The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (11 page)

“But on our way there, we saw my demon.”

Nonna lifted her head like a deer, listening.

“Corporeally?” she asked.

“If you mean did he take over one body after another, just for a second, yes,” I said.

She asked, “Did he say anything?”

“He said he would come for me,” I told her, forcing out the words.

“Let him try,” she said, almost growling.

I blinked and felt my spirits rise, seeing her fierce expression. She put a hand on my shoulder.

“You are not alone, Mia,” she said. The doorbell rang and she dropped her hand. “Go get that.” She placed the dough on a floured board, still looking dangerous. I could picture her braining a demon with the rolling pin.

Anna Maria was waiting on the doorstep with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread. She bustled in, uncorked the wine, washed her hands, and picked up a knife.

“You want this parsley chopped?” she asked her great-aunt.

“Yes, very fine.”

She sat down at the kitchen table with the cutting board and went to work. I finished the garlic and shallots. Anna
Maria and I put together the rest of the mushroom filling—the chopped parsley, garlic, and shallots—before Nonna Laura took it from me and sautéed it in a pan. Then she added the grated Grana Padano.

I was still thinking about Nonna’s fierceness when I started spooning the mixture onto the sheets of pasta.

“You’re overfilling those,” Nonna pointed out. “They’ll explode in the broth. Your head’s in the clouds.”

I laughed.

“Sorry, Nonna. Should I start over?”

“Yes, please.”

I began the process again.

“Is it a guy?” asked Anna Maria.

I blushed, even though I had nothing to blush about.

“No,” I said. “It never is, with me.”

“Lesbian?” she asked coolly. Nonna stiffened beside me.

“No!” I said quickly. Then I felt bad, acting so narrow-minded. Anna Maria laughed.

“It’s just,” I struggled. “Guys. I never have any luck. Come on, you know about my first date, right?”

Nonna patted my arm. “Give it time,” she said.

Anna Maria nodded, though I guessed that she had more advice than that. She gave it to me after dinner, when we headed down to the shop office to go over the notes she’d brought.

“Guys are pretty simple,” she told me. “You just need practice. You’re too shy, for one thing. You need to get over that.
You’re quite pretty, in a mousy kind of way, and you’re dressing better now, thanks to Francesca’s shopping expeditions. But you’ve got to get out more, too. I think Nonna would skin me if I took you to clubs, though.

“And if you do decide you are a lesbian,” she added as she took some notebooks down from a shelf, “I know some great gay bars.” She opened a drawer and took out a slim satin-covered box.

My face felt hot, even though I knew for sure I liked guys. “Thanks, but I think I’ll be okay,” I said.

Most of the time I can’t believe that Anna Maria is only three years older than I am. She seems to have lived an entire lifetime.

“You’ll have your chance,” she said, smiling, as if reading my mind. “Don’t worry about it so much; that’s the first thing. You’ve got to relax.”

It’s always so unhelpful when people say that. I sighed and reached for one of the notebooks she’d set on the table.

“No, wait,” she said, opening the satin box. “Put these on. Don’t handle the books with bare hands. They’re too old.”

She handed me a pair of white cotton gloves, the fingertips smudged faintly brown with leather dust, and the backs stitched with neat rows.

“I feel like Mickey Mouse,” I said.

She shrugged, pulling on her own gloves. “I bet Mickey Mouse has perfectly kept hands,” she said. “I’d hate to let him loose in our archives, though.”

I laughed.

We each cleared a space in the piles of notes and accounts that always covered the office table.

“We are looking for an account relating to the Austrians who ruled Milan in the 1740s,” Anna Maria said. “We served on a few cases in their court. There’s something about altering a building at the palace. There may be more than one case. If a client likes what we do for them, we often get called in again, of course. There are families we’ve served and aided for centuries.”

“Like the Strozzis? Have we helped them before?”

She looked up and creased her elegant brows, thinking.

“I don’t think so. But we’ve helped a lot of people over many centuries, so I could be wrong.”

She pulled a book from the shelves, one of the thicker history books that I hadn’t yet found my way through. She flipped quickly through as if seeking a page by feel, then laid it open on the table and ran one gloved finger down a list of names and dates.

