Lampo.
All along, Babbo had been using the Italian word,lampo. It did mean lightning or flash, but its secondary meaning was a shortened version ofchiusura lampo.
Zipper.
To close something in a flash.
Chuide il lampo. Close the zipper.
That was it.
Find the power. Close the zipper.
But why? Why did we need to close the zipper and stop the scars from rifting? Jack was corporeal now. The Chucky-slime couldn’t hurt him.
Another vision flooded me.
Dante. Branwell. Tennyson. They stood shoulder to shoulder, facing me. Behind them, stood our father, Cesare. Behind him, my grandfather, Alessio. Men stretched behind them all, fading into the distance. Into the past.
An oily blackness clung to the men, my father and grandfather. The black sludge covered them, turning their skin sallow, sucking their life away. Chucky-slime?
But the slimy darkness struggled to stick to my brothers. It roiled and pulsed around them, but they brushed it off. Something about them made it harder for the shadow to attack.
As I watched, my brothers gathered the oily sludge into their hands and pushed it behind them, their hands struggling to hold the darkness back.
If only they had a way to close themselves off from it—
I suddenly understood.
The madness is not what it seems.
Closing the rip would seal my brothers from the madness. The Chucky-slimewasthe madness.
Stopping it would break the curse of their GUTs.
The vision faded. But the intense sense of rightness remained.
That was what Cesare—both of them, I supposed—had been trying to tell us.
There was a way to stop the madness. We simply had to permanently close the scars in reality, stopping them from rifting open and seal the Chucky-slime away from my family.
Wasthatwhat my father had been chasing that fateful night? A way to seal the scars and break the horrid curse that threatened to destroy his three sons?
Had he done something to help us? Had his rejection of me not been a rejection at all? But, instead, a determination to help us in the only way he could?
I replayed Babbo’s final moments—him on the tower, me calling from the back terrace. The rain pounding between us, the whipping wind.
Babbo’s eyes finding mine, intent, purposeful.
Stay, Daddy. Stay.
But this time, instead of reading his eyes as unfeeling and uncaring, I saw determination. I saw compassion.
I saw heart-wrenching, blindingly-determined love.
The powerful, soul-shaking love of a father for his children.
Allhis children.
