This was what they were waiting for. Ambrose clocked the gargoyles creeping across the roofs.
No rest for the wicked. For the wicked it was all sexy adventures, strange magic, and duels to the death, which Ambrose personally found to be terrific. He indulged himself by reaching out and taking Prudence’s hand in his, the same brown as his own but ringless and with the nails painted dark.
“What do you call this color nail polish?” he asked idly.
“Eggplant,” Prudence responded, her eyes sparking and intent.
Ambrose kissed her hand. “I call it aubergine. Americans are a ghastly people who speak a brutish tongue.”
“We speak the same language.” Prudence rose. “Try saying something in English that I couldn’t say.”
Eggplant and aubergine were their code words.
The gargoyles dropped from the curved-eggshell dome of the Duomo, the hard claws of stone monsters scraping against the cobblestones. One gargoyle looked to Prudence, and its gray lips curled back from granite fangs.
Ambrose grinned as Prudence drew her twin swords. “Darling, I rather fancy you.”
While they were in Italy, Prudence wore long, floating dresses. Usually she dressed to match her sisters, in a witch uniform of prim lace collars, dark colors, and short skirts. Ambrose liked to imagine that Prudence sometimes saw this murder quest the way he did. As an opportunity to be who they were when not bound in a web of complex loyalties. Escapism got a bad rap. Who couldn’t use an escape now and then?
Prudence’s long dresses showed cleavage in which a man could plunge to his glorious death.
As Prudence spun over the darkened cobblestones, her skirts and her swords were a luminous whirl. Ambrose drew his own sword, tipped his straw hat to a table of mortal tourists, then flung his hat onto the table, where it landed spinning between their champagne flutes.
“I challenge you to a battle of wits,” Ambrose told a gargoyle.
The gargoyle grunted.
“I can see in the battle of wits you are unarmed,” said Ambrose. “Battle of battle it is!”
He joined the fray. The legend went that the last star to appear at evening in the warlock Galileo’s city would show you exactly where you wished to go. Being guided by the stars was something even the mortals knew how to do.
But there were other warlocks and witches hunting for the star’s answer. Or perhaps someone was trying to prevent Prudence and Ambrose from reaching their goal. For whatever reason, these gargoyles had been sent to stop them.
Their enemies hadn’t yet realized that Ambrose was with an unstoppable girl. Prudence reached out and grasped the midnight-blue bubble. The gargoyles closed in.
Prudence circled their enemies, skirts swaying like a country girl dancing around a maypole, and lopped off a gargoyle’s head.
“Do not make puns about how everyone loses their heads over me,” warned Prudence. “You already did that with the ghouls last week.”
“Yes, dear,” said Ambrose. “But consider this. We are gorgeous immortal creatures with cool weapons and killer fashion sense. The world has a right to expect witty repartee.”
A gargoyle lunged for Prudence, and Ambrose buried his sword in its stone breast.
“O, if no harder than a stone thou art —” Ambrose began, then was rudely interrupted by another gargoyle, stone claws sinking into his sword arm. Prudence hurtled through the air like a silver shrike, landing on the gargoyle’s back and cutting the creature’s throat. Ambrose admired her narrowed eyes and the lethal twist of her mouth, her face set harder than stone over the monster’s shoulder.
She had more killer instinct than he did, but he could usually keep up. Even when he couldn’t, he had fun trying. Ambrose took a knee and scythed the legs out from another stone monster. When three came for Prudence, stone teeth raked her shoulder, and she let the orb drop. Ambrose rolled across the cobblestones, caught the star’s message, and came up swinging. Their swords kissed with a victorious ring as they cut off the last creature’s head together.
He and Prudence stood with their blades bared as the stone flesh of their enemies crumbled to dust at their feet. Moonshine made their pale clothes glow silver, so they seemed beings garbed in light.
Ambrose was wearing a white linen vest and trousers. He felt no need to wear a shirt on holiday. He was cheerfully confident that he and Prudence made a handsome pair.
The table of mortal tourists applauded enthusiastically. Ambrose bowed with a flourish.
“What a fun cabaret!” called out a woman. “Do you do private performances?”
“I’m just as sensational in private,” Ambrose called back.
“Ambrose,” said Prudence, her voice arch but firm.
She caught his hand to attract his attention. Ambrose gave her a swift, fond glance. Prudence gestured to the midnight-blue orb in his palm.
“The star’s message?”
Ambrose turned away reluctantly from his adoring public and passed a hand over the orb, the metal of his rings sparking and suffused with light. The shimmering blue turned to water, and he pulled out a message written in blood on a broad white feather. The message read: Ask Urbain Grandier at Marche d’Ailleurs in Paris.
Prudence nodded. “This is our last night in Italy.”
“Then we should enjoy it!”
She started to release his hand, but Ambrose pulled her around the curve of the domed building, glowing pink marble on one side and a glittering Florence on the other. Prudence’s skirt flared, and her laugh came pealing behind him. Better than bells, filling the whole city with music.
“You enjoy yourself too much,” Prudence told him breathlessly.
“No such thing,” Ambrose returned.
“Doesn’t that attitude get you into trouble?”
“Sure,” said Ambrose. “I was put under house arrest for trying to blow up the Vatican. I go big and I go home … and stay there under occult house arrest. I do it all. All’s a lot more fun than nothing.”
Prudence laughed. This was going considerably better than Ambrose’s confession of misdeeds on his first date with Luke, Ambrose thought.
Thinking of Luke made melancholy drag down Ambrose’s buoyant mood.
His boyfriend Luke Chalfant, lost in exactly the same way Ambrose’s father had been. Killed by witch-hunters. Only, unlike Ambrose’s father, Luke had loved Ambrose. Luke had told him so.
Ambrose was flattered, and fond of him. Luke was cute and had appeared on Ambrose’s horizon when Ambrose was almost despairing. Luke offered him freedom from house arrest, and Ambrose had dreamed of nothing but freedom for decades. Ambrose owed him. Luke had no reason to help Ambrose. He’d been purely motivated by affection. Ambrose thought, surely if he was capable of loving anyone besides his family, he should love Luke.
But Ambrose hadn’t. Ambrose thought maybe it would come. And he’d thought maybe he couldn’t love anyone. Not in that way. Perhaps love was only for his family, for Auntie Hilda, Cousin Sabrina, and Auntie Z, not that Zelda or Ambrose would admit to feeling that way about each other.
Maybe Ambrose couldn’t ever fall in love.
“If you’ve forgotten the way to our hotel,” said Prudence scornfully, “I shall lead you.”
And maybe he could.
She led him past Gothic towers and cathedrals, over the Ponte Vecchio with its medieval arches and jewelry shops where mortals bought diamonds for their beloved ones. There was a stone plaque on the bridge, worn to illegibility with time, saying this bridge had been rebuilt after a flood seven hundred years ago. Prudence didn’t let go of his hand.