Me.You look like you have something to say.
Him.Ladies before gentleman.
Me.I don’t want to talk about it.
Him.Me either.
“How’s about we agree to not test this again?”
He nodded. “Agreed. That was a mite terrifying.”
And that was all we said.
Two days later, we still hadn’t talked about That Which Could Not Be Discussed.
Namely, his weird almost-collapse. And my continued night terrors over my father’s suicide.
It was a tentative stalemate.
Opening up to Jack about my father had been . . . difficult, to put it mildly. I felt even more raw and exposed and was not eager to relive the experience anytime soon.
But the whole exchange had thawed something between us. Or, if I were being completely honest, it thawed something in me. Our exchanges were still snarky but they had lost that biting edge, moving more toward teasing humor than anything else.
It was a good change, though it did serve to confuse my poor emotions even more.
The automation team completed their job and packed up. A command center now sat in the former distillery off the kitchen, gleaming with computer monitors and cameras. The idea was to provide Jack with a state-of-the-art surveillance system, as well as a way to control it all through voice activation. The monitors could be switched from room to room, position to position, leaving hardly a square inch of the estate unmonitored.
“This is quite remarkable,” he commented for the twentieth time, upper-crust accent crisp. “I shall enjoy this room, I think.”
Men and their toys. Some things were universal.
I brushed off my hands. “Well, I’ll leave you to your devices then.”
“Hah. You and your horrid puns.”
Maybe. But it didn’t stop him from smiling. For the record, Jack had a terrific smile.
True to his word, Jack spent the next day and a half glued to his electronics, shifting his cameras at regular intervals and yelling when he saw something exciting. Like, ya know, a rabbit hopping across the driveway.
The man knew how to par-tay.
As for me and my potential future as aCosa Nostracrime statistic, Inspector Paola assured me that the police were making progress.
“We are expecting arrest warrants any day now,” she said in one of her almost daily calls.
I wasn’t sure if she called me out of courtesy or to fish for information about Jack. Paola seemed to have developed something of a crush on my ghostly roommate.
Regardless, the whole situation with the Tempeste family felt like old news. We had explained the random lightning bolt messages and realized that my own subconscious was more likely to take me out than a Tempeste bullet.
But still. I valued my beating heart and had a strong interest in keeping it that way, so I laid low.
Besides, Jack was good company. I wasn’t ready to admit this to him—his ego hardly needed another boost—but he was funny and clever and I found myself looking forward to our days together. He and I passed the time with our mutual combing of the D’Angelo digital archives, searching for anything that might help us understand the scars or weird Chucky-slime.
It was very slow going. For better or worse, the entire D’Angelo archive was organized by year and person. So you could read the writings and notes about Lorenzo D’Angelo, Sofia’s brother and the D’Angelo heir that Jack had known in 1818. Or you could read about Alessio D’Angelo from the late sixteenth century, dubbedil Magnificodue to his patronage of the arts and elegant manners.
But if you wanted to find information about a specific topic—for example, what had been said about future wars over the years—then you had to read each page carefully.
After over four hundred years of detailed record keeping, there were tens of thousands of documents.
