Owen wasn’t finished making a ruckus. Babington’s rooftop pavilion was on fire now—presumably ignited by the smoking corpses of the vampires caught in the brief rays of sunlight—and he used his brass-covered claws to burst through the wall as a bear and slide to the edge of the roof, where he shape-shifted to a red kite. I followed his progress as he arrowed across the piazza to a window in the terra-cotta building where Marko’s rifle muzzle poked out. He didn’t get there before Marko fired but rather just as he fired, knocking the muzzle down with his talons so that the bullet went spaff into Bernini’s fountain. I don’t know if Marko was aiming at Granuaile or me. He didn’t get a chance to shoot again after that. Owen disappeared into the building and I presume he took out all the gun-wielding lads one way or another, because he eventually emerged from the front entrance, dressed in one of their suits.
In the meantime, authorities were pouring into the piazza, trying to reestablish order as a precursor to figuring out what had happened. The wail of sirens heralded the arrival of firemen and paramedics. Granuaile and I had no difficulty pretending to be traumatized victims, and neither did the Rabbi Yosef Bialik. Only five of the Hammers of God survived, but they had defeated the Hermetic Qabalists completely, and their beards looked like normal facial hair again. I noticed that all the silver knives had been removed from the body of the first Rosicrucian the Hammers had taken out. The rabbi floated the idea that maybe we should blame everything on the guys with the funny haircuts, and I nodded my approval.
“I have lost good friends tonight, but this was a true triumph over evil, yes? We will talk later. When you can talk.” Yes, we would. I owed him some Immortali-Tea for sure.
When Owen emerged from the building, he still had enough juice left in his brass knuckles to cast camouflage on the three of us and get us out of there. His jaw, I noticed, was misshapen, as I’d suspected. It was dislocated for sure and possibly broken like mine. We limped and grunted our way back to the grounds of the Villa Borghese and fell onto the grass once we felt Gaia’s presence again. I numbed the pain first so I could keep my head clear, then set about getting my jaw back into place and the bones and teeth bound together like old friends. Owen’s jaw was merely dislocated, and once he popped it back into place with an audible crunch, a river of profanity that had been dammed up all during the fight spewed forth. Granuaile likewise worked on her wounds, and once Owen wound down, we rested in silence and healed. After an hour I could talk again, albeit with a thick slur.
“Yay team,” I said.
“Damn,” Owen said. “I knew it wouldn’t last forever. But it was right peaceful there for a while, not having to listen to your yapping.”
CHAPTER 27
Fishing out my burner phone, I made a call and spoke past my bloodied lips and tongue. “Meet ush now at the Antico Caffè Greco by the piazza.” I thumbed off the call once I got an affirmative response.
“Who was that?” Granuaile asked.
“The ansher to what happensh next. Hungry?”
“Not while covered in blood. Maybe afterward.”
“I’m sure they will have a washroom.”
Charged up again, we camouflaged ourselves and walked back through the piazza, ignoring the barriers and surveying the damage. Babington’s suffered damage only to the rooftop pavilion; someone got up there with a fire extinguisher and saved the building. There was nothing but oily stains and empty clothes to mark the final deaths of the vampires—Owen confirmed that we had gotten them all. He hadn’t killed all the thralls but left them broken and, in one case, naked. He’d lost his stake on top of Babington’s somewhere and would have to look for it later. Mine had been found by the police on the steps and was being bagged as evidence. As soon as the officer put it down, I snatched it up, unseen, and shoved it underneath my jacket.
Normally there would be something of a wait to get into Caffè Greco, the legendary establishment where Keats and Shelley and many other artists and poets dined over the centuries. Its red and gold interior with vaulted ceilings fairly teemed with the ghosts of creative minds, and people lined up to park their buttocks where famous buttocks had lounged in days of yore. But on a freezing, snowy evening in Rome, it was almost deserted. We kept the camouflage on when we entered and shambled past the maître d’ to the restrooms where we could attempt to clean ourselves up somewhat. We could get our faces and hair clean, and Owen had stolen his clothing so he was in good shape there, but my clothes weren’t going to look decent again before they had gone a few rounds with industrial-sized containers of bleach. Better to unbind them and let them feed the earth.
“Ye look like ye killed a bus full o’ people, lad,” Owen said.
“Yesh, I do. But it’ll be okay. I think.”
We walked out together in camouflage, dropped it, then walked right back in again, entirely visible. Granuaile didn’t look bad at all, having managed to either clean or conceal most of the blood on her. I was the one who had to talk my way in. I explained in broken Italian to the alarmed maître d’ that my clothes weren’t stained with actual blood; it was corn syrup and food dye, thrown upon me by some damn animal-rights activists who’d targeted me for my leather jacket. I gave him fifty euros, courtesy of the pickpockets I’d run into yesterday, and we were seated with alacrity at a table for four.
“Our friend will be joining us shortly,” I explained.
We ordered espressos and sat in silence. We were exhausted, cut off from Gaia, and quietly trying to manage our pain. There was little else to say until our guest showed up.
When he did, Owen was the first to spot him. “Fecking hell?” he said, then he began to speak the unbinding for vampires. I saw that a tall, pale Viking with straight blond hair approached, dressed in a modern Italian suit.
“No, no!” I said, clapping a hand over his mouth. “Thash who we’re waiting for!”
Leif Helgarson halted, because he’d heard what I said, and held up his hands to show that he was harmless, but Owen slapped my hand away and growled, “Gerroff me, ye poxy cock!”
“All right, jush lisshen to him. He’sh gonna keep your Grove shafe.”
“Fine. But give me your stake just in case,” he said. “He’d better fecking behave.” I handed it over, and he laid it on the table in plain view as a warning.
“Atticus, what’s going on?” Granuaile said. “I thought you hated him.”
“Not as much as I hate the thought of a never-ending war.” I waved Leif over. “Shometimes a deal with the devil is better than an eternity of righteous shuffering.”
“Good evening to you all,” he said formally, pulling out his chair and seating himself. “I am grateful for the invitation to join you. Congratulations on your victory against the Druids’ oldest enemy.”
“Thank you,” I said. Granuaile and Owen just stared at him in silence, their muscles tense and ready to lash out.
“I have the document you requested, Atticus,” Leif said. “It is in my coat pocket.” His eyes latched on to Owen. “I am going to remove it very slowly.”
“Aye. Ye take your fecking time with that,” Owen said.
Leif’s pale hand crept slowly toward his jacket pocket, and Owen’s grip on the stake tightened. The hand disappeared, the faint rasp of fingers against paper could be heard, and then a single folded sheet emerged in his hand. He extended it to me.