DELUGE Read online

  “Which sounds pretty creepy,” Lia said.

  “And then we have a mother with a fascination for the tombs,” I said reproachfully. “Which is all-kinds-of-weird to them.”

  “Our dealings in Etruscan artifacts is good enough as a cover story,” Mom said, flipping her blond braid over her shoulder.

  “Is it?” I asked. “With these new Betarrinis in town? Dudes who said they came through a tomb, too? And probably wearing clothes that couldn’t be explained?”

  We were all silent for a moment. Marcello had burned the jeans, cardigan, cami and flats I’d arrived in, God bless him.

  “Lia,” I said slowly, a sudden horror growing inside, “what happened to your clothes when you first arrived?”

  She looked at me helplessly. “I don’t know. Paratore gave me a gown to change into. But I’m not sure what happened to them.”

  My eyes met Mom’s, and I felt a little sick. We’d buried hers and Dad’s in the woods, and covered them with rocks. They weren’t likely to be found. But Lia’s…It would’ve been just like Paratore to hide them away to use at just the right point and time.

  “What’d you have on that day?” Mom asked.

  “Jeans. A t-shirt. And my purple sneakers.” She bit her lip and looked around at us worriedly.

  Dad sighed heavily. “Where’d my clothes go again?”

  “We buried them as you changed into that knight’s uniform.”

  “And we left that guy fairly naked,” he said, pacing now. “If that word got out too…” He rubbed the back of his neck. We’d all thought of these things over the last year and more. We just hadn’t dared to talk about it.

  “What else could incriminate us?” Mom asked.

  Dad resumed his pacing. “I flung my flashlight into the forest. Stupid, I know. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Where?” I asked. “Do you think we could find it?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You have that First Aid kit,” I said to Mom.

  She shook her head. “I hid it too, once I figured out how dangerous it was to have it around.”

  I frowned. “You’re sure no one will find it?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I took a deep breath. “There’s no way we could explain it away.” I thought of the plastic box—plastic!—the imprint and color, the slots and bottles and individually-wrapped products inside. Yeah, if that was found by the wrong peeps, we’d be toast.

  “Was there anything else?” Mom asked. “How about when you and Lia came back the second time. Did anyone see you leave?”

  I flung out my hands. “It’s possible. We were in the middle of a freakin’ battle. I think everyone was behind us, you know, fighting and everything. But who knows! There were a ton of people in this valley. Did you see anyone?” I asked Lia.

  She shook her head. “We were running, distracted. I don’t think anyone saw us…”

  “But you can’t be certain,” Dad said quietly.

  We heard the horses outside whinny. They must have sensed another approaching. I immediately ducked and crawled out, yanking at my pesky skirts all the way. As I rose, my hand instinctively ran across the sheath that held my sword, comforted by its weight. All four horses stood, ears pricked forward in the same direction. Toward the road that led to Castello Greco.

  Toward Lord Greco, it turned out, as he languidly entered the tomb meadow, astride an elegant, black gelding.

  My family gathered around me, brushing themselves off. We waited for Rodolfo to near, and he paused, leaning down to casually stroke the neck of his horse and then pat it. He smiled at us. “Now why did I suspect that I might find the Betarrinis here, come morn, after our discussions last night?” he asked, his eyes resting squarely on me.

  “It’s a lovely morning,” I said, overly bright and cheery. “We found ourselves restless. So we elected to take a ride.”

  “To the tombs,” he said drolly, lifting his far leg and easily sliding to the ground. He turned and opened a big, leather saddlebag and pulled out a fabric-wrapped package tied with string, tossing it to me. I narrowly caught it.

  “You can open it,” he said, crossing his arms. “But I suspect it belongs to Lady Evangelia.”

  My heart faltered, and his eyes narrowed.

  He knew. He knew.

  I turned and handed it to Lia, not wanting her to open it, just trying to buy time to think. We all knew what was inside. I’d felt the familiar weight and give of a rubber sole, her tennies.

