by Camilla Monk
Faust’s eyes widened briefly as if he didn’t expect his sidekick to step in. “Well—”
Silvio cut him off to ask me, “You were at Katharos’s headquarters yesterday afternoon?”
“Yeah,” I replied in the same cutting tone he was using with me.
“You saw the table?”
“Silvio,” Faust warned softly. He didn’t like any of this, I could tell by the wrinkles deepening between his eyebrows.
Silvio rose from his chair and grabbed his empty coffee cup. As he turned to go rinse at the sink like I had, he paused to drop a hand on Faust’s shoulder. He gave it a squeeze, and for the second time this morning, I heard him grumble, “Dovresti chiederlo a lei.” You should ask her.
Ask me what, exactly? Did he mean when Faust had stilled time while I was in the lab with the others? Had he done that to get inside Katharos’s HQ? Come to think of it, the time had stopped too, not long before I’d first met him on the digging site . . .
I watched Faust pat Silvio’s tanned hand gently. “Don’t worry my friend.”
That didn’t seem to particularly reassure the old man, who shot me a disapproving glance over his shoulder as he went to sit on Faust’s couch. He searched the stacks of shoeboxes surrounding it and retrieved a bunch of papers that looked like administrative stuff. “Call me if things go bad,” he said ominously before he started leafing the documents. Apparently, he was done with us for now.
Faust sighed, scratching one of his tabbies when it jumped on his lap. My gaze flitted between him and Silvio’s hunched frame; I felt kinda guilty that I’d been the cause of a bromestic fight. I couldn’t blame Silvio. From where he stood, I had just barreled into his friend’s life—just like Faust had barreled into mine, actually. Silvio probably thought I was bad news, and if I was being honest with myself, I had very little to plead my case with . . .
Faust’s voice cut through my musings. “Emma?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s something I want to check, not far from here. Will you come with me?”
Across the attic, Silvio raised his nose from the paper he’d been reading, watching my reactions. “Sure . . .” I replied hesitantly. “As long as no one tries to kill us there.”
Faust pressed a hand over his heart. “It’s perfectly safe.”
I cringed. You’d think he’d have learned to lie better than this after two millennia.
Faust’s shower must have been built at the same time as his building. The pipes rattled ominously against the tiling, but the hot water raining on my shoulders helped me focus. I scrubbed with his cake of olive oil soap and dried myself with a Superman towel. Apparently, Faust’s old neighbor kept giving her grandson gifts he didn’t want. A bottle of Lightning McQueen shampoo stood in the corner of the shower tray. As I combed my hair with my fingers, I shot a suspicious glance at the small portable washer Faust claimed could bounce all over the place. I drew a wide berth around the thing, lest it jump at my throat.
I knew it was dumb, but when I closed the door, I stroked the winged dick pinned to it. I was going to need all the luck in the world to pry Lily out of Katharos’s claws, and I had a sinking feeling that Faust had other priorities anyway.
The ceiling hatch opened, and I quickly snatched my hand back. The wooden stairs unfolded, revealing Faust’s cane and legs, quickly followed by the rest of him. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah. Nice shampoo, by the way,” I teased.
“You should see my Babar mugs.”
I chuckled and peeked up the hatch. “Is Silvio coming after all?”
“No, he needs to do some paperwork for November’s property tax.” He shook his head. “The rules keep changing . . . Let me tell you, Emma, you don’t want to spend an eternity doing your taxes.”
I gave a once-over to his threadbare pants and free Salvation Army tee. “You . . . um . . . you pay property taxes? For your attic?”
“For the building.”
“What do you mean, for the building?”
He blinked. “It’s the law. If you have a property, you have to pay taxes.” He flicked his wrist. “It’s all very complicated. I mostly let Silvio collect the rents and do the math.”
I raised a quivering forefinger to the ceiling. “You own all this?”
He acquiesced. “My father built it when he retired from the legion, with his discharge bonus. I lost it after some minor legal trouble, but I won it back from a silk merchant in a die game . . . I think it was in 204.”
