by Zan Safra
I shove the thought away.
The procession of the Dead continues, sneaking from homes and sepulchers. They were always here. They must have been here since the beginning, as they are in other cities, lurking for centuries in cellars, cemeteries, hidden lairs.
The northern docks come into view. Beyond the lagoon lies the mainland and its distant mountains, peaks gleaming white as bone. The katakano lumbers onto the wharf. Without pausing it steps over the edge of the boards and drops into the water. After a moment it emerges, slowly swimming towards land.
The nachzehrer follows it, shroud rippling as it jumps. The pricolici and three upiri slip into the water. Vampire after vampire leaps into the lagoon, moving at a deliberate pace, a column of rats deserting a burning ship.
Deserting Venice.
A low voice slinks into my ears. “Bona sera, siorina.”
I spin about. A gaslit silhouette stands at the mouth of the lane, leaning cross-armed against the wall. His form is a void, but for the faint shine of eyes.
He steps into the moonlight. He wears old-fashioned clothing, of a kind I’ve only seen in paintings: a knee-length coat, lacy cuffs, buckled shoes. His blond hair hangs to his shoulders, limp with humidity. His face is gaunt, hollow-cheeked, like that of someone deathly ill. Deep creases mar his face, running from the corners of his mouth, splitting his chin.
An aluka. One of the Greater Dead.
His voice is silky, a cloying purr. “What is a pretty lass doing out of doors on such a night?” His clouded eyes glitter. “Spying on the Dead.”
A small hunched shape peers around his legs, a monkeyish corpse with hands curled into crescent-shaped hooks. Its eyes gleam like sparks of sulfur, points of light shining in the center of gaping sockets.
A myling. A child vampire.
“You haven’t run,” the aluka says.
I clench my fists. “You haven’t given me reason.”
The aluka smiles, tight-lipped, hiding his teeth. “I’ve already fed.”
A chill crawls down my back. “Who are you?”
The aluka regards me, eyes sharp, considering. “I was called Laszlo, when I lived.”
The myling creeps towards me. “Amon!” the aluka barks. The myling scurries back to his side.
“Little devil.” Laszlo ruffles the myling’s sparse mane of hair. “I keep him out of mischief. For the most part.”
He studies me. There is nothing human about his gaze, fixed, unblinking, dead and yet alight. I force myself to meet it. “Where are you going?”
“Me?” He shrugs. “Wherever I land next. Meat is abundant in this part of the world.”
Laszlo glances at my metal left hand. He cocks an eyebrow.
I tighten my fists. “Why are you leaving Venice?”
The smile hardens. “I prefer freedom to servitude.”
“Servitude?” I realize what it must mean. “To the fiend?”
“To any.” He narrows his eyes. “What do you know of the fiend?”
“We’ve…met,” I say. “It went poorly.”
He snorts. “Her little minions tried to recruit a number of us.”
“Recruit?”
“Oh, yes.” He grimaces. “Many did join her, many of standing. The yek brigade, the drekavac assassins, the Corradina sisters. All her pets now, I’m told.”
His eyes sharpen with contempt. “I’ve heard her promises. Naught but that. Promises.”
Amon chitters and leaps away, chasing a passing moth. I hold Laszlo’s gaze. “I mean to kill her.”
“You?” He chuckles. “Best of luck to you, siorina.”
He turns to the playing myling and lets out a hiss like a cat’s. The myling returns to his side. The aluka nods to me and saunters past, the myling trotting behind him, towards the water’s edge.
“I will destroy her! I’ll end this!”
Laszlo turns. Amon peers at me curiously. “What stake do you have in this?” the aluka asks. “The meat hate your kind.”
“She’s…attacked Unnaturals. She wants to capture us as well,” I say. “That won’t do.”
Laszlo looks out towards the mainland, his haggard face pensive. “I’ve no real wish to leave,” he murmurs.
He turns to me again. “Come with me. Tell the rest of your intentions.”
