The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird (27 page)

We wouldn’t be quite like Luciano and Giulietta, though, because we would grow old together like Nonno and Nonna. All our children would be good at demon catching. We would live in an apartment in the Via dei Giardini, across the street from the Giardino Perego, and we would sit on a green bench, reading the
Corriere
while the kids played on the large wooden snails and the huge spiderweb. I would put my feet in Bernardo’s lap. Old women would smile at us.

I would have an ordinary Milanese life. Of course, there’d be differences, involving getting up in the middle of the night to get into an Audi—my own, of course—to go rescue people from demons. I tried not to think too much about how Bernardo would feel about this, reminding myself that obviously all of my cousins managed to date or marry ordinary people.

Then I touched the bell at my throat and thought about the demon. I remembered his eyes looking into my own from the eyes of that child in the Piazza del Carmine. If Luciano Della Torre hadn’t stood a chance, what about his distant cousin, a young girl with only a fraction of his training?

No apartment, no bench, no
Corriere
, and no children. No holding hands in Center Plains and not much of a chance for Gina and my parents to meet Bernardo. I felt sad about all these plans that wouldn’t come to anything.

Bernardo bought us two tickets, the guy at the counter looking slightly relieved at the sound of a Milanese accent. My thoughts were far away, thinking about all the dreams that people never got to live. Lisetta Maria Umberti, the girl from Christmas Eve, she’d been an art student. How many paintings had she dreamed of making, how many brushstrokes had she left undone? Luciano Della Torre must have planned to grow old with Giulietta. He’d never seen his son, Emilio, as a grown man, straight-backed, luminous, standing in the candle shop, still dressed for work at the bank, pulling out his demon-catching case. He’d never seen his daughter, Francesca, packing her briefcase, her sleek head bowed over
her papers, or seen her come home and wait halfway through dinner to say, with quiet pride, “We won the case.”

Bernardo touched my hair lightly, so lightly I hardly felt it, yet his fingers brought me back to the present. We stepped out into the street.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked. “You look sad.”

I wanted to tell him my daydream … and so many other things.

“I was thinking of home,” I said.

He smiled.

“I do want to go there with you, you know,” he repeated as we got into line for the stairs to the Duomo roof. Bernardo presented our tickets to the grumpy attendant, and then we began to climb the narrow steps, 201 of them. Every now and then, we saw the buildings across the street at another angle through a window in the dank stone. The air smelled warm and musty. Bernardo let me go ahead, and I felt his eyes on me. What was he looking at?

We stepped out on the roof. The cathedral, from the piazza, looks like a huge marble confection, like a sand castle you’d make at the beach, only whiter, with sharper edges. The folks who had built it over the last six hundred years (the last bronze door was added three years before my dad had been born) clearly felt that a church wasn’t a church unless every spare inch was covered with gargoyles and gloomy saints. Yet somehow the whole crazed mass of marble creatures looked incredibly
elegant, a very Milanese cathedral, indeed. The shingles on the roof were gigantic, plain slabs of marble. Above us, the gilded statue of the Virgin Mary, called the Madonnina, inclined her gilded head over her city. We walked along the edge of the roof, gazing across at the rooftop garden of La Rinascente, the big department store, and then looking between gargoyles to the people milling below.

So easy to swoop down on one of them, take over their body … 
Where did that thought come from?
I shook my head to get rid of it.

“Don’t lean out too far,” Bernardo advised. “It’s a long drop.”

I smiled, glad he worried about me. He took my hand and led me to the far side, saying, “Look,” as we came over the peak of the roof. The gray city spread out beneath us, past the roofs of the Palazzo Reale, roof after tiled roof stretching away. In the far distance, I could see the Alps, still carrying a big burden of snow.

“Wow,” I said in English.

“Uoaou,”
he imitated me. I squeezed his hand and laughed.

“I haven’t been up here in years,” Bernardo confessed. “Living here, one doesn’t act like a tourist all that often. Especially with the crowds. But I couldn’t believe you hadn’t seen this view.”

The Alps seemed close enough that I could reach out and prick my finger on their frozen peaks. “It’s like you can touch the mountains from here,” I said.

