To sit there and do nothing. What a useless piece of crap I was.
She hurt. Her pain was enormous. It rolled through and over me. She understood, however, when I could not. The only thing to do was wait for it to be over.
“Look,” I spoke softly to her. “Look. The sun is coming up. It’s another day.”
What did she know with her eyes closed like that? I would lie and do whatever else I could to provide comfort.
I was alone except for Whisper and had been in one way or another since I was six-years-old. We didn’t have a single damn person I could go to and beg to help us. Help did not exist in Venice. That’s why I resented being alive. Trapped until the tide went out again in this subterranean doorway that reeked of mold and rotting fish, I hugged her carefully, oh, so carefully in my arms.
“What will you catch today, my love?” I asked her. “A pigeon? A fat, juicy mouse?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw whorls of royal blue slide into the flashlight beam.
Again? So soon? I wanted to pick up the flashlight and throw it smashing into the stairwell wall facing me. At least, if we were in total darkness, I couldn’t see the mess another dream seizure made of this moment.
Then something astonishing happened. Rather than cast the surrounding environment into a blue dirge, the light expanded and grew stronger, more natural, less blue. Its source changed, too, no longer coming from the flashlight, but from a spot over my shoulder. I couldn’t turn around, not with Whisper in my lap, but a second later the brick wall to my left disappeared, replaced by azure sky and gentle sun.
My lips parted, my mouth open in disbelief as walls faded and the quay at the end of La Piazzetta San Marco replaced the watery dungeon in which we’d taken shelter. Sitting cross-legged, I stared out at the Grand Canal and the morning sun warmed Whisper’s fur.
While I marveled at what I saw, Whisper’s upper body curled into itself. Her head butted into my stomach. She was afraid. I could feel that, too. She needed to be near me. Held close. Her eyes closed again, and she began to purr.
Bright, hazy sunshine was the last thing she knew.
That was me. I’d given Whisper one final morning.
A few seconds later, the air left her lungs in a long, shuddering gasp.
She was still.
San Marco vanished.
We sat together on the dimly lit landing until the tide went out and stairs re-emerged from the dirty sea. I spent the hours picking splinters out of my hands by the light from a flickering, failing pen light. When at last the water was low enough for me to escape, I tucked Whisper into the corner where door and wall met, kissed her ears and the top of her head and told myself I would remember the feel of them forever.
And then I descended into the tunnel. Not looking back. Away.
4
Sulla Grigio never took off his shades, indoors or out, not in total darkness, and as far as I knew, screwed his wife while wearing them, too. He thought by hiding his eyes no one would see he was a hybrid, son of a fae father who took off on Sulla’s human mother five minutes after he sprinkled his magic fairy sperm on the naïve, poverty-stricken ragazza and was never heard from again.
I hadn’t been unfortunate enough to catch Sulla and his middle-aged wife doing it, thank God, but he wasn’t shy about taking a piss in front of a woman in the middle of a business deal. It was weird since a boiled shrimp could have stood in for his prick, and he apparently didn’t care who knew it. Still, if you wanted to sell him your antiquities, you had to accept Sulla the way he was and pretend nothing he said or did unnerved you. You had to make him think you could take it. Usually, he was just gross. Fat and opposed to hygiene, he reeked of perpetually infected sweat glands. A facial tic contorted his upper cheeks at least once a minute.
On rare occasions, however, he could be shockingly physical and brutal. I’d been selling to him since I was nine and learned after one particular trade not to enter his “shop” unarmed. My body had hurt afterward in ways I didn’t understand at that age, and no matter how hard I’d scrubbed, no matter what homemade potions and concoctions I’d used to get rid of him, he’d clung to my skin and hair for weeks.
Why did I return to a child molester, again and again, to sell what I had unearthed from debris inside the wrecked and ruined apartments of Venice? Because I had to eat, and there was no one else. It really was that cut and dried. I’d made sure he never touched me again, though. The missing tip of his left middle-finger used to embolden me each time I stepped through the door with merchandise in my pack. I’d done that. When younger, I’d believed it proved what a bad-ass I could be. However, Sulla—never mourning the ten grams of flesh I’d extracted—thought the whole thing hilarious.
“So, you’re here,” he said an hour after I’d left Whisper in the storm drain. “I thought you might come.”
My heart vaulted into the back of my throat and tried to choke me.
He’d been expecting me?
One concrete rule I’d maintained in our sick dealer-slash-scavenger-rape victim relationship was that Sulla had never seen my face. I’d never told him my name. He did not know who I was or at least that’s what I’d always believed. I’d worn a deep hoodie and a carnival mask during all our transactions from the moment I’d met him.
Masking wasn’t a social requirement; it was just good sense for an unaccompanied girl without family. Those girls and women who wanted to skip their security details always wore masks. Polizia did not exist in post-merge Venice, but those without family were the least safe. When I wore a mask, no one knew I was unfamilied. I might be a girl of high rank. No gangs or other violent criminals would want a piece of that. Assault or kill a girl with family, and the vendetta you brought down on yourself could be as much of a death sentence as the decree I now faced.
