The Collector's Tithe: A Da Vinci Supernatural Thriller (The Painted Souls, #3)

The Mona Lisa was the cage. The collector has come for the man who built it.

Florence, 1503. Artists are vanishing behind shuttered doors, and the thing that wears Lisa del Giocondo's face is still whispering through the cracks of the world. Leonardo da Vinci, last keeper of his line, came home to fight one hunger. He finds a city being farmed.

Vincenzo de' Neroni survived the Black Death by making himself useful to the things that feed. For a century and a half he has been a cultivator: selecting the gifted, ripening their talent, delivering them to appetites older than Rome. His collection fills a palazzo in Venice. His seeds are planted in soldiers, merchants and priests along every road out of Florence. And he has decided that Leonardo, the one painter who ever built a cage instead of a feast, will be his masterpiece.

With his grandfather's pigments nearly spent, a broken friend who now speaks the hungers' own tongue, and Salai at his side, Leonardo must run a gauntlet of everything Neroni has planted between Florence and freedom. Running will not save him. Keepers who run are only harvested tired.

Paris, tonight. Dr. Amara Santos has started seeing what no curator should see. And a man who has worn a hundred names in seven hundred years pours a whiskey opposite the Louvre, and waits.

The Painted Souls continues. For readers of Dan Brown and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.