by Venom (mobi)
Cass didn't say anything for a second. That was exactly how she felt, and he had put it into words better than she had ever been able to do. She repeated the sentence in her mind, intending to write it in her journal when she returned home. But even though it was true, she didn't want to admit to Falco that he was right. "I'm no one's pet," she insisted.
"You're not?" Falco raised an eyebrow. The way he was looking at her made Cass feel out of breath. He tucked the bit of parchment into the pocket of her cloak. "Keep it," he said. "You can hang it in your cage." Then he turned as if to go.
"I mean it!" Cass cried out. "I'm not like all the others." She realized she was squeezing her hands into fists.
"Is that so?" Falco turned back toward her, and all of the air went out of Cass's chest. They were separated by half an inch of space. She was hot all over, as though someone had lit a fire under her skin. Falco stared at her so intensely, she felt she could fall into his eyes, into the swirling mists she saw reflected there. "Yes," she whispered.
His lips quirked into a small smile. "Prove it," he said.
6
Cass studied Falco's face in the darkness as he pulled away from her again. Breeze whipped through his hair and he looked completely wild.
"Prove it? How?" Cass asked, suddenly feeling wild too.
"Come with me to look for clues," Falco said.
Cass searched his face for signs that he was joking, but found none. "Now?" she stuttered. "Isn't this your general business hour?"
Falco did not reply. Instead, he headed toward the graveyard gate. He paused to allow her to catch up. "Are you with me or not?"
So many thoughts flew through Cass's brain at once that she couldn't latch on to a single one of them. "But—but we don't have any idea where to begin," she said.
Falco pulled something from the pocket of his cloak. "Wrong. We have this." A strange ring sat on his palm, a smooth red stone set in sturdy silver. "I found it in your friend's tomb."
So that was what Falco had meant when he mentioned a trinket the previous night. She had forgotten all about it in her haste to escape the graveyard. Cass lifted the ring from his hand. A strange symbol was engraved in the center of the red stone. A six-petaled flower, inscribed in a circle. She had never seen Liviana wear anything like it. "Why didn't you mention this before?" she asked sharply.
Falco's eyes glinted in the dark. "Mi dispiace, Signorina. I got a bit distracted by the body of a murdered woman."
"This isn't Liviana's. It's far too big, and it isn't her style." Cass handed the ring back to Falco. "So maybe it belongs to the dead girl. Maybe it belongs to the murderer. How does that help us?"
Falco slipped the ring back into his pocket. "I've seen this symbol before. Traced in charcoal on a building, abandoned as far as I can tell. Maybe it's a hideout for a murderer."
Before Cass could respond, Falco started walking again, passing through the rusted iron gate and skirting the edge of her aunt's property. Cass hurried to catch up with him. Though he was only a few paces in front of her, the thick folds of mist nearly obscured his form.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked, then realized she had just given him tacit permission to take her somewhere. She pulled Siena's cloak tighter around her thin nightgown and added quickly, "I haven't even agreed to go anywhere with you."
"And yet here you are, stumbling alongside me like we're in a race." Falco's voice had a lilting, laughing quality to it, despite the fact that they were surrounded by ghostly white clouds, in the middle of a pitch-dark night. Then he said, "The city. The building is in a run-down block of the Castello district."
"The city?" Cass repeated. She realized they were nearing her aunt's moldy old dock. Her shoes sank slightly into the damp ground. She could hear the whispering of gentle waves as they coursed up against the rotting wood. Cass looked north, across the lagoon, toward where she knew Venice proper lay. Madalena had talked of stabbings and brawls that occurred in the streets at night. Cass could only imagine what sort of creatures prowled the dark. Thieves, murderers . . . vampires. Could Falco protect her? Would Falco protect her?
She remembered the way his eyes had blazed when she found him in the cemetery. Violent one moment, joking the next. The wind blew her cloak against her hip, and she felt the weight of the small knife in her right pocket. She was glad to have it.
