by Camilla Monk
The Libro had tried to drown us. No, I reminded myself, it wasn’t the Libro. It was the shadows. They’d been here, in the apartment where Lily’s grandpa had chosen to end his life, and somehow, this mere “memory” had turned out to be horrifyingly real. Lily’s desperate sobs were drilled into my head as if I were still hearing them. My head spun, and the edges of my vision blurred as I remembered those minutes of absolute terror, the black mass swarming on the ceiling, the walls . . . I managed to rise on shaky legs and leaned on the table where the Libro had been open moments before.
Louison had sealed it back inside its iron prison already, along with the decoy grimoire. Faust moved closer to rub circles on my back. “Are you all right?”
“No.” I shrugged off his touch. “Lily . . . Where is she?”
Behind me, I heard Louison mumble, “Always eager to jump, never ready for the landing.”
Meanwhile, Faust had taken out his phone. Voice-over’s metallic voice commented each tap and swipe as he browsed to “Barbowatch”—Silvio’s video feed app, I gathered. The voice droned through a list of updates on Lily’s position in Italian. 15:27—Villa Malespina; 16:19—Parcheggio, Cayenne AD989DP; 16:27 Ponte Sisto, Cayenne AD989DP.
“She’s all right. She’s driving back to the Residenza with her boyfriend,” Faust said.
“Okay . . .” I rasped. “We have to tell her—”
“Out, out, out! Now!” Louison returned to the room with a bucket and a mop, which he waved at us menacingly.
“Thank you for your help, Louison,” Faust said tiredly, steering me back to the musty stairs leading back to the shop. Once we were on the street, he told me, “I don’t like this. We’d better head back to my place as soon as possible.”
Anger sizzled up my spine, chasing the last remnants of nausea in my stomach. “No. And I don’t want beer, I don’t want weed: I want to know what’s going on!”
His chest heaved. “Emma . . .”
I backed away from him. “Don’t even try to bullshit me! Lily was in there! And you actually dragged our asses into the Libro because you already knew. You said Montecito wasn’t powerful enough to use the Spear of Shadows, but the Libro took us straight to the Residenza!” My voice broke as the full weight of this madness set on my shoulders. “They did something to Lily’s grandpa, and now, she’s in there and . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. What if Montecito tried to get rid of her too? A small, bitter part of myself thought of my mom. She’d be heartbroken if something happened to her only child.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Faust reasoned. But there was an edge to his voice, and I could tell he was shaken too. “There’s definitively a piece we’re missing in this puzzle.”
Maybe there was. And the longer I kept looking for that missing piece, the deeper I dove into Faust’s upside-down world, the faster I’d lose my mind. I couldn’t do this: magic, immortal people, liquid books that sucked you into nightmarish memories and tried to swallow you whole afterward. This wasn’t my life, my playing field. Those weren’t weapons I could beat Katharos with. My spine straightened. “Okay, you know what? We’re done here; I’m going to the cops.”
He shook his head. “Emma, you’re being ridiculous; this is way out of their depth. They probably won’t even file your complaint.”
“Lucius chasing me down, trying to snatch me serial-killer-style, you think they won’t listen to that?” I shot back. “Maybe someone other than you and Silvio heard me scream, and . . .” I rolled up one of my sleeves. “I got bruises to show. Even if they don’t believe me, they’re gonna have to ask Lucius about that, and it’ll keep him busy for at least a couple days. Meanwhile, I’ll call my mom, and I’ll make her freak out, so she jumps on the first plane for Rome. Once she’s here, Dante can say whatever he wants, Lily won’t listen. She basically does everything Mom tells her to,” I concluded with a nod to myself.
Faust listened to my one-sided brainstorming, his lips pursed in what I realized was mock admiration. “I suppose it could work; I can’t imagine Katharos would dare to resist your mother.”
I gritted my teeth, trying desperately to hold onto the single thread of sanity I had left. But I was cornered, terrified, and drained by our plunge into the Libro. I had only one defense mechanism left—always the same, really. I inhaled deeply and detonated. “Fuck you, Faust! You’re the one who dragged me into that shit in the first place. You fucked my life up from the very start, and now I’m supposed to trust you? How about no? So yeah, I’m going to the cops, and when they ask me if I got any witnesses, I’ll take them to your place! How does that sound?”
