “I hope you keep a halberd in here.”
He laughed. “That’s not what I had in mind. I’d like to understand what I’m up against before we move on to the stabbing part.”
Silvio acquiesced with a grunt and lowered his glasses, sending me a pointed look. “We want to understand everything,” he said, the words coated in a gravelly Italian accent.