Chapter II
II
“I’m relieved,” she says, a few nights later, “to see you looking so revived. ”
They are out again, on another evening walk, Venice glittering by lamplight.
Matteo smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “It is our nature, isn’t it? To persist. Continue on when others can’t.”
“You do seem to be persisting.” She nods at Giovanni, who now strolls ahead, hands in his pockets and head thrown back. “I’m sure your new companion helps.”
Matteo’s smile flickers, briefly becomes a grimace. “I thought—”
“Don Accardi!” call out a pair of women, strolling toward them, arm in arm. “How glad we are to see you.”
Sabine searches her memory, knows they’ve met before. Sisters, she recalls, though she didn’t bother to learn their names, since she could never separate the two. Either in her mind, or in person.
“I was beginning to think you’d abandoned Venice,” says one.
“Though I can’t blame you,” adds the other.
“The winter is so bleak.”
“I fear I was unwell,” he says, despite the fact he is, has always been, the very picture of good health.
“Truly?” says one.
“You’d never know it,” says the other.
“Indeed, you do not age a day.”
“Neither do you, Carmina,” he counters gracefully.
Her sister snorts. Carmina sours, then says, “My mirror disagrees.”
“The fault is with the glass, then, and surely not with you.”
Matteo’s charm, infallible as ever. He turns to his companions. “You recall my niece, Sabine.”
“Who could forget such a beauty?” says the first, Carmina, the air stained with an envy that buoys her own mood.
Matteo gestures to his other side. “Allow me to introduce a new acquaintance, Giovanni.”
“Piacere di conoscerla,” says Gio brightly, bending low to kiss each of their gloved hands.
But on the second one, he lingers, head bowed, his grip shifting just enough to turn the hand palm up, exposing the inside of her wrist, the veins just beneath the skin.
Sabine can feel exactly what he plans to do before he does it. Not that she intervenes.
But of course, Matteo does. He lays a hand on Gio’s shoulder, a simple gesture, save for the tightness of the grip.
Gio drops his hand and straightens as the women blush and say good night. As soon as they walk on, Matteo wrenches Gio round to face him.
“What have I told you?”
Gio holds up his hands in mock surrender. “I did nothing.”
“Only because I stopped you.”
He rolls his blue eyes, which Sabine has decided are in fact a duller shade than Alessandro’s. It is only the strange light in them that makes them seem so bright. “Why shouldn’t I have eaten them?” he whines.
“We do not hunt our neighbors,” scolds Matteo. It has the air of a recurring quarrel. “We do not kill those whose death would cause an uproar.”
“Rules, rules, rules,” he moans. “I do not care. ”
“You should. You must.”
“What does it matter if they’re of noble blood or common stock? What is the difference in the end?”
Sabine doesn’t say that Gio has a point. She doesn’t have to. It must be written clearly on her face because Matteo takes one glance at her and mutters, “Oh, don’t. ”
“You are an elitist,” declares Giovanni, crossing his arms.
Sabine snorts.
Matteo flings his hands out in frustration. “It is not about which lives have worth. Only about which ones will be missed. ”
“How is that different?”
“Don’t be na?ve,” he snaps. Then sighs, and cups his new lover’s face. Sabine studies them. Matteo, who believes all lives have worth. And Gio, who seems convinced that the same logic renders all lives worthless. She wonders which will give in first.
In the end, it’s Giovanni. Perhaps because he does not want to fight, or perhaps because he finds the quarrel boring. A waste of a perfectly good night. Either way, Giovanni deflates, and rests his head against Matteo’s.
“Bene,” he murmurs. “Show me then who I can eat. I’m really very hungry.”
Matteo softens.
Shortly after, it begins to snow.
A light dust that frosts the lamplight and lands in small drifts on the empty gondolas.
Matteo and Sabine walk arm in arm, Gio trailing in their wake. A handful of flakes land on Matteo’s hair. The only flecks of white.
“The sisters have a point,” she says. “How old are you supposed to be?”
She asks this, and not how old he is, knowing that he will not tell her. Matteo has never made more than passing mention of his early life, and on the rare occasions she has pressed, he’s changed the subject.
She wonders now if Alessandro knew. If so, the stories died with him. Her only token is the name, Mateusz, which she keeps as if it were a talisman around her neck, a coin she can neither trade nor use.
“I know I cannot stay both as I am, and where I am, forever,” he admits. “People start to notice. And then, they start to talk. And then, it is only a matter of time before a life must be given up, or lost. But I will miss this city dearly. And all the memories it has.”
Ahead, a couple pause halfway across a narrow bridge, stopped to appreciate the way the snow falls between the buildings, melting when it hits the water.
Their backs are turned, and their attention held. An easy meal. Too easy for their tastes, but not for Giovanni. Perhaps Matteo thinks the offering will put an end to his new lover’s whining.
He turns, as if to signal his assent.
But Gio is not there.
“Merda,” Matteo curses softly, doubling back as a new smell cuts through the cold night air. Blood. The odor lurches through her—metallic, sweet. It’s been three nights since her last meal, and the scent sends an ache from her temples to her teeth.
They find Gio in an alley two blocks back, folded over the body of a man beside a cart. Matteo pulls him off, but it’s too late.
The man lies crumpled on the ground, his eyes open and his throat torn wide, the last beats of his heart sending a weak trickle of blood onto the stones beneath.
Two hundred years, and the sight still tightens something in her. A feral hunger. The same one she sees in Gio’s face, the bottom half of which is painted red.
