Kingdom of the Wicked (Kingdom of the Wicked, 1)

A prince of Hell is the most dangerous of the demons. He appears angelic, but will claw out your heart. To combat his power, wear or draw a cimaruta charm—a branch of a rue with five stalks sprouting designs that correlate to your needs. Choose five images needed to banish a demon prince back to his realm. Example: a key, dagger, owl, snake, and moon will send him straight to Hell.

—Notes from the di Carlo grimoire

Blood was the key to unlocking demon magic.

I’d been thinking about Greed’s seemingly innocuous answer all afternoon, and puzzle pieces slowly clicked into place. I tallied up a few instances where blood had been integral with demon magic. In order to summon a demon, I needed to offer blood in sacrifice.

Then there was Wrath and his blood trade. The supposed blood debt Nonna mentioned.

I tried and failed to hide my repulsion. Would it be too much for demons to accept a bit of wine instead? I sighed and pricked my finger with a pin, letting a single drop splatter onto Vittoria’s diary. Breath held, I stared at it intently, waiting for some sign the spell held or disintegrated.

There was no cataclysmic event or flash of lightning. One minute I couldn’t open it, and the next I could. I hesitated with the spine half cracked. I’d been trying to get into this diary for so long, and now I was a little afraid of what I was going to find. This might reveal my sister’s murderer. The more I learned, the more I doubted witch hunters. Demon princes were taking the lead as the most likely to commit murder. But if the devil needed a witch, it didn’t quite make sense for them to thwart his efforts. Which meant someone in our circle might have been responsible. I shivered in place. It was easy to think she’d been killed by a demon, but the thought of it being someone she knew . . .

I took a deep breath and began reading Vittoria’s most private thoughts.

The first several pages were dedicated to the perfumes she’d crafted. A few random spells, or charms for Moon Blessings and luck. A sketch or two of a cimaruta and a few other symbols I didn’t recognize. I paused on a page where she’d written down one of Claudia’s scrying sessions in great detail. I was about to scan the opposite page when something caught my eye. A tiny, almost insignificant note she’d left for herself.

Am I hearing magical objects, or the souls attached to them over time? Sometimes the whispers are louder, clear. Other times they’re frantic and hard to understand. Similar to Claudia’s scrying, or different?

Hearing magical objects? I stared at the line, unblinking. I had to be misunderstanding somehow. Vittoria never mentioned this ability before. We told each other everything. I was her twin, her other half—but then again, I’d never told her about the luccicare, either.

I turned over the events of the night when we were eight. It was highly probable that she’d developed some latent ability, too. I had. Though I had believed I was an anomaly because I’d been the one holding both of our amulets. I hadn’t confided in my sister because I didn’t want her to worry about the repercussions, or blame herself since it had been her idea.

I quickly turned to the next page, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. No clue to her magic. I flipped to another, and another. I’d gotten to the middle of her journal before finding another passage about the strange, secret magic.

I was out near the sea collecting shells and sea salt when I heard it. It started as a whisper, frantic, too low to hear clearly. I set my basket down and clutched my cornicello, which seemed to help me focus on the voice. Voices. There were many. And they were speaking all at once. They begged me to come help. They said the time was upon us. I followed the whispers until they turned to chatter, indistinct and out of sequence—like they were speaking in tongues. It reminded me of old Sofia Santorini. Of the time her mind got trapped between realms. I wanted to walk away, to run back and get Emilia, but something warned me not to. I followed the hum of voices into a cave, high above the sea. I don’t know why, but I dropped to my knees and started digging. I found it there, buried deep within the earth. I managed to understand one line before it descended into chaos.

Unfortunately, my twin didn’t write down the line she’d heard. I exhaled loudly, hands shaking as I flipped through the rest of the diary. There wasn’t any other passage about the mysterious “it” she’d found buried beneath the earth. I scanned doodles of flowers and hearts, Claudia’s dreams, and all of the questions Vittoria had recorded the answers to.

I couldn’t bring myself to read the part about what ended up being our last night in the world together. So far there were no names, no people she’d mistrusted, or demons she’d struck bargains with. How she’d ended up agreeing to marry—my attention fastened on to something that made my palms dampen.

I didn’t plan on listening to it again. I’d already decided to hide it, far from where they could ever find it. Then it whispered something that sounded a lot like nonsense, but my blood prickled. The Horn of Hades is a key to locking the gates of Hell, but, according to it, what it really is, is two somethings. They are the devil’s horns, cut off by his own hand. I held my cornicello, feeling the truth in the hum and whispers. The root of my power. Emilia and I, for reasons I am unsure of, have been wearing the devil’s horns our whole lives.

