DEVIL’S ROW

by Serafini, Matt

  Maybe she cared for her women, but Elisabeth guessed they still had to bring money to the table at the end of each day. By any means necessary.

  “Thank you,” Elisabeth said, the sincerity in her own voice was surprising. “But I should go.”

  “Is nothing. It’s best that we take care of each other. No one else will, yes? And no, you will not leave yet. Your fever may be gone, but you must sup with us and have another good night’s rest. I insist.”

  Dinner was served downstairs. Sarmale, which was minced meat wrapped in cabbage leaves. Elisabeth wasn’t hungry, though she quickly ate her share, swallowing red wine by the goblet and listening to the evening woman swap trade stories. They were impressed by their perception of Elisabeth as a rogue nightcaller, and accepted her presence by looking to her for approval at the end of each anecdote. She smiled and nodded, laughed when it was appropriate, and feigned disgust when she was supposed to. She felt welcome here, and it warmed her, even if she couldn’t wait to leave.

  The conversation circled the table until Elisabeth’s mysterious arrival could no longer be ignored. The women wanted to know more about her, threading their inquiries through regular dinnertime chatter until their curiosity brimmed.

  Emilia was careful not to pry, always respectful of her guest’s privacy. “If she does not wish…”

  “It’s fine,” Elisabeth said and polished off her fourth glass of the night. The girl beside her refilled the goblet and pushed it close, eager for an overshare. “I paid a debt, and nearly died while doing it, as you saw.”

  “I hope you made him suffer.” One of the women brushed her hair behind her ear to reveal a small piece of it missing. There were teeth marks on the lobe.

  “Me too,” Elisabeth said.

  “It will be safer for you here, you know," Emilia said. “I offer protection, nothing more. You pay me a pittance for your room in this house, and for the food you eat. Otherwise, it’s your living to earn. The Ottoman rule may be ceremonial for the time being, but what happens when Constanta must do more than simply bow to the Sultan?”

  “Well,” Elisabeth said, considering her next words with precision. “Then you’d do well to consider leaving. You can only protect your girls from so much. And never from warlords. This house will be the first to fall, your women conquered and passed around like trophies.”

  “Experience is the cruelest teacher, I suppose.” Emilia said. “But of course I agree with you. None of this would be necessary if these girls could earn a safe living on their own. That’s all that’s important to me. They’re living.”

  “I don’t need your help to do that.”

  Emilia gave a glance that lasted an eternity. It caused each of Elisabeth’s injuries to throb once more, as if accenting her point.

  The front door swung open and a man spilled into the firelight. Emilia rose to meet him head-on, resolute in her motion with a pistol tucked into her hand.

  “Huntress,” he said, and bent a knee.

  Elisabeth took her place beside Emilia, watching as if this couldn’t be real. “Claude?”

  The young pup looked up and smiled. “Nothing has ever filled me with more relief,” he said. “When I found the mountain site…discovered Aetius…”

  Elisabeth went to him. He pointed his head back to the floor, maintaining his gesture of servitude. The boy looked good, much better than she’d ever seen him. His dress was crisp and his face clean-shaven. No older than Survivor, she recalled finding him on a battlefield in the stickiest summer months. He’d been quick to accept his Turning for reasons he kept to himself, even when asked.

  Those who passed through the bite became a slave to their instincts, and Elisabeth had assumed that Claude was too ashamed to fess up to his. Their animal urges were often guided by human impulses.

  Aetius had gone on to enjoy the boy’s enthusiasm so much that he’d tasked him with an important errand.

  That he’d finally returned from, apparently.

  “We should leave, my huntress.” Claude growled, the change eminent.

  “No,” Elisabeth said and motioned for him to stand. “You mustn’t.”

  The young man’s features moved, his brow wobbled and his arms trembled.

  Elisabeth took his hand in hers and shook her head with vigor. “They saved me.” She couldn’t say why she cared about that. Only that she did.

