Read The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird for Free Online

leaning against the columns, holding hands, hanging out. Maybe they were older than I was, but they didn’t look it.
    At home in Center Plains, they would be in trouble. Somebody from the shops around the piazza would have called theschool. I thought of my high school, of the ice in the parking lot on February mornings like this. I suddenly wished all the girls back home could see me now, walking through the heart of Europe’s fashion capital, looking like I belonged there. I wanted to casually answer my cell phone,
“Pronto,”
and have an animated conversation in Italian, preferably with some gorgeous guy.
    I sighed, looking over at all the teenagers, and Nonno smiled at me.
    “Not enough people your own age in your life, I think,” he said as we went on. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure I truly minded; I didn’t hang out with people my own age at home, except for my sister, and she’s one and a half years younger, even if everyone always thought of her as older than me. But to have a crowd of friends like the ones sitting on the steps; to have something to do on Friday nights besides help Nonna Laura cook fish; to have a boyfriend to post pictures of on Facebook—well, I did wish for that.
    What did it matter, anyway? I was probably going to die, killed by the demon that had taken two of my cousins in the last century, and killed another young woman practically under my eyes. She had come back to herself before she died, that was true. But, like many others, she had died because she’d been possessed. Sometimes all we could do, I had learned, was make sure they died free of whatever creature had attacked them. It seemed a pretty miserable victory.
    “Anna Maria can’t really introduce you to anyone,” Nonno was saying. “She left school at fifteen to become a model, and she never seemed all that interested in making friends her own age. I don’t want you meeting the kinds of people she works with, or the men in her life,” he added. “Your father would not be happy with me. He’s angry enough that we had to take you away, isn’t he?”
    “I think he’s getting over it,” I said. “But I don’t think it matters: I don’t live the life that other girls my age live, do I?”
    He nodded. “It’s a lonely matter, being a member of this family,” he said. “When you can get away from all the other family members,” he added, grinning.
    I grinned, too, in spite of myself. “But that’s not what I meant,” I said. “I mean, with … with someone chasing me.”
    “I was thinking of that, too. Yet so many people have a demon after them, you know,” he told me.
    “You mean, like a metaphor?” I asked, feeling impatient. “Because mine isn’t a metaphor.”
    He could only shrug in agreement. We had been waiting to cross the busy Via Orefici, streetcars rumbling along while cars and
motorini
zipped past. Now we stepped hastily into the street, taking advantage of a window in the traffic and getting sworn at by a biker, the dog in her basket yapping as if it were swearing, too.
    “Have patience with an old man!” Giuliano called after her, and then we were across the street, heading for an old buildingfar up the Via Cesare Cantù. “It first opened to the public in 1609,” he told me as we got closer and climbed the dimpled stone steps. “The Biblioteca Ambrosiana,” he said.
    There was no sign over the door, just a poster for an exhibit. Inside, the hallway smelled like the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, where my family occasionally attended services. It occurred to me as we pushed through the glass doors that it smelled kind of like our shop, too.
    “Here,” said Nonno, opening another door, and we entered the great library.
    “Libraries always take me by surprise,” Nonno reflected in a whisper. “I always expect them to be bigger than they are.” The Biblioteca Ambrosiana’s main room was carpeted in red, and its walls of books rose to the arched ceiling. There was a