In the twelve years we’d known each other, Sulla had never breached that one point of my privacy. Every other form of it, yes, but he’d left my face my secret. Again, as a kid, I’d believed foolishly it was his way of apologizing for what he’d done to me. What a load. When I was sixteen, he finally confessed with a shrug that he’d never found that part of my anatomy of interest.
So when I knocked on his door and he said, I thought you might come, I panicked. He’d known who I was all along.
Sulla chuckled. “So, the little marten freezes at the flap of a raptor’s wings.”
Little marten. That’s what he called me.
I didn’t dare move from the doorway.
“Did you think I would let anyone walk in here without identifying her first?”
He reached under the counter and produced a small monitor trailing cords and cables he set on the rippling, water-damaged plywood. Venetians cobbled together many of the technologies that had been commonplace in the old city before the change, with a difference. Sulla pivoted the screen so I could see. I gasped. My face bobbed, suspended in a blue mist on the screen, every facial feature hidden by the mask I wore detailed courtesy of fae magic.
My gaze darted to the camera mounted in a strategic corner opposite the entrance to the forgotten underground chamber turned home and shop. Buried two levels below a neighborhood square known as a campo, originally it had been a community cistern.
Sulla gave one of his typical shrugs. “A hood and carnival mask? No match at all for my cameras.”
“You know, then,” I whispered.
“That you are morte dal consiglio? Sì.”
I swung around to leave.
“Lunari!” He called after me.
I paused with my hand on the door, already pushed open for me to slip out.
“Sell me what you have brought,” he said.
“No.”
“Come on. Who are you going to deal with?”
“Someone else.”
“There is no one else for you.”
“I’ll find someone else.”
“I’m not going to tell if that’s what worries you.”
“Yeah, right. Any
profit you make off what I have is nothing compared to what the council will give you for turning me in.”
Sulla’s fat hand rose to his temple, his fingers grasped his sunglasses and boosted them atop his head. Muddy blue eyes frowned at me, hardly remarkable. I was confused. This was what he’d concealed all these years? He had blue eyes. So what? Lots of people did.
He shook his head at me. “Wait.”
A few seconds later, it happened. I thought at first it was just one of his facial tics. His human blue eyes sank back and down into his skull behind his cheekbones. Exposed muscles and tendons worked, and another set of eyes dropped into place where the first had been. Also blue, they almost resembled a bright fae’s eyes. Or would have had the whites not been missing and the irises surrounded by weeping red veins.
He pulled his sunglasses back over his eyes. Another tic screwed up his face, presumably restoring the human appearing eyes to their sockets.
“The council and I would not be…simpatico,” he said.
I hid my discomfort with what I’d seen.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “You don’t have to be friends with them to sell me out.”
“I would be an idiot to expose myself to them.”
“By law, you’re entitled to everything I have on me anyway.”
“Fine,” he said. “Go your own way, but you can’t eat a phone. That tablet I see outlined by your pack won’t keep you warm tonight.”
Sulla was right. I needed supplies if I hoped to make it through the coming days. I hesitated for several seconds. Since it was of no use in protecting me, I took off the mask and set it on the counter.
He huffed. “Thank you,” he said. “For trusting me.”
“Who says I do?”
He brushed my protest aside. “No matter.” He got down to business. His index and middle fingers gestured in a universal ‘gimme’ motion. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Last night had been one of my best in recent months, at least before I’d returned home to find looters and a red flag at my door. My wanderings through a section of Dorsoduro once frequented by artists, writers, and other tourists but now sagging into full decay and infested by gangs rougher than the fireheads, had turned up a surprisingly well-preserved cache of electronics from the twenty-first century. Bright fae adored them and paid a lot for them. At least, they would pay Sulla good money for them.
“I don’t have all day,” he said.
I dropped my pack on his makeshift counter, unzipped the front section and pulled out the first of two treasures. Sulla practically wet himself at the sight of the circa 2012 Samsung Galaxy smartphone I set on the counter. Screens without cracks were nearly unheard of when it came to electronic antiquities.
“Ohhh!” He picked it up with reverence. “Where did you find it?”
I snorted. “Right. I’m going to tell you that.”
“Why not? It’s not like you’ll ever have a chance to go back and look for more.”
As in, I would be dead.
He glanced up at me. “My apologies, little marten. That was careless of me to say.”
“Thoughtless, you mean.”
“Whatever.” Yet another shrug. “And what else do you have for me?”
Sulla’s wife, Alice, popped her head into the shop from the couple’s bedroom. Surprise puckered the smoker’s lines around her lips when she saw me. Her thinning eyebrows, heavily drawn in with pink pencil, shot up.
Sulla scowled at her, communicating his annoyance without saying a word. She retreated back into the bedroom, tugging the curtain separating the two spaces closed.
I removed my second find from the pack, and handling it gingerly by the edges, I placed it in front of him: another historic device, an Apple iPad. Going by the serial and model number I looked up in my guide, it dated to 2020. It, too, had an unblemished screen.
“I don’t suppose you found adapters with either of these? Accessories?”
I shook my head.
He let out a long sigh, full of regret. “Too bad.”