He said it so easily, like it was nothing. But Lady Montecito’s tragic story came back to me as he spoke, about the emperor who had blinded Faust, executed his family, and condemned him to live as a beggar. He’d mentioned a fire instead . . . which one was true? Did he remember them after all this time? I studied his peaceful expression as he counted off his fingers and went through his memories. “Then there was the sack, then we had the riots in 1242, a fire in 1757, the two wars . . . I kept patching it up, rebuilding . . . now all that’s left from the original insula is the cellar.”
“But why live in the attic if you’re . . . rich?”
Faust shrugged. “There’s not that much money left once taxes have been paid. Enough to pay for repairs, and I do have a little money on the side too. But I like it up there.” His face lit up. “And I love it out there, on the streets.”
The words felt like a sudden slap, smarting my cheeks, and making my blood boil. Maybe if I had been someone else, someone better, I would have seen just how awesome it was that Faust had managed to cling onto his roots for two millennia with so much tenacity, that he just happily lived on the fringe. But I was just me, and I could find nothing but resentment in my heart for a fauxbo who thought it was fun to sleep on the street because he had an entire building to go home to anyway. I zipped up my hoodie and hurried past him to the stairs. “Whatever,” I mumbled. “Let’s go. The sooner we can sort out that shit with Katharos, the sooner I can get Lily out of there and go home.”
Faust trotted behind me down creaky steps. “Emma?”
“What?”
“Did I say something to offend you?”
He sounded like Lily, his voice laced with the same kindness, the same pity. I ground my molars together, crushing my anger between them. “No,” I replied. “I don’t care enough about you for that.”
“So where are we going?”
“To a bookstore,” Faust announced as we passed the Trevi fountain to lose ourselves in a maze of narrow streets lined with ancient houses. Ivy slowly ate away at a thousand shades of ochre everywhere I looked, dangling from balconies, winding around stone archways. Faust seemed to have no problem finding his way, as if his cane knew each long-polished stone of the pavement.
“How is this going to help us?”
“I need to check a little something to jog my memory,” he replied, the occasional clatter of his cane rhythming this strange trip back in time. I wondered how it must have felt for him, to roam this changing city throughout the centuries with nothing but his sense of touch and hearing to learn its secrets. Were the streets still in the same place even though all that remained of the Rome he was born in were either ruins or new buildings standing where the old ones once had—just like his house?
“Emma.”
My head snapped up.
“There’s something we need to talk about.” Faust’s voice held its usual calm and gentle quality, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked serious for once. I shivered. There it was, the discussion Silvio had meant to have with me. “Yesterday was a strange day,” he noted like he’d have commented on the weather.
I kept walking, waiting for him to go on.
“Things didn’t go quite as I planned.”
He could have meant my leaving the Residenza, Lucius’s insane powers, or even the car chase . . . but all I could think about were those few seconds back at the lab. The pressure in my chest, the white noise in my head when my fingers had grazed the table. “Stop playing with me,” I snappe
d. “If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.”
“You know I can’t tell you about the table,” he began. Aggravation zinged in my veins, but before I could ignite, he added, “What I can tell you is that my power has never failed me once in two-thousand and five years.” His legs came to a stop. “Except yesterday.”
The mind-blowing, blood-curdling moment of realization didn’t come this time, because a remote part of my conscience had been expecting this—dreading it, in fact. I stood there while the afternoon sun trickled down in my hair from old roof tiles, my throat too tight to speak. Faust’s power had stalled on him, the same way Lucius’s ribbon of smoke had dissipated when he’d tried to cut me with it, or just like the embalming spell that kept him young had let him down when . . .
“I touched it,” I murmured, wrapping my arms around myself as if it could shield me from the memory of that brief contact with Chronos’s Table. That feeling of being so utterly alone in the face of something too big for me to ever comprehend. “I was with them in the lab when time stopped. I freaked out, and I . . . it was an accident, I just leaned on the table.”
“And the flow resumed,” Faust concluded.
“Yes,” I gasped. Freaking Christ, something was wrong with me.