"Well, it's too late to go anywhere now," she said, trying to keep the relief from her voice.
"No it isn't," Falco said, gesturing toward Agnese's gondola bobbing in the shallow water. "Come on."
"But I'm not even dressed!" Cass protested.
Falco snickered. "You're dressed enough. What? Do you need to run home and have your servant lace you into a proper gown before you can go sneaking around in the night?" He crossed his arms in front of his chest. "Or are you just scared?"
"You're not afraid at all?" she asked, lifting her chin and deliberately avoiding his question. "My friend swears the city is crawling with evil spirits at night."
"I don't believe in that superstitious nonsense," Falco said.
Cass looked around them at the hanging mist. If she squinted, she swore she could see faces swirling in it. When she was younger, she had often walked along the shore and imagined the mist was full of the spirits of people who had died at sea and now floated the shores to greet other souls who suffered their same fate.
"You don't believe there are evil spirits lingering here on earth? Forbidden to enter the kingdom of heaven?" Cass asked.
Falco shrugged. "Heaven. Hell. Just more superstitions. Superstitions that cause people to behave with ignorance and stupidity."
Cass stared at him, certain he was joking, but his expression remained neutral. "But . . . but then where do you think spirits go?"
"I don't know where spirits go, but I know what happens to bodies. They rot. It's that simple. It almost seems ludicrous to lock them up or bury them in dirt." Falco began to fade away into the fog as he headed for the edge of the dock.
Cass reached out for him. Her hand landed on the center of his back. She could feel ridges beneath her palm. Muscle and bone. "What would you have us do?" she asked. "Burn them?"
The ridges moved beneath Cass's palm as Falco shrugged again. "There's got to be a better answer," he said, turning back to face her. "Maybe we should be studying them. Learning. After all, death and life are just two phases of the natural order of things. It seems silly to embrace birth and fear death."
Cass was so surprised, she could hardly speak. "Studying? As in . . . dissecting? Mutilating? That's sacrilegious."
"Science is my religion," Falco said. "I care about facts, not fleeting beliefs with no grounding in the real world. Everything can be answered through science." He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. "Your problem is that you do believe in all of that nonsense. And that's why you're scared."
"I'm not scared," she insisted, but even she wasn't convinced by the thin protestation.
"Yes, you are, or you wouldn't be asking all these questions. You're stalling."
Falco bent down and started untying the gondola's rigging. His hands worked through the ropes easily, as if this were a trick he'd performed many times before. "Hop aboard before I let it go completely loose."
Cass swore she saw him wink at her through the gloom. "My aunt will positively murder me if she finds out I took her gondola without asking." In the middle of the night. With a strange boy.
"Oh, don't get your laces all in a knot. We're just going to borrow it. We can have it back before your precious auntie realizes it's missing."
Cass stood by the dock, staring at the sleek gondola. The early morning was cool, but the blood racing through her veins kept her warm. As long as Falco was certain they could return before anyone found out. . .
Falco knelt in the middle of the boat, one hand held out in Cass's direction, the other poised to release the gondola from the dock with a quick tug of the rope.
"I understand if you don't want t
o come. So many rules to break." Falco's voice still had that lilting quality to it, but his eyes were serious. "It is safer in the cage, isn't it?"
It was safer. If her parents had stayed in Venice instead of plunging themselves into plague-afflicted foreign cities, they might still be alive. They had wandered outside the little circle of safety and expectations, and had paid the ultimate price.
But Cass didn't want to stay in the circle. She wanted to live.
Besides, if there really was a murderer out there, and he had his eye on Cass, what was the point in sitting around waiting for him to come to her?
Cass glanced back over her shoulder. The hanging mist reminded her of Liviana's burial wrappings. It beckoned like a white death. Suddenly, Cass felt certain that if she turned back toward Agnese's villa by herself, the haze would devour her and her body would be torn to shreds.
She took a step toward the gondola. "I want to go."