“I chose a commoner,” says Gio, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of the coat he doesn’t need. Now that he has slaked his thirst, he seems to have regained his senses enough to register Matteo’s anger. “He was alone . . . I thought you would be glad.”
Matteo rakes a hand through his black hair, looks like he wants to push his new love into the canal. Instead, he orders Gio out of the way, and kneels beside the body.
Sabine folds her arms, tips her shoulder against the wall, watches as Matteo attempts to arrange the dead man’s limbs beside the cart. Most bite marks close after the fact, but the wound at his throat is so wide it will never mend in death. The violence, unerasable.
“Every corpse makes ripples,” she recites.
“Not now,” mutters Matteo.
“Where is Gio’s ultimatum?” she wonders aloud. “Somehow I doubt you will threaten to banish him. Tell me, is it because you made him or you bed him?”
Matteo straightens. Pinches the bridge of his nose.
“He is young,” he says that night.
“It will get easier,” he says the next.
“He will learn.”
But of course, he never does.
Sabine has walked the earth long enough to know that not all flowers grow well in the garden.
Some thrive, and others wither.
And a wretched few must be dug up before they ruin everything.
She has been home less than a week when the first bodies are discovered. A well-known merchant. And his wife. The two of them found dead inside their courtyard.
After that, the sisters—the ones they met together that first night.
The bite marks fade, but the other signs of Gio’s butchery do not.
What he was like in life, Sabine will never know, but she can guess. After all, what grows in the midnight soil is not a different flower, only a bolder bloom. He is by nature passionate, and reckless.
Matteo tries to turn his rules to games, as he did once with her, but it doesn’t work. Gio cares less about rewards than slaking his relentless thirst. He has no patience for the slow pursuit of prey. Instead, everyone he passes becomes a potential meal.
And he is making an ungodly mess.
Each and every corpse makes waves, and the waters of Venice soon begin to churn.
Word of a killer spreads, and when the body of a magistrate is found propped against a column in San Marco, some take to their homes, and others to the streets. Men patrolling day and night, the air around them humming with the hunger for justice, for blood.
It is inevitable. Like standing at the top of a steep hill, the valley laid out below, the knowledge that if you point yourself down, it’s only a matter of time before you reach it.
Sabine is not surprised when she comes home one night and finds Matteo standing on the balcony, looking over the lagoon. His shoulders tense, his head bowed low. She knows, before he says it.
“Gio is dead.”
The words fall, and keep falling. She waits for them to land, searches herself for sadness, dread, but finds only dull relief.
Knows that Matteo can smell it on her, and braces for his mood.
Wonders if he will plunge himself again into grief.
But he doesn’t, only shakes his head and says, “If the mortals hadn’t killed him, I might have done it myself. ”
A grim confession.
He turns toward her as he says it, and he looks so . . . tired. As if the nights with Giovanni have worn on him, much longer than the centuries without.
“What happened?” she asks, though she can guess.
He was caught attacking a man. Found with the body. There was no judge, no court, no sentence. They fell on him right there. Drove him through with spikes. Cut off his head.
A gruesome act, but Matteo recounts it in a weary voice. He crosses to a chair, drops into it. Rakes his fingers through his hair.
“It was a mistake,” he says softly. “I knew when I did it. It was selfish. I was grieving. After you left, I finally forced myself outside. I was walking when I saw him and I thought . . .” He trails off, shakes his head. Then, “Have you ever taken a companion?”
“Now and then,” she says, and it is true. She has indulged that hunger when it rose. “But only for a night.”
“Perhaps one day you’ll find someone you want to keep for longer.”
“I doubt it,” says Sabine.
She does not tell him she has thought of it, a few times over the years, watching Alessandro and Matteo. The bond they had. The life they shared. But while she envied what they had together, its aftermath was bleak enough to put her off.
He manages a wan smile. “Only because you have not met them yet.”
He rises slowly, as if bearing a heavy weight.
“If you ever do decide to turn a lover, make sure you know their temper well. This life can be a kindness, or a curse.” His gaze goes to the window.
To Venice. The buildings, lit like floating candles in the dark.
“This city. If I stay here any longer, I may as well lie down by Alessandro and let the grave dirt take me, as you once said.”
“We are made for many things,” muses Sabine. “But surrender isn’t one of them.”
He nods. “That is why I’m leaving.”
A strange tug behind her ribs, though she cannot tell if it is toward him, or away. So many years now, she has been the one who comes and goes, while Matteo stayed, anchored to Venice.
“Where will you go?”
He has passage on a ship, he tells her. Bound for the Americas.
“You’re welcome to come with me,” he adds, though they both know she won’t.
It is not just the time aboard the ship she dreads. The thought of so many weeks at sea, trapped in a rocking vessel beneath the scorching sun, surrounded by passengers who have been counted, whose every absence would be missed.
It is Alessandro—or at least the absence of him, and the knowledge that he will follow Matteo wherever he goes, from now until the end, like a shadow, a ghost. And Sabine has no desire to be haunted.
When Matteo boards his ship the following night, she knows she will never see him again. Watching it sail, she feels a shallow swell of grief. A ripple. But then it’s gone, he’s gone, and something shifts inside her, crumbles, falls, taking the wave of sadness with it.
Where others rot without, we rot within.
Sabine suspects that it is starting: that some small piece of her has died, as Matteo said it would. She thought she would feel frightened, or at least disconcerted by the loss, but there is only a visceral relief, like shedding layers on a too-hot day, the absence like a breeze against bare skin.
She exhales, feeling lighter than she has in years.