Page 91 of A Dangerous Bargain

The cut on my arm is healed, a black mark covering it. A long, shaky breath escapes me. I’m either dreaming, or I’m dead, but either way, it worked.

I ease open the studio’s door—unlocked here—and step into an empty corridor, my footsteps strangely muffled. The silence is thick, stuffing my ears like wool. Each shift of my body feels like a warning, each step a step too far.

The Palazzo Medici shares the same, unnerving emptiness as the studio. The walls only seem to focus if I squint my eyes just so. There’s a hazy, ethereal quality to it all, as if I’m looking through the bottom of a glass or stuck in the memory of a dream.

Downstairs, double doors loom closer and closer, more solid than anything else I’ve seen so far.

They open at my touch, as if pulled back by invisible footmen.

Leaving me to behold a ruined, gutted Florence.

My eyes slam shut, stomach roiling. It’s not real!

But it looks like it could be, right down to the faded red duomo crumbling in the distance.

Buildings are upside down, entire walls missing. Some of the cobblestone streets run up their facades; others dead-end in a pall of mist that pours through the streets like smoke. Shapes flicker in the gray. Some seem human, but every time I’m on the verge of seeing a face, it dissolves in the haze. The air remains sepulchrally quiet, devoid of all the life and noise that belong in a city.

No, a living city.

I’ve entered a place that belongs to the dead.

Something flickers right beside me. The silence swallows my shout.

’Tis nothing but a lithe black cat. It sits and starts licking a paw.

A chill goes through me—one that seems to ripple on and on through the emptiness. I sidestep the creature and keep going.

There’s a pinprick of pain on my calf. I gasp and turn.

The cat is up on its back legs, tail lashing furiously.

“Do… you want me to follow you?”

The cat’s ears twitch. Shadow-fast, it races to the next corner, staring at me with an ancient, impenetrable gaze that stands my hair on end.

“I need to find my brother first.”

His portrait is still whole. His body is not yet dead, but his soul is lost, drifting somewhere I couldn’t find on earth. I have a hunch it’s here. I don’t know if I’m right, but I have to see if it’s true.

The cat hisses but doesn’t move. Are those… leathery wings slowly materializing above its shoulders? Not a cat, but a demon, then.

I swallow back a heap of nerves. I’ve made enough bargains in my life to know what happens next. I break the skin of my thumb against a jagged cobblestone and lower my hand.

The cat laps the blood eagerly, wings splaying for balance. Without a sound, it turns around and races through the foggy streets. I hurry after it.

The cat is always waiting for me when I round a corner, tail whipping impatiently. I have the oddest sense that if I took off in the opposite direction, I’d still find it waiting.

The deeper I go into the city, the narrower the streets become, as if this nightmare Florence has a hidden vanishing point like a sketchbook landscape. I’m about to tell the cat-demon I don’t want to go any farther when I stumble into an open space and find myself dazzled by a strange golden orb.

It hangs in the piazza’s center, so brilliant, I squint against it. It looks like the Easter Carro del Fuoco paused right as its fireworks explode, but smaller.

A gasp falls from my lips when my eyes adjust to the light. “Niccolo?”

He undulates weightlessly above the ground, gold pouring from every one of his pores. His eyes are closed, lashes two black fans against his cheekbones. I reach out with a trembling hand to touch him—

A force knocks me to the ground with a snarl.

The cat leers over me, the size of a lion now.