Bernardo looked proud of himself.

“That’s why I told you we had to wait. The rain has washed away the smog. No point in coming here when the air isn’t clear.”

What would it be like to step out into the nothingness over the piazza, if you didn’t need to be afraid to fall? If you could float over the roofs, lighter than that single cloud drifting in the sky to the south? Your heart would tug you upward, inside your rib cage, and under its deft, inexorable power you could fly as far as the mountains, and feel the cold breath of the snowfields on your face.

I had been lifted into the air in my own room, at home in Center Plains, by the demon that had taken over my body. I’d been pushed down the stairs, my feet banging against the steps, leaving destruction behind me. Was that the only way to fly? I felt as if Bernardo’s hand was the only thing keeping my feet flat on the marble roof. I smiled at him, and his face filled with light. I almost felt our shoes start to rise off the ground, as he shut his eyes and leaned down to kiss me.

That night, I had a vivid dream, full of shifting images. First, I saw a round lake, as still as a mirror, reflecting the steep hills around it. The hills were covered in ancient trees, all oaks.

Then I was on the sea, watching a bird building a nest among the waves. The bird seemed confident and unhurried, as if it had done this many times before; it hovered on glittering blue wings, weaving bits of straw and slender sticks together
above the deep. The water shone and rocked beneath the nest, and I could see great fish swimming far, far down, at impossible depths. The bird did not drop a single stick from its beak, and presently, a nest floated in the water.

Then I was hovering above a town in a narrow gorge, watching two men walk down the street, talking intently. I couldn’t see their faces, but I thought I might have known them, once.

Next I was back in Milan, near the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The air was warm. As I passed over the city, I saw a great black bear moving with massive and deliberate steps out into the Via Armorari. Its pelt was as smooth and sleek as one of the mink coats in the shops on the Via Montenapoleone, and it walked with a serious, heavy gait, putting down each paw as if it could plan an earthquake. I doubt that Milan has seen a bear in its streets in a long time.

The bear passed under a streetlight and I felt a fresh wave of muggy heat slide over me. No one was in the street, and yet I knew that everyone who was awake at this hour was watching, standing in the shadows so that the streetlight would not catch their faces, so that the bear would not turn to look at them. It continued down the Via Spadari, then turned toward the Piazza del Duomo.

Presently, it came and stood before the cathedral. It looked up at the Madonnina, high on her pedestal above the roof. I didn’t see her move, but she looked down at the bear, as if she had been waiting for it. The bear opened its mouth and spoke.

I woke to find myself sitting straight up in bed, one foot on the floor, as if I meant to go look for the bear. All the next day, I found myself forgetting it was just a dream and turning toward the Piazza del Duomo to see if I could find—what? The stones of the piazza would not yield a single pawprint. Still, by six o’clock, when the books in front of me made my eyes swim, I slipped away from the shop, full of the smells of Nonna’s cooking and the sound of Emilio on his cell phone. He was talking to Alba, and I don’t think he even noticed when I left. I took a bike from the BikeMi
stazione
and headed down the Via Brera, pausing on the corner to stare at the stone street sign set in the opposite building: Via dell’Orso, the Street of the Bear. Then I thought of the black bear holding up the Madonna in Santa Maria del Carmine, the sculpture my ancestors had given the church.

Someone honked behind me and I realized I had to get out of the narrow street or move forward. I biked down past La Scala, turning into the side streets by the Galleria, and parked my bike at the
stazione
by the Duomo. I turned, and walked slowly toward the cathedral, trying to see exactly where the bear could have stood.

All around me the crowds swirled, their conversations rising in the air. “It’s much cheaper in the States—”
“Fünfunddreißig euro?!”
“
Mi dispiace
, I was supposed to call earlier …” Most people hardly noticed me as I wandered toward the center of the great stone grid, though some guys called out, “Hey, gorgeous!” and “Let me take you home to meet my mother,” and so
on. They didn’t bother me, not now. I had a boyfriend, for one thing. And I was a demon catcher. I’d seen things that would make these tough guys shrivel up.

