The Forgotten Locket (16 page)

Orlando waited another moment, then returned his attention to Dante. “How did you get those?” he demanded.

“The same way you did.”

Orlando cut him off with a sharp gesture and an even sharper word. “No.”

Dante nodded slowly, his eyes sad but determined. “They came for me in the middle of the night. I was at da Vinci’s studio.”

“No.” Orlando’s voice rose in volume.

“They took me. They imprisoned me. They tried me, judged me. Sentenced me.” Dante’s voice was relentless.

“It’s not possible.” Orlando’s lips barely moved. His face had paled to a shade beyond snow.

“They marked me.” Dante clenched his fists, the veins standing up beneath the golden chains.

Orlando shook his head, his eyes locked on his brother’s hands.

“They stood me before the black hourglass door. And they sent me through.”

“No,” Orlando said for the third time, but this time it was only a whisper. A sigh. More of a wish than a denial. “Not you. They didn’t . . . they couldn’t have . . .”

Dante nodded. “I found myself on the bank.”

Both brothers turned toward me. They looked so much alike that I felt my heart skip a beat.

Dante reached out and gripped Orlando’s hand with his, drawing his attention and holding it steady. “
You
found me on the bank.”

Orlando swallowed. “When?”

Dante turned his right wrist over, revealing the letters etched into his flesh: MMIX.

Orlando closed his eyes. “That far? They sent you forward that far?” A muscle quivered in his jaw. “How did you survive it?”

Dante turned back to me, his gray eyes unreadable behind the scar. “I had help,” he said simply.

I caught my breath, feeling the air burn in my lungs. I closed the space between us in two quick steps and knelt by his side. I joined my hand to Dante’s on Orlando’s arm. At my touch, Orlando opened his eyes.

“I know this is hard to hear,” I said, “but it’s the truth. I promise.”

Orlando nodded, but his gaze was unfocused, distant. “It’s my fault. He said he’d do it. He warned me. I didn’t believe him. It’s my fault,” he repeated.

Dante and I exchanged a glance. We both knew the man to whom Orlando was referring: Zo. He had coerced Orlando’s obedience by threatening to implicate Dante as one of the Sons of Italy. And when Orlando had turned in Zo to the authorities, Zo had turned in Dante as well.

“No,” Dante said firmly. “It’s not your fault. And I understand—now. Everything is all right.”

“How can you say that?” Orlando demanded. “I ruined your life.”

“You
saved
my life.” Dante wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer to his side. “You made it possible for me to
find
my life.”

Orlando looked from Dante to me, and his eyes wouldn’t let me go. A spasm of pain traveled along his jaw. He clenched down on his teeth with a sound like cracking ice. “So, I wasn’t dreaming just now when I saw you on the bank?”

“No. I’ve been through the door and back. It’s how I was able to come here. How I could come home,” Dante said.

Orlando was silent for a long moment. “And your marks? They are gold because you’re from . . . from the future?”

Dante nodded and gave me a little squeeze. “We
both
are.”

“It’s where we met,” I said.

Orlando looked at me, the pain in his face touched with shadow. “That’s how you knew,” he said quietly. “What to tell me. How to help me on the bank. Because you’ve been here before.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I haven’t been
here
before. Not in 1501. I know what I know because of you, Orlando.” I reached out to touch his knee, but I stopped short; he seemed unusually fragile and I didn’t want to add any more pressure. “Because when you find Dante on the bank all those years from now, you will teach him what you know. And he, in turn, will teach me. So I, in turn, could teach you.”

Orlando squeezed his eyes shut and dropped his head in his hands. “It makes my head hurt to think of it.” When he looked up, his eyes were bloodshot. He rubbed restlessly at the marks on his wrists. “I’ll never be free of it, will I? None of us will. We’ll be trapped in this endless spiral of past and future forever. Doomed to pay for our mistakes for an eternity.”

“No!” I said with more force than I’d intended. “That’s not true. We can still change things. We can still choose.” I reached for Dante’s hand without looking and gripped it tight. “We’re here to close the circle—lock it so it is
safe.
So it is
protected.
And once we do, we can leave the past behind and move forward. It is possible, Orlando. I promise.”

He drew in a deep, shuddering breath. As he exhaled, he took my free hand, linking the three of us through a common touch, a common goal. “You’ve asked me to do a difficult thing, but . . . I will choose to believe you.”

The moment of time that had been in flux snapped back into its flow, running fast toward the future. The ripples were spreading; I shivered as a shroud of unexpected possibilities seemed to fall over all of us.

“I wouldn’t ask you to do it if I didn’t think you could,” I said quietly.

“Thank you,” Dante chimed in, his voice low and raw, and I knew his gratitude extended to both me and Orlando. The first connection back to his family was complete, though it remained to be seen how strong it would hold, how long it would last.

I wondered how soon we would be able to do the same for my family.

A woman’s voice rose in song from the corner of the shop, a melody I recognized.

Letting go of Orlando’s hand, I stood up and turned around, the hairs on the back of my neck already warning of danger.

Valerie sat in her rumpled nest of blankets, the soles of her bare feet pressed together and her knees angled away from her body like wings. An unnatural brightness glimmered in her eyes. She sang one phrase over and over; I recognized it as the opening line of “Into the River.” And with the music came a shot of pain. Darkness filled my mind as Zo’s black veil threatened to fall over my memories again.

I fell back to my knees, fighting with everything I had in me to keep the darkness at bay. To hold on to my self and my sanity.

