Last Rites

by Danielle Vega

  I squeal—out of delight, not fear—and curl closer to his body, pressing him between my legs. Vibrations shudder through me, making my bones and teeth clatter. I press my face into the back of his neck, relishing the sweaty, still-warm feel of his skin against my nose and cheek. He tilts his face toward mine, still keeping his eyes on the road ahead, and I feel the rough prick of the stubble on his cheek scrape against my lips.

  I can’t quite put a finger on the feeling rising inside me. It’s not just happiness—it’s freedom. I feel freer than I have in forever—since before the institute and everything that happened. I want to throw my head back and shout into the deep, velvety Italian sky.

  I whisper in Giovanni’s ear, “Let me drive?”

  Giovanni doesn’t say anything for a long moment. I’m just starting to wonder if he heard my voice over the wind roaring in our ears when he half turns over his shoulder, shouting, “I do not know. This is not as easy as it looks.”

  “Come on!” I yell back. “When am I going to get another chance to ride a real Italian moped?”

  Giovanni shakes his head, but I catch the edge of a smile pulling at his lips, and I know I’ve talked him into it.

  He steers us to the side of the road, where the dry grass has been trampled flat, and cuts the moped’s engine. The low buzz seems to hang in the air around us.

  Giovanni swivels around in his seat, both bushy eyebrows rising so high they nearly disappear beneath the swoop of his dark hair. “You are sure you want to do this?”

  I lean forward, planting a kiss on his nose. “Haven’t you heard? Us American girls are all crazy daredevils.”

  “I have heard that,” Giovanni says, winking. He shakes the hair from his forehead and hops off the moped. I scoot forward, the vinyl seat warm where he was sitting.

  He slides in behind me, covering my hands with his hands. His voice is in my ear. “You turn it on like this . . .”

  He twists my right hand, and the moped roars beneath me. It sounds a lot louder from the driver’s seat. I bite into my lip, grinning like a fool as we roll forward.

  “Careful,” Giovanni purrs, lips tickling my ear. “We go slow at first, okay? She is delicate.”

  “Okay.” I nod. “Slow.”

  With Giovanni guiding me, I coax the moped off the side of the road and onto the packed dirt, moving in spurts. It’s not nearly as easy as he made it look. Every time I move my leg or twist my wrist, the moped jerks, following commands I didn’t realize I’d given.

  “You are too tense.” Giovanni moves his hands from my hands and rubs my shoulders. “Lighten up, maybe?”

  Lighten up. Okay. I can do that. Taking a deep breath, I loosen my tiger-like grip on the handlebars. We roll forward.

  “There!” Giovanni squeezes my shoulders. “You are driving like an Italian girl now.”

  I ease my foot off the brake. We go faster. Giovanni explains how to turn the bike by leaning into it, and the wind blows my hair off my shoulders as we roll around a corner and start heading back down the mountain, the road a steady decline beneath us. Giovanni leans forward and hooks his chin over my shoulder. He moves his hands to my waist, his fingers grazing the inch of space between the bottom of my shirt and the top of my jeans.

  “You can go faster now,” he murmurs. “It feels like we are moving through mud.”

  I nod. The fear I’d felt when I’d first slid into the driver’s seat vanishes as the road disappears beneath the bike’s front tire. I twist the handlebar, and the bike responds with a low growl. We curl around the tiny mountain roads, faster and faster, the wind screaming in our ears. No one is up here but us. It feels like our own private mountain pass. I can’t help feeling like the universe made this moment just for me, as a gift after all that time in the institute.

  I twist and we go faster. Faster.

  “Okay, bella,” Giovanni says, laughing. “I think we are going fast enough now, yes?”

  I nod, but in my head I’m thinking: Not a chance. Every time the speedometer climbs a little higher, I feel a twist of triumph in my heart.

  I’m fearless. I’m a warrior. I push faster.

  “Bella . . .”