  The boy couldn’t shake the wolf like Elisabeth though. She put her head to his and whispered, “We leave without doing this…just this once, this is how it must be.”

  What she wanted was to leave everything. Reach Paris, spend an obscene amount on a luxurious silk mantua—she hadn’t worn one since those turbulent city nights spent with Alina—and find a beautiful aristocratic apartment to weather the coldest months. All so she could lose herself in the culture there. All so she could forget she was alone.

  The void that ate her soul was irreparable, yes. But maybe with time—

  No. She didn’t think so. Never again. The pain was too great. The loss, crippling. The hunters had killed a piece of her after all.

  “We really must go,” Claude suggested once more, his eyes lost in hers. It was wrong for Elisabeth to suggest there could be something between them, but there was no other way to send his wolf scurrying.

  “I was going to ask about this,” Emilia handed her a sack. “But I think it’s best you leave now and not return.”

  Elisabeth peered inside and saw the crusader’s spine as Emilia’s eyes blazed with the knowledge of assembled pieces. Elisabeth wished her no harm and knew the only way to deliver on that was to go.

  “Your kindness,” Elisabeth said. “I won’t forget it.”

  Claude put his coat around her shoulders as they stepped into the chilly night. “We are in the process of securing passage on the next ship out of harbor. It wasn’t hard to track you here, but your scent is all over these streets.”

  Elisabeth didn’t feel like talking about it. She had to picture Survivor draining every drop from the orphan girl in order to remind herself that Aetius had, in fact, been avenged. The feeling of triumph was so slight that it had already faded completely.

  She’d planned to return to Nightfall one last time. To see her lover as she’d left him: mutilated parts charred beyond recognition. But that was already a memory she wanted to forget. Aetius was long departed, and she’d only stare indifferently at his pieces. She didn’t wish to be this cold, but her attachment was no longer to those vestiges.

  Nostalgia was tied to memories of their life, and even those would fade in time.

  “I wanted to bring these to you,” Claude said. He reached into his satchel and dropped some unbroken fangs into her palm.

  Elisabeth held them tight, not yet ready to abandon her lover completely.

  This was more loyalty than she deserved in the wake of what she’d done to his brothers. They went in silence toward the water, and were almost there before Elisabeth remembered that she didn’t know where Aetius had sent him.

  “Rome,” he said as they stepped onto the docks, far away from the decrepit shack that had fallen into the Black Sea nights ago.

  Claude led her to a large cargo ship. The man standing in front of the ramp smiled at their approach. “This is her?” He sounded excited.

  “It is,” he said. “Huntress, meet Luca.”

  Elisabeth lifted her eyebrow, looked at Claude and sighed. Luca was human, and the tension in his body language hinted that he’d been promised something.

  “Are well all set?” Claude said.

  “Right this way,” Luca nodded and started up the ramp. “We were able to secure two quarters. Of course, Elisabeth Luna will have her own, and the cargo has already been placed there.”

  “Good,” Claude said. “Please, huntress, there is something in there you’ll want to see.”

  They went below deck and Luca pushed open the first door on the right. “This is yours,” he said. “And I do hope you’ll indulge me in conversation whi
le we are at sea. I have so many questions.”

  Elisabeth didn’t know what to make of Luca’s persistence and admiration. She only knew that she wanted to get out of sight. Her response was a stubborn smile that lasted just a moment. Then she brushed her arm against Claude’s elbow. “Where does this ship go?”

  “France, my huntress,” Claude said.

  “It’s Elisabeth now. Just Elisabeth.”

  Claude nodded as he and Luca went into the room across the way. Before shutting the door, he turned to her. “Luca was very helpful in retrieving it.”

  “Retrieving what?”

  “You’ll see. Get some rest, my hunt…Elisabeth.”

