Inamorata (36 page)

N
ICHOLAS

T
he night was cold, a lowering frost already in the air, the canals still and spreading a miasmic damp. I flipped up the collar of my coat and pulled it more firmly about me, grateful for the warmth of the stew and the fritters I’d brought for her warming my hands, and anxious to get back before she woke. And all the time my mind was spinning as I tried to decide what to do, how to save her brother, how to keep him from the despair and madness that would descend once his masterpiece was done. Now that the bargain was made, and pain could not be prevented, all I could hope to do was ease it.

I went up the stairs and in through the door of the
portego
, pausing to take off my coat, though the palazzo was as cold as any other damn room in Venice, and I should probably do better to keep it on. I huddled in my suit coat instead and picked up the food again, making my way to her bedroom. The place was dead quiet—
like a tomb
, I thought. When I reached her bedroom, I realized why. The Moretta
was
empty. Sophie was gone.

I stood in the doorway, the fritters leaking oil onto my hand through their crumpled wrapper, and stared disbelievingly at the mussed bed. The lamp was burning, turned very low, and I thought I must be wrong. She was here somewhere. Perhaps the
sala
. I set the fritters and the stew down and called, “Sophie!” As my voice echoed into darkness, I saw the note she’d left behind.

Nicholas, I’ve gone to save Joseph. I love you.

The leaping joy I felt at those last words was eclipsed by the first.

I’ve gone to save Joseph.

I cursed beneath my breath. What could she possibly hope to accomplish, even assuming Odilé let her in? The bargain was set; there was no undoing it. Odilé would offer no mercy.

I shoved the note into my pocket and grabbed my coat, stepping out again into the dark, freezing fog.

I wove through the narrow
calli
, dodging cats and the occasional rat as I made my way past the flickering oil lamps of the corner shrines and the shadows. I wished she had waited for me, but I knew she wasn’t thinking clearly. The news about Odilé had shaken her badly, her brother’s fate worse so, and I knew he had been right when he told me Sophie didn’t realize her importance, that she thought she was nothing. It would be my task to convince her otherwise, to show her what a singular talent she had. There was magic in her, just as in her brother. I remembered the Lido, watching her spin her tale, watching the way she beguiled him, the strength and inspiration he took from her. The way he drew her as if she were his sole purpose for being alive. I still could not accustom myself to the bewitchment they cast when they were together. As if they’d been forged together in some brutal crucible, and had emerged strong and shining, fatally joined.

Fatally.

I cannot live without him,
she’d said.

I stopped short. No. Impossible.

I thought of Odilé on the balcony, the way she’d seemed to shift before me, as if I’d been viewing her underwater. The serpent I’d seen behind her eyes. The desperation in her voice.
Ah, but this one is so different. He is not like the others. . . .
At the time I’d thought she’d simply been telling me what I already knew. He
was
like no one I’d ever met. Blake’s dark angel. But now, suddenly, I wondered if it was perhaps something else.

Was Joseph Hannigan different because of his talent? Or was he different because of his sister? Was it because Sophie and Joseph were inexplicably connected, not just twins at birth, but twins in living?

I tried to make sense of my thoughts. Odilé’s despair, the shifting . . . I had seen those things before, hadn’t I? I had seen them in Barcelona, in the days before she’d withdrawn to that dark little room with a score of hapless, ill-fated men. I had seen the emergence of the demon when the choice had not been made. I had seen those men die.

The choice has not been made.

Odilé had misjudged the connection between Sophie and Joseph. The world they made required both of them.
They were joined.
No one could get in unless they agreed. Odilé could not take Joseph, because Sophie was in the way. To love one, you must love both.

I stared unseeingly at the shadows before me, my heart beginning to pound in my chest. None of this was possible. But I’d spent years now chasing the impossible, and I knew the truth of impossible things. Just as I knew now, deep in my heart, that I was right. The bargain had not been sealed. Whatever was in Joseph and Sophie had prevented it. Odilé had failed. Desperately, I tried to remember the date. October fourteenth, wasn’t it? Nearly three years to the date of Barcelona. Lacking only a single day.

