I got butterflies in my stomach, suddenly. We didn’t go out. Not ever. We had not had very meaningful conversations yet. I didn’t suspect him of idiocy. The problem was I had feelings for a non-talker. He just mostly stared at me. Then I would freak out. It was also hard to breathe around him.
Lunch today consisted of vegetarian risotto and a glass of wine.
It looked delicious. I opened the Codex to where I had left off and read a very esoteric passage on the god and goddess Wicca and the duality of the sexes. Something about the yen and yang. I didn’t know.
“While traditional Wicca takes its cues from elements of the Craft, leading some researchers to believe early Wiccans somehow managed to get their hands on at least a few partial leaves of the Codex, its subsequent development has proven unsystematic and ineffectual.” Like our relationship. “Wiccans have managed to conjure––but not all of them. The majority report interest in the subject only as a social lubricant.
“Those who know the Codex, meanwhile––” me “––are assured of success.” Yay me. “It is the true demonography.”
Someone had scrawled in a minute hand, lengthwise across the page, “Wiccans may have only scraps to go on, but from what I’ve read, they are the essential scraps.” It turned up along the outer margin, the scrawl, then ran upside down over the top, left to right, so that I had to turn the book to read it. “Take for example the Lover’s Sarcophagus, as it compares to the God and Goddess, and the theory of the Super Bitch. FF.”
Frobenius Foucart.
It had to be.
I turned to the frontispiece. There in his chicken scratch was the name Foucart. Below that, my father’s. And below that, hers, my mother’s. On an inspiration, I took a pen out of my bag and signed in neat lettering, HALSEY ROOKMAAKER. It felt like I had two family heirlooms now: the locket and the book.
Mistress Genevieve always said my mother and father were a powerful witch and wizard. She would not elaborate. No amount of social lubrication worked with her, including flattery. She was immune to everything. About the only thing I knew she enjoyed was bossing me around.
Becca... saw...
What did that mean?
I felt futility. I felt a waste. I felt my decisions like irreversible mistakes; each would end up costing me. I felt terribly alone. If I could perhaps find Foucart... Better: find the school.
There must be, mustn’t there? A school? For magic? For honing witches and wizards here in Rome?
My copy of the Codex offered no evidence, except the three written names. Foucart must have passed it to my father, who passed it to my mother. Maybe that was how they had met!
“Rabble-rousing around...”
I turned to look.
“They had to have been racing around all night...”
It was a groggy-looking English couple, sitting next to me, commiserating, no doubt, on their lack of a peaceful night’s sleep.
“Isn’t this place supposed to be ancient? What are these kids up to that the city doesn’t institute a crackdown against street racing? Don’t they have work to do? School?”
“Now, hon...”
“I say we go on to Morocco. At least if they howl, it will be from the tops of minarets, not racing around underneath our hotel window.”
He tried to console her to no avail.
“And have you heard about the murders? I tell you, this place is going to the dogs!”
On the contrary. From what little I had seen, it appeared they had a cat infestation, instead.
They were simply everywhere: half-wild house cats roamed the Eternal City, skulking around corners, running across the tops of walls. Black ones, grey ones, calicos; Siamese, white, tabby, hairy, hairless. They were all over the place. When the sun went down, they yowled. You heard them everywhere: hissing, fighting, making love. Or else they hunted. Alone or in packs.
People seemed to treat them with great respect. The house cat was the mascot of Rome.
A mosquito, fat and happy, landed on my arm, and sucked the blood. When its small body intercepted my open fist, it exploded with a fierce joy, emptying its guts upon the summit of my wound. “That’s what you get,” I told the little wet spot.
There was an e-mail from Ballard, when I got home. I didn’t have a phone, and he was stranded for the remainder of the summer, unless he decided to take the metro (“Which, I never do,” he wrote). It was inviting me to something called Festa de’ Noantri, a festival of sorts, in Trastevere. “Who knows,” he said, “this may be your one and only hot Roman summer. You don’t want to spend it hovering above Tourist Central. Here is a chance for authentic Rome.” I accepted the invitation for tomorrow night, gratefully.
I had learned something distressing. My waiter, at the café, passed on the unfortunate news that due to the rising heat index in late July, Roman citizens, including coffee shop owners and their staff, tended to leave the city in droves, in August. I listened on, perplexed. “You mean they just leave?” I had never heard of such a thing.
He assured me it was true. They all went on extended leaves of absence, taking with them their families to the seaside.
Amazing.
I finished my cappuccino, glad that I still had two weeks left to enjoy easily available, good food.
I bathed and got ready. I had purchased a blow dryer so I could dry my hair. By the time I finished, he was standing there. “Hello,” he said.
I marveled at him and then gave myself an inward shake to basically wake the H up and stop messing around. “How do you do that?” I asked, not a little put out by his finesse, especially since I was relatively unathletic, and I was beginning to think maybe we were too different.
“Do what?” asked Lennox.
“Par for the course,” I said. “Sneak up on me––fly up to my window; move around without my hearing you? And other unexplained behaviors.”
“Unexplained behaviors?”