  The wind steals the rest of his voice. He’s just being cautious, anyway, because he knows I haven’t ridden one of these things before. He was going way faster than this when he was driving. And I’ve got the hang of it by now. I know my limits.

  And I need this. This is everything I’ve been missing since the institute. I no longer feel like that zombie girl on all the pills. I no longer feel like I’m not even really alive.

  This. This is living. This is flying.

  The turn up ahead is sharper than the others I’ve taken so far. I see it coming and inhale, preparing myself. I tilt the handlebars to the side and lean in . . .

  But something’s wrong. I feel it right away. The balance of the bike is off. I’m tilting too far to the right, and the wheels feel unsteady and slick.

  And then—

  A horn blares, the noise cutting through all my careful concentration. I look up, and there’s a truck rumbling toward us. It’s so close. I can’t tell where its lane ends and mine begins.

  I start to shake, and my tension spreads to the moped, making it tremble between my legs. We’re going down. We’re going to fall, and the truck is going to run us over. I open my mouth, wanting to scream—

  Then Giovanni’s hands are curling over mine, and he’s pulling the handlebars of the moped back, stopping the skid before it starts. We jolt forward as the bike slows, too quickly, and for a moment a horrible image plays in my head:

  The back wheel skidding out from behind us, sending us into a slide beneath the oncoming truck. Bones breaking . . . skulls crushing . . .

  The truck’s horn blares a second time. I clench my eyes shut . . .

  And then I hear the truck rumble away, horn still blaring. The danger has passed. I open my eyes again, whipping around to watch the truck vanish up the side of mountain. We didn’t crash. We’re alive.

  “Turn back around!” Giovanni squeezes my hand, which is still wrapped around the bike’s handlebars. “Pull over.”

  I return my focus to the moped. Hands still shaking, I pull the bike over to the side of the road and hit the brake.

  CHAPTER 8

  Giovanni insists on driving the moped the rest of the way into the city. I don’t argue. My heart still pounds in my ears, drowning out the tinny whirr of the motor. My hands—now grasped tightly to Giovanni’s T-shirt—still tremble.

  I can’t stop replaying what almost happened. The truck’s blaring horn. The way the moped tilted beneath my legs, hanging in midair for seconds that seemed to last hours. The ground rushing at my face . . .

  I shiver and lean closer to Giovanni. We didn’t crash. That’s all that matters.

  The bike starts to shake as the road beneath us switches from packed dirt to well-worn cobblestone. Most of the storefronts have already gone dark, but I can still see sausages and cured meats dangling behind the windows, and I can imagine how, in the mornings, the fresh produce must shine with dew beneath the striped awnings. I can taste burnt sugar in the air, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from until we speed past the darkened windows of a bakery.

  Giovanni steers us through the winding streets, slowing to shout “Buonasera!” at strolling passersby and pointing things out to me as we ride by.

  “There, that is the best espresso in all of Italia.” He lifts a hand, pointing to a café that has already closed for the day. A thick padlock hangs from the front door, and wooden folding chairs lean against the walls, but the air still smells of deep, rich coffee. “If you ever want a gelato that tastes like it was made in heaven, you have to go there. Promise me?”

  The faster he talks, the more pronounced his accent gets. I say, “I promise.”

  He flicks his hand a
t me, as though my promise means nothing. “I will take you. Tomorrow, maybe. You will love it.”

  I can’t help smiling as I bury my face into his neck. We speed past a general store with wicker baskets and bunches of fresh basil hanging from the roof. I can see piles of juicy red tomatoes and deep purple eggplant just inside. Giovanni shouts something in Italian to the old woman in the window. She flashes him a wide, toothless smile. And then she looks at me, and her expression darkens.

  “Diavolina,” she mutters, shaking her head. Her left eye is lazy, the dark pupil drifting toward her cheek, but the right eye focuses in on my face.

  Giovanni shakes his head, laughing under his breath. “Crazy old woman.”

  “What did she call me?”

