The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (19 page)

The demon screamed and roared, his elegant voice abandoned for the moment. I was reminded of Signore Strozzi, and of the contrast between his calm voice and his thick-fingered,
dangerous hands. Standing a few feet from Francesco, I could smell the beeswax candle in its holder—here inside the Second House, the honeyed scent was overpowering, a blessing, since it helped block out the demon’s stench. I could hardly see the flame, however, a blurred, shuddering light that bowed with every roar.

The demon stopped.

“Wait,” he said to Giuliano in his cultured accent. “I can see I started out on the wrong note. Forgive me. Maybe we can work out a deal. There’s something that troubles you, something terrible you’re going to have to do.”

The hump of his head blurred and tipped toward me. I blinked, but Nonno did not move.

“Perhaps I might have information … answers?” the demon said to Giuliano.

I knew what he meant when he said
something terrible
. Sooner or later when my demon attacked again, my family would almost certainly have to let me die rather than allow it another chance at this earthly plane. A huge hope leaped up in me.

Through all of this, Signore Strozzi had not done more than shift his weight inside the monstrous shadow that enveloped him.

“No,” said Giuliano firmly to the demon. “You must go.”

“Wait! Shouldn’t she have a say?” the demon asked slyly, his crawling torso bowing toward me. “After all, she’s the one who is going to suffer.”

“Don’t listen to him, Mia,” said Emilio. “Demons play games like this. Think,
cara
! If you’re going to possess a banker, you’ve got to be cunning.”

“Yes,” agreed Giuliano, still facing the writhing hulk in front of us. “It’s time to go,” he told the demon.

The demon shuddered. “You shouldn’t just let them talk you out of it,” he said to me. “I only want to help. What you face, it’s horrific, and what your family will have to do is even worse, I fear.”

As far as I could tell, the demon had no eyes, yet I felt I was staring into them. That’s how strange it was inside the Second House, halfway into the Left-Hand Land. I wanted to say,
more horrific than you
? But I knew the answer to that, having lived it. I took a deep breath, still wanting to believe in the demon.

“No,” I said. “It’s time for you to go.” He shuddered again. I wondered if I had made the right choice.

Emilio began chanting once more. The demon’s body jerked with every word now, convulsed with every stroke of Anna Maria’s bell. Inside the creature’s boiling, blurring body, Signore Strozzi twisted and shuddered at the same time. The banker whipped about, and I thought his spine would snap.

Inside the Second House, the demon’s roars rose and fell as if someone were fiddling with the volume on a stereo. One minute the sound would fill my whole head, and the next it would fall away, leaving me shaking. Inside the demon, Signore Strozzi threw his head back and screamed, but I could not hear him. I
wondered what he sounded like inside the ordinary apartment, and whether his family was awake.

Emilio and Anna Maria settled into a rhythm: he would chant a verse, and when he paused for breath, she would ring the bell three times. I couldn’t tell what power the words or the bell had over the demon, if any. I thought I recognized single Milanese words, as Emilio’s voice flowed in and out of range just like the demon’s roars. “
Radice
—Root.” “
Terra
—Earth.” I didn’t understand them all, but I could guess at most of them. “
Disagio
—Unease.” “
Legge
—Law.”

Until now, I had not understood why Giuliano had decided that this creature was a demon of place. I still wasn’t sure what place he was referring to, but I could
feel
what he meant. Each time the demon and Signore Strozzi shuddered, the room seemed to shake as well. I saw Anna Maria shift her footing, saw Emilio rock on the balls of his feet, and Francesco throw out a hand. Only Nonno held still. As I struggled to keep my balance, I tried to figure out how he did it.

Another shudder, and I realized that I could hear another faint sound. I waited for the next convulsion and heard it again, a voice—no, more than one voice—from the portraits. The old woman was growling. The monsignor was screaming in terror and surprise. The look-alike Tommaso portrait was shouting for joy. There were other voices I did not recognize.

“Anna Maria,” I whispered under Emilio’s chant.

“What?” she snapped, holding her silver stick beside her bell.

“Can you hear them?”

As the verse came to an end, she didn’t answer. She struck her bell three times, pausing in between for the sound to carry as far as it could in the Second House. The demon quivered.