“The…the rest?”
He nods, extending a hand. “Prove yourself, Lady Unnatural.”
I don’t move. I mustn’t. It’s madness. Utter lunacy.
And my best hope of discovering more.
Take heart, Draculesti.
I steel myself and reach out. He takes my hand and draws me forward. The myling follows us as we move on, into the waiting night.
Chapter Fifteen
Belle
I AM AWAKE, AND not awake. Smoky grayness envelops me. I am drifting, dreaming, but then…
Wet leaves press against my face. The smell of mud and loamy rot crawls up my nose. I know this. I have felt and scented these things before.
In the Before.
My hands press against the ground, pushing me up. I cannot move as I wish. This has already happened. I cannot change the past.
I see my hands. They are blue, stitched, with silver fingernails. But…but not right…
I rise to my knees, staring at my hands. Were they always this way? So odd, so…
Yes. No. Yes. No.
I stand. My gown is long and gray. Heavy boots grip my feet, made of thick leather and with metal soles. A strange feeling pulses inside my heart, an energy, like fire but unlike fire.
Volta. It is called volta…
I look about. I stand in the middle of a muddy square. Dark jagged shadows turn to silhouettes of cottages. Beyond them stands a forest of whispering trees. Ragged clouds race across the sky. The smells of rain and lightning linger in the air.
Where am I?
All is quiet. The cottages lie in ruins. Tremendous scorches blacken their walls. Their doors and windows are empty and their insides are dark, hollowed out. Moonlight pours through the beams of their crumbling roofs. Nothing stirs within them, not even drops of rain.
Unease grows in my chest. The shadows are solid, so deep that anyone or thing could hide within them. I wonder if someone watches me. Every moment I expect to glimpse a pair of staring eyes.
I wrap my arms about myself and walk, leaves crunching beneath my boots, peering into each ruined home. Someone lies on the floor of the fifth.
I go closer. The figure comes better into view. She lies sprawled on her back, not in the way one falls asleep.
A new feeling drops like a stone into my stomach. Dread.
I step through the door, into air grainy with floating cinders. The person wears a gown something like mine. Her dark hair is disheveled, fallen from its knot, concealing her face. One hand lies flung out. It wears a leather gauntlet, with a palm and fingers covered with metal scales. Beside it lies a strange, broken device, a shattered glass sphere encased in a shell of fine golden wire. The wire is torn, as though something exploded through it.
Fear tears through my brain. Run! Get away! GET AWAY!
But my feet carry me forward. I kneel at her side and move her hair from her face.
A bolt of shock and horror and misery and pain tears out of me in a wail as I fall on her, clutching her, shaking her, begging her to…
I open my eyes. The traces of the Before slink away, dwindling to nothing.
A haze surrounds me. Every part of me aches. The volta around my heart pulses, diminished.
All of it returns. Jette. A brilliant crowd. A Dead creature with insect eyes, a thing that stole my volta…
I sit up. I lie in a canopied bed, atop a green coverlet. Bars of moonlight stream through towering windows, illuminating a room so grand that I wonder whether I am still dreaming. The walls are papered in turquoise and the ceiling is gold-leafed, set with dark oil paintings. Polished furnishings with golden upholste
ry stand artistically placed about the room and an enormous fireplace covers an entire wall, carved with endless spirals and curlicues.
The vampires brought me here. For what?
I raise my hand, prying volta from my heart. I can hardly muster a thread. I unravel it, trying to create sparks, but the thread thins the further it travels down my arm. It dies at my wrist.
I cannot fight. I hardly have enough to stay alive.
I slide from the bed. The carpet crunches under my feet as I head for the door. It leads to an adjoining room, one so dim that I can only just make out the door at its other end.
I rush for it, banging into tables and chairs. I shove them out of the way and reach the door, but when I find the handle a noise freezes me. The hiss of an igniting candle.