Falco grinned. "I knew you would."
Cass paused, her hand on the side of the boat. She looked up at Falco. "Why is that?"
This time, he definitely winked. "Not every girl likes to wander through graveyards in the middle of the night."
"I guess I'm not every girl," Cass said, allowing him to take her hand and gently assist her into the gondola.
An indecipherable look flashed across Falco's tan face for just a second. Then he smiled. "No, Signorina," he said. "You are definitely not. You're different, and I like it."
Cass couldn't help but think that Falco, with his teasing manner and bizarre beliefs about life and death, was also quite different.
And she, too, liked it.
7
Falco loosened the final rope with a flourish and the gondola floated free of the dock. He laughed when Cass instinctively took her usual spot, tucked back inside the felze. Then he went to the rear of the boat and began to use the long flexible oar to steer toward the Giudecca, the sandbar island that separated San Domenico from the more populated islands of Venice.
Cass felt a bit foolish. She slid out of the felze and went to stand beside Falco as he moved the boat through the water. Fog swirled around the gondola.
"Don't expose yourself to the elements on my account," Falco said with a crooked smile. "I don't mind playing gondolier for you."
"Is it difficult?" Cass asked. "To steer the boat?" Though she'd ridden in a boat almost every single day since her birth, she had never paid any attention to the mechanics of it.
"It's not so bad," he said. The wind blew a shock of dark hair into his eyes and Cass had the sudden urge to reach out and rearrange it. "Takes a little strength. Want to try?"
Cass was surprised to hear herself saying yes. She secured the cloak tightly around her waist and pushed her hair back from her face. The boat wobbled as she stepped onto the tiny platform beside Falco, and she gasped.
"You have to move with the rhythm of the water," he explained.
The platform was tiny, really only enough space for one person, so Falco had to press his body against Cass's back. His forearms fit neatly across her hipbones; she could feel his soft hair brushing against her cheek. He exhaled, a warm breath that tickled her neck and sent a shiver through her. She stiffened and nearly lost her balance. Falco tightened his grip on her momentarily until she regained her footing. His body radiated heat through her cloak.
Falco gave her the oar and put his hands on her waist to steady her. Cass awkwardly thrust the oar through the murky water and the boat skewed off at a funny angle. She felt herself wobbling, but Falco moved one hand from her waist to the oar and helped her guide it through the water. Cass began to relax her body against Falco's.
She laughed, in spite of the mist and the night and their destination. Steering the boat was fun, and she was doing something that probably no other woman in all of Venice had ever done. After a few minutes, she got the hang of steering and the long wooden gondola started to move swiftly through the water. Falco offered to take over, but she persisted, despite the aching in her arms and shoulders.
"I'm impressed," Falco said. "You're a natural."
Cass was grateful that he was standing behind her, so he couldn't see her smile. She didn't want him to know how much the comment pleased her. She lengthened her stroke and the boat coursed over the frothy water. A sleek form rose out of the mist like a sea snake. Cass teetered on the tiny platform, holding her oar in front of her to keep from falling into the lagoon. A man swore loudly as his small fishing vessel glided by.
"Forgot to tell you to watch out for other watercraft," Falco said, leaning in to help support her. "Not everyone has a lantern."
Cass glanced around for other boats, but didn't see any. "What do you make of the X carved in the girl's chest?" she asked, trying to distract herself from the feel of Falco pressing up behind her. The strange slash marks haunted her. She shivered even now, just talking about them.
Cass felt Falco shrug. "Judging from the bruises on her neck, I'd say she died of strangulation." His breath was warm on her jawbone. "Those cuts were made by someone who was angry. Someone who dislikes women, or at least women-for-hire."
Cass could almost feel fingers squeezing her own throat, a blade slicing into her skin. How terrified the girl must have been. Cass attempted to change the subject. "Do you really think we'll find something in the city? I want to know what happened to Livi's body."
