“That’s where we are now?” Luce asked, even though she knew that Daniel didn’t like to talk about how he still had not chosen a side.
“You used to really like Cam,” Daniel said, sliding the subject away from himself. “For a handful of lifetimes on Earth the three of us were very close. It was only much later, after Cam had suffered a broken heart, that he crossed over to Lucifer’s side.”
“What? Who was she?”
“None of us like to talk about her. You must never let on that you know,” Daniel said. “I resented his choice, but I can’t say I didn’t understand it. If I ever truly lost you, I don’t know what I would do. My whole world would dim.”
“That isn’t going to happen,” Luce said too quickly.
She knew this lifetime was her last chance. If she died now, she would not come back.
She had a thousand questions, about the woman Cam had lost, about the strange quake in Daniel’s voice when he talked about Lucifer’s appeal, about where she’d been when he was falling. But her eyelids felt heavy, her body slack with fatigue.
“Rest,” Daniel cooed in her ear. “I’ll wake you up when we’re landing in Venice.”
It was all the permission she needed to let herself drift off. She closed her eyes against the phosphorescent waves crashing thousands of feet below and flew into a world of dreams where nine days had no significance, where she could dip and soar and linger in the glory of the clouds, where she could fly freely, into infinity, without the slightest chance of falling.
THREE
THE SUNKEN SANCTUARY
Daniel had been knocking on the weathered wooden door in the middle of the night for what felt to Luce like half an hour. The three-story Venetian townhouse belonged to a colleague, a professor, and Daniel was certain this man would let them crash, because they had been great friends ‘years ago,’ which, with Daniel, could encompass quite a span of time.
“He must be a heavy sleeper.” Luce yawned, half lulled back into sleep herself by the steady pounding of Daniel’s fists. Either that, she thought blearily, or the professor was sitting in some bohemian all-night café, sipping wine over a book crammed with incomprehen-sible terms.
It was three in the morning—their touchdown amid the silvery web of Venice’s canals had been accompanied by the chiming of a clock tower somewhere in the darkened distance of the city—and Luce was overcome with fatigue. She leaned miserably against the cold tin mail-box, causing it to wobble loose from one of the nails holding it upright. This sent the whole box slanting, making Luce stumble backward and nearly hurtle into the murky black-green canal, whose water lapped over the lip of the mossy stoop like an inky tongue.
The whole exterior of the house seemed to be rotting in layers: from the painted blue wood peeling off the windowsills in slimy sheets, to red bricks crawling with dark green mold, to the damp cement of the stoop, which crumbled under their feet. For a moment, Luce thought she could actually feel the city sinking.
“He’s got to be here,” Daniel muttered, still pounding.
When they’d landed on the canal-side ledge usually accessed only by gondola, Daniel had promised Luce a bed inside, a hot drink, a reprise from the damp and bracing wind they’d been flying through for hours.
At last, the slow shuffling of feet thumping down stairs inside perked a shivering Luce to attention. Daniel exhaled and closed his eyes, relieved, as the brass knob turned. Hinges moaned as the door swung open.
“Who the devil—” The older Italian man’s wiry tufts of white hair stood out at all angles from his head. He had sensationally bushy white eyebrows, and a mustache to match, and thick white chest hair protruding from the V-neck of his dark gray robe.
Luce watched Daniel blink in surprise, as if he was second-guessing their address. Then the old man’s pale brown eyes lit up. He lurched forward, pulling Daniel into a tight embrace.
“I was beginning to wonder if you were going to visit before I kicked the inevitable bucket,” the man whispered hoarsely. His eyes traveled to Luce, and he smiled as if they hadn’t woken him, as if he’d been expecting them for months. “After all these years, you finally brought over Lucinda. What a treat.”
His name was Professor Mazotta. He and Daniel had studied history together at the University of Bologna in the thirties. He was not appalled or bewildered by Daniel’s lack of aging: Mazotta understood what Daniel was.
He seemed to feel only joy at being reunited with an old friend, a joy that was augmented by the introduction to the love of that friend’s life.
He escorted them into his office, which was also a study of varying degrees of decay. His bookshelves dipped at the centers; his desk was piled with yellowing paper; the rug was worn to threads and splashed with coffee stains. Mazotta set immediately to making each of them a cup of dense hot chocolate—an old man’s old bad habit, he rasped to Luce with a nudge. But Daniel barely took a sip before thrusting his book into Mazotta’s hands and opening it to the description of the first relic.
Mazotta slipped on thin wire-framed glasses and squinted at the page, mumbling to himself in Italian. He stood up, walked to the bookshelf, scratched his head, turned back to the desk, paced the office, sipped his chocolate, then returned to the bookshelf to pull out a fat leather-bound tome. Luce stifled a yawn. Her eyelids felt like they were working hard to hold up something heavy. She was trying not to drift, pinching the inside of her palm to keep herself awake. But Daniel’s and Professor Mazotta’s voices met each other like distant clouds of fog as they argued over the impossibility of everything the other was saying.
“It’s absolutely not a windowpane from the church of Saint Ignatius.” Mazotta wrung his hands. “Those are slightly hexagonal, and this illustration is resoundingly oblong.”