“Well,
buona sera
! It’s Mia Della Torre, of all people,” said a voice.

My whole body went cold as Lucifero came up beside me. I didn’t have to look to know that his friend had come up on my other side.

“Buona sera,”
I heard myself say.

“Yes.”

We kept walking. Neither of them had touched me, but I still felt like they had gotten inside my skin. I noticed they were steering me slowly toward the rear of the cathedral, away from the main doors—and farther from home.

A quick glance at Lucifero showed he didn’t look at all well, just as Anna Maria had said. I wished ferociously that she were there beside me.

Part of me started to cry inside with rage. I hated being so afraid … hated it.

Then, right there, I could feel myself opening up a way into myself, like a road, a place for the power to flow in, the only power I’d ever really known, the power of the demon …

“So you will help us, you see? You will help us,” Lucifero was saying, his voice soft and cold, but I knew that in a moment I would have the power to turn his face whiter than it already was, and smash every one of his sharp teeth. I felt the demon’s
gloating joy, just as I had felt it during my possession. I felt sick.

I stopped dead and stamped my foot. Lucifero and his friend stopped, too, staring at me.

“Damn you
all
,” I growled, my voice shaking. “None of you can have me. Do you hear me?
None of you!
”

I was snarling at him and his stupid follower and the demon I had almost opened the way for. For one split second, I felt another power, like a shadow stooping over me, rising up from my feet at the same time. I thought I could smell the musk of some animal, and for one split second, I thought I had black fur and earthquake paws. Then my eyes cleared and the feeling was gone.

So were Lucifero and his friend. I caught a flash of them as they disappeared between two shops.

I stood there, staring, shaking, making sure they were gone. Then I turned and started to run in the other direction, toward home.

I
told Nonno what had happened when I got back to the shop. He frowned, pouring out the wine. Emilio frowned, too.

“Do we need to go back to the old days, when I couldn’t go out without an escort?”

Emilio smiled. “We might be able to enlist some help with that, now,” he said.

I blushed. “No, he has to work all day,” I replied. “And anyway he’s not family.” But I couldn’t help liking the idea.

I wanted to tell Bernardo everything, but I knew I couldn’t. He met me the next evening, shaking hands with Nonno, as always, and telling him what restaurant we were going to and
promising I would be home by eleven. When we stepped out into the spring air, Bernardo said, “Are you hungry just yet? Because it’s such a lovely evening.” We drove to the Parco Sempione instead. The sun was just starting to angle over the trees as we found ourselves a bench on a path mostly free of Milanese out enjoying the sweet, if muggy, air.

It felt so good to sit beside him. I sat still, trying to decide how much I actually could tell him, and while I was thinking he pulled me into his lap as easily as if I’d been a cat. That’s one great thing about dating a building contractor’s apprentice, I can tell you. I wrapped my arms around him in the dark.

I didn’t have a lot of experience, yet I knew I was with someone really patient. I thought of the way he ate, of watching him during our first
aperitivo
at the wine bar in the Via Vincenzo Monti, the night we started the Second Door. So maybe it wasn’t patience; maybe he was just enjoying himself right where he was, and he didn’t need to try anything new, get to any bases or whatever. He just tipped his head so that he could smile down at me.

“Cara,”
he said. “It’s so good to hold you.”

I could hear only our breathing. Then my senses widened, and I could hear the leaves, back and forth in the trees above us. Farther out, the cars and
motorini
on the Foro Buonaparte zipped through the dusk.

Bernardo’s arms tightened around me. I leaned into him, still trying to decide how, or what, to tell him about the day before, what to call Lucifero. My ex? Hardly. I had already
made up my mind that the dream would sound too weird to him. Somehow it seemed too important to tell in passing.

“So good to hold you, at last,” he said.

“You hold me all the time,” I teased.

“I know,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me even more tightly. I pressed my face into his neck, loving his sweet smell—always a bit too much cologne, and the day’s sweat. His heart was pounding like mine. That made me feel better. I’d learned by now that he was really good at holding back, so it was nice to know that at least part of him didn’t want to.