  “There are only two solutions, as I see it,” Rodolfo said gently, evenly, looking from one to the next of us. “Either you’re witches and warlock, or there’s some strange truth to what the Ravenna-Betarrinis espoused. That you hail not from Normandy or Britannia, but rather from a different…time.”

  My mouth was dry, my mind spinning. I didn’t want to lie to Rodolfo. He was our friend. Our ally now. And yet it endangered him to know. To be in on our secret.

  “Come now, Rodolfo,” Dad said, stepping forward. “Have you been so deep into your cups this early in the day? I’ve never known you to speak like a superstitious old man or madwoman. You know our story.”

  “I know part of your story,” he corrected. He moved over to Lia and looked down at her. “Open it.”

  Casting me a helpless look, she untied the twine and spread apart the corners. A shoe rolled out and onto the ground, practically bouncing. We all stared at it like it was kryptonite, leaching us of any power, any energy.

  Rodolfo bent and picked it up and examined it, as if for the first time. “I have been to the finest trading ports of Italia, of Normandy and Greece, but I have never seen anything like this.” He lifted the sneaker a bit higher, turning it over to examine the contoured shape of a gripping sole, the stitching across the purple mesh fabric, the neon-green laces. Then he looked at Lia. “Cosmo Paratore told me he’d found you in shoes that reminded him of my family’s colors.”

  “He was a liar,” Lia protested.

  “He was,” Rodolfo agreed. “But in this, he was not. And you, my dear friend,” he said, leaning toward her, “are not. Please do not begin now.” He studied her a moment. “Paratore had decided you were a witch, but you were too lovely to give up; and you displayed no other powers other than the power to beguile a man—a power to which he was willing to be subjugated. So he elected to forget the clothes. Remake you into a proper woman of our lands. Make you his. Until your sister came to save you,” he said, nodding at me. “I never heard him say another word about it. But he left the clothes beneath the floorboards of his room. Which I happened upon when we returned from our travels.”

  He gestured to the other clothes in Lia’s hands. “Any one of those pieces would identify you as not only foreign, but…other.” He handed the sneaker to my dad and crossed his arms. “So tell me. All of it. Where are you from?” He asked the last of it slowly, emphasizing each word, clearly abiding by no further debate. Again, he looked at each of us, one at a time, and I felt like I was in the principal’s office.

  Dad stepped closer, directly in front of him, and looked in his eyes. “What Marcello said was true. Sometimes, it’s best to not know everything. Can you not let this go? Allow us to burn these clothes? Forget you ever laid eyes upon them?”

  Rodolfo stared at him. “Forgive me. I cannot. I’d rather know of potential danger than not. Even if it puts me in greater peril.”

  It made sense to me. He was clever, long used to navigating the complicated waters of being a blood brother to many who were considered enemies, and yet loving many on his side of the line too. It was his whole life, really. And he’d lost and gained big in the exchanges that resulted from that devotion. To his mind, how was this any different?

  “We are not witches and warlock,” Dad said, trying to leave it at that.

  But Rodolfo forced it. “Then from what time are you?”

  Dad searched his eyes. “From a distant future.”

  Rodolfo scowled in irritation. “How distant?”
/>
  “Almost seven hundred years.”

  Rodolfo’s brown eyes widened, his lips parting as he stilled. Then they clamped shut, and his brow lowered. “How is that possible?” he bit out.

  “We do not know.”

  Rodolfo shook his head as he waved at the tomb. “Through there?”

  “Yes,” Dad said. “It is some sort of portal, a time tunnel, through which we only thought that Gabriella and Evangelia could initiate travel. But now with these new Betarrinis from Ravenna…” He rubbed his temple and looked to the horizon, lost to his own thoughts.

  “If only the Ladies Betarrini could travel through it, how did you and your husband arrive?” Rodolfo asked Mom.

  “Holding on to them,” she said, gesturing toward me and Lia. I still couldn’t believe they were telling him. All of it. “Clinging to them for our very lives,” she said.