  The quarters weren’t all that extravagant, but cozy enough. The featherbed was currently more inviting than Alina’s throne room, and the breakfast table had a spread of fruit laid out, along with an unopened bottle of wine. Elisabeth looked at the teeth in her hand until she felt tears dribbling off her chin.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  Those words were colder now than they should’ve been, obligatory and almost meaningless.

  She put the teeth inside the sack with the spine and left them on the floor. Before she could even consider getting out of this stupid gown and climbing into bed, a knock rapped against the door.

  Claude hovered in the crevice. He’d looked less terrified while dying on the battlefield.

  “How are your, uh…”

  “Accommodations?”

  “Exactly! Those…if the bed is too small I can…”

  “Thank you, Claude.” She smiled, and for the second time tonight she’d been grateful for help. These dormant feelings had been gone for so long she’d forgotten they’d existed, but was glad to have them back. She wished she’d been able to do more to repay Emilia’s kindness, and was surprised to discover she was still thinking about that.

  “I didn’t do much. It was Luca who tracked it down. You really must talk to him. If you want to, of course. But he has more of them.”

  “More of what?”

  “You haven’t looked yet?”

  “No, I’m in no rush. It’s a long way to France, yes?”

  “Oh, most certainly. I only…”

  “I know. Thank you again, Claude.” She would’ve made it out of Constanta on her own, but it was comforting to be able to depend on others.

  “I am honored, Elisabeth.”

  “I think I’ll get some more rest.”

  “Then I shall leave you, but when you are ready…” He pointed to the tarp-draped object leaning against the wall. “Take a look. The crew offered to have it secured below deck, but that is for you to decide.”

  Elisabeth closed the door and locked it, anxious to get off her feet. She shoved the clumsy gown down off her shoulders and kicked it to the corner. Then she yanked the oilcloth down.

  Impossible…

  A hundred memories returned: the terrace overlooking Piazza in Avone where she sat for an entire summer, sketching her vision with charcoal sticks before applying paint, the swirling oil colors that followed, experimentation with perspective that brought richness and depth to her work for the first time.

  The personal demons that inspired its creation…

  The longer she stared the more she recalled the night she was pulled away from her dying mother, the sphere the laughing men had plunged through her throat. Armored crusaders so large they looked like moving fortresses. This was over two hundred years ago, but the nightmares got her every now and again.

  The men who took her in the name of God were long dead, but their cruelty haunted the shadows of her mind.

  Elisabeth had begged for just one more night with her mother. The sick old woman wasn’t destined to last much longer, but they’d refused to listen. Their decision had already been made: murder her and steal her only possession. A twenty-four year old daughter.

  The nomadic Inquisition traveled across Europe, striking without fear or repercussion. Their atrocities fell far beyond the church’s borders whenever foreign rulers had use of their services. Road-weary men were enlisted to perform certain tasks, and were in exchange gifted with the freedom to pillage isolated estate grounds as payment.

  Elisabeth had been one such form of currency. A young girl who went by Elisabeta then, she became their prisoner and suffered a host of horrors as bad as anything her wolf had instilled upon the innocent. They whisked her to a nearby church where the utmost priority became educating her in the ways of religion.

  This painting had only partially succeeded in exorcising those demons. Gazing at it now, while watery and weak, she realized they were the type of monsters that could never be fully exorcised.

  Back then, she’d been too scared to fight, incurring punishment and violation out of timidity, and because resistance only guaranteed more mutilation. She couldn’t say how she survived it, but no one else from her village had.

  This piece depicted a forced march through her homeland. It’d been hell on earth: women impaled on their sexes and hoisted onto pikes, sharpened tips tearing from their throats, all because they’d lain with the devil.

  According to the men who’d raped them first, of course.

  Elisabeth had wanted to kill them all. She passed the nights forming fantasies in her mind, picturing the different ways she’d do it. Plotting vengeance every moment of the day, more intently while in the throes of sexual violence.

  So badly had they hurt her, she shouldn’t have been able to enjoy pleasures of the flesh again.