“Okay. You really need to stop doing that. Unexplained behaviors: coming and going, disappearing before I can even get to you, you never talk about anything, and you stare.”
“I stare.”
“You stare.” I felt myself breathing heavily. Go, if you want. I don’t care. We’re doing this.
“You stare, too,” he said. He had smiles. I saw a new one: The Devastator. Side effects included making me lose my balance.
Something in his eyes. He needed a warning label. Now he asked me a question.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?” I asked.
He helped me up from the floor. My hair was all in my face. I felt his radical touch. It was like my nerve endings didn’t end where they were supposed to, anymore. Touching him was like touching possibilities: They went on forever.
I gaped at him. “Say that again. I didn’t hear it.”
He sighed. “You need to pay more attention... Halsey.”
Squeeeeeeee.
“What did you say?” I gasped breathlessly.
He was still holding on to me. I felt his hands, warm and tender, upon my arms. Neither one of us considered breaking the connection. If anything, he squeezed me tighter. I turned to mush.
“I said––”
The purpose of our mouths was not in words. His lips pressing to mine, stole my secret essence. We kissed there on the balcony.
“You are the most––”
It was like breathing and dying, simultaneously. I felt the warm heart of his embrace and offered up the only thing I had in return.
Our tongues met.
“And I know I shouldn’t,” he was saying.
“If you leave me, I will die. I will seriously die,” I said. I just managed to get it out before he kissed me some more.
I didn’t know where I was. It felt like we were entwined. By blood and by purposes.
My own surging heart I took for granted, thudded now, with an intensity I had never experienced before. It was like someone else was in control of my desires. I had no say. Who was drivi
ng the ship?
Standing on tiptoes, I put my arms around his neck, and felt his hands slide naturally to my waist. We were like that for ten minutes straight. I felt his mouth explore my own.
Eventually––though I could not tell you how––gravity, like time itself, seemed to have no bearing. We were lost in one another, simply, completely. I didn’t know where I began and he ended. And it was only getting more intense. I knew that there were rules, to this type of game. Even some rather funny maxims.
About cows. And free milk.
I couldn’t remember them.
“We need to stop,” he said.
I did something with my tongue that put an end to that conversation. I could feel the animal within him. “Never stop,” I said. He groaned, mightily.
He withdrew, and turned his back on me. At the parting of his lips, I lunged halfway towards him.
“I shouldn’t have lost control like that,” he continued, angst-ridden.
I took secret pleasure at how he moved with familiarity through my apartment. The sheer canopy of the four-poster exposed the lavender color of my bedding, which was the color of his eyes.
I had lit the interlacing iron roses, topped with scented candles. He was silent for a while.
The atmosphere was moody, electric. The gentle flames flickered from the breeze through the open French doors. “Like us,” he said.
I nodded, licking the taste of him off my mouth. First from my top lip, then the bottom.
“We are like the iron roses,” he said, still turned from my beseeching stare.
I thought it was too beautiful an analogy to endure.
And with that, a particularly strong draft extinguished one of the candle flames.
“We are like the iron roses. One cannot wither without the other dying as well.”
With his fingers he snuffed the final flame and it was unnaturally night. I looked for him, but he had gone.
Lennox
Stupid! Selfish! I berated myself. Idiot! Are you trying to get her killed? The Spanish Steps were overrun with fashionistas, haute couture celebudrones. It was the Alta Moda Fashion Show. Every day in the summer something new was going on. The onlookers watched dispassionately as impossibly spindly-legged women in ridiculous getups paraded in front of them. I thought they had nothing on the girl whose apartment I had just left. Dallace, my cousin, for all intents and purposes, had written to me, in hastily worded scribbles, from Venice, “Do not eat her.” I had given him play-by-plays up till now, along with assurances I would not if I could help it; but this was just for me. No doubt he was enjoying my predicament with the rest of the Venice Coven, all of whom loved me. And I them.
Even Camille had something to say about it. She was Dallace’s wife. They met in the Roaring Twenties, back when she had a heartbeat––the first thing she lost when she became immortal.
“A girl’s place is a statement,” she said. “A girl showing you her place is an even bigger one.”
Understatement. Rather than moving in and changing her surroundings, Halsey had changed to her surroundings. I had no basis for comparison, of course, between pre-Rome Rookmaaker and who she was now; only the feeling that she belonged.
It was I who did not.
Dallace wanted me to come back to Venice. I think he thought I might go off again, relapse, go off alternate blood fuels. “It’s murder. Killing her is murder,” he said.
But not killing her was murdering me.
When I said she and I were like the iron roses, she nodded; even blind I could feel her body move. So attuned was I to her. If only she knew what I meant by that. I raced home, through the crowd.
It was like... a complex thought... I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Before I knew it, it had taken root. The more I thought about it, the deeper it got. If I fooled... with her, she would become iron... like me... A vampire! Cold and invincible!
And if I didn’t, I would just end up killing her. And to snuff her flame would be to snuff my own. I knew I could never consciously harm her. The stalker that crowed within me, so sure-footed, had slipped.
We will turn her, he said; but he no longer had any power. I had thorns.