So if that’s true, how did they find their way to us?

I slowly closed the diary and exhaled. Holy goddess. The devil’s horns. It was hard to believe and yet . . . I knew it was true. We’d been wearing the Horn of Hades our whole lives. No wonder Greed was so interested in our amulets—I couldn’t even begin to imagine the damage that he could cause if he managed to get his hands on them both. I shoved that destruction from my mind and read over the last line my sister wrote again. It was an excellent question. One I fully intended to get the answer to immediately.

“It’s about time you tore yourself away from dark pursuits, bambina. Your mother and father are sick with worry.” Nonna eyed me from the rocking chair she’d dragged across from the simmering cauldron. Spell candles for peace and restful slumber burned all around her. “All day, petrified you were laying somewhere with your heart ripped out, alone. Like your sister. Do you have any idea what you put us through?”

I did. And I hated it, but I wasn’t the only di Carlo who had explaining to do. I moved fully into the kitchen and laid Wrath’s dagger and then my cornicello on the island. “Is this one of the devil’s horns?” Nonna’s face paled. “Have we been wearing the Horn of Hades?”

“Don’t be silly. Who filled your head with these stories?” Nonna got up and walked over to the cauldron, added a sprinkle of herbs and stirred them into her newest essence. It smelled of spruce and mint. I wondered where she got the evergreen, but didn’t ask. “We don’t believe in such things, bambina.”

“A Viperidae was summoned, and is guarding Vittoria’s amulet.”

She stopped stirring the mixture. “It’s true, then. The Malvagi have returned.”

I waited for her to start muttering protection charms, or rush around the house, checking all the windows and doors for herbs and garlands of garlic she’d hung to keep wicked things out. She didn’t ask me to grab olive oil and a bowl of water to make sure evil wasn’t in our home this very moment. This calm, collected version of my grandmother was completely foreign to me. For as long as I could remember, she’d worried about the devil and his soul-stealing demons.

Human children had nursery rhymes, but we’d been taught about the seven demon princes and the four—in particular—di Carlos should fear the most. I hadn’t forgotten that Wrath had been named. Nor had I figured out if he was the one who’d crave my blood, capture my heart, steal my soul, or take my life. Honestly, I could picture him fulfilling any of them.

My grandma moved the wooden spoon around the boiling mixture, her attention stubbornly fixed on its ornately carved handle, and said nothing. Of course now that all of the nightmarish stories were coming to life, she stayed silent.

“Nonna, you have to tell me about the Horn of Hades. Vittoria knew about it, and she was killed. Please. If you don’t want that to be my fate, too, you need to tell me what it is and why we’re wearing it. I deserve to know.”

She stared into the cauldron and sighed.

“Dark days are upon us. It’s time to be a warrior of the light.” Nonna left her essences and removed a pitcher of wine from our sideboard. She poured herself a glass of chianti, then sat in her rocker. “I never wanted it to come to this, child. But the hands of Fate work their own magic. Who are we but puppets on their cosmic strings?”

Cryptic as usual. I decided to start with the smaller details, and work my way up to the harder questions. “Is it really a key for locking the gates of Hell?”

“Yes and no. It has the ability to open and close the gates, but that’s not all it does.”

“Are they the devil’s horns?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve known the whole time?”

Nonna nodded. I stared at her, trying to process the fact that my grandmother—who’d been making us bless our charms to protect ourselves from the demon princes our entire lives—had placed such things around our necks. “La Prima cast a spell that turned them into two smaller amulets, hoping to hide them from all who’d seek them.”

“Because they belong to the devil?”

“Because if brought together, they not only have the ability to lock the gates, they can also summon him. They grant the summoner a certain bit of power over him.”

I stared at the amulet I’d worn for as long as I could remember, wondering why my sister hadn’t come to Nonna when she’d found this out. I still had so many questions about her bargain. If we had a means of controlling the devil, why didn’t she just ask me for my cornicello?

It made sense why Greed was after it; his sin was closely tied to power. But if all princes of Hell craved power why, then, didn’t Wrath try to snatch my cornicello?

Something Envy said resurfaced amidst my confusion. “What’s a shadow witch?”

Nonna made a disgusted sound. “Shadow witches are what demons call us. We are known as Stelle Streghe.”