“In the 1740s, the ruler of Milan was the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Hapsburg. She had briefly visited the city in 1739 on her way home from Tuscany,” she said thoughtfully. “She had a whole pile of other places to rule, so we were just another dot on the map. But she did have a governor in Milan to rule for her, who used the Palazzo Reale as his residence.”

She looked up, lifting an eyebrow, then went on, “Otto Ferdinand, count von Abensberg und Traun, was the governor
from 1736 to 1743, and Prince Georg Christian von Lobkowitz governed from 1743 to 1745. Before the Austrians, the Spanish and French fought to control Milan.”

“Never a dull moment,” I joked. “Why does everybody always war over this city?”

Anna Maria replied in an offended voice, “Why not? It’s the greatest city in the world.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to …” I began, and she laughed.

“No,” she said, and I realized she’d been teasing me. “It’s money, trade, location. It’s a gateway between the Alps and all of Italy to the south, and between Venice in the East and Genoa in the West. Plus, we have always had the most skilled artisans, the best armorers … and the best clothiers. We led fashion long, long before today.”

She opened her notebook, writing down the names she’d mentioned. I watched her, with her perfect hair and clothes, her pristine skin and elegant features. I’d seen her photograph in magazines, and on a billboard, too. I always wanted to point her out, and say, “That’s my cousin.”

Who would guess that that face hid a mind full of history, or that she sometimes came to her photo shoots straight from an exorcism?

“Okay,” she said, pushing a pile of leather-bound notebooks toward me. “We need to look for these two names, or a variation on them. I know Nonno thinks I’ve got all this in my head now but I don’t. I’ve always been interested in the nineteenth
century, not the eighteenth. Although I’ve often speculated about G. Della Torre, the one who founded our shop. These cases would have happened during his time, you know.

“Of course,” she added, “with some clients we had to use code names, particularly if they were nobles. So if you see some unusual name repeated, something that doesn’t look normal, note the page.”

She passed me a pad of what looked like very slender, cream-colored Post-its. “Use these,” she said. “Always. They are acid-free and won’t harm these old manuscripts.”

I nodded, opening the notebook on the top of the pile. The spidery, gorgeous cursive handwriting of our ancestors was hard to read. There were records of visits, like the one Nonno Giuliano and I had paid Signore Strozzi; detailed notes of exorcisms, with commentary on what had worked and what hadn’t. We wound up with a list of page references, with short notes beside them. The notebooks began to bristle with acid-free markers.

It may not sound all that interesting, but we had a good time. We each had a notebook in G. Della Torre’s handwriting, as well as the notebooks of three other ancestors working at the same time. I liked reading G.’s notes the best, because they were the cleverest, and the funniest. He said things like, “Giovanni does not remember a thing about last night, which must count as a blessing; what a shame that everyone else will.”

Sometimes he gave me a more direct idea of who he was: “I felt as excited by this discovery as I did the day I snuck my
father’s copy of
Scienza Nuova
out from under his nose and read the whole thing in a night.”

Around ten o’clock, Anna Maria slapped the table and said, “Ah!”

“You found it?”

“I think so. Prince Georg. ‘A strong presence, easily detected by my assistants …’ ”

She paged forward, white gloves fluttering in the lamplight.

“Here. ‘I have elected to build a Second Door on the side of the palace; it took some time to convince the prince, for he did not easily understand the idea of a demon of place, Austrians lacking subtlety—or this one at least. Like every other client, he commanded us to make as little fuss as possible; this suits my instinct as a demon catcher, since I would avoid the fate of my great-grandfather.’ ”

She paused and looked up at me.

“I can’t remember who his great-grandfather was. We did get tried as witches, sometimes, you know.”

“What, like, burned at the stake?”

I think I must have sounded facetious, because Anna Maria replied, “Well, yes. That was if you survived the trial; they had some pretty harsh methods for testing people for witchcraft, you know.”

She frowned and went on with the notes. “ ‘The demon has certainly disturbed the palace with his antics, all of which show a ghoulish sense of humor: meals uncovered before
Prince Georg appear to be maggot-ridden, though they left the kitchen in perfect order; wine turns to foxglove on the palate, then to wine again, terrifying guests (many of whom already have reason to fear poison); sleepers wake to find corpses in bed with them, only to watch them fade into nothing.’ ” Neither Anna Maria nor I could figure out what about this demon made it a demon of place, except that it haunted the palace.