  Years later, a psychiatrist had told her that she was attempting to screw her way out of the self-loathing. She didn’t know what she expected from a man whose profession analyzed sanity through methods the Inquisition would’ve favored. Chaining patients to walls and whipping impure thoughts from their minds as if that could cure any mental ailment.

  Elisabeth hadn’t cared for that diagnosis, or the vulnerable light it cast her in. As such, she’d waited outside his home one evening, tearing him and his family to pieces. She’d wanted to do more, castrate him to remove his ailment, for example, but Aetius had convinced her that simplicity would suffice. His persuasion always could shy her away from her cruelest impulses.

  On her final night of Inquisition imprisonment, a varcolac called Scythe had happened into the stronghold and ‘saved’ her while doing what she could not. His actions weren’t heroic, but her enemies died anyway, allowing Elisabeth to witness retribution through the feverish haze prompted by the wolf’s bite.

  Not unlike the one affecting Survivor right now.

  That she had to be rescued at all conjured feelings of lingering inadequacy. For two hundred years, she wondered what it would’ve been like to take her own revenge that night.

  To this day, she resented her sire for denying that privilege.

  “What would it matter,” Scythe had said. “They’re dead, same as if you’d done it. All that remains of them is mixed with wolf shit.”

  Maybe Scythe had understood her predicament all to well, speaking from experience. She didn’t care, because she needed to find out herself.

  And she finally knew.

  The mere thought of Scythe churned her stomach now. He’d wanted a whore by his side then—his only reason for turning her. Elisabeth stayed with him just long enough to accept the wolf, to learn how to cope with the animal within. Then she fled far.

  Distance from Scythe that she continued to keep.

  Although she realized now, quite begrudgingly, that he’d been right about revenge. All who were responsible for the Nightfall ambush were gone, and yet her hostility had never been greater.

  Deep down, Elisabeth understood the only one left to blame was herself.

  She tilted her head and chased sleep. In the next room, Claude’s heart pounded so hard she heard it from here. It was oddly soothing and she counted the thumps while attempting to drift off. His desire for her was so desperate that she pitied him.

  It was amazing to think that Aetius had sent him t
o Rome to find whatever work of hers remained, and that he’d somehow succeeded. After all this time, here was an original Elisabeth Luna.

  Tomorrow, she’d have to hear the whole story. How Claude had managed to find it. Her name hadn’t been Luna back then, and she imagined that’s where Luca’s expertise probably came in. Why Claude had brought him along, though, was anyone’s guess.

  She wouldn’t be siring him in exchange for his help, because, well, the huntress had died for good somewhere over the last few days.

  Elisabeth. Just Elisabeth. Elisabeth Luna.

  The Luna surname was given to her years ago, after spending four seasons whittling down the residents of a tiny fishing village back west. She claimed a life each night, and her arrival was soon associated with the rising moon. The monster attacking the village came to be known as ‘the Luna.’

  She’d loved how it sounded and quickly adopted it, wondering now if she shouldn’t have kept her real surname. That life was long gone, though. No point in disgracing her mother by stomping the family name through puddles of innocent blood.

  She kept her eyes closed, tossing and turning atop the bed, pushing her head deeper into the pillow. Deep breaths searched out calming memories, but they were impossible to find.

  Sleep came at last and much darkness greeted her there.

  There was no comfort in it.

  #

  Afterword & Acknowledgements

  When I floated news that my next foray into the Feral universe would be a prequel, the reaction was a bit startling. More than one person reminded me that I had ended that book on a cliffhanger, and the wait to discover the fates of those survivors had already been a bit on the long side.

  But I hesitate to call Devil’s Row a prequel in the traditional sense. Yes, it’s set 300+ years before Feral, and yes, certain characters are mentioned or appear in both. That’s because Devil’s Row was originally a flashback within Feral. It was meant to illustrate the reason behind Elisabeth’s self-imposed exile, and I cut it for pacing with the intention of adding it to the sequel.