by Nichole Van
I froze, mouth dropping open.
“You would do that? Michael is like . . . your third arm?”
Mom nodded. “He is, but you’re my heart, Olivia. I can live without Michael. But—” Mom’s eyes went shiny. “—I cannot live without you, Livy-loo.”
Whoa.
Not what I expected.
Now it was my turn to swallow, blinking furiously. “Thank you, I love you, too.” I whispered. “That means a lot to me. You don’t need to fire Michael. Just set him straight and we’ll be good.”
She smiled, a small thing, but a smile nonetheless. “I haven’t always been the best mother for you.”
“Mom—”
“No, it’s true. Let’s be honest with each other in this, at least.”
A beat.
“Well, I haven’t been the best daughter.”
“I disagree. You have been a wonderful daughter. You have always loved and supported me no matter how tough on you I was. I’m sorry for pushing you and making you feel that my political agenda is more important than you. Nothing in my life is more important than you, Livy-loo. If you want to be with Tennyson D’Angelo, then I will support you.”
Shock froze me to my desk chair.
Wow. I had not expected this.
She continued, “I came to the realization last night that I had two choices: I could continue to fight with you over the Wriggles’ existence and cause more damage to our relationship or . . .” She paused. “Or I could simply believe you. I love you. I’m tired of arguing over this. So I decided to let go of my rational mind and just trust. From now on, I’m going to trust that what you say is true.”
Just.
Wow.
WOW!
I blew out a slow breath, tears tumbling down my cheeks.
Stupid emotions.
“Th-thank you,” I whispered.
“No, darling. There is nothing to thank. I should have done this a long time ago. I should also confess that I called the D’Angelo Enterprises offices in Florence.”
“Mom!”
“It’s okay, darling. I spoke with Chiara D’Angelo and then Dante, who I believe is Tennyson’s brother.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“They seem like very nice people,” Mom continued.
“They are nice people.”
“Chiara emailed me this.” She handed me her phone.
I glanced at the screen.
Oh.
The photo of Tennyson and me asleep together in the hospital bassinet. Seeing his tiny hand on my shoulder, so protective—
Who knew I still had tears to cry?
“They mentioned this to me, you know.”
“The D’Angelos?” I wiped my eyes before looking up.
“No. The nurses, when we went to pick you up for the first time.” Mom pointed at the phone. “They told me that they had put you with one of a set of triplets in the hospital and that you and he ended up snuggled into each other every time you were placed together. It was like you each had your own gravity. I had forgotten about it until seeing this photo.”
Mom smiled through my stunned silence.
“So tell me about this,” she said. “Tell me about Tennyson and what’s been going on.”
“Uhmm, sure. What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
My body unfroze. I jumped off my chair and hugged her. It was one of those full body, mommy-daughter squeezes that leaves you feeling loved and warm.
Mom laughed and returned my hug.
We may have even both cried a little as we hugged it out. It was another extremely mother-daughter moment.
And then I told her everything.
And I mean E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
Scars. Daemon. Tennyson’s visions. Jack. Shadow world. Fourteen questions. D’Angelo archive. Gypsies. Barry Manilow. Oracles. Madness.
“So that’s where we are,” I concluded. “We need a solution or the daemon will kill me. It’s just a matter of time. You’ve seen the neurological reports.”
Mom nodded, tapping her lips. “If this daemon really is killing you, then we need to stop it.”
“Yeah, that’s the point. The D’Angelo archive might have the information we need buried in it, but who knows.”
“Is that truly a possibility? The archive?”
“Chiara seems to think so. It’s a long shot at best.”
“When it comes to your health, Livy-loo, even long shots matter.”
I gave her a watery smile. “If nothing else, thanks for listening to me, Mom. It means so much.”
She patted my hand, eyes warm and too bright. “I love you, Olivia. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Let me make some calls. I might be able to help.”
The next day, the CEO of the OCR company in Milan called me. Turns out, he was friends with my mom from her time in the State Department. He said they had a short breathing space currently in their work with the Vatican and, at Senator Hawking’s urging, he could work our project in. We chatted and I laid out the scope of the project. He described some ground-breaking software they had in beta-testing. When combined with employees skilled in reading old, hand-written Italian text, the software might be able to yield quick results. The D’Angelo archive was a perfect test case for it.
The software was a miracle.
Ten days later, the entire D’Angelo archive had been digitized. The text could now be searched.
Chiara cried when I told her.
We held a series of conference calls, all of us: me, Dante, Claire, Branwell, Lucy, Jack, Chiara and Judith.
Tennyson was going downhill rapidly. We had to know if the archive held any answers.
We all dropped everything we had going on, each of us focusing on researching what we could. I was mostly a sideline cheerleader—minus pom-poms and bleach-blond hair, though I mentally promised Tennyson to find a short skirt if he would just hold on a bit longer.