  “It’s the handprints,” I muttered, irritated that he’d managed to get us to spill the beans. Marcello would be ticked when he found out. And yet I couldn’t see a way around it. Now we needed to use his knowledge to our advantage. “There’s something about the handprint frescoes inside. When Lia and I touch them, they’re hot. And we have to touch them together. Do you know if there were handprints in the tomb the Ravennans emerged from?”

  He shook his head, still looking a bit dazed. “I do not. I thought…I thought it was the entrance itself. With the angels, the figures of both Greek and Legionnaire.”

  Mom nodded, clearly gratified that she’d been right about him noticing that particular element.

  Greco’s attention turned toward me. “So at any time, you and Evangelia can leave?”

  “It appears that way,” I said. “Though we have no intention of trying. When we went back last for Dad—we retrieved him from a time before…well, before he died.”

  Rodolfo visibly paled at this, the first time I’d ever seen him do so in some time. He stared hard at Dad. “You…you died.”

  “Apparently,” Dad said, flinging out his hands. “It happened a couple years later. I don’t remember it, because for me, it never happened. They came and retrieved me two years before that ever happened.”

  Rodolfo rubbed his face and stared at me, the pieces starting to slide together. “That’s why you first claimed your father was dead, but then later miraculously ‘found him.’”

  I nodded. “But now…Now we’re wondering if we are only one part of a family that can somehow travel through time. If there are more tombs, other cousins that might emerge. Which would be rather…problematic. So we must get to these men you met. Find out if what they say is the truth.”

  “’Tis the truth,” Rodolfo said definitively. “Now that I know all this,” he said, waving vaguely over at us and the tomb, then staring into my eyes. “Those men speak the truth. You must get to them, and then you must get them out of Venezia. Back to their tomb, or this one. Whichever! And back to their own time. Do you understand me?”

  He loomed, dark and urgent, fear practically seeping from his pores. “Swear they are madmen. Cousins, kin, if you must. But claim they are stark, raving mad.” His large hands were on my shoulders. “For if the doge decides there is truth in them… If he thinks that you and your kin have a strange power he could harness to extend his own…You will be in grave danger. Do you understand me, Gabriella?” he asked, shaking me a little, his fingers digging in. His brows knit, and he looked to my parents, to Lia. Then over his shoulder toward his own castle, thinking, I knew, of his wife.

  “Yes!” I said in agitation, pushing his hands away. Then again, more softly, “yes,” understanding his look of angst as the love of kinship, care. For all of us. Not just me. For the future, for his new bride, Alessandra.

  He turned, went to his saddlebag, and came back with Dad’s flashlight. After one last flick of the button and observation of the foreign, miraculous light that came on, he slapped it into my hand. “And destroy this.”

  I lifted the flashlight in my hand, felt the comforting weight of it, the memories it held for me of Dad in so many places, so many archeological sites. In some ways, it represented my childhood. But he was right. It had to go as fast as we could destroy it, in the hottest fire we could find.

  “We depart at daybreak on the morrow,” I said. “Pray that we can accomplish what we must.”

  “That I will,” he said, with a wonderstruck shake of his head. “Because only with God can you go and sift sanity from madness.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EVANGELIA

  I pretty much didn’t talk to Luca until we were at sea, on our way to Venice. I knew I should tell him of what had happened with Rodolfo, but, well…we were hardly on speaking terms yet. So I let it slide.

  As far as I could tell, Gabi hadn’t yet told Marcello either. He seemed free, easy, almost on vacation as he led her about the deck of the ship.

  Lutterius was throwing apples for me, above the waves, and I was practicing, shooting them down, arrow after arrow.

  After about ten, I sensed that Luca was behind me. Without turning, I said, above the noise of the sea, “Please, Sir Luca. Won’t you join me?”

  He hesitated and, after sharing a look with Lutterius, I kept shooting, waiting him out.

  Eventually, he dared to join me at the rail, leaning upon it. Lutterius, in deference, handed him his last apple, and then disappeared belowdecks.

  Luca gave me a smirk and then chucked it, as high as he could.

  I smiled, waited for it to arc, slowly drawing my arrow, and then shot it, just before it hit the water. Arrow and apple somersaulted across the waves and then bobbed there, twenty yards distant.

