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

“Never! Not until my work is finished!”

Nonno turned to Emilio, who nodded and opened his notebook to a different page. When Emilio began to read again, he didn’t consult the page, but glanced down at it occasionally, like a singer who knows the music in front of him by heart.

“We will not wait, we will come, we will reach for you, we will bind you with chains of oaths and exhortations. Render up the body you have infested, the spirit you afflict, release them unharmed, and we will not confine your spirit in the close places, the dusty dark of the ancient underworld, but rather return you to your home in the Left-Hand Land.”

I’d heard this ritual before, at the exorcism of Lisetta Maria Umberti. That time, it had not really worked, at least not right away.

This time, the man’s mouth opened wider, until I thought his jaws might crack, releasing a roar that hurt my ears and seemed too big for his body. The man arched his back, and I could hear his own screams joining with those of the demon. Giuliano whipped the candle into his hands, shielding the flame, and knelt close to the suffering body. A knot of wind
seemed to fall from the man’s mouth, tumbling across the room to the flame.

The man collapsed back onto the floor, his eyes fluttering, his body slack.

“Did you catch him?” Emilio asked doubtfully.

“No,” said Nonno, sounding uncertain for the first time.

“But he’s gone, isn’t he?” asked Anna Maria. “I’m not getting anything in the mirror, either.”

Giuliano got to his feet slowly as I waited for the woman beside me to sag with relief. In fact, I waited for her to do something, anything; she’d been so still the whole time.

Nonno looked at her.

“You may come to your husband now,” he said.

There was a terrible pause, which gave me time to realize how much I’d missed while watching the man on the floor. I still had my hand on his wife’s arm. She turned and gripped my wrist, so swiftly I had no time to move. She grinned, and I saw, too late, who looked out of her eyes.

“He should have come to her long ago,” said the demon, this time from the woman’s mouth. “He should not have betrayed her. He went to that other woman, over near the Stazione Centrale. A waitress in a café! After all his wife had done for him.”

I met the demon’s eyes in shock, trying to get hold of myself as the woman’s fingers squeezed my arm. I could feel the pulse in her fingers: her own heartbeat and the pulse of the demon, an irregular, frantic rhythm. I had felt this once before, at Lisetta
Maria Umberti’s exorcism, when my demon’s pulse began to tap at me, pushing toward me, reaching out. Another wave of nausea swept over me. Would this demon’s pulse reach for me, too?

“I’ll take better care of her,” whispered the demon. “She’ll never know a moment’s sorrow with me. It won’t be like the last time.”

“What happened last time? Did she die?” Giuliano asked.

“I didn’t do it,” whispered the demon. “She wanted to die.”

“You keep coming back, don’t you?” Nonno said softly. “You keep hoping that the human spirits will survive in the bodies you take. You want to care for them, don’t you? You want a love returned.”

“Yes,” said the demon, so faintly that I could barely hear him.

“But the bodies, the spirits, they can only bear your presence for so long,” Giuliano said. “I am not pleased that I must tell you this, but it is so.” He smiled gently. “Your name isn’t really Revenge, is it?” he asked.

“No,” the demon hissed.

“Do you wish that was all you needed?”

“Yes.”

“What do you long for? Might we give it to you?”

“You might,” conceded the demon. The woman’s fingers tightened their grip on my arm, and I whimpered at the pain. “You might, but I do not trust you. You will return me to the Left-Hand Land if you can. You are not here for
me
. You are not
here for
her
. You are here for that wreck on the floor.”

The man had begun to groan in pain. The burns on his arms were starting to fade.

Nonno nodded. “Sometimes we arrive to help one person and leave having helped another,” he said. “We assume nothing. We do the work that must be done. If you are the one we must help, then we will help you.”

I wasn’t sure I believed this, and I could tell the demon wasn’t sure, either. True, I had been there before when we had helped a spirit, one that had returned from Majdanek concentration camp, but that had been a ghost, not a demon.

“I suspect a trick,” the demon said.

Giuliano laughed.

“It is a fine trick,” he said. “It rescues everyone: you and those you occupy at the same time. Who loses? Not you. Not anyone.”

“Not even you?” asked the demon.

“I look after myself,” Nonno replied with a wide, open smile.