We learned that G. built a false balcony and door on the side of the Palazzo Reale over one of the tall windows; then used a ritual called the
Canto della porta d’Orchoë
to enter what he referred to as the Second House. Unfortunately, he and his assistants arrived at an awkward moment, interrupting an assignation between the prince and a married Italian noblewoman.

“ ‘The prince was vastly displeased,” he wrote, “having forgotten that I had named that night for our entrance, but the lady became quite intrigued once our presence was explained, as I fear it had to be; she was too intelligent a woman not to have guessed the significance of bell, book, and candle, and begged to be permitted to observe our experiments, though warned of the danger.’ ”

Anna Maria rubbed her eyes. “Well, we found it. Now we can stop for tonight,” she said.

I blinked. “Why? It’s just getting good.”

She laughed.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted, and I have to work early tomorrow. Let’s go to bed.”

Up in my room at last, I didn’t go to sleep right away. I thought about the demon’s voice, and the smell of cinnamon. About Lisetta Maria Umberti, gray-faced from her struggles with my demon. Her body had looked so empty after she was gone.

I wanted answers. I wanted to get this bastard, this demon. I wanted to understand who or what he was. I felt my stomach turn with anger, and with fear.

I sat on my bed, my case open beside me. I fingered my tools absently, turning a silver nail over and over. It had a square head and four flat sides that tapered to a point. It looked like it had been made by hand. I could tell from the feel of it that it wouldn’t hold a house together nearly as well as one of my father’s steel nails. It had a beautiful roughness to it, though.

“Don’t try to tell me about humans,” Signora Gianna snapped, and I wondered how long she and Gravel had been arguing while I’d been lost in thought. “I am one! Or was one, anyway,” she amended thoughtfully.

“And I’ve watched you for ages! I know something … me.”

I’d figured out by now that Gravel wasn’t human, that his gravelly voice reminded me of my demon’s. Yet it didn’t make sense, a demon here in this room, in this house so carefully warded against them. I remembered the first time I had heard
these two voices, the night after I had arrived in Milan; they had been discussing my wardrobe. In the end, I’d worn the outfit they had chosen. But it had been months before they’d spoken directly to me, and even now I knew only Signora Gianna’s name. Gravel was simply a name I’d made up, like Pompous, which was the name I’d given Signora Gianna before I knew her real one.

“Watching is not the same as being,” replied Signora Gianna. “Me, I know.”

“Being is not the same as watching, either,” Gravel snarled. “Maybe I see what you don’t.”

“Maybe, but I know I see what you don’t, because you never had a heart like mine.”

“How do you know what I began as?” answered Gravel.

I was used to their bickering, but this sounded like real anger, the kind of fight where, if these were living people, they’d start throwing dishes in a minute. Or books.

“I don’t know why we’re talking about this,” snapped Signora Gianna. “We’ve talked it over hundreds of times, and it makes no difference. By now, he’s been dead—oh!—five years? A thousand? I can’t tell anymore.…”

Her voice began on a raging note and ended on a lost one.

“I don’t want to stay, my dear,” she said. “I see them make the same mistakes we did, over and over. I’m losing track of myself, of you, of time and place. Part of me floats free, part of me is tethered; all of me is divided.”

When Gravel spoke again, his voice was gentle, soft even, despite its gritty accents.

“I know, my dear,” he said. “This part, I do understand, believe me.”

They were both silent for some time, and then he added, “Besides, neither of us knows where I came from anymore. I’ve forgotten. It’s been so long. Before you came, I was only anger, nothing more. I was on my way to being one of those who leaps out from the gargoyles on the sides of buildings, tipping the scales of human decision, so that a man who might have left his wife decides to murder her instead. But for you, I would have been …”

He trailed off.

“That, my dear,” he growled, “is why we must stay. They need us now, especially. The girl, she needs us. They all do. You felt how he tested the wards at the beginning, and he does so now, again and again. They need our help, so that they can help one another, instead of giving in to jealousy or fear.”