A little group of tourists walked past us during my screaming tirade. They kept at a safe distance, but I could feel their eyes on me, some amused, others frightened—a typical reaction to witnessing a bum fight in the street. I didn’t care what they thought of me. I was too far gone, my body shaking from the bitch storm I’d just unleashed on Faust.
I waited for him to get mad, too, to give me a good reason to keep fighting and exhaust myself yelling, but he just blinked and released a heavy sigh he’d been holding while I tore him a new one. “Emma . . . you know I won’t let you do that. It could get Silvio in trouble, and it’s the last thing I want.”
It wasn’t the blaze I needed right now, but that spark would do. “You won’t let me?” I spat. “Really? Well, freeze me!” I challenged him, arms outstretched. “Come on. Freeze me if you don’t want me to go to the cops.”
When Faust just kept giving me that sorrowful look that seemed to say, “Can we be done with this?”, I spun on my heels and marched away from him, my head held high. I tried to stay angry with each step, but I could feel the intoxicating adrenaline rush sizzling away in my veins already, leaving nothing but shame and this vague sense of being trapped, forced to go down the road I’d barreled onto—because apologizing was out of the question.
I’d barely covered fifty feet when a familiar shockwave washed over me. I stopped mid-stride and peeked over my shoulder, practically blowing steam through my nostrils. Faust hadn’t moved. Higher up the street, the bunch of tourists we’d passed had stopped mid-stride. Two teens stood huddled in front of Louison’s window, permanently grinning at a phone affixed to a selfie-stick.
Faust walked toward me, armed with his cane and an apologetic smile. “I can’t freeze you, but I can freeze everything else.”
I chewed on my lower lip angrily. “For how long? You can’t keep time still forever.” At least I hoped he couldn’t. But he was immortal, so technically . . . Oh God.
His shoulders rolled in the faintest shrug. “Long enough for you to truly hate me, I suppose.”
“I already hate you,” I snapped back.
A twitch of his lips. “No, you don’t. You’re frightened, lost, and you don’t know what to make of me, but I’m growing on you.” I shivered, because there was a tiny measure of truth to his assessment, and it made me feel exposed, vulnerable that he didn’t even need eyes to see that. When I remained quiet, he held out a hand. “Come, Emma. I want to take you somewhere. Somewhere safe,” he added, as if in afterthought.
I gazed at him, at the kind features of this man I couldn’t lie to because he’d probably heard it all over 2,000 years, and I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t trust you.”
His eyebrows shot up. Maybe it was still possible to surprise him after all. “Emma, are we really going to have a battle of wills?”
I had no rage left to spend, only a sense of being numb—lost, as he’d aptly diagnosed. I turned around and kept walking, ignoring the clatter of his cane trailing after me, and the undercurrent of annoyance in his voice as he called loudly, “Suit yourself. I have all the time in the world!”
Well, I was twenty, and I had time too.
The rhythmic tapping on the cobblestone pavement followed me down Via della Madonna dei Monti, then Via Urbana, past stone façades and silent bistro terraces where gracious waiters waltzed still, a tray full of drinks balanced in
their hand. I kept treading obstinately along the much larger Via Cavour and its luxury hotels, housed in a string of nearly-identical nineteenth century stone buildings. My hands shoved in my pockets, I walked in the middle of the street, along the tram tracks, slaloming between buses and cars, frozen passersby and sleeping bums.
Faust followed me all the way to the big square stretching in front of Roma Termini Station. I took a right, strolling along Via Giolitti in the shade of the station's massive concrete frame, and at last, he surrendered. “McDonald’s?” his voice offered tiredly, a dozen feet behind me.
I glanced right and paused in mild surprise. There was, indeed, a McDonald’s tucked between two souvenir shops in a craggy building that faced Termini’s monumental glass entrance. Man, he really knew every single square-inch of Rome, and the craziest part was that he couldn’t rely on sounds or smells as long as we were outside time. He was able to tell his way with nothing but his sense of orientation and counting his steps. Unreal.
I turned around warily. “You’re paying?”