  Giovanni slows his moped to a crawl. “It’s just a name the old women here call pretty American girls. Means nothing.”

  We take another tight turn, brick buildings blocking us in on either side. This part of town looks grimier than the rest of Cambria. Clotheslines crisscross the sky above me, stiff, stained towels fluttering in the wind. A sickly looking goat leans against one of the walls. The curved lines of its ribs are clearly defined beneath patchy spots of fur.

  At the bottom of the hill, Giovanni cuts the engine and climbs off the moped, offering me his hand. I hesitate. The air down here doesn’t smell of sugar and coffee. It smells damp, rotten. Weeds creep up through the cracks in the street. The houses surrounding us look destitute. Half the buildings are boarded up. It’s not that late at night, but the windows are all dark.

  “Where are we?” I ask, tentatively sliding off the moped.

  “This is a famous neighborhood.” Giovanni presses one hand into my lower back. “You see that?”

  He points at a hill towering over the grimy neighborhood, its shadow casting this part of Cambria in utter darkness. I crane my head back to stare up at it, remembering how Harper and Mara and I walked past the spot earlier today. “That’s where Lucia was sacrificed, right?”

  “You know our history,” Giovanni says, impressed. He snakes both arms around my waist, pulling me into his chest. He’s tall enough to rest his chin on top of my head. “Some people say that if you walk there at night, you still hear her screaming.”

  A breeze blows down the narrow street, chilling the sweat on my arms. I shiver and lean into Giovanni. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “You don’t like our famous story?” He kisses the top of my head. “Most American girls love hearing about Lucia. She lived here, in this neighborhood, you know, a very long time ago.”

  I wrinkle my nose as I glance around the grimy neighborhood, filled with broken-down buildings. “It isn’t very nice, is it?”

  Giovanni chuckles under his breath. “No, it is not the pretty Italia American girls like to see. But come over here. Let me show you something.”

  Giovanni moves his hand from my waist and heads down a narrow alley. The road is steep, the moon blocked by high walls, leaving the space all in shadow. Water crawls down the bricks, dripping. The sound seems to take longer than it should to reach my ears.

  My palms have started to sweat. Giovanni leads me halfway down a dark stairwell. I open my mouth, trying to come up with some excuse to go back home, when he takes me by the shoulders and turns me toward the wall. My words die in my throat.

  It’s not a wall—it’s a tunnel, hidden from the street by the angle of the staircase and closed off by a spiky black gate. A brass plaque hangs above it, the Italian words obscured by years of dirt.

  “What is this?” I breathe, awed.

  “Our catacombs. We buried our dead here after the famine.” Giovanni’s voice bounces off the walls, then distorts, and continues echoing until it doesn’t sound like his voice at all. He reaches through the gate, unlatches something with a click, and pushes it open, hinges creaking. “Would you like to go see?”

  The hairs on my arms stand on end. No, I think. I most definitely do not want to see where Cambria’s dead are buried, thank you very much.

  But I find myself taking a step forward.

  The tunnel twists away from the main street, disappearing into perfect darkness. There’s a sound like scuffling in the dirt. Rats.

  I shrink backward. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I swear I can see the light reflecting off their tiny red eyes.

  Giovanni puts a hand on my back. “This is the spookiest place in all of Italy. You are not curious?”

  I swallow. I am curious, obviously. The feeling gnaws at me, even as fear creeps over my skin, making my hair stand on end. I take another step into the darkness. And then another.

  The tunnel dips lower, and a few crumbling stone stairs appear. I don’t hear the scuffling of rats anymore. Maybe we scared them away. Or maybe they’re hiding in the corners. Waiting. The thought sends an icy shiver up my spine.

  After another few steps, a stone archway curves over us, marking the proper entrance to the catacombs. It’s colder here than it should be. Colder than the rest of the city by at least ten degrees. It smells different, too. Rich, like earth and . . . something else. Something pungent that I can’t quite put my finger on.

