Page 16 of A Dangerous Bargain

Lupa brightens. “Because of the gold! The kind you don’t eat.”

Never mind. Some explanation is obviously needed. “They need it to keep living in their house.”

“Do they, though? We could gather sticks for them, like the birds in the workshop.”

“No, bird nests and people houses are different.”

Lupa sighs explosively and crosses her arms. “So many rules! It would be better if there were fewer of them.”

“Undoubtedly.” I gnaw my bottom lip, keen and frightened to ask the question that’s burned through me for days. “On the subject of rules… you said I’m out of life. Would you take my memories instead for magic?”

For all my bargains struck, I’ve never once parted with a memory. Memory is too delicately stitched into the fabric of being human to be ripped out like a seam. One of Verrocchio’s artists, wild with grief, bartered away the memory of his deceased wife for the ability to always know which colors a painting needed. But gradually, his vivid canvases grew dull, and by the end of the year, he could only paint in shades of gray. He cried softly at his easel, trying to remember what it was that once filled his life with brightness. He was gone a month later. Verrocchio never told us if he had quit or died, but I had my suspicions.

Lupa shakes her head. “No, they are not different like you think. Memory is life already lived. If I take anything more from you, you will die.”

Angels can’t lie, so I know she’s telling me the truth, but I feel like part of it is missing.

“You should live as though you don’t know you are dying,” Lupa says. “That is what everyone else does.”

“I don’t know how.” My confession is soft, barely a whisper.

She shrugs, as if the discussion of my untimely, tragic death bores her. “Ask the da Vinci boy to let you help with the painting for the Medici if it means so much to you.”

My stomach jolts like I missed a step and everyone saw me stumble. “No jests. Haven’t you heard I’m dying?”

“He likes to be helpful.”

“He likes to be meddlesome. It’s much different.”

Lupa stares. An ancient, thousand-yard, dead-eyed expression we’ve been working on teaching her not to do because it unsettles people. “Be honest with him and he will say yes. You are like a cat everyone wants to pet, but who always has his claws out. Where is the harm in asking?”

I am supposed to drop dead sometime this year, so she has a point. But what Lupa doesn’t understand is that there are a hundred other ways to die. Asking for help feels like one of them. Asking Leonardo for help feels especially horrible. He doesn’t know what it’s like to work hard only to fall flat on his face in the end.

If he had to, Niccolo would ask his least favorite person for help. I groan and rub my temples, feeling sulky and cornered. “What do you know about cats? You barely know how to use a fork.”

Lupa’s pointy teeth bare in… a smile? I’m not certain, but it’s worse than her long, dead stare. We’ll have to go over appropriate human facial expressions again. “If you do not do something to help yourself when we return, I will pee on your bed, also like a cat. Your moping bothers me.”

“Oh, apologies my melancholy offends you, Your Holiness!” I place a hand on my chest, my face remorseful and penitent. “How rude of me. Your time on earth really should be all fun and games.”

“It should be,” she says without a trace of irony.

We emerge into a dead-end piazza. A cracked fountain sputters against the city wall at the end, its marble gray with filth above the water and streaked with green beneath. The Neptune in the center stares with dull, unseeing eyes. There’s not a smidge of magic in this sculpture. Nor care, either, judging from the cracks already splintering through it.

But the fountain’s state doesn’t seem to matter to the dozens and dozens of people crushed around it, all of them filling up kitchen pails with the unclean water. A ripple goes through the crowd at the sight of Lupa, a rolling whisper that makes the hair on my arms rise.

“Angel, angel. An angel has come among us…”

Someone jostles me, sharp elbows against my soft side. “A girl,” the woman whispers, lifting her dusty hands toward Lupa. “The angel is a girl!”

Mouth thinning, I push past her and place Lupa’s hand firmly in the crook of my elbow. I don’t like the shine in the woman’s eyes. It reminds me of the priest’s when he really gets going on a good bender about how all sinners are going to hell.

“We’re going to leave.”

Lupa peers into my empty basket. “You didn’t get the pigments.”

I keep a tight hold on the basket, angling it into the crowd. “Someone can get them later.”

After I get her safely back to the workshop.