"I wouldn't get your hopes up." Falco's voice was soft in her ear, but it had a slight edge to it. "The murderer probably dumped it in the lagoon."
Cass swallowed hard as she imagined Liviana's decomposing corpse floating to the surface by the dock outside Agnese's villa. "Maybe not," she insisted, forcing the gruesome image from her mind. "Why dump one body to hide another?"
The Giudecca was coming into focus, its southern coast barely visible through the low-hanging haze. Cass steered the boat toward the dark finger of land.
"Your friend is already dead. It doesn't really matter where her body is now, does it?" Falco said curtly. Before Cass could protest that it did matter—of course it did—he pointed toward the eastern side of the island. "The water is calmer if you hug the shoreline." There was silence for a moment before he added, more softly, "Anyway, what matters is finding out who sent you that threatening note, so we can stop him from whatever he's planning next."
Cass let the argument go. He was right, of course—what mattered most was making sure the murderer was caught and put away, before he could do more harm. They needed evidence of some kind. They needed a suspect.
As they neared the Grand Canal, Cass began to feel the weight of fear pressing down on her once again. The Chiesa delle Zitelle loomed like a stone guardian southwest of the entrance to the canal. Lanterns burned in the church's twin bell towers, illuminating the structure's gleaming cupola. It was like God was watching over the city. Cass steered the boat into the large backward-S-shaped canal that wound its way through the main areas of Venice proper.
The air was warmer inside the city, tall palazzos sheltering the small boat from the night wind. Cass leaned forward to put space between herself and Falco. The darkness swallowed up all but a faint halo of light from their lantern.
As Falco directed Cass down a side canal, the two maneuvered the gondola by the light of the moon reflecting off the water. Cass held her breath, hoping she wouldn't awaken anyone by running the boat into the canal wall.
Falco seemed to sense her discomfort. He took the oar from her and navigated toward the Castello district, toward a seedy block where the buildings looked as though they'd been under siege. Even in the darkness she could see that their roofs were full of broken red clay shingles; shutters hung open and tilted at funny angles.
As Falco steered the gondola along the edge of the canal, Cass saw a man slink across a bridge and head down an alleyway.
Cass pointed out the retreating figure. She and Falco watched the man vanish into a broken-down shack. "Probably just a thief, or a Jew hiding from the soldiers," Falco s
aid. "Ah, there it is." Falco pointed to a square brick building with a pair of cracked marble lions flanking the front door. He steered the boat over to a dock. Sliding his body nimbly over the side of the gondola, Falco looped the rope over a mooring post. The gondola swayed back and forth. "Leave the lantern," Falco said. "I'll guide you."
Cass reached out for Falco's hand as she exited the boat, thankful that she was moving without the constraints of her heavy skirts and chopines. She had never been out in the streets like this before: unfettered, nearly undressed, and it gave her a quick thrill.
Falco led her quickly into a narrow alley and pressed their bodies up against the side of a private residence. The alley was completely dark. Cass again felt the weight of the knife in her pocket. She realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled slowly. The night was so quiet, she swore she could hear her eyelashes feather together each time she blinked.
From where they stood, they could see the front of the abandoned building. The whole street was deserted.
"Come on." Falco took Cass's arm and pulled her past the front of the building around to the back. Another alley. This one was home to a butcher shop and an apothecary.
The two of them maneuvered around a large pile of trash. Cass's insides churned from the smell of spoiled meat, and she brought the sleeve of her cloak to her face, inhaling through it. Falco pointed; Cass could just barely make out a small six-petaled flower inscribed in a circle beneath one of the windows. Though mist or rain had faded part of the symbol, she could tell each petal was exactly the same size and shape, meeting at a point in the center of the circle. There was something almost mathematical about the design. "What now?" she whispered.
Falco didn't answer. He stood on tiptoe, his face pressed against a pair of grimy shutters. Cass leaned in next to him, but the crack between them was too small and the room beyond too dark to make out anything.