  The darkness seems to pulse. I squint, but this darkness is different from what I’m used to. It’s the darkness of a place that’s never once been touched by sunlight.

  I take a step forward, lowering my fingertips to the walls. They’re strange, bumpy, and covered in dust. I move my hands over ridges and crests. There’s an open space, like the opening of a very small jar, and then more bumps, something jagged—

  I hear a spark behind me, and red light flares up. I cringe at the sudden brightness, blinking. Giovanni has a lighter out, the flame dancing between his fingers. I squint, and the wall comes into focus.

  Skulls. Hundreds of them.

  They line the walls, stacked one on top of another, starting at the floor and towering all the way to the ceiling, the white bone gone yellow with age. Their dark eyeholes stare out at me, blank and unseeing. Their jagged mouths are broken into permanent grins.

  My hand rests on a cheekbone, fingers stretched toward empty eye sockets.

  “Oh God!” I jerk my hand away, the skin on the back of my neck crawling. The space seems suddenly airless. I realize that the smell I noticed before, the one I couldn’t place, must be human flesh. Long-decayed human flesh.

  I must’ve started shaking, because Giovanni wraps his arms around me. “Bella, bella, no. Do not be frightened.” He kisses me on top of my head, rocking me like I’m a child.

  “I thought they’d be underground,” I choke out, fighting against the nausea rising in my throat. “Like, buried.”

  “It is okay. We can leave now.”

  I nod and cover my mouth and nose with one hand, but that doesn’t make it any better. The smell is still there, pressing against me, creeping up my nostrils. I think I’m going to be sick. I keep my eyes straight ahead as we make our way through the twisting underground tunnels. I try to pretend I can’t see the skulls’ vacant eyes and broken teeth.

  I swear I can hear footsteps down here with us, whispers echoing through the bones.

  Giovanni keeps one hand pressed to my back, leading me through the catacombs to another entrance, this one far away from where we came down initially. For a second I wonder how big the catacombs are, but then the darkness opens into a wide square, different from where we entered. We take the small stone stairs two at a time.

  Buildings rise around us, grass and wildflowers growing over forgotten staircases, dripping from long-darkened windows. The air here smells blissfully, wonderfully fresh after the catacombs. It’s like drinking cool water. The moon hangs directly above, bathing the space in silver.

  I turn around and swat Giovanni on the shoulder. “You rat. Why would you take me down there?”

  He cringes, like I actually hurt him. “I am so sorry. Mo
st American girls love our catacombs.”

  “Really? Or do you love making them scream and go all helpless?”

  “Maybe.” He shrugs, smiling that devilish smile that curls only one side of his mouth, flashing the tips of perfectly white teeth. For a moment, I forget how creeped out I am. I feel like my knees might crumple beneath me.

  “Well. I am not most girls.”

  “Of course not. You are special.”

  I stop and tilt my head up, looking around. We’re in a large piazza. The buildings here aren’t all crumbling brick, like they are in the rest of the town. Instead, I’m surrounded by old stone and whitewashed plaster. The structures look mystical bathed in the silver moonlight. I turn in place, awed, drinking everything in. A massive tower stands at one end of the square, jutting into the sky. It looks like a castle. A marble sculpture of a man astride a horse stands at the other end of the square.

  But despite the place’s beauty, it’s empty. The storefronts have been shuttered, and there’s no laundry hanging from the windows. The rest of Cambria smells like bread and coffee and sugar, but the air here smells like nothing. It’s completely deserted.

  Giovanni leads me to a large stone fountain in the middle of the square, long ago run dry. Weeds crawl up around the stone, and rocks and debris fill the basin.

  “Where are we?” I stop in front of the fountain and run my fingers over the stone. It’s still warm from the day’s heat.

  “It used to be our main piazza, but the shops all closed many years ago.” Giovanni nods to the boarded-up storefronts surrounding the square. “There’s been talk of getting the businesses to come back here, now that we have all the students from CART spending their summers here and spending money, but that will take years. It is beautiful, no?”