Tomorrow, the three years would be over.

The resounding
bong
of la Marangona shattered my thoughts. I started, looking up at the sky, while the great bell of San Marco tolled the midnight chime.

There was no more tomorrow, I realized with sudden panic. The time was up now, today. Joseph was with Odilé. And Sophie . . . Sophie was there as well.

I broke into a run.

S
OPHIE

S
ophie,” Joseph said, and his voice seemed to shiver in the air, across my skin, as did the lingering chimes of the bell.

My heart leaped to him; I felt a surge of strength and stumbled toward him.

She stepped between us before I could reach him. Her eyes were black in the dim light. How strange they were. “He belongs to me now,” she said, and her voice too was strange, nearly hissing. It prickled the hair on the back of my neck.

“I won’t let you have him,” I said desperately, looking to my brother, and the sorrow in his face told me what I’d already known, what I hadn’t wanted to believe.

“I’m sorry, Soph,” he said softly. “I had to do it, don’t you see?”

“You didn’t have to,” I protested. He and Odilé wavered before me. “Henry Loneghan is returning. There would have been others too. All we had to do was wait.”

“But that’s why. I don’t want you to keep waiting. Not for me. You’ve sacrificed so much already. You’re brilliant, you know, in your own right. The world you see . . . it’s beautiful. It shouldn’t be just me who knows it. Others should know it too.”

My heart hurt so I could hardly breathe. “But I can’t see it without you.”

“Yes you can.” I heard the tears in his voice. “Dane will help you. He’s promised to. And he loves you too.”

“Joseph, no—”

“It’s too late for any of this,” Odilé whispered. “Too late.”

I glanced at her—those terrible eyes. Odilé’s face seemed to ripple when I looked at her. I could not keep her features straight. I turned back to my brother. “Joseph, come with me. Please. You mustn’t do this. You know what she is. You know what will happen. It will kill you.”

I wiped my tears from my eyes, but still she undulated before me. It was as if her edges were fraying. Shadows—were they shadows?—drifted across her face, blurring her features. It was disorienting, nauseating—and then her features went so sharp they looked unreal. “There is no bargain.” The words reverberated as if they came from the world about us and not herself. “I cannot get past your walls.”

My desperation fled in sudden apprehension. Something was wrong with her, something terrible. “What do you mean, there is no bargain?”

“Did you not feel it? In dreams, did you not feel his despair? Your conjoined souls—” She laughed bitterly. “What were you when he was gone?”

The darkness in her seemed to spread, her shadow a concussion against the marble wall behind. I thought I saw wings. I could not take my eyes from her.

She said, “Do the two of you feel one another’s every pain and joy?”

Her words raised an echo, a memory. Miss Coring spitting as she beat me, her eyes burning, and Joseph across the room with clenched fists, tears running down his face as she forced him to watch, and then after, to draw. Her furious satisfaction.
He feels everything you feel, doesn’t he?
Doesn’t
he? Well then, let him feel
this.

I forced the image away and tried to focus on exactly what Odilé was saying. “But . . . if there is no bargain, it means he isn’t bound to you. He’s free to go—with his talent intact?”

She stared at me—a long, tense moment. Then she laughed again, and it was a horrible sound, gurgling and chortling. “That is half true. You belong to each other, just as before. But now you will
both
belong to me.”

“What do you mean?”

She ignored me. She went to Joseph, her dressing gown shifting about her bare feet like mist. He didn’t move, but watched her warily. When she touched his arm, I saw his yearning, still there, still strong, and my heart sank.

She slid her fingers almost lazily to his wrist, and then she grazed his jaw with her lips. “You are so beautiful. So much talent. You could have been the best of them. Would you have sung my praises, my darling boy? How sad I will be when you are gone.” She spoke in a whisper. I should not have been able to hear it, but it was as if she stood next to me, as if it were into my ear she was murmuring.

Joseph jerked his head at me. “Sophie, go home.”