Star witches. “We are known? Since when are we known as Star Witches?”

Nonna gave me a sardonic look. “Since the dawn of our bloodline. We hail from an ancient line of witches who had ties to the Wicked prior to the curse. We were guardians in a sense, ensuring creatures of the underworld remained there, never interfering with the human world. For a time we worked beside the Malvagi. That was before—”

Nonna’s wine glass flew across the room and shattered against the wall. Chianti dripped like blood. I screamed, but not because of the glass. A floating blade hovered against my grandmother’s throat. My ghost demon was back, and it didn’t seem like just a figment of my imagination now. It had been quiet the last few days, and I’d forgotten it. Now it was hard to ignore Wrath’s serpent dagger as it glinted in the light.

“Little tricksy witch.”

The demon’s blade pressed into Nonna’s skin. I shook my head and stepped forward. “Please. If this is about what I did to Greed, she has nothing to do with it. Leave her alone, she’s innocent.”

“Innocent?” It accentuated the “c” until it sounded like a hiss. “She is no such thing.”

Before I could dash across the room and knock Nonna away, her head jerked back and the invisible hand dragged Wrath’s blade across her throat. Blood gushed from her wound. She gurgled, the sound one of the most horrendous things I’d ever heard. The weapon clattered to the ground. I watched everything happen as if it occurred in slow increments.

A window burst open, and I imagined the invisible demon fled through it.

Then reality crashed into me and I was in motion. I was across the room a breath later.

“No!” I snatched a cloth from the counter and held it to her neck, stanching the blood. Then I screamed until my voice broke, rousing the whole house from the spelled slumber Nonna had enchanted them with. There were spells to help slow the flow of blood, but I couldn’t think of any through the panic screeching at me. It was as if my mind shut down and all I could focus on was one basic need: hold the wound.

My mother rushed into the kitchen first, her attention immediately falling on Nonna. And the growing lake of blood. Tears streamed down my face, blurring my vision.

I would not let my grandmother die. Not like this.

My father appeared a minute later, his eyes widening at the sight. “I’ll get bandages.”

I stopped paying attention to anything other than keeping the cloth pressed firmly against my grandmother’s wound. Time ticked by. Blood saturated the cotton, my mother prayed over a thick herbal paste she’d made. I held firmly. I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t panic and could act calmly. But logic didn’t penetrate my terror. Mamma tried yanking my hands away, but I refused to budge. I had to keep applying pressure. Nonna needed me.

“It’s all right, baby. Let me get this on her. It’ll seal the wound.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. It’s all right.”

It took another bit of coaxing, but I finally relinquished my grip. Nonna slid to the ground, her breathing labored. I’d seen this in injured animals before and it wasn’t a good sign.

My mother slathered the thick paste across the injury, then wrapped one of the clean bandages around it. My father had brought them in before he went to work checking for any more intruders and securing our window. My mother finished tying it off with a prayer to the goddess of good health and well-being to heal Nonna quickly. I offered up a prayer of my own, hoping she listened to us both.

“Help me get her into bed, Emilia.”

I swiped at my tears and did as I was asked. Once we’d laid her across the mattress, my mother pulled up a chair to watch. I sat against the wall and stayed there until the sun set, turning the room bruised shades of purple and black. Nonna’s breathing finally evened out, and she fell into a deep, restorative sleep. She’d made it, no thanks to me. Praise the goddess.

“You should go get some rest, baby. Your grandmother will be fine. The worst is over.”

I nodded, but couldn’t sleep now. I wasn’t sure I could ever rest again without seeing the gory scene replay in my mind. And the worst part was, Nonna was almost killed because of me. Then, when she needed me the most, I’d failed her again. I’d lost all memories of spells or healing charms. I’d shut down and let fear take control. If I hadn’t started investigating my sister’s murder, or tricked Greed, none of this would have happened.

I crept into the kitchen, wanting to clean up the blood before my parents saw it again. I scrubbed until the floor shined and my fingers ached. Then I repeated the routine. Pouring water, scrubbing. I needed to remove the stains from the grout. It took most of the night, but I finally managed to erase all physical signs of the attack. But the memory would never leave me.

I rinsed out the rag and leaned against the island, sipping a glass of water. It took a while for me to notice at first, but eventually I realized the invisible demon came here with a mission. I absently reached up, thinking of Nonna’s injury, and went to hold my amulet. My hand dropped away, empty. I forgot I’d taken it off. I went to pluck it off the counter and froze.

My cornicello was gone.