“Sulla, you know as well as I do that these are mint.”
“I’ll give you ten thousand lire.”
Ten thousand lire were the price of a day’s worth of food. An insult. Not saying a single word, I snatched the Samsung out of his hand and jammed it back in my pack. I went for the tablet, to put it in my back pack, but he stayed my hand.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Not money.”
“Of course not.” He nodded and agreed. “Money won’t be of use to you any longer.”
“A sleeping bag and mat. Soap. Toothbrush sealed in the package. Lantern. A collapsible water container and filter,” I said. “None of it used, either. The sleeping bag, especially, better be new.”
“Yes. Yes. I wouldn’t dream of selling you one already…”
“Inhabited?” I shuddered at the thought of what insect life and bacteria resided in Sulla’s used fabric goods.
“Just so.”
“And food,” I said. “Stuff I don’t have to cook. Easy to open.”
“Naturally.”
“And…” This was the big buy, the main thing I’d come here to barter for. “…a fate cell. A powerful one.”
He sputtered. “No. Now you are the one insulting me.”
“Did you think I only had the two goodies I’ve shown you?”
“Really? What else?”
“First, tell me if you have what I want,” I said.
His face launched into a series of hostile twitches, and I visualized the rapid-fire exchange of the two pairs of eyes in his head.
“As you point out, I could just take everything you have,” he said. “It’s within my rights.”
I threw off the hand clamped over mine and took back the iPad, a visual distraction, while my other hand quickly pulled a blade from a pocket in my jacket sleeve. At the press of a tab on the hilt, the flick knife sprung open.
“How much do you value the middle finger on your other hand?”
Sulla uttered a petulant sigh. “You steal from me, Lunari.”
“Do you have one or not?”
“Yes.”
“Then…” Still holding my knife, though less aggressively, I put the Samsung and iPad back on the counter. I dug deeper into my bag for the package I’d retrieved from the hiding spot back in my apartment bathroom. My fingers worked quickly to pull apart two separate bundles tied together. One bundle he could have; the other I would keep for an even greater emergency than I faced now. “These can be yours, as well.”
Sulla unwrapped the bundle I handed him. It contained two Apple iPhones, one a nearly unheard of gold iPhone 10, an Apple Watch, complete with original synthetic rubber band, though that had cracked and begun to disintegrate half a century ago, and a pair of glasses with electronics embedded in the lenses that I couldn’t find listed anywhere in my guide, which meant they must be rare, and thus valuable.
He drooled over the horde laid in front of him, tongue licking his lips. Seconds later, he turned, squatted down with a grunt and a fart, and opened a mini-fridge against the wall behind the counter. Its door turned out to be a false one intended to disguise a safe. Pressing his palm to the safe’s door inside, he uttered words I didn’t quite catch and pulled his hand away. A moment later, the shape of a keypad formed within and then extruded from the grey-green metal slab, keys blank of varying sizes and scattered the door in a free form pattern instead of a grid. Sulla wasn’t deterred by the nonsensical arrangement or lack of numbering. He entered a combination, each key emitting a brief flash of turquoise light as he touched it. The door popped open with a rush of air escaping. An intoxicating floral scent, at odds with Sulla’s dank and musty shop, tingled the inside of my nose.
Sulla shoved items inside the safe aside until his fingers latched onto the one he wanted. He stood, bumped the safe and refrigerator doors closed with his knee and dropped a small but weighty brocade sack on the counter. My hands went
out for it.
“You don’t want to touch that without gloves on,” he said.
I had no desire to release what was inside the bag. Not here, anyway. I’d owned one before, much less powerful than this one. I didn’t need to examine it uncovered to know the fate cell as the real thing. It sang. The music was barely there, softer than the brush of wind through leaves on a mostly calm day, but once you’d heard it, you recognized it forever.
I buried the cell in the bottom of my pack, gathered the other things he piled on the counter for me, and headed for the door.
“Lunari—” Sulla had something left to say to me, but I knew my time was running out. I couldn’t afford to stay in any one place for long. Besides, for the first time since that day he’d assaulted a homeless nine-year-old too stupid to understand what was going on, I felt free. I’d never have to speak to this deviant again to buy food and the other basics of life. I would never come back here.
Outside the shop, I sprinted up the stairwell away from his door, into a second, larger chamber, and hurried through a hole in the basement wall of one of the houses that faced the campo above.
Shit.
I’d left my mask on Sulla’s counter.
Go back or leave it?
Leave it.
It was fortunate I could continue for another third of a kilometer through a warren of basements and connecting passages before I’d have no choice but to pop my head up into the streets and possibly be spotted by someone eager to claim the bounty the council would have placed on my head.
Lay low. Find some place to hide until things—
I halted mid-thought, darting into a shadowed niche. That presence from the tunnel was back. Someone was following me again, the same hunter. I’d swear it. I was almost a kilometer away from where he’d been turned back by the flooded storm drain. I’d made dozens of turns to get here. Gone through door after door, up and down levels, in and out of ruins and slag heaps of brick and marble that had once been the grand residences of Dorsoduro to reach Sulla’s rat den. How had he found me?
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 4
