Waterfall (42 page)

Marcello stared at me for a long moment, and for the first time, other than when he had confessed love for me, I saw a helpless expression upon his face.

“What? Poison? What is it?” I asked.

“Arsenic. Cloaked inside something else, we think,” Marcello said. He came and knelt beside my bed, stroking my face. “I shall hunt him down, Gabriella. He shall pay for these crimes-after he tells me who paid him to do such a horrific thing.”

He was making me a deathbed promise. Giving me something to cling to as I departed.

“There-” I coughed, winced, and then forced my eyes open again. “There is no antidote?”

His eyes, so wide and brown, grew even more forlorn. He shook his head, looking down in sorrow.

I looked over my shoulder to Lia. There had to be an antidote. I’d taken it too long ago to throw it up. There had to be another option. If only we could Google it…

We had to get out of here. Back to our own time. Immediately. It was the only thing that could save me.

“Lord Marcello, I must speak to you in private,” Lia said, reading my mind.

“I am not leaving her,” he said, staring at me.

“Then have them leave,” I managed to say, my voice ragged.

He studied me, then raised his hand, clearing the room of servants. Cook was last to go, reluctantly closing the door behind her. Luca remained. “He is as close to me as Fortino. Say what you must before us both,” Marcello said, pulling his eyes from me for but a second to look Lia in the eye.

She came around the bed and knelt beside me and Marcello. Luca hovered over his shoulder. “What I am about to tell you will be difficult to understand. We do not yet understand it ourselves.”

I cried out, wondering if this was what it felt like to have a baby. Labor pains. My insides tearing. Was I already bleeding within? And added to that, was I about to have a full-on heart attack at seventeen?

“Three weeks past we came to you, through the tomb.”

“Yes, Yes, I know,” Marcello said. “We remember it well.”

“Nay,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm, forcing him to look her in the eye. “We came from another time. The same place, but hundreds of years into the future. We came from that time, to you, here, through the tomb. It is some sort of portal.”

His eyes grew large and his brow furrowed as he stared at her. “You are witches?” he asked, his tone incredulous. “Practitioners of some dark magic?”

“Nay,” she said calmly. “Nothing but two girls who were transported through time-as if we walked through a doorway in error.”

He rose, looking frightened and confused. “You speak of madness.”

Luca stood beside him, arms folded, no trace of humor in his face.

Lia rose too as I cried out with another pang.

“I must get her home, Marcello. To our own time. She is dying here. You said yourself there is no antidote. But there, in the future, we have antidotes to nearly everything. If I can get her to Radda in Chianti in time…”

I winced, thinking of how far the Etruscan site was from any real sort of medical care, even in our own time. I cried out again, sounding pitiful, even to my own ears. When it was over, I gasped for breath as more tears rolled down my face.

Lia stepped forward and grabbed Marcello’s tunic with both hands. “Do you love her? Do you love her as you have professed?” she demanded, all tough, trying to snap him out of his shock.

He stared down at me. I could feel his hot gaze but could not meet it. I was writhing again, shuddering as a wave of pain shook me from the center of my gut outward. The pace was increasing, the time between the pangs diminishing.

“Yes. God help me, I love her,” he said angrily.

“Then save her,” she said. “Save her. Help me get her to the tomb.”

Luca went running to the stables for horses. Cook and Fortino appeared in the doorway. “I am taking her to another doctor,” Marcello lied, staring into my eyes as he stroked my sweating forehead. I was panting like a pregnant woman trying to bear through constant contractions. At least, like what I’d seen on TV. “She has taken a turn for the worse.”

“Let me send a messenger,” Fortino said. “Bring the physician here. We shall send our fastest rider.”

“Nay,” Marcello said. “She will not survive but another day. She has ingested arsenic. We must try and make it to Siena.”

Fortino and Cook both brought hands to their mouths.

“Pray that we make it.” He rose. “Please, return to the dining hall and spread word that all is well. Keep everyone at peace. And away from us.”

“Lady Rossi,” I panted.

“Leave Lady Rossi to me,” he ground out, pulling aside my covers, and wincing as he saw the widening pool of blood upon the side of my gown. The wound had opened a full two inches, now oozing with each twist of my body.

Yeah, you’re doing a number on yourself, I told myself. But I couldn’t help it. I again grew rigid, holding my breath against the searing pain. And my heart was seriously going crazy.

“Pull some leggings of some sort over her,” he said to Lia.

He turned to the others. “Return to the dining hall and keep everyone inside. Bring forth the jugglers, the singer again. Captivate them. No one must see us as we depart. If somebody wants her dead, I want them to believe they have accomplished their task-so I can hunt them down at my leisure.”