  “Fairly impressive, m’lady,” he allowed.

  I laughed quietly and then leaned on the rail beside him. “Fairly? What must I do to fully impress you, good sir?”

  “You know what would impress me most, Evangelia,” he whispered, his green eyes a cauldron of conflict—all at once hopeful and challenging and defeated.

  “Hmmm,” I said with a heavy sigh. “And again we come to that, yes? Our predicament. Please, might we set it aside? Just for a time? Through Venezia?”

  He took his own deep breath, staring toward the setting sun, and I admired him from the side as the rays cast a gentle glow over his skin, highlighting the stubble of a sandy-colored mustache and beard.

  “So say we set it aside through this sojourn to Venezia, but what then, Evangelia?”

  “I do not know,” I confessed. “Mayhap nothing will be different. But at least we would have that time together. Rather than endure this dreadful divide where neither of us is happy.” I dared to touch his hand with just my pinky and ring finger, and he froze.

  Slowly, slowly, we both looked at each other. He moved his long, strong fingers to cover mine, and my heart pounded as he lifted my hand to his lips.

  “Ahh, Evangelia,” he said resignedly. “I suppose that it is far less trouble to keep you near me, even if I cannot have the promise of your heart forever. It nearly tears me to pieces to stay away from you.”

  I smiled gratefully. “It was the archery, was it not? That made you give in? Wasn’t it my skill with bow and arrow that first made you claim your love?”

  He smiled ruefully and looked out to the sea. He still held my hand and I grew quiet, well aware that we both felt wounded, hurt, and it would take some time to come together fully. To bridge this chasm between us.

  If we could, truly, given that what I wanted and what he wanted were so opposed.

  It was as if a layer of caution nestled between us now. But it was better than being apart, I mused.

  Even if I couldn’t promise Luca forever, it certainly felt like I was his, and he was mine.

  Weren’t we?

  He wrapped an arm around my shoulders, and we stared out to the endless waves, the distant coastline of what would someday be Croatia, and I hoped.

  I hoped.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  GABRIELLA

  Come morning, I s
tared at the roiling waters and fought to keep my breakfast in my belly. I hadn’t felt this heave-ish since my first trimester. Ya know, other than when Greco was creating all sorts of his own havoc.

  Lia joined me at the ship’s rail.

  “So it turns out,” I said, panting, “that pregnancy and sailing aren’t the ideal companions.”

  “Stare at the horizon,” she said. “Remember that whale watching trip in California? Keep those eyes on the horizon, not me.” I did as she said. “Good. Now, breathe, Gabi. Slowly. In and out.”

  Again, I followed instructions, and gradually, my stomach began to settle. The ship felt small, tall and tippy, like a double decker sailboat with two sails. For a time I’d considered going below decks and trying to ride it out, but Mom had gone before me and came up, shaking her head. “You don’t want to go down there.”

  So here I’d stood for hours, in the center, at the lowest point. It was maybe nine and we still had a couple of hours to go. If the winds remained favorable, we’d arrive in Venice by afternoon. Silently, I thanked God that we wouldn’t be spending another night on this ship. How on earth had Columbus crossed the Atlantic in the Santa Maria?

  Marcello came to join me after breaking his fast. I’d decided against food, in general, for the foreseeable future. “Are you feeling a bit better?” he asked hopefully, offering me his arm. I took it and leaned my head against his shoulder.

  “A bit,” I said.

  “Perhaps a morsel of bread—”

  “Nay, nay,” I declined quickly.

  He frowned in concern. “The baby—” he whispered.

  “The baby is fine,” I said, laying a hand on my belly. “Plenty of mothers are sick for many more months than I have been. It’s just the sea.”

  “Mayhap this was a foolish venture,” he chastised himself. “We’d best stayed safe at home.”

  “And sent my family alone? I think not.”

  “We could’ve managed,” Lia said defensively. “You simply did not want to miss it.”

  “Undoubtedly. Between these other mysterious Betarrinis and seeing medieval Venezia, there was no way you were leaving me behind.”