Page 80 of A Dangerous Bargain

“Why are they here?” Leonardo demands, any authority in the question undermined by the crack in his voice. “Where’s Lupa?”

Verrocchio crosses his arms, then uncrosses them, eyes flicking to the guards behind us. “The Medici took her away. She was defective.”

“Defective?” Anger sizzles through me, hot and smoldering. Only things are defective. Lupa isn’t quite a person, but she’s far from a thing. “You know better than that.”

Leonardo’s fingers are light on my elbow, holding me back. “Why would the Medici take an angel away? Shouldn’t it have been the church?”

Verrocchio shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says, confused, then frightened. “I don’t know!”

A sharp breath straightens my shoulders. My master doesn’t know about the demons.

It shouldn’t matter to me right now, but it does. He didn’t let the Medici into his workshop. He’s not working with them.

Verrocchio’s eyes meet mine for a breath. Then they flick behind me.

I tackle Leonardo to the ground just as the guards try to seize us.

But I’m not the only one moving.

“Leave them alone!”

Giorgio’s face looms overhead. He’s leaning over the narrow balcony that runs along the workshop’s second-floor gallery. The other apprentices’ faces pop up beside him, some fierce, some frightened, but all of them set with a frantic resolve.

I push myself up, gaping. How long have they been lurking there? Where was this fierce determination when it came to their lessons?

As if he can read my thoughts, Giorgio winks, an expression he absolutely, one hundred percent learned from Leonardo. “Now, everyone!”

As one, they upend the buckets they held behind their backs on the guards’ heads.

The guards shout and shriek as watered-down paint pours through the holes of their helmets. Some of them double over with coughing; some rip their helmets off and rub frantically at their eyes. Verrocchio screams and leaps onto a stool to prevent a flood of paint from sloshing over his very expensive boots, only to scream again when he realizes it’s ultramarine paint, one of the most expensive pigments in the entire workshop, used exclusively for Virgin Mary commissions. He grabs his face and howls, “Anything but the blue!”

Leonardo’s freckles are sprayed with green flecks, an awed and delighted grin spilling across his face. He kisses his pointer and middle finger and turns them toward the balcony.

Giorgio salutes him and tosses another bucket over the railing. “Lupa warned us something like this might happen before she was taken away. Go get her back!”

We leap to our feet, sidestep the howling guards, and escape to the street.

Pedestrians gasp and leap aside when we pass them. I can only imagine what they think when they see us, dripping with a rainbow of colors, holding hands and running like our very lives depend on it.

They probably do.

“Here.” I tug Leonardo down an alley filled with drying laundry. His eyes pop when he sees me tearing off my shirt. Then my trousers. “We’re too easily spotted. We need to change.”

A beat later, he starts shucking his clothes too. “Right! Of course.”

I’m not sure the end result is less conspicuous than before. Leonardo’s trousers barely go below his knees, and his red-blond hair might be permanently stained green. He examines one of the tresses and lets it fall with a resigned sigh. “Now what?”

“We need to find Lupa.” The fact that the Medici took her and she warned the other apprentices to look out for them confirms my hunch that there’s something she hasn’t told us yet.

“Where would they take her?”

That I’m less sure about. “The Palazzo della Signoria?”

“I don’t think they’d take her somewhere a lot of people have access to,” Leonardo says. “The Medici wouldn’t want anyone to see her captured. Angels are still sacred.” He paces across the alley’s narrow length, one finger tapping his chin, the other hand drumming along his long thigh in those ridiculous, too-small pants.

I look away, trying not to be distracted. “I don’t understand how they were able to take her in the first place,” I say. “She has powers. She can fly.”

“Which means they’d take her to a place where no one could see her struggle.”