He inhaled sharply and released the air in a slow exhale, like that first breath you take after a flaming shot of Tequila. “Well . . . this should be fun. Remind me why you came to Rome again?”
“I didn’t tell you.”
His thumb rapped on his cane. “Does that mean you keep secrets of your own?”
“I just came here to see my father, okay!” I near-shouted. “Nothing else. I didn’t want to see Lily—we just ran into each other—and I certainly didn’t come here looking for you either. I had never heard of you until yesterday. I just . . .” My voice died in a whistling breath as I contemplated the chaos my life had devolved into in just a few days. “I just wanted to see him,” I rasped.
“Did you?” Faust asked, his voice softer.
“No. It’s complicated . . . Look, I don’t want to talk about it.”
His eyes were kind, but I sensed a speck of distrust lingering in those milky pupils. “As you wish.” He seemed to consider his next words, before he said, “I have a friend, someone very knowledgeable. When I’m done checking the Libro, I’ll take you to her. She might be able to shed some light on your predicament.”
“The Libro?” I asked as we resumed our walk.
His sunny composure returned—if I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought that easy smile was just how his lips were shaped. “Do you remember when I told you that Lady Montecito has been taking pages from someone else’s book?”
“Kinda.”
“I meant literally so. And I’m interested in finding out exactly which ones.”
“Okay . . . and how—”
“Here,” was Faust’s answer to the question I didn’t have the time to ask.
He paused in front of a tiny storefront on the first floor of a house whose wooden beams showed through a cracked plaster façade. Dozens of books were, indeed, displayed in the window, but I noticed there was no sign to be found above it. My mouth pursed as I examined the English-speaking offerings of this nameless shop. Positive Magic: Occult Self-Help; 100 Spells a Wiccan Needs to Keep her Home Clean; Belzebub’s Christmas Table; Empower Yourself at Work with Black Magic . . . “Self-help for witches?”
Faust grinned. “It’s what sells these days. But he keeps the real deal in the cellar—not the sort of thing his average customer is looking for.”
Before I could ask who he was, Faust went ahead and entered the shop with a resounding, “Bien le bonjour, Louison!”
I followed him into a cramped space that was crammed with books from floor to ceiling, squeezed on dusty shelves, piling up in waist-high stacks on each side of the threadbare red velvet curtain leading to the back. Faust’s greeting sparked some furious rustling behind said curtain before a wrinkled hand parted it. A shriveled grandpa popped out, wearing a dirty apron over a striped blue shirt and a sparse dusting of white hair on his skull. Approximate age: 150 years old.
He slammed his fist on the counter and roared, “Fous le camp toi!” The words rasped his throat. It sounded like French, but I wasn’t sure. His name sounded French, though. When Faust kept grinning and felt for a stack of books with his cane, the old dude yelled, “Sciò! Fuori dal mio negozio!” Shoo! Out of my shop!
I side-eyed Faust. “Are you sure about this?”
He all but ignored me, taking another step toward the counter. “How have you been, Louison?” I gathered this time he had switched to English for my sake.
The reply flew fast and hard, with an unmistakable French accent, indeed. “You’re no longer allowed here!” Louison took a ragged breath before unleashing his full wrath on our asses. “Last time you come here, you bring a cat and the cat he piss on my carpet! Now you come back, you bring a punk!” He pointed a dramatic finger at me, his cheeks mottled red with rage. “What is the punk going to piss on?”
My own temper lit up like fireworks. “Hey, mind your own prostate, dude!”
Faust raised his cane in front of me to stop the exchange from escalating to a punch-off with a hundred-year-old guy. “Allons, allons . . . I came here with an offering of peace, Louison.”
The grandpa watched, tight-lipped, as Faust fished in his coat pocket for a pair of tiny colorful objects. I recognized the Playmobils I’d noticed on his dining table earlier. He held them out in his palm for Louison to see, who fumbled for a pair of spectacles sitting among the papers scattered on the counter. He fitted them on the end of his potato-shaped nose and hobbled closer to inspect the toys. He took one—a little construction worker with yellow hair and a rake in his blue hand—and squinted at it, his lips pinched.