“Oh, but she cannot,” said Odilé, stepping away from him, and her eyes grew so large they seemed to encompass her skull—I saw the demon Nicholas had promised was there, the black and fathomless eyes, the wretched, avaricious hunger that must consume everything. “Did you not hear me? It is too late for that. I have you both. There’s no escape now.”

Everything Nicholas had said about her was true, and in that moment I understood what was happening. The bargain hadn’t worked. No one had been chosen, and her time was up. Three years, he’d said. Three years, and if the choice wasn’t made, the demon would emerge and destroy everything in its path. She would kill everyone around her. Joseph. Me.

She stepped toward me. I had spent a lifetime imagining demons and monsters, but my imagination had not been nearly ambitious enough for what I saw now. Such pure voraciousness. I could only stand and stare as she came toward me, and she was still so beautiful, despite the menace in her eyes—

Joseph lurched between us. “Don’t touch her, Odilé. Let her go. You have me. I’ll do whatever you want. Just let Sophie go.”

“No,” I whispered. “She’s right. It’s too late.”

Joseph threw me a glance and said through clenched teeth. “Run. Get out of here. Leave her to me.”

“No. I won’t lose you.”

“You don’t understand, do you?” asked Odilé, her voice sing-song now, gentle and sad, as if she spoke to children. “You are already lost.”

“We are indeed,” said a voice from behind me.

I looked over my shoulder. The courtyard door was open, and there stood Nicholas. I felt a relief and joy that buckled my knees—and then horror that he should be here too, in danger. Joseph’s hand tightened on my arm, keeping me upright.

Nicholas stepped fully into the courtyard. He was breathing hard, as if he’d run a distance.

“Nicholas,” she said, and there was a wealth in that word, years of history, if only I could understand it. I heard affection and resignation, anger and resentment, love and hate. “Oh my darling, how sad that you have come just at this moment. This time, I fear it will truly mean your death.”

He did not look at me, or Joseph. His pale eyes fastened on her. “Make an end of it, Odilé. Aren’t you tired? Don’t you wish for eternal sleep? After so many years, so many masterpieces—when does one call it good?”

Her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared. But I thought I saw something else there too—something he’d said had resonated.

Nicholas went on, “Surely you have left legacy enough.”

“Legacy?” Her body seemed to pulsate; the wings in the shadow on the wall fluttered. “I have no
legacy.
Who knows who I am? Who has ever heard of me?”

“You have provided inspiration for ages. Byron. Keats. Schumann.” He spoke softly, urging. “What more is there? How much more can you want? It’s time, Odilé. Lock yourself in a room. Devour yourself and leave us. Make an end of it.”

I felt a lurch within me, a lightheadedness that had me gasping as if someone drew upon my soul. When I looked at my brother, I saw he felt the same.

Nicholas staggered; I realized he felt what Joseph and I did, as if breath and bone were being slowly leeched away. “You don’t want to do this, Odilé. You don’t want to kill us. Lock yourself away.”

“And you think that will end it?” she asked, her voice hard, rumbling all around me, pounding against my ears so I had to restrain the urge to cover them. “Have you spent all this time believing that I can destroy myself?” Her laughter was like a clap of thunder. “If you lock me away, it will only be the beginning, you foolish man. The monster cannot be contained
in a room.
It cannot be destroyed. There is no space that can hold it.”

She grew as if to emphasize her words, darkness covering the courtyard as if it were a tide that seeped from her, the shadow on the wall behind gone black, gaslight disappearing into a darkness so profound
I could not see through it, and the four of us eerily illuminated within it. Odilé began to change, coils upon coils lengthening her body, jewel-like, stunning scales, blinding with a hideous light—Keats’s Lamia, a woman’s head and torso on a serpent’s body. Her eyes flashed, endlessly deep, endlessly terrible.

“All you have done is unleash
this
on the world,” the not-quite-Odilé creature hissed. “I cannot go back. You cannot destroy me, Nicholas. No one can. You have only created a worse monster.”