I could see the demon considering this.

“What is your real name?” asked Giuliano.

“I cannot remember it,” said the demon, and I could hear just how far his voice had traveled to reach us.

“Anger abrades memory,” said Nonno.

“Grief abrades it!” snarled the demon. “You cannot know how I grieve!”

Giuliano shrugged his shoulders. I noticed my hand was going numb; every time the demon spoke, he made my arm shake.

“What would you like your name to be?” Nonno asked. “If you could be done with the name Vendetta?”

“
Pace. Speranza
. Peace. Hope.”

“Not joy?”

“I have lost too much for that.”

“You are sure?”

“Sure,” snapped the demon.

“You want peace; you want hope.”

“Yes.”

“You find them by caring for women who have had their hearts broken?”

“Yes. I make them happy!”

“By taking revenge on the men who have hurt them, or by occupying them?”

I could see the woman’s face being pushed and pulled from within, just as her husband’s had been. I remembered my own possession with a sudden vividness—the way it felt to have no control over my body, to be jerked about like a puppet and punished with pain when I fought back. But I could recall the power, too—the way I could see through walls, hear people’s thoughts. I shivered, and the demon Vendetta turned the woman’s eyes toward me, his secret, terrible smile pulling her lips thin.

“You know, don’t you?” he hissed. “You know.”

I had to swallow hard to speak.

“I do. But I never wanted to,” I said.

I held his eyes with my own, trying hard not to watch the way the woman’s irises writhed under the demon’s control.

“Let her go,” I whispered, my jaw tight from the pain of his grip. “You think you help, but you don’t. Let. Her. Go.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Giuliano start toward me. I looked back into the demon’s eyes and saw them beginning to withdraw, saw the skin of the woman’s face begin to deflate, felt a movement in her hand, as if the tide were going out of her body.…

“NOW
,” roared Nonno, and Emilio leaped forward and ripped the woman’s hand from my wrist. The demon threw her head back and roared. Giuliano cried words I could not hear and held up his candle. This time, the roaring narrowed to a distant point, and a miniature whirlwind spiraled down into the candle flame. In a moment, the flame flickered and died. The room stood silent. The woman slid slowly to the floor, caught at the last minute by Francesco, who sank to his knees, gently bringing her to rest. I realized Emilio was holding me up.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I muttered, looking down at them, husband and wife, both unconscious on the floor. I wondered what their story was, what had drawn the demon to them.

Emilio shifted his weight behind me and I remembered where I was.

“Steady, wait,” he counseled in my ear as my legs buckled under me. I forced myself up and took a step out of his arms.

“I’m fine,” I said, gritting my teeth. I couldn’t see his face.

Nonno was kneeling on the floor, his fingers on the man’s wrist; Anna Maria was checking the woman’s pulse.

“Fine,” she said, looking up at Giuliano.

“Yes,” he agreed.

The woman stirred first; she sat up abruptly, snarling, “Get out!” Then she looked up at us. “Oh,” she said, sounding hoarse. “What …?” She rubbed her eyes. “I can’t remember a thing,” she complained.

“Good for you,” said Nonno.

“Rufo!” she said, catching sight of her unconscious husband. “Rufo!” She looked up at us with an expression I had not seen before—genuine fear. “Will he be all right?”

“We must wait and see. He stirs,” Giuliano pointed out. The man was rocking his head side to side just as he had earlier, but this time I could see that he was using his own muscles.

“Mother of God,” he said at last. He looked up at his wife, not rising from the ground, and she stared back.

After what seemed like hours, he said, “I have broken your heart, my dear.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“What now?” he asked.

She waited a long time to answer. “I do not know,” she said softly.

Nonno stood and began to put his tools in their case. Anna Maria followed suit. Emilio turned and opened his notebook again, this time with pen in hand, and began making notes. I kept staring stupidly at the couple on the floor. They seemed to have forgotten us. Then I collected myself and turned to see what Emilio was writing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Francesco slide a tiny leather cover over the clapper of his bell and tuck it away in his case.
That’s all?
I thought. I wanted to know the answer to the man’s question. But instead, we helped them rise, and Giuliano fetched them each a glass of wine. When he had satisfied himself that they would do for now, he counseled them to sleep and to skip work the next day, if possible.