We could hear the clatter of horses’ hooves from outside, through the open doorways.

Cook bent and kissed my forehead. “God be with you, m’lady. Your return shall be my constant prayer.”

“And mine as well,” Fortino said, bending to kiss my hand, even as Marcello pulled me up and into his arms.

The two turned and scurried out, shouting at servants in the corridor to follow them, return to the feast. Luca appeared and glanced at Lia. “You need water? Food?”

“We need nothing but to get her home,” she said, striding past him. Marcello followed her, holding me hard against him as I grew rigid with another seizure, arching back this time. Outside, he handed me to Luca for a moment, mounted, then reached for me, pulling me into his arms, stretching my legs across the mount, the better to hold me through the ride ahead, I assumed. No attempt at a sidesaddle this time.

Distantly, I understood that I’d be dead if I fell off the horse. My sides would split open, and it would be all over.

He shouted at the tower guards, and the massive gates were opened before us. Would it be the last time I ever saw Castello Forelli? I felt a wave of sorrow, wishing I was well, able to take one last look.

He kept a firm grip on me as we tore down the path, the same path we’d taken the night of the attack upon Castello Forelli, and later Castello Paratore. I could tell he was trying to be gentle, easing me forward to duck a branch. But every movement was either an agony to my side or a searing to my gut. And my heartbeat was making me crazy. I literally thought it might stop at any point.

Again and again we came to a stop as the pain overtook me and Marcello struggled to not let me slip to the ground. I concentrated on taking one breath at a time, of surviving just one more breath…

In time, we were crossing the creek, climbing the winding path to the top of the hill. To where I had first met him. Luca and Lia were already there, faster on their own horses. Luca held a torch high, waiting by the tomb’s entrance, his brow a mass of confusion and frustration and fear. He handed the torch to Lia and reached for me. I pretty much slumped down into his arms. I hurt too much to even think about being embarrassed. I was crying pretty hard by then.

Marcello dismounted and followed Lia into the tomb’s entrance, then turned to accept my body from Luca, dragging me inward. Luca followed behind.

When we reached the center, Marcello looked up at Lia, who stood near the handprints, waiting. “You merely touch those, and you will be gone? Back from whence you came?”

“I hope so,” Lia said, “for her sake.” Her face was a mask of sorrow and fear. “Let me hold her. I do not think that you should be touching us when our hands are on the prints, lest you leap through time with us.”

“Mayhap I should,” he said, rising, with me in his arms again.

“Mayhap we both should,” Luca said, stepping closer.

“Nay,” Lia said. “It might keep us from going. And if you were to come to our time-you would be as lost as we felt here.”

I panted, the pain constant, but I could not keep my eyes from Marcello’s profile, trying to memorize the line of his nose, the curve of his cheek, the strength of the muscles twitching in his jaw and neck.

This was it. One way or another, I was saying good-bye. Forever.

I could tell I was dying then. Because it didn’t hurt.

It was more of a dim assessment. An understanding. Fact.

“Gabriella,” he said, looking down into my face. “If all it took was for you to touch the prints to return to your own time, why did you and Evangelia not do that as soon as you could?”

“We had to be together,” I said, panting. “It doesn’t work with just one of us. And there was…you.”

His brows lowered a tiny bit. “You stayed-because of me?”

“Forgive me,” I said, shaking my head. “I interfered. Between you and Romana. In so many ways.”

“Nay,” he said, kissing my forehead tenderly, then my lips, for such a brief moment I wondered if I’d dreamed it. He set me on my feet. Lia wrapped her arm around my waist to hold me up, her fingers from her other hand already on her print.

Marcello lifted my hand in his, kissing the pad of each of my fingers, then looking into my eyes. “You did not interfere, Gabriella. I love you. You have stolen my heart,” he said, closing my hand in a fist, covering it with his own. “You hold it now. Do you understand that?”

“I do.”

“Then, if you love me, Gabriella,” he said, his eyes mad with urgency, “as I love you, return to me.”

“You cannot ask that of her-” Lia said.

“Return to me,” he continued, ignoring her, never looking away from my face, “and you shall find me waiting.”

I wanted to tell him there would be no return.

I wanted to tell him to go to Romana and do what he ought. What was expected of him.

But all I could do was watch as he slipped the palm of my hand to the wall, directly above the print.

I cried out as the muscle at my side stretched and the half-healed wound split further open, just as another wave of pain emanated from my gut.

“Gabi!” Lia cried.

I had dragged my hand to the print, and for the first time in hours, I felt heat and pain from something other than my torso, my pounding heart.

The room was stretching, spinning, yawning wide in that funhouse mirror sort of way.

And in a breath, Marcello and Luca were gone from the room, as if they had never been there at all.