Free The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird by Kat Beyer

Aunt Brigida gave me and Francesco the rest of hers to fight over.
    After dinner, Dottore Komnenos walked with us. Apparently, he had a small apartment near the Porta Nuova he stayed in sometimes.
    “You don’t mind the stone streets after all?” I asked, feeling brave enough to tease him.
    He smiled. “Sometimes during the night, I wake up andlook down into the street, and wonder why it does not sparkle under the lamps.”
    I wanted to visit Venice.
    We walked along the canal for a little while, enjoying the evening. Later, heading back to the metro with everyone, I thought about Lucifero.
    “He doesn’t seem to have reacted to possession the way I did,” I said to Anna Maria, who stopped texting to look at me. We’d wound up ahead of the others, who were arguing about the best way to cook the meal we’d just had.
    “I mean,” I went on, “I really … it took so much out of me. I don’t think I really started to feel like myself until Christmas.”
    She shrugged. “You were also learning a new language and living in a new place,” she pointed out.
    “Still, I don’t think I’d have gone around setting demons on people,” I said. “Not after what I’d been through.”
    “You weren’t dumb enough to invite a demon in,” said Anna Maria. “Maybe that’s the difference.”
    I had been wondering about that, though. Why had my demon gone after me in the first place? He had crossed an ocean to find me, something he had not—as far as anybody seemed to know—done before. Before me, he had chosen and killed strong people, like Emilio’s father, Luciano. I wasn’t some practiced demon catcher, I wasn’t a Luciano, not by a long shot. So, if I wasn’t his usual kind of victim, why had he gone to the trouble to target me? Had I inadvertently invited him in? Wasthere something about me that called to him?
    I feared the answer to that question, but I had to find it. I set these thoughts aside, looking at Anna Maria. “What does Lucifero want?” I asked. “Nonno says quick power. But why? What happened to him?”
    Anna Maria snorted.
    “Don’t make excuses for him! He may be good-looking, he may be charming, he may have asked you out on your first date, but those aren’t reasons enough. I’ve been on several photo shoots with him, and he’s a diva, a pain in the butt … messing with the photographers or stressing out the makeup artists. What does it matter if he had a horrible childhood? People live through terrible things all the time, and still go on to live good, happy lives. They even use their experiences to help others. It’s no excuse, ever.”
    I thought that was pretty harsh. But then she said, “Like you, Mia. The same demon possessed you, and instead of going crazy, or looking at how evil the world can be, you’ve already helped Signora Galeazzo and Signorina Umberti.”
    “Signorina Umberti died,” I retorted, holding up a finger.
    “Yes,” she said simply. “But then, even Nonno couldn’t save her. And you helped her get free. She didn’t die possessed, she died herself, her own self.”
    We walked on in silence for a moment.
    “And that is very, very important. We can’t lose ourselves,” she went on fiercely.
    I stopped thinking about Lucifero and started wondering about Anna Maria. Had she always been like this? Emilio said that as a kid she’d badgered the family to let her learn to be a demon catcher, finally sneaking into an exorcism when she was eight. They gave up after that. Why did she want this so badly? She wasn’t born until a year after her uncle Luciano died, so she didn’t have Emilio’s motivation to become a demon catcher; but then again, Emilio had always wanted to be one, even before his father was killed. Since Emilio was a man, nobody had argued—no, his mother had, after she had lost her husband to the profession.
    This family was complicated.
    As we boarded the metro, Anna Maria and I melted back into the puddle of Della Torres. Nonna