Nomad (36 page)

Giovanni turned to face him. “What?”

“If you haven’t guessed yet, your father,
Baron
Ruspoli. He did not die naturally. Aconite from the Monkshood flowers, all through the vineyards—I used his own earth to poison him.”

It took a few seconds for Giovanni to process. His face went white. “You bastard, he trusted you like his own son.”

“Maybe his own son should have been here, no?” Nico’s lips trembled. “Come down now! Or I will kill Dr. Rollins.” He snarled a wolfish grin. “And just to show you I’m serious, we’ll kill someone else first.” He whistled.

From behind a low stone wall, a hundred feet away, a muscular man dragged a smaller one across the gravel. Jess squinted. She knew that face. “Roger?”

“Jesus Christ, Jess, do whatever they’re asking. They’re going to kill me,” Roger screamed as he was dragged across the dirt.

“Who’s Roger?” Giovanni asked quietly.

Jess gritted her teeth. “My boyfriend.”

Giovanni’s brows came together. “Your...”

“He
was
my boyfriend.” Jess winced. “Before I…never mind.”

“Don’t do it,” Jess’s father wheezed, his hands behind his head. “Nomad will be here in an hour, get underground—” He gagged as Nico tightened the pressure around his neck.

“NOW!” barked Nico. “I want to see Baron Ruspoli coming out of that gate right now.”

The muscular man dragged Roger next to Nico, forced Roger onto his knees with a gun pointed at the back of his head.

“Jess, please,” Roger cried, cringing.

A hot wind blew in from Jess’s right, a roar rising, blowing the leaves back on the trees. Rain fell.

“There’s no other way,” Giovanni said, turning to Jess. “I’ll go out. We have no weapons, no way to fight back.”

Jess shielded her face from the rain. It pelted down painfully. Looking down, she realized it wasn’t rain. Tiny white pebbles bounced off the stones. The scorching wind intensified, roaring over them, bringing with it a shower of hot rocks from the sky.

“I’m coming!” Giovanni roared, trying to shield Jess from the volcano’s ejecta with one arm, pulling her down the stairs.

Jess cowered with Giovanni under the cover of a stone awning. “We have weapons,” Jess yelled into his ear over the roar of pellets clattering into the gravel courtyard and off the stone walls, the noise almost deafening.

“You just threw our only gun over the wall.” Giovanni shook his head. “I checked the armory. Nico took everything. We have no weapons.”

Jess winced and grinned at the same time. “He didn’t take
everything
.”

The shower of rocks thinned, the hot blast of air passed.

“I just checked, there’s nothing in—”

“Not in the armory.” Jess turned and pointed at the two-story building just past the old olive tree. “In there.”

“In the museum…?” Giovanni frowned in confusion.

“There’s a thousand years of Ruspoli family weapons in there, isn’t that what they say on the tour?”

37

C
HIANTI,
I
TALY

“I’M COMING OUT!” Giovanni yelled, his voice carrying over the walls.

From her second-story perch inside the portico gate wall, looking out through a narrow slit in the wall, Jess could just see the wooden door crack open, Giovanni’s head coming out, both his hands over his head.

“I’m only coming closer if you let them go.” Giovanni edged out of the door.

Overhead, a northerly wind sprang up, dragging dark storm clouds from the north into the billowing black ash clouds from Monterufoli. They swirled together, churning up the sky under dancing tendrils of green and orange flame snaking from the rising sun. The ground shuddered.

Nico tightened his grip on Ben’s neck, wrenching him back. “No deals.” He glanced at the large man gripping Roger’s hair, the gun pointed at the back of his head. “Five more seconds till Roger dies.”

“Let them go,” Giovanni insisted, edging forward. “This is between us, not them.”

A crashing roar echoed through the valley.

Jess shifted, tried to get a better view on Nico. Flakes of ash fell like snow. The gap in the wall was a narrow slit, three feet high but not more than four inches wide, the opening swept back at a high angle from the outside to inside of the wall. She’d seen openings like this in castle walls a hundred times before on tours and imagined medieval archers angling their arrows out of them in some ancient battle.

But she never imagined that she’d be pointing a crossbow out of one.

Pumice raining from the sky, she and Giovanni had sprinted across the courtyard, ran up the steps into the museum containing the ancient swords, pikes, and crossbows. They smashed the glass cases, Giovanni retrieving crossbows refurbished by local artisans—new gut strings and oiled mechanisms—and grabbed as many bolts as they could carry.

Jess grabbed the Medici dagger on the way out. A small but lethal close combat weapon.

She spied through the gap in the wall, feeling the weight of the gold dagger in her back pocket. Shifting on her knee, she kept her eye low on the crossbow bolt, aiming down it at Nico. “Come on, come on,” she muttered, waiting to get a clear shot.

Nico scanned the tops of the walls. “Where’s our Jessica?”

“Down in the caves, with her mother,” Giovanni growled. The ground trembled.

“Just let him go,” Jess whispered, her bolt trained on Nico’s head. Sweat dribbled down her forehead, stinging her eyes. The light of the rising sun was fast being extinguished by the swirling black clouds overhead, even dimming the crackling aurora.

“Let her father go, and you can have me.” Giovanni took a step into the open, toward Nico, his hands up. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Nico scanned the walls again. He glanced at the man next to him and shrugged. “Yes, that’s what I want.” He let go of Ben, shoving him forward, and pointed his gun instead at Giovanni, not twenty feet away.

It was all Jess needed. Saying a small prayer, she squeezed the trigger on the ancient crossbow, aiming dead center on Nico’s chest.
Thwack
, the bolt loosed, the crossbow kicking back into Jess’s shoulder, knocking her off balance.