He gave a beaten sigh. “What a man wouldn’t do for the love of a venal woman . . .”
My knees gathered to my chest, I watched a coin fly and land in Faust’s empty coffee cup, tossed by a backpacker.
“Either you tell everything you know, or I’ll manage on my own with the cops. I’m done running in the dark,” I stated, taking a sip of my Sprite. The first words I’d spoken since we’d sat against one of Roma Termini Station’s mile-high stone walls. There was something soothing about the incessant roll of the crowd coming and going in waves, the ads everywhere, the voices droning from speakers that the trains would be late. It kind of reminded me of Grand Central.
Faust emptied the cup in his palm and felt for its contents—almost five euros so far, not bad. “There are things I’m not allowed to tell you.”
I pondered that. Same old tune. “Then let’s take the table out of the equation for now. What’s the Spear of Shadows? I mean, apart from being . . . shadows.”
Faust’s head bobbed as if he were having an internal debate with himself and he’d just come to a decision. “Do you remember when I told you that the power Montecito and Lucius use isn’t magic?”
“Yeah.”
“Magic is just a word we put on forces we don’t understand.” His lips quirked. “Your abilities are magic to me.”
My abilities . . . I gulped softly upon hearing Faust use that word. What kid never dreamed of having mutant powers or a magic wand? But these only sound great as long as they remain sealed within the safe realm of fantasy. I studied my knuckles that I’d bruised trying to escape Lucius in Augustus’s Mausoleum. That I might have anything in common with people like Lucius or Faust . . . I couldn’t accept it. There must be another explanation. Plus, it wasn’t like I was capable of doing anything specific anyway. The way I saw it, the problem was with their powers, not with me. That’s what you get for buying your wand at Dollar Tree.
“Let’s set aside my case for now,” I snorted. “Tell me about the powers you understand instead.”
“The Spear is a weapon,” No shit . . . My ears perked up though, when he added, “which used to belong to a very powerful entity who lived long before the age of men.”
I frowned. “Like, during the dinosaurs?”
“After that.” Faust chuckled. “What I’m trying to tell you is that humans who seek to control the Spear’s power misunderstand its nature. The Spear represents what little is left of this deity’s power, the remains of the soul of a titan.”
My eyebrows raised slowly. “A . . . titan? You mean an actual god? Like Chronos?”
“Perses the Destroyer,” Faust breathed as if he were afraid to merely say that name. “Technically Chronos’s nephew, but it’s difficult to plaster human notions of a family on such primordial beings.”
I was having a little trouble breathing straight, but overall, I was taking this better than I’d thought. Immortal, witches . . . titans. Okay. I mean, sure. I eventually found my voice again. “So that guy we saw in the Libro, he didn’t know he was basically summoning part of a titan?”
“He did,” Faust replied, his thumb playing on the smooth knots of woods of his cane. “But he made the same mistake you just made.”
I gave him an uncertain look, barely aware of the toddler who’d just dropped a spit-covered M&M in our cup as she waddled by with her mom. Around us, life pulsed and flew as usual, which only served to make this entire conversation eerier. “What did I get wrong?”
“No one summons a titan,” Faust replied, his tone hardening. “You beg, lay all you have, all you are at their feet in exchange for the fulfillment of a meaningless human wish, and once in a billion times, that god vaster than you can ever comprehend choses to use you. You summon nothing. You control nothing.”
As I listened to him, the station’s clamor and swarming crowd seemed to fade away, replaced by the burning room where the mysterious long-haired man had once attempted to use the Spear of Shadows. Faust’s gloomy warning echoed in my mind . . . before he’d chosen to kill that man rather than let him sell his soul to Perses the Destroyer. My eyes fluttered back to reality. I saw Faust’s tattoo, like a chain around his right wrist. “Is that what happened to you? You begged, and now you’re Chronos’s servant, but you can never know why he chose you, and you can never break out?”
Two thousand years of servitude weighed on his features as he replied, “I’m not allowed to discuss this with you, Emma.”
A fear I couldn’t place swelled deep inside me, a hazy intuition that maybe the same thing was happening to me, that like Faust, I was just a tool, a chess piece someone much bigger had chosen and was moving around.
