Starling (95 page)

Piero paused but then turned away from Cass, toward the row of
glass cabinets. Coughing, he fumbled in his pockets. “I don’t have
the key,” he said.
Belladonna swore loudly and Cass saw her waving the smoke
from her face as she struggled to climb over the flaming table. “Help
me,” she shrieked at Piero.
Obediently, he edged his way around the table to give her his
hand. But as she tried to lift her heavy skirts into the room, a sharp
tongue of fire found the edge of the fabric and Belladonna was suddenly engulfed in flames.
She thrashed about, screeching, wailing, making sounds Cass had
never heard before and hoped never to hear again. The fire spread
from her skirts to her bodice to her hair. Piero struggled to escape her
deadly grasp, but she was clinging to him out of fear or malice, and
his doublet quickly began to burn.
And then his skin.
Cass was trapped in a nightmare, a horrible fiery nightmare where
she could do nothing but watch as Belladonna and Piero were consumed by flames, their animal-like howling rising in pitch until Cass
thought her ears would bleed.
Belladonna’s burning form was clawing at the glass cabinets, desperate to procure the Book of the Eternal Rose, even as the fire raged
straight through her flesh.
It’s over,
Cass thought, with a sudden pang
of sadness. Piero, Belladonna, and the book would all burn, and
with them, the knowledge of how to make the elixir.
But that meant Joseph Dubois would go free.
Piero fell suddenly to his knees. He flailed toward the window,
one burning arm reaching out for the soiled fabric of Cass’s dress,
and then Cass was screaming too. “Falco!”
“One more hit, starling,” he said. Falco reared back. Bones
crunched wood. The board broke clear through. He yanked at the
remaining fragments and tumbled off the windowsill back onto the
floor.
Cass saw the night sky looking in at her.
Grazie a Dio.
Behind her,
poisonous fumes swirled throughout the room, and the deadly
flames licked ever closer.
“Come on.” Falco was a blur in the billowing smoke. Squinting,
she saw him lace his fingers together to boost her up onto the windowsill.
Cass stepped into his waiting hands and lunged for the opening.
She could barely see anything. He pushed her feet through the window, and for a second the fabric of her dress caught on the broken
wood as it had the first time they’d escaped. Cass yanked violently.
Fabric ripped. She tumbled to the ground, landing hard on her hands
and knees. Breathing heavily, she struggled to a sitting position. Had
Falco made it out behind her? She couldn’t tell. All she could see
through the smoke were vague shadows that may or may not have
been real.
“Falco?” No answer. From somewhere nearby, a church bell
began to ring. Cass tried to orient herself by the sound, fumbling
toward what she thought was the window, toward where Falco might
need her help.
She reached out for the wall of the workshop, but her fingers
closed around air. “Falco!” She flailed in the smoke. Again and again
until finally her fingers gripped scalding stone. The heat threatened
to burn the skin from her bones. But Cass refused to let go. She had