I clenched my fingers upon the marble to keep myself upright. My head spun, and my heart beat so rapidly I couldn’t breathe. Joseph fell to his knees; Nicholas stumbled. “There must be some way to end it,” he insisted. “Nothing is indestructible. Tell me how to release you and I will.”

Her neck undulated, her dark hair falling over her shoulders, catching on luminescent scales. “There can never be release. There must always be one.”

Nicholas looked confused. “One?”

“One to inspire. One muse. Mankind would destroy itself without the angel’s gift.” Those dark eyes gleamed; Odilé’s lips moved with a voice that mesmerized with its horror. She laughed again. “Inspiration to keep men from giving in to despair. There must always be one.”

Nicholas was on his knees before her now, obviously trying to cling to reason, to understand, though I saw how fierce her draw was upon him—I felt it too. My thoughts were disjointed, the world spun and swayed before me. All I could think was how Nicholas’s hair gleamed in the darkness. How strange that it should glow so. “One to inspire,” he repeated in a whisper. “You mean . . . you can pass it to another?”

Her eyes riveted to him, and yet I felt them on me too, drawing relentlessly. “You were always so clever, Nicholas.”

“Let me understand,” Nicholas gasped. “If you pass the demon to another, it will be satisfied? It will not require our deaths?”

“Yes. But why should I do that,
cheri
? Why should I cast aside Odilé forever?”

My heart raced like a mad thing. Joseph clutched his chest.

Nicholas said hoarsely, “Because you are tired. Because there is nothing more you can want, Odilé. You have inspired so many already. You know what a talent Hannigan is. Why would you destroy him? What more do you want?”

“What if I tell you I have no desire to disappear into the great nothingness?” she asked. “Obscurity does not suit me. I have not yet fulfilled my own wishes. Why should I die unsatisfied?”

“Don’t we all?” Nicholas asked. “Don’t we—”

“No.” My brother lifted his head. His face was pale, his eyes dark as he looked at her. “What if I could satisfy you? What if I could give you what you most desire?”

I thought at first he was mocking her, throwing back the words of her stories, the words of the bargain.

She laughed. “How can you even know what that is, Joseph Hannigan?”

Joseph whispered, “I could make your name famous for an eternity.
Yours.
I can make people remember Odilé León forever. That’s what you want, isn’t it? It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

She had been drawing from us relentlessly, and suddenly she wasn’t. My head cleared, my vision sharpened. And I saw she was looking at him, her focus intent, as if she did not quite believe what he was saying, as if he had come upon a great truth, and I realized he had. He had, as always, seen what others had never noticed, what others could not see.

“How would you do that?” she asked.

My brother said with confidence, “You said I could be the best of them. If you let us live, I promise you I will be. I will paint a portrait of you for the ages. I will give it your name.”

She went very still—it was unnerving, to see a serpent body so unmoving, to see not even a pulse in the coils.

Nicholas added, “He can do it, Odilé. You know he can. He’ll paint a masterpiece, and I’ll make certain he’s famous for it. I know the people who can help. Even without your inspiration, he has a destiny. I’ll do my part to make certain he meets it.”

I felt a surge of hope as I saw how she considered it. But when her answer came, it was not directed at my brother, or Nicholas. Instead, she looked at me.

Her fathomless eyes surveyed me dispassionately; I felt their poison in my heart. “How is it you can best me? What is your magic, Sophie Hannigan?”

I met that gaze, though it took all my will not to turn away. I felt Nicholas’s eyes upon me, nervous, yet determined and hopeful. I felt his love for me. I felt Joseph’s too, and with it I felt the strength of the world we had made together. “You said there was no meaning in life, but I think that cannot be true. I think I can give meaning to yours, if you will let me. Joseph will paint you, and Nicholas will help him find the fame he deserves, and I . . . I will tell the whole world the story of who you were. I will make it one of Venice’s best and most enduring legends. I will tell it across continents. I will never stop telling it.”

Odilé was silent. The night sounds of Venice intruded—the splashing of an oar, the faint strain of a gondolier’s song from far away—such normal sounds that they seemed fantastical, unholy and fearful.