I turn. A pale hand emerges from the shadow of an armchair and sets the candle on a low table. Its light flares, revealing a girl so beautiful that the sight of her robs me of my breath. Her eyes are large and hazel, her hair long and auburn, falling in rippling waves down her back. She wears clothing of a kind I have never seen, a black tunic dress with a wide cloth belt, both embroidered with silver thread. A black diadem sits atop her head, dangling strands of black pearls that frame her face.
My hand closes around the doorknob at my back. “Who are you?”
The girl only looks at me. The candle flame sways, making her silhouette thicken and thin, there and not-there.
A chill pierces me. Something is wrong with her. Her skin is papery and with no tint of life, no blood running beneath it. Her hair is dulled. Her eyes are unfocused, glassy. She may as well be a waxwork.
Or a propped-up corpse.
Kudlak, Ayanda murmurs in my head. Shape-changer…
“You?” I blurt.
A smile spreads across the fiend’s face, a strained stretching that reveals every tooth. She does not blink. She has not blinked once.
I croak out, “What do you want with me?”
“To speak with you.” Her voice is sweet and airy. “Nothing more.”
She sweeps and arm towards the chair opposite. I do not move. “Where is Jette?”
Her smile does not waver. “I cannot say.”
“You have her as well?”
She says nothing. I feel I am trapped in some game, with rules I cannot understand.
“No,” the fiend says.
Her expression changes in minute movements, as though she must concentrate to control each muscle. “I am sorry for our last misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding? You tried to kill us!”
“No!” Her face rearranges again, stunned now. “I meant to return you to me. I should not have used servants as…crude as upiri.”
“I saw how you attacked Ayanda. You did it before my eyes!”
“She meant to slay me.” For an instant I hear the dry scratch of the kudlak, a rotten core with the sweet voice wrapped around it. “Did she not?”
Beads of sweat run down my spine. “Who are you?” I ask. “Truly?”
The expression falls away. The world petrifies, waiting.
The name she speaks is sibilant, let out like a breath. “Isadora.”
I cannot say what I expected, but it was not that.
She gestures towards the chair again. I grip the doorknob so tightly that it creaks. I am locked in. I am barely alive. I have no choice.
She wants to talk. Very well.
I go to the armchair and sit. The fiend smiles again, but no pretty face or name can fool me. I know what she is.
Isadora motions towards the shadows. A man steps out of them, dressed in livery and bearing a golden tray. He sets a glass of reddish tea on the table. Isadora smiles and nods to him, like a queen acknowledging a subject. He bows, awestruck, and retreats to the corner. He must be a moroi.
Curls of steam rise from the tea. Isadora chuckles. “It is not poisoned.”
“Not even with your blood?”
She blinks for the first time. “I would not do such a thing.”
I look to the man in the corner and back to her. She waves a hand. “They are only meat. It makes no difference to them.”
“That’s what we are to you. Meat.”
She raises her eyebrows. “No. Of course not you.”
“What makes me so different?”
“You are Unnatural.”
“What of it?”
She watches me through lifeless eyes. I squeeze the armrests. What does she mean by this? Why choose this shape? Whose shape is it? That of someone she killed, or…
“Is…is this how you were when you…lived?”
Silence. Her face stills, as though she has truly turned to wax.
“Yes,” she says.
I stare at her, dumbstruck. She looks no older than me.
“How did you die?”
Silence again. I wonder if I have gone too far.
Isadora lowers her gaze to the candle. “The Dragon killed me.” Twin flames dance in her eyes. “Then I killed him.”
Her jaw tightens. “I will be greater than he could ever have imagined.”
The air seems to quiver, as though a feeling is wafting from her, poisoning the room. A word from the Before streaks through my mind.
Hate.
The feeling winks out. I see her reining it in, collecting herself. “You must understand,” she says. “You have known death.”
“What?”
“You are a reanimation like the rest.”
Reanimation?
She falls silent. Her fingers drum on the armrest. I am almost glad when she speaks again. “We are alike. Unnaturals and the Dead,” she says. “The meat murder us all.”