“It’s time, my children,” Valerie sang, her eyes never leaving mine. “It’s time, time, time. The waves are rising. The waters are running. The clock is chiming midnight.” She unfolded herself from the floor, a single sinuous motion that lifted her to her feet. She extended her arm and pointed a sharp finger at me. “You’ve felt his mark, his mouth, his mind. And you’ll never be the same again. Oh, no. He’ll make sure of that.”

And then she threw back her head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Chapter 12

Make her stop!” I cried, curling into myself and covering my ears with my hands. “Please!”

Dante slipped from the chair and knelt by my side before the words had left my mouth. He covered my shaking hands with his strong ones and the extra pressure against my ears muted the sound of Valerie’s voice until it was nothing but a rumbling murmur.

At the same time, Orlando rushed to Valerie’s side and covered her mouth. Instantly he yelped and pulled his hand away. Shaking his fingers, he looked at Dante and me in shock. “She bit me!”

“Did not!” Valerie retorted, folding her arms in a pout.

Orlando ignored her. “What is she saying?” he asked us, confused. “I can’t understand her.”

“That’s because I’m speaking English, silly. Would you rather I speak something else? Because I can,” she said in perfect Italian. “What about this?” she added in French. “Or this?” she finished in Spanish. “I speak the language of whatever story I’m in, and this story has Italian written all over it.”

Orlando’s eyes bulged in surprise.

Dante turned to me for an explanation, but I shrugged. I didn’t know how it was possible, but then there was so much about Valerie that was strange and impossible. “She can speak the truth in a story. Why not Italian, too?” I murmured. I wondered what else she was hiding in her cracked and broken mind, what other talents or gifts might be at her call.

“Who are you?” Orlando demanded of Valerie. “What are you doing here? Where did you get these?” He grabbed her arm, holding up her tattooed wrist to examine the chains marked there.

“She did those to herself,” I answered.

Orlando dropped Valerie’s arm in horror. “Why?”

“It’s a long story. She’s my friend,” I answered, though it felt strange to claim her as such when she was so very different from the person I’d grown up with. “She also came through the door like I did. But she’s not well.”

Valerie bared her teeth at Orlando and snapped at him again.

“Valerie,” Dante said calmly, “don’t bite people, please.”

“I don’t have to do what you say.” Valerie yanked her arm away from Orlando and smoothed her hair down. “Or you,” she tossed over her shoulder at Orlando before turning away.

Dante frowned. “Fine. Then the River Policeman says, ‘Don’t bite people, please.’”

Valerie turned back, her eyes opened wide. She bit her lip. “The River Policeman?” Her voice lost its high-edged intensity, replaced with a gentle reverence. She took a step toward Dante.

I flinched back in his arms, hating my instinctive reaction. Valerie had once been my best friend, and now I didn’t want her to come another step closer. I lowered my hands but kept them tucked under my chin, just in case. I still felt the darkness hanging over my mind like a guillotine’s blade.

“I need to talk to the River Policeman,” Valerie said. “I need his help.”

“I can help you,” Dante said. “But first I need you to sit still and be quiet for a moment. Can you do that for me?”

In answer, Valerie dropped to the floor, crossing her legs and sitting up as straight as possible. She drew an imaginary zipper across her lips, twisting her fingers at the corner of her mouth. She looked at her pinched fingers, a frown of concentration pulling her eyebrows together. Then she twisted around and held out her closed hand toward Orlando.

He looked over Valerie’s head at us.

Valerie huffed a breath through her nose and wiggled her hand at Orlando.

“What does she want?” he asked.

“She wants you to take the key,” I said, remembering how upset Valerie had been when I had once so casually discarded an imaginary key of my own.

“She doesn’t
have
a key,” he said slowly, as though he had missed an important detail.

Valerie reached even further toward Orlando, her body contorting in her effort to stay where Dante had asked her to stay, yet still move closer.

“I know. Like I said, it’s a long story.”

Orlando took a cautious step forward, extending his open hand toward Valerie’s. A red crescent bite mark bloomed on the heel of his palm. When his hand was directly beneath Valerie’s, she opened her fingers. Orlando folded his fingers into a fist as though he had caught whatever she had dropped, and Valerie relaxed, a smile lighting up her face.

Edging away from her, Orlando returned to where we sat by the fireplace.

Dante helped me to my feet and into the chair he had recently abandoned. He hovered behind me, his touch never far from my shoulder, my neck, my arm.

“So, will you tell me the story?” Orlando sat in the other chair. “I think I deserve to know what’s going on. And what I’ve agreed to.”

I took a deep breath and told Orlando the abbreviated version of who Valerie was and why she was the way she was and how she had ended up here, Dante chiming in as needed. I hadn’t been kidding; even just covering the basics, it was a long story and my throat hurt by the time I was done. My heart hurt, too, as I relived the events of the past few months. Had it really only been since January? Since Dante had first come into my life and everything had changed?

Through the entire retelling of her history, Valerie leaned forward like an attentive pupil, her eyes moving in an endless circle from me to Dante to Orlando and back again.

Orlando leaned back in his chair, his fist still holding the invisible key. He turned his thoughtful gaze to Valerie, and when her focus was back on him, he held her eyes. “I’ll keep it safe for you until you need it back,” he said. “I promise.”

Valerie nodded solemnly, crossing her finger over her heart, first one way, then the other.

“What does that mean?” he asked me in a low voice.

“She wants you to promise—cross your heart and hope to die.”

Orlando looked at me oddly, but he mimicked Valerie’s motion.

Dante cleared his throat and stepped around me, kneeling down in front of Valerie. “Thank you,” he said. “You have been very still and very quiet, just as I asked. I’d like to help you now. What did you want to talk to the River Policeman about?”