She might prick herself upon them. And then she would bloom, crimson and inviting, and I would turn her to my Dark Rose, a creature of the night.
She was fragile as a candle flame, and burned as sweetly as the lavender I smelled between snuffs of her skin scent. She was not made to last, and she was my light; in a dark eternity that would be once she no longer existed, she was my fatal inamorata.
There was no clear path.
I cannot help my nature. That I have fangs is a just impediment. I will conceal my fangs, and the lust I have for her blood. But not to harm her. Not, as in a trap, to masquerade as what I am not. Am I not a human, if I choose to be? She made that seem possible, somehow.
I will try to be what she needs, if it breaks me, I decided. Because, otherwise, it’s over. My life. Everything.
Living in a world without her was no longer an option.
Chapter 11 – Halsey
I brought the Codex to the festival; it felt sort of sacrilegious to do so, but once I got there, I realized it was more than just a religious festival. I had been reading up on everything Rome and Italy.
For instance, there was this big celebration, Carnival, that happened in Rome and also Venice; people wore masks and partied the night away. Brazil did something similar. And even in the States, they had Mardi Gras.
Festa de’ Noantri was much more pious. It involved carrying a Madonna around to various churches, followed by a procession of the devout––which in Rome was quite a few.
There were also lights, games, music, and fireworks. Ballard said it would go on for weeks.
The way he described it, I thought I might need a mask. “Just come,” he said.
When I got there, Lia decided to stop being annoying, and actually acknowledged me warmly. “Don’t be fooled,” said Ballard. He was wearing a pair of loose-fitting dark grey shorts and a finely woven, light blue shirt, that showed off his muscles. He was deeply tanned. “She still wants to know what we’re doing, but she’s changing tack. Don’t let her lull you into giving something away.”
“I wish there were something to give away,” I said. I brought out the Codex. He and I had both been taking turns with it; anytime we made a new discovery we e-mailed the other. It seemed like all I was doing these days was driving back and forth between my apartment and the motorcycle shop in Trastevere.
We were parked between two stalls, sitting on a pair of crates. I could smell roast porchetta turning in a spit, it drew crowds. There was still some time before night.
There was still one thing that was bothering me, however. How to word it?
I could see Ballard concentrating on the Codex; he was looking at a page full of symbols, saying, “It’s some kind of clue,” looking for where we could turn to next; it had been slow going and our leads were nil, when I asked him what Succo del Gatto meant. He had a long neck in his hand. I could hear the gold foil crinkle.
“What do you mean?” he said, which was a very curious response.
“Seeing as how, together, we probably buy up half the Succo del Gattos produced in Rome,” I said, letting the words trail off. Was there something to all this?
I remembered the taxicab I hailed when I got here. “The driver had a whole ice chest full of them; it was actually pretty weird,” I said, watching as his brow furrowed. Was it something in the Codex? He continued to ignore me.
“The reason I mention it––I’ve been here a couple of weeks now, and the only time I ever see them is when I’m hanging around with you.”
I mentioned the vending machine down the hall, in my apartment. “And zip. It’s like they’re only here, in Trastevere.”
He definitely didn’t meet my eye.
“I bet, whoever that guy was, he probably lives around here,” I said. “Otherwise, where did he get all the Succo del Gatt
i?”
“‘Cat Juice.’”
“Pardon?”
“Succo del Gatto,” said Ballard, “it means ‘Cat Juice.’ It’s like the caryatids you see.”
I didn’t know what he meant by that.
“I forget. I keep thinking you live around here,” said Ballard. He spoke deliberately. “Rome is old and it has a lot of sculptures.”
“Obviously,” I said, nodding my head.
“If you’ve seen all the cats?” he said. I nodded for him to continue. “Well, some of the stone carvings in the architecture show off the family felidae: cats. In fact, I don’t know if you saw, but above a portion of the Wall surrounding us––” he meant the Aurelian Wall, and I had noticed “––there is a shield with a lion. The lion is very big here and also Venice.”
“How come?” I asked.
He just shrugged. “I think it has something to do with royalty or something. I don’t know. Look.” He pointed to the Codex.
I stopped him. “The thing is,” I said, “you, your family, run, like, a motorcycle shop, right?”
“What’s your point?” he said.
“Just that I notice you all ride Ducatis.”
“It’s Ducatisti, plural,” said Ballard. “Why does it matter if we run a motorcycle shop or not?”
“I saw Lia’s jacket,” I said.
He closed the book.
“Go on.”
“It’s just that, I saw what was written on her jacket. Is, if you get me? It’s the same thing that’s on Gaven’s, Paolo’s, all of theirs.”
“Except for mine,” he said.
“No, you don’t have one,” I said. He didn’t; Ballard didn’t have one of the leather jackets I saw them all wear that had the patches on them.
“And?” he said.
I chewed my bottom lip, wondering how to proceed. He helped me.
“You’re wondering what it means; what they have written on the backs of their jackets,” he said.
“Actually,” I said; I chewed my lip some more. I had already bothered to translate it.
The Wiccan Diaries Page 12