Overhead, the clouds closed together, sealing off the last of the sun’s rays and casting the courtyard into darkness. Regaining her footing, Jess peered through the slit as she put down the crossbow and picked up another one, preloaded with a bolt cocked back. In the sudden gloom, Jess wiped her eyes, squinted to see. Had she hit him?

Yes.

Nico staggered back, the crossbow bolt buried deep in his right chest, his right hand holding the gun dangling uselessly at his side. He looked down at his chest at the bolt sticking out of it, and wiped his mouth with his left hand. It came away dark red.

Giovanni roared, reaching behind his head to pull out a sword. He raised it above his head and charged at Nico.

One thing about crossbows—they were almost silent.

The big man next to Nico stared at him, still not sure what was happening. He was quick, though. He raised his gun from Roger’s head and aimed it at Giovanni as he ran at Nico, ready to bring the sword down and cleave Nico’s head from his body.

Swearing, Jess aimed the new crossbow bolt at the big man. Just as she pulled the trigger, Roger jerked to his feet to sprint away. The bolt caught him in the left shoulder, spinning him around into the big man who fired his gun in the same instant.

Jess watched in horror as blood sprayed into the air from Giovanni’s chest, the bullet’s impact knocking him sideways. Throwing her second crossbow down, she grabbed the third one, brought it up to the slit. Giovanni fell to his knees, the sword dropping from his hand. Roger fell back into the big man, who shoved him aside and brought his gun up again.

This time Jess didn’t miss.

The crossbow bolt snicked through the air straight into the big man’s neck. He dropped the gun and clawed at his neck, blood spurting across the gravel. Holding his shoulder, Roger staggered to his feet and ran to the wall, while Giovanni slumped to the dirt, blood pooling around him.

Nico had figured out where the attack was coming from. He snarled at the wall where Jess hid, but paused to smile at Giovanni in the dirt before turning to run, his right arm holding the gun dangling at his side. Jess grabbed her fourth pre-loaded crossbow, brought it up, but Nico made it into the cover of olive trees to the left of the driveway.

Cursing, Jess jumped to her feet and hopped down the winding stone staircase to the courtyard. At the bottom, she bounded to the open entrance door.

Her father was at Giovanni’s side, bent over, dragging him across the gravel to the entrance, leaving a trail of blood. Roger leaned against the doorframe, the bolt deep in his left shoulder. Painful, but not life threatening, was Jess’s instant assessment. She ran past him to her father. Scanning to her left, through the olive grove, she looked for any sign of Nico. Nothing. The coward ran.

“How is he?” she blurted out, grabbing one of Giovanni’s arms. She slung the crossbow over her back.

“Not good,” Ben replied. He’d taken the gun from the big man, and offered it to Jess.

“You keep it,” Jess told her father, crouching over Giovanni, his eyes half-open. She kissed him. “Hang on, just hang on.”

Smiling weakly, he whispered, “We got your father.” He coughed up mottled red blood and mucus.

The clouds in the sky thickened, the gloom deepening.

Jess glanced at Giovanni, his eyes closed, his body twitching. He wasn’t going to make it. She grabbed an arm and helped her father pull Giovanni, glancing left into the olive groves again.

A hiss erupted between the trees. Whitewater churned through the valley below, a black sludge surging behind it. Looking up, lightning crackled through the angry black clouds, a peal of thunder rolling through the valley. The ground juddered, shaking rocks from the castle walls.

“We have to hurry,” Ben urged, grunting, pulling Giovanni through the entrance into the courtyard. “We’re almost at Nomad’s closest approach. Tidal forces will increase cubically. They’ll triple in the next hour. It’s going to rip the crust apart.”

“Down through the stables.” Jess pointed to their left. “We can get into the caves below.”

Roger stumbled in behind them.

Over the roaring wind and water, the crack of a gunshot, then another.

Screaming.

Her mother’s screaming.

Jess let go of Giovanni’s arm and turned, ran up the stairs to the house as her mother ran out.

“What is it?” Jess grabbed Celeste.

“Nico came in the side door, shot through the locks,” Celeste cried. “He took Hector.”

“Is he inside?”

“No, he dragged Hector out, into the olive groves on the north side.”

Jess hung her head, closing her eyes and listening to the rush of the water. The entire valley to the north was submerging. No way he’d get out there. This mountain was fast becoming an island. Where would he go? He knew they had the gun from his partner, so he wouldn’t risk coming in here. Would he just kill Hector?

No.

He’d want something more symbolic.

Jess looked at her mother, wiped swirling ash from her face. “I know where he’s going.”

38

C
HIANTI,
I
TALY

“
STA 'ZITTO
!” NICO yelled at Hector, who squirmed in his arms.

Putting the boy down, he swung his left hand back and slapped Hector hard across the face, knocking the child into the dirt.

Fat droplets of black rain hammered onto the tin roof of the cable car control shack, spattering onto Nico. His eyes burned. It stank of rotten eggs, of sulfur. Pain flared in his right side. He’d snapped off the crossbow bolt, but the point was lodged deep in his right shoulder. It burned, and he’d bled badly. He was lightheaded, but it was almost done.

The ground trembled under his feet, black water churning in the valley below while lightning crackled in dark skies above. Nico smiled grimly, shaking in fear. This would be the end of it. This would be the end of
everything
.

After securing his prize, the final Ruspoli heir, little Hector, Nico would have disappeared down into the valley if it hadn’t been filled with churning water. Instead he was forced to escape up here, outside the north wall, up through the rocks to the highest point. The cable stretched over the valley floor, connected to Villa Tosetti on the other side.