“The people from the portraits. They are shouting when the demon shakes. When the room moves.”

“Can’t hear them over the bell,” she said after a while. “Can’t focus. Try Francesco.”

Francesco heard his name and edged over to us, carefully holding his candle.

“Need to swap stubs,” he whispered.

“Don’t talk, just do it!” snarled Anna Maria. “There are two in my case.”

“Got my own,” he said.

“Shut up. Mia, tell him.”

He rolled his eyes. “Crabby.”

“Working,” I retorted.

“So am I,” he shrugged, not sounding particularly hurt. “What’s up?”

“Voices. From the portraits,” I managed as the demon’s roars filled our heads again. “Listen.”

Francesco didn’t ask what I meant. Instead, he occupied himself with replacing the failing stub in his thumb holder with a longer beeswax candle, and sheltered it with his palm against the next trembling outcry.

“Ah!” he said, turning his eyes toward me, frowning.

“Yes,” I said.

We stood silent, listening. I took a few deep breaths, trying to call the Madonna to mind, trying to pull back from the roaring, the stifling air.

I watched the demon writhe. Whenever he screamed, the tiny hands would stretch out their fingers as though reaching far beyond him, pulling the air toward him. They never stopped crawling and plucking at his skin. I watched him bellow, hands reaching outward, listening to the cries of joy and fear.

Then I noticed that the look-alike Tommaso portrait had gone silent, and one by one, the other voices faded. The hands, reaching and grasping outward, seemed to weaken, too. Even Signore Strozzi’s body seemed to hang, wrung out, within the body of the demon. I had not noticed, or felt, how tightly the tiny hands had held on to everything around them—the air, the walls, the spirits, all of us—until Emilio’s words and Giuliano’s will forced them to let go. I had a momentary, bizarre fear that the apartment would collapse around us once they lost their grip. I felt as if we were pulling the demon out of this place, bit by bit, and it might not stand up without him.
That
, I thought,
is what Nonno meant by a demon of place
.

I wanted to know if time was passing as slowly in the ordinary world as inside the Second House. It seemed like we had been here for hours, days, years. The creature’s roars faded to whispers, and we could see Francesco’s candle tugging at him, now. The hands lifted a final time; Anna Maria suspended her
hand beside her bell; Emilio fell silent; Nonno, watching carefully, lowered his mirror—and the demon lost his grip upon Signore Strozzi in one last convulsion, pouring toward the flickering light in Francesco’s hand.

He vanished inside the candle with a hiss.

Francesco placed a snuffer over the flame. When he drew it away, I could smell a faint scent of pond muck in the smoke. Giuliano, Francesco, and I stood quietly, while Anna Maria and Emilio went forward to help Signore Strozzi collapse into his chair, though helping him was as awkward and slippery as it had been for Nonno to grasp the handle of the door to this room. They guided him down as best they could, but he still struck his desk hard as he settled. We heard a muffled thump that must have sounded much louder in the ordinary world. Over the banker’s shoulder, I could see that it was still dark outside.

“We must leave the Second House and help him,” Giuliano said. “I will go last, to close the Second Door.”

Signore Strozzi began to raise his head and snarl at the air. We had to struggle to make out his voice.

“How could you take him?” shouted Signore Strozzi. “Come out, wherever you are, come out where I can see you, and explain yourselves! How could you take him? My family will murder me, they’ll smother me in my sleep, they’ll drive me mad with their whispers.… He was the luck of our house. How could you take him?”

We watched him search the air for us.

“Gone,” Signore Strozzi said to himself. “Gone like the cowards they are.” He began searching his desk. “Got to get out, get out, get out …”

He found what he was looking for, a clattering bunch of keys. The sound grated distantly in my ears.

“Back to the Second Door! We’ve got to go. Quickly!” cried Nonno, and Signore Strozzi lifted his head as if he almost could hear us.

We ran back through the hall, bumping into furniture that our confused senses couldn’t warn us about, hearing Signore Strozzi’s agonized roars above it all. I heard his wife awaken with a scream, his son call a terrified question.

I didn’t expect to hear any voices from the portraits as we passed through. The look-alike Tommaso portrait was silent, and so were the ones of the monsignor and the old woman, but I could hear a handful of others, more distant, shouting at one another. As we came through, they shouted at us, too.