“I believe they’re prototypes from the 1974 Nuremberg toy fair,” Faust cooed. “Virtually unique.”
Louison held the playmobil between trembling fingers, turned it around to check its feet, its red-striped jacket. “And the other?”
Faust gave him a little Indian with a plastic feather standing on his head. Air whistled in the old man’s throat. “How much you want for them?”
Faust shook his head. “Not a cent.”
Louison’s eyes became pale slits behind his glasses. “What you want?”
A smile stretched Faust’s beard, that might have been a teensy bit evil, or maybe it was just the light. “I’d like to take a look at your copy of the Libro Creaturae.”
Louison looked down at the playmobils in his hand, greed and hesitation playing across his features. “I can pay.”
“But what I want is to see the book,” Faust countered suavely, extending his hand to take the precious toys back.
The grandpa’s fingers curled them around like claws, and he drew his hand close to his heart. He pointed his chin at me. “She waits outside, not in my shop.”
I bit my tongue, seething as Faust replied, “Emma is very curious about the Libro too, and . . .” he tilted his head at Louison. “She’s more than able.”
Able to do what? A vague discomfort settled in my stomach, a presentiment I wouldn’t like the rest of my afternoon. Louison peered up at me suspiciously from behind his spectacles, his mouth so tight it looked like his chin was about to fold over his upper lip. “You two wait here.”
As soon as he disappeared behind the curtain, I jumped at Faust. “What is this about? What am I supposed to do? I’m warning you, I’m not doing weird shit,” I hissed, keeping my voice barely audible.
Faust bent to whisper in my ear, the brush of his beard against my ear sending an unexpected shiver down my back. “Relax, Emma. We’re just going to read a book.” His fingers reached to tuck a turquoise strand behind my ear. I let him, only to nudge him away when I realized his hand was lingering and my cheeks were growing hot.
“I don’t like this.” I warned him, just as the red curtain rustled open to reveal Louison. Wearing
a full bike suit. With a motorcycle helmet. And holding a fricking medieval sword.
A thick silence fell in the bookstore as I stared at him, my face slowly melting into a mixture of dismay and disbelief.
“Is there a problem?” Faust asked.
“He’s dressed like . . . like he’s trying to buy a flat screen on Black Friday. He’s carrying an actual sword!” I squeaked. “What kind of book are we talking about?”
Faust patted my shoulder. “A real page-turner. Don’t worry; Louison is overdoing it a bit.”
The old man lifted the visor of his helmet and glared at us. “Still want to read?”
Faust’s “of course” outsped my “no.” Louison gave a firm nod and turned around to disappear behind the curtain. Faust’s hand traveled down to rest on the small of my back, applying the slightest pressure there. “Shall we?”
I gulped, gazing at the dim and messy corridor stretching beyond the frayed red velvet. Only one way to know what was in that Libro thing: I soldiered onward, followed closely by Faust. We slipped between boxes of dusty books and magazines, guided by the clanking of Louison’s sword in a scabbard secured around his waist by a black karate belt. The corridor led to ancient stone steps spiraling down to a vaulted cellar. Here, the books looked different than in the shop: thick leather-bound tomes, worn by decades—possibly centuries—of use, and all locked inside grilled cabinets. I couldn’t decipher the gold letters of their titles. It was mostly Greek or maybe Hebrew stuff. On a few bindings, I recognized the same ancient script Faust’s tattoo was made of.
Louison went to take a set of iron keys hanging from a small hook on the stone wall. There was a door in the corner of the cellar, whose dark wood bore the scars of time in its veins, a landscape of holes, scratches, and dents. The longer I looked at it, the more my guts coiled like a plate of spaghetti. Louison lumbered to the door in his cumbersome suit and turned the key in the lock. The hinges creaked open, oh so slowly.
Faust’s thumb rapped on his cane. “Here we go,” he whispered. “It’s been a little while since the last time I’ve been in there.”