Three days later, Chiara called, saying she might have found something.
Two hours after that, I boarded a plane back to Florence.
TWENTY NINE
Tennyson
I stared at the wall. Eyes unblinking.
I had been here before. In this place of barely surviving.
After Lucy dumped me. After my injury in Afghanistan.
Somehow, this felt bleaker than either of those.
Was it that I was more fractured now?
Or was it the depth of my love for Olivia?
This was what I had foreseen . . . the bleakness, the emptiness of life without her.
I missed her.
No. Missed was too small a word for the vast barren desolation that gripped me.
I missed my left leg.
But Olivia being gone . . . her lack was a new category of emptiness multitudes beyond an amputated limb.
I had not been lying. She was my soul. And without her . . . I floundered . . . soul-less. My very life force bleeding out from the hole she had once occupied.
Whether she lived or not, I could never have her.
Maybe that was a lie. It was hard to see through the darkness clouding my mind.
But what other option remained?
If she were here, I would have killed her by now. The daemon would destroy her mind.
Or I would kiss her and the daemon would take her and she would be gone forever.
I ignored the small voice whispering that I did kiss her. Twice, in fact, without any harm. Glorious, incredible, perfect kisses.
Maybe I was making the wrong assumption about my vision. Maybe we could be together.
Maybe I had been wrong to leave.
That tiny little seed of doubt opened the flood gates:
You were wrong about the chain, too. It exists.
You need to jump. Just one fall and you’ll be free.
The fractured voice was relentless.
Jump. Make it go away.
I wrenched my head out of that place. That voice lied.
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Fight every day, son. Fight with everything you have.
I had been right to leave Olivia. But that didn’t make the pain any more bearable.
My mom stayed by my side the entire time.
The poor woman.
She had already done this routine with my father. Now it was my turn. If we couldn’t break the cycle, would she be sitting by Baby Alessio’s side thirty years from now?
Outliving us all.
I could almost see it in my mind. Generation after generation of D’Angelo women, standing hand in hand as they supported and loved and nursed their men until the very end.
Love hard. Love true. When all hope is lost, remember only love will see you through.
I clung to my dad’s words. For those I loved, I would hold on.
Day drifted into night drifted into day.
But no matter how many times I pushed them away, the obsessive thoughts would return. They played in a loop, over and over.
The chain needed to be broken.
A fall would break the chain.
I needed to fall.
It’s a lie. It has to be a lie.
Don’t listen. Ignore it.
But as I lay in bed, it was hard sometimes to remember that. To remember why I shouldn’t jump when it seemed like such a reasonable thing.
It would be so easy. So quick.
And then it would be over, one way or another.
Either the chain would break and the curse would end. Or I would die.
Or would I?
Would even death itself stop the pain?
The fracturing hurt. It came from somewhere deep inside me that maybe even death couldn’t erase.
The problem?
I would never get better. This was as good as my life was going to get.
You should end it now. What are you waiting for?
Fall.
Chain.
Break.
The chain was real.
What if that was the only way?
It’s a lie. Don’t give in.
The days blended, one after another.
Visions came and went. Past and present, a cacophony of sight, sound and feeling . . . unlike anything I had previously experienced.
Was this what the full curse felt like? Was this what my father had experienced?
It was horrific.
Scene after never-ending scene.
Cesare il Pompaso wandering Villa Maledetti, cackling and muttering to himself.
My father doing the same, repeating over and over, “Lightning, it’s the only way. Must stop the lightning.”
My father again with Olivia, hugging and crying.
My nephew, Alessio, grown to be a man and running through the house in rambling madness.
Me falling from the tower.
Me kissing Olivia.
Olivia playing with our children.
My mom weeping into Dante’s shoulder at my funeral, Branwell throwing a shovelful of dirt on my casket.
My mom, old and gray, sitting with Chiara alone because her boys had each succumbed to the D’Angelo curse.
The scenes wrapped together into a cacophony of whirling perspectives until I scarcely discerned the difference between reality and vision.
Not all these futures were possible. Which one would happen?
I wandered through the house one afternoon.
I was alone. No emotions filtered in.
I had no concrete idea how long I had been in this state, my mind splintered between visions and reality. Days? Weeks?
I vaguely remembered Mom kissing my head and making me swallow a sedative, saying something about needing more bread.
I had woken to silence.
The entire world felt vague. Like seeing it through wavy glass.
I stumbled into the kitchen, staring at the harsh light streaming through the bank of windows. The sun shone in the sky, a brilliant ball of light in the blue expanse.
Just like my vision. The one where I fell.
Suddenly, I knew I had to get as close to the sun as possible.
I was up the stairs and then up the ladder to the roof of the tower before consciously thinking I should go there.