You’re not wandering around aimlessly . . .
Renewed anger simmered in my stomach. “It’s too easy! You just stumble around in the dark, and you got no idea why, where you’re going, or how long it’s gonna last. That’s the name of the game?”
Faust ducked his head with a bitter smile. “Congratulations on figuring out the meaning of life, Emma. Some people live up to be a hundred without realizing this.”
I fidgeted, tapping my feet on Termini’s gum-studded asphalt. “That’s just bullshit . . .” I muttered. “What about Montecito? Say she rang that Perses guy, and he picked up, what do we do?”
He rolled his eyes. “We run and hide—especially me.”
I gulped the last of my soda and kicked the can to send it rolling toward a couple of pigeons. “You got bad blood with him?”
Faust blinked in amazement, before a warm laugh burst from him, which infuriated me as much as it eased my tension. “No, don’t worry. I’m but a comma in the pages of history; I don’t battle titans.”
“Okay, if you say so . . .” I eyed him warily. “So why do you need to hide? Why would he go after you? Why . . .” My eyes popped wide open as those damn puzzle pieces finally started to come together. “Montecito is after you, and you said no one controls titans—it’s pretty much the other way around. You think Perses is holding the remote, right?” I asked, my pulse increasing steadily.
Faust’s brow knotted as if something still didn’t quite compute for him. “It would explain a few things . . .”
As good as a yes. I gazed down at the coffee cup sitting between us, mentally picturing the silvery threads of a spiderweb made visible by beads of dew. Perses was after Chronos’s Table—an old titan preying on another old titan’s turf, both manipulating their respective goons on a chess board to achieve their goal. That, at least, made some amount of sense. Except I stood in the middle of this shit storm, and if I couldn’t get Lily away from Montecito and Lucius . . . “This is not gonna end well,” I murmured, the certainty coming from a deeply buried part of me I preferred not to inspect too closely. I clasped my hands together, wrenching my fingers. “Faust, you know what I’m gonna ask next, right?”
He turned his head my way and gave a single nod. His milky pupils stared past me, through me. �
��And you know what I’m going to answer.”
Christ, I wanted to shove that paper cup up his ass so bad. “It’s not fair,” I ground out. “I’m part of this, somehow. There’s something inside me messing with your power—with the table’s power. If you don’t tell me why Perses wants the table and how you fit into all this . . .” My voice faltered. “I can never know where I fit.”
He reached for my arm. I tensed, but let him feel his way to my hand, covering it. I shivered from the warmth seeping between us. A tender smile cracked through the blond bristles of his beard. “Are we still discussing titan business, or is this perhaps a broader question?”
“You tell me,” I replied, right before he raised the cup just in time to catch another coin—how the hell could he manage that?
“I honestly don’t know where you fit into all this, Emma. But I have a friend who might be able to answer that.” His Fausty grin returned. “She’s an expert in titan matters.”
I jumped to my feet. “Titan expert. Is that an actual job?” To be honest, I played it cool, but my head was still reeling—along with the rest of me, in fact.
Faust dropped the contents of the McDonald’s cup in his palm, shoved the change in his pocket, and rose to his feet with a wink in my direction. “Everything is a real job if you’re brave enough. I used to know a Parmesan whisperer. Now let’s . . .” He paused mid-sentence, his eyes turning to slits. His fingers tightened around his cane. “We’re being watched.”
I crashed down to earth and darted a panicked look around, before my eyes met a pair of big brown ones, staring hard in our direction. A little girl no more than six or seven, whose fuzzy cornrows ended in bright pink beads. My shoulders slumped in relief, and I grinned. “It’s okay. I think you got yourself a new admirer, but she looks way too young for a bowl of faxkrispies.”
But Faust didn’t relax one bit. “No, Emma. There’s someone else.”
I rolled my eyes. “How do you . . .” The words remained stuck in my throat when I caught the girl’s mother’s eyes on us too—empty, like those of the old man standing next to them, about to bite into a panini. I scanned the crowd, nostrils flaring. Every single pair of eyes was . . . “Faust, they’re all staring at us like they’re high or something,” I hissed, slowly backing against the wall.