“I will come by in the morning to check on you,” he said. “You should not be troubled again tonight. I see no need to leave a sentinel.”

“You are confident,” said the man.

“I know the signs,” Giuliano replied. “You’ll do, for tonight. Sleep. You’ve both gotten off lightly. Rejoice in it. People die of this, yet you live. Now go … sleep.”

They obeyed him in a daze, but I still wanted to know,
What now?
I took comfort from the fear in the woman’s voice when she’d woken up, and from the look in the man’s eye. Maybe there would be a happy ending, after all.

I reached into my coat pocket and drew out my case, the case I’d longed to open when everyone else opened theirs. I
turned it over in my hands, looking at the list of names stamped in gold on the leather, beginning with
G. Della Torre
, the founder of our candle shop.

We stepped outside into the freezing February night. The Via Mario Pagano stood empty, but the smell of diesel fumes lingered.

“What time is it?” asked Anna Maria.

Francesco pulled out his phone and smirked at his sister. “Not
San Valentino
anymore,” he said. Anna Maria rolled her eyes, but it was Emilio who swore, and then promptly apologized to his grandfather. Nonno shrugged and asked, “You think she won’t forgive you?”

Emilio frowned. We all knew his girlfriend Alba wasn’t the forgiving type.

Italians, famously in love with love, have imported Valentine’s Day, and Emilio and Anna Maria had both had dates. Francesco had been disappointed, too; he’d had plans to go out with a bunch of his university friends.

Not me; I was the only one who’d been glad when Giuliano had gotten the call about this case.

Nonno walked behind us, his hands clasped behind his back. Francesco slowed down to walk beside him. As we crossed the Piazza Niccolò Tommaseo, Anna Maria asked Emilio in a low voice, “Have you thought about telling Alba what we do?”

He looked straight ahead and didn’t answer at first.

“What about the rule?” he asked at last.

“What about it?” replied Anna Maria. “Don’t you think it’s maybe a bit antiquated? Anyway, so many of our neighbors know, perhaps one of them told her already?”

I blinked, but Emilio only laughed. I love the way his face changes when he laughs; he is as handsome as Apollo, with curly blond hair and high cheekbones—but the sun really shines out of him when he laughs. Anna Maria, walking beside him, made quite a contrast to her cousin, pale and dark-haired. In her brother, Francesco, the same features are overemphasized—huge nose instead of an elegant one, gawky instead of slender, hair sticking out in every direction instead of a sweeping mass of curls. Anna Maria is beautiful enough to model, which is what she does. Francesco’s main talent seems to be the ability to bump into things.

Nonno Giuliano had passed some of his features on to Emilio, his grandson, and his niece and nephew shared the family traits: the high cheekbones, the far-seeing eyes, the generous mouth. Emilio had his sturdy frame and straight back.

“Can you see Alba talking to any of our neighbors … or listening to them? Seriously?” asked Emilio.

Anna Maria shrugged and grinned. Francesco laughed.

“You’re right,” she conceded.

“Anyway, it’s not like … like we’re superheroes or something,” Emilio went on, looking at me. I thought maybe he was saying this for my benefit. “No. I will follow the rule.”

What the heck is the rule?!
I wanted to scream. Then I
reminded myself that the tool case in my breast pocket was nearly three centuries old, made by the same man who had made Emilio’s case. Even though there was a demon following me, I had a right to ask questions, didn’t I? They could choose whether it was safe to answer them. “What rule?” I asked.

Anna Maria looked at me. “Sometimes I completely forget that there’s all this stuff you don’t know, because you didn’t grow up with it.” She clouted me on the shoulder. “You’re really changing, you know that?” She looked down at my ankles and added, “And growing, too, still. Remind Francesca: new pants, immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, rolling my eyes. Anna Maria is three years older than I am, which should not be old enough to act like my mom, but that doesn’t stop her. Emilio looked over at us, smiling wryly.

“And the rule …?” I prompted. Emilio opened his mouth, but Anna Maria broke in.

“The rule we’re talking about is that you don’t tell your lovers what we do. You don’t even tell your wife or your husband, until you’ve been married a year and a day. It’s an old, old rule, and I don’t know who decided it.”