“Della Torres! You’ve always wanted everyone else’s power! Want that consulship back, don’t you? Never got to be dukes! Shameful traitors! Revenge!”

Part of me wanted to scream that all we had been trying to do was help. I slowed down, but Emilio caught my shoulder and said, “We have to reason with the living! Come on!”

I felt the air thicken as we forced our way through the Second Door and tumbled out onto the balcony, gasping for fresh air. I wasn’t prepared for my senses to return to normal.
Suddenly, I could see so clearly in the dim streetlights. My lungs could expand; my nose didn’t smell every single atom of scent; my skin didn’t react to the sound of voices. I stood blinking until Anna Maria swore at me to get out of the way.

Down in the courtyard, Uncle Matteo was rocking impatiently on the balls of his feet. “He’s starting his car!” he called. Signore Tedesco and Bernardo were running toward their
motorini
. I realized I could see the
motorini
clearly in the shadows of the courtyard; the sky was just getting to get light.

Nonno swung down the scaffolding faster than I would have thought possible for an eighty-year-old man. I landed on the street beside him, feet smacking hard onto the pavement. Bernardo pulled up on his
motorino
. Giuliano walked swiftly to his own, jumping on and stamping the gas pedal with a grunt. Before I knew it, Bernardo held out a hand to me, shouting to Nonno and Emilio, “I’ll take Mia!” Emilio scrambled on behind his grandfather, looking as if he was commending his soul to heaven.

“What about me!?” moaned Francesco.

“You must call the Greek,” Giuliano commanded. I made no sense of that. “Follow us as fast as you can. Matteo! Anna Maria! Stay behind, for the wife and son!”

We heard the roar of an engine from the courtyard on the other side of the apartment building, then Signore Strozzi raced past in a black Mercedes, head bent over the wheel. Nonno took off after him,
motorino
wobbling wildly, Emilio fighting to hang
on while Giuliano repeated over his shoulder, “Call … the … 
Greek
!”

“Hang on,” Bernardo ordered.

He didn’t wait for me to tighten my grip, jerking his
motorino
forward so that my fingers slid across the leather of his jacket. As we bounced over the uneven curb into the Via Vincenzo Monti, Bernardo felt me slide, and braked hard, so I slammed into him.

“Hang on,”
he repeated, but it sounded like he was laughing. “Put your arms around my waist and lock your hands!”

I still hesitated. Put my arms around his waist? I could smell the scent of his cologne.

“Mia! Don’t be scared,” he said, turning his head, his voice thrumming inside his chest. “But do hang on.”

I took a deep breath and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face to the back of his jacket. It took me a minute to remember we were supposed to be chasing Signore Strozzi; nothing much mattered at that moment, beyond the smell of leather.

As we leaped down the road, I worked out how to keep my seat. I pushed down on the footrests with my feet and threw my head and chest forward, bumping into Bernardo’s back but not falling off. Then we were careening onto the Via Mario Pagano, weaving across lanes as we followed the Mercedes.

I matched my rhythm to Bernardo’s, following the bend of his spine as he leaned this way and that, turning sharply
around a delivery van with an enormous fish painted on the side, crossing in front of a Smart car, veering past a BMW as he expertly gunned the motor. Someone shouted from a car, “Hey, Bernardo! Come to Plastic!”

“Later!” he shouted back. I felt a stab of envy.

They yelled something else, but we were gone, whipping past, caught up in the river of lights and car exhaust and early morning drivers. Bernardo muttered under his breath, “He’s cutting right, he’s cutting right.” And sure enough Signore Strozzi’s engine roared again, and he shot across three lanes of traffic. Bernardo whipped the
motorino
around and followed.

Watched over by the angels and saints who protect almost all Italian drivers, Bernardo chased after Giuliano and Emilio, and the Mercedes wove erratically ahead of us all. Then up ahead, Signore Strozzi jerked the Mercedes hard left, alongside the enormous forested darkness of the Parco Sempione. By the time we reached the other side of the Largo Cairoli, Bernardo swore and changed his mind.

“Shortcut!” he exclaimed, before swerving between two buildings and bumping down a set of steps into a narrow alley. The
motorino
’s voice compressed into a whining rumble.