The words slam into me like a rockfall. “You murder! I saw what you’ve—"
“We do not murder.” Her lips curl, baring her teeth. “We eat. We eat how we must.” Her hands unhook from the armrests. She spreads them. “All of nature has an order. All creatures are preyed upon by others. Why should the meat be different?”
She leans towards me, challenging. “Have you never eaten the flesh of a creature that once lived?”
“That’s not the same!”
“How? How is it not?” She glares at me. “You are as much of a monster to the beasts as I am to the meat.”
I wrack my brain for an answer, something to fling back at her. “It’s…it’s not the same.”
Her snarl turns to a smirk. She knows she won.
“I pity the beasts. They are innocent.” The candle flutters. As shadows pass over her face it seems to change, sharpening. “They are not as the meat are.”
“The meat slaughter the Dead,” she says. “They slaughter their own kin.”
“But…but they must. They’ve turned into—”
“Fiends? Demons?” She raises an eyebrow. “Monsters?”
A lump swells in my throat. “The Dead kill.”
“And the living do not? Unnaturals do not?” Her eyes narrow. “How many died during your escape from the Scholomance?”
The word stabs into my chest. “No one died.”
The air thickens. The darkness closes around us, a curtain severing us from the room, the world.
The memories emerge, those I have tried to stamp out. The pulse of volta tearing down the fuse in my hands. The explosion. The blast of smoke boiling down the corridor. Jette seizing my arm, dragging me into the blinding cloud, rubble tearing at my feet. The screams. There were screams, men’s screams, women’s. Many.
I blotted it out. I told myself that they lived. Alchemy can heal. The Scholomance must have saved them.
I squeeze the armrests, piercing the cushions. I cannot let her see. I must not let her see…
“They deserved their fate.”
“Don’t say that!”
“They would have killed you in the end.” The rot in her voice spreads, deadening it. “You were wise to kill them first.”
“I killed no one!�
��
“You killed to survive. As I do.”
“No!”
She scoffs. “They were only meat. They do not feel as we do.”
I stare at her. She stares straight back, eyes narrowed to slits.
“You were alive once,” I whisper.
The candle flickers again. This time the change does not disappear. Her teeth are longer.
“The meat watch their kin die in agony. When they return they murder them again,” she says. “They set them alight. They hack them to pieces.”
Her eyes shine, not with candlelight but from within. “Can you imagine?”
She leans forward. “We rise in terror. The Lesser Dead have no conception of what has passed. They do not comprehend why they are murdered. But the Greater are not fortunate. We rise with understanding.”
She presses her lips together. The line of her mouth hardens. “Can you imagine how it feels to see your family scream at the sight of you?” she murmurs. “How it feels when their swords and axes cleave you apart? When those who claim to love you set you alight?”
Her teeth clench. “I only learned the meat’s nature after I ceased to be one of them.”
Her fingers drum again. Her nails have lengthened. “Could they not have mercy? In thousands of years, could they not find a way, some way to…”
Ragged breaths seethe through her teeth. “They with their knowledge. Their clever, clever alchemists,” she spits. “Could they not find some other means of satisfying our hunger? Could they not have taught us to contain our instincts? Could they not have loved us? Seen that we are no different?”
Her cheeks hollow. Her eyes recede in their sockets. “Or was it easier to slaughter us?”
I swallow hard. “Th-they—”
“Quiet!”
I flinch back, heart battering my ribs.
“I have learned of Unnaturals. The meat brutalize you as well,” she says. “Is that not so?”
I have nothing to say.
Her voice softens. “This world can be better.”
“What?”
“I am the Dragon’s heir.” A smile spreads across her face, impossibly, gruesomely wide. “I have the strength to change it.”
“What do you—"
“Others of the Greater Dead are weak. They mimic the meat. They have their courts and Houses and pretend that they still live, but they cower. Pitiful.” She slams her fist against the armrest. “Pathetic!”
