Page 107 of A Dangerous Bargain

With shaking fingers, I uncork the vial. There’s still a single drop gleaming at the bottom. “Can whatever you made get us past this thing?”

Leonardo takes the vial with a wink. He snaps out a large paper fan from the table. Are those his sketches making up the webbing? “That’s the plan.”

A second fan snaps out. No, not a fan.

A wing.

Leonardo dumps the rest of Lupa’s blood on the table’s remains.

And the flying machine shudders to life in a wash of gold light.

Right as the window shatters.

With a triumphant scream, the demon thrusts its head inside the hole. Glass and water spray across me.

I turn toward the door.

“No!” Leonardo shouts. “Sit down. We’ll be trapped if we go back!”

The demon strikes like a serpent.

I dive onto the second wagon bench, feeling a gust ruffle my hair.

The demon hisses, pulling back for another attack—

I thrust Clarice de’ Medici’s rosary in its face right as it snaps forward. It flinches away, eyes furious reptilian slits.

Leonardo gives the flying machine a push, thuds onto the bench in front of me, and whistles.

The machine shudders. Starts canting across the floor toward the demon occupying the window. If the creature doesn’t move, we’ll crash and lose our only way out.

“Throw it, throw it!”

I tighten my fingers around the prayer beads, the little golden cross at the end gleaming.

Then I hurl it with all my might straight at the demon’s snout.

And it howls.

The demon recoils, clawing at its face with an outraged noise. The stink of burning flesh hits me.

It falls backward, taking out the rest of the window along the way.

And with a downward heave of its wings, the flying machine shoots out the open aperture.

The writhing demon gets smaller as we sail into the storming sky: Leonardo gives it a jaunty wave, whooping with delight. “Did you know there’s magic in Lupa’s blood?”

Laughter pours out of me, a torrent that streaks behind us like a comet’s tail. My brave, brilliant inventor.

The flying machine cuts across the sky, skimming above rain-slicked rooftops. Its fragile wings shudder in the gale, but the magic holds them together. Gold crackles over the wooden body, little flickers of warmth that zip across me.

“Where to?” Leonardo shouts over the roar.

I reach out to him with a wild grin and squeeze his shoulders. “Where all this started. The Palazzo della Signoria.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

The overwrought portrait of God in Piero’s office isn’t God.