But once I was standing on the ledge, hands clinging to the arched opening, it seemed the most logical thing in the world to be here.
So much freedom just inches from my foot. All I had to do was step.
The ground looked blissful. So far away. Such a perfect drop.
Of course I would fall.
The chain would break.
I would be free.
I would do it.
For Alessio.
For Dante. For Branwell.
For everyone.
It was the least I could do, after causing them so much harm.
It’s a lie, something in me whispered. Stop.
I shook my head. Blinked.
No. I had to jump, right?
Stop! It’s a lie.
What?
Confusion swamped me.
I looked down. The dizzying height had me pitching to the side.
Where was I? Why was I here?
I wasn’t supposed to be here.
Was I?
Gravel crunched. Multiple footsteps.
Terror. Worry. Fearfearfearfear.
Stop. Don’t. It’s a lie!
“Tennyson!” A voice called a name.
Wait. My name.
“Tennyson! Don’t jump. It’s a lie. What you’re thinking is a lie! Don’t believe it.”
I looked down.
Dark curls around a pointed chin. Wide eyes.
Anima mia.
Olivia.
Love hard. Love true.
Oh.
Olivia!
My love!
Memory slammed into me, jolting back into my body.
I swayed, instantly nauseous. My knees shook, my hands clammy.
I leaned forward, the ground terrifyingly far away.
What was I doing? Why was I up here?
Horrified realization washed behind.
“Tenn! Stay. We’re coming up!” Chiara’s voice called. Fearworryterror.
More gravel crunching. I felt them then, their emotions screaming.
StopNoLoveYouStayStayStay!!
Branwell and Dante.
Shaking, I managed to step backward off the ledge, stumbling into the shade of the loggia behind me, collapsing to the ground.
The magnitude of my situation swamped me.
What had I been thinking?! I knew that voice was a liar—
Abruptly, a vision pulled me under.
Suddenly, I was every D’Angelo.
I was Giovanni, desperate for an answer only to realize that he needed to break free. The chain held him. Like my thoughts, he threw himself off a tower to try to break it. He failed.
His son tried to blast the chain off with a cannon. He failed.
Generation after generation.
My grandfather, Alessio, thought if he could just swim deep enough, the chain would slip free. He failed.
My father knew that lightning was the answer. If he could pin the chain with a lightning rod, it would shatter when the lightning struck. He failed.
Lies. All lies.
Despair crashed through me.
The chain was unbreakable. Something wanted us to believe we could break it, but it wasn’t possible—
“Tennyson!” Olivia’s voice pulled me from my vision.
Her hands touched me, tugging me upright, propping my back against the stone wall. I collapsed into her, trembling in earnest now.
“It’s okay; you’re okay.” She clutched me to her, her shaking joining mine.
She was here. I was touching her.
She was warmth and light and love. I sank into her nothingness, letting it soothe me.
“S-sorry. So s-sorry. C-can’t break the chain,” I mumbled into her shoulder, body shivering. “Not p-possible.”
“Shhhh, hush. I know, I know.�
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That got my attention.
What? I sat up more and raised my head, meeting her eyes. Gorgeous gray flecked with golds and greens and colors of autumn. Tears clung to her lashes.
She was here.
She was HERE!
Reality crashed back more fully.
She shouldn’t be here. My vision. Her death.
She needed to leave.
“Olivia—” I tried to push her away.
She clung to me.
“It’s okay,” she repeated.
“You need to go.” My voice more urgent. “C-can’t be here—”
“No, I need to be here. I understand now.”
“What?”
“I understand,” she repeated.
And then she kissed me.
Olivia
I was born to kiss this man.
As in, literally, absolutely, predestined to kiss him.
It was the only way.
Tennyson tried to push me away, but I had a vice grip on him. No way was he getting away now.
He fought me the merest fraction of a second longer before my insistence won out.
Then he fisted a hand into my hair and held my head tight, kissing me with a desperation that bordered on savagery. My entire body melted into his.
My eyes stung. What I wouldn’t give to have this with him always? This connection, this adoration?
I heard feet behind me, rattling up the ladder.
Dante. Branwell. Chiara. Jack.
Those of us involved in this mess. All together.
Fractured pieces of what was once whole.
But that separation was also the solution. Our salvation.
This had to work.
I felt it, saw it hovering at the edge of my vision, even lost in our kiss.
A scar fluttered open, at least four feet in height. The daemon would be right behind, pouring through, intent on destroying us.
This was the curse.
An ancient evil, tied to the D’Angelo line by the gypsy’s mystical powers and blood sacrifice. The evil augmented the small genetic gifts of Second Sight that already existed in the D’Angelo bloodline.
But it demanded much in return.
It feasted on the life’s blood of both the gypsies and the D’Angelos. The two were impossibly linked.
