Chapter 38
“Enzo,” De Luca uttered, and his tone held a thousand different shades of confusion.
Candlelight picked out De Luca’s brother, pale and shaking as he stood over Matteo’s prone form.
They all stared at Enzo in disbelief. Whitby was to one side of the cave, sitting on a rocky perch. Bastian stood by De Luca, who stepped toward his brother, but Bastian put out an arm to block him.
“Look,” he said.
Blood coated Enzo’s hands. It streaked his cheeks. He was barefoot and shivering in the cold, wearing a white sleep shirt and shorts that were still rumpled from bed. His eyes shone at De Luca, and they were blue, too, just like De Luca’s. Bright, clear, crystalline blue.
“Whose blood is that?” De Luca asked.
“Non lo so,” Enzo said. I don’t know. His voice was weak. Deep but childlike.
“You’re standing,” De Luca said. “How are you standing?”
“Non lo so.”
“How did you get here?”
Enzo’s chest heaved. His gaze was sharp with fear as he looked at Matteo, then the cave, as if seeing it all for the first time. He raised his hands, pushed them into his hair, appearing on the verge of tears.
Bastian noticed a scrap of paper on the ground beside the waiter. He could just make out a handwritten note.
Ci vediamo nella grotta.
Meet me in the grotto.
Had De Luca’s brother lured Matteo out there?
Peering closer, Bastian saw that the blood smears on Enzo’s face weren’t random. They formed patterns. Swirling symbols on his cheeks and forehead. Infinity symbols, just like the pin badges they had found next to each victim.
“Were you going to kill him?” Bastian asked Enzo, gesturing at Matteo. He heard a faint pulse. The waiter wasn’t dead.
Enzo silently looked at Bastian, then De Luca, then the body at his feet, his face morphing from fear back to confusion. He staggered backward, and Bastian saw a deeper darkness behind him. Another cave?
“Enzo,” De Luca said, moving toward his brother again, but then another voice entered the echoey space. Light and comforting and female.
“It’s okay, you’re okay,” the voice said as a shape emerged from the dark behind Enzo. A woman in a black apron, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her large, Disney-princess eyes glinted in the gloom, and a silver cross hung about her neck. Bastian went rigid with shock.
Arianna.
She ignored them as she circled her arms around Enzo, pulling him close. His head sank to her shoulder, and she put her mouth to his forehead, speaking into his skin.
“You’re okay, tesoro mio. Shhh, you’re okay.”
“What are you doing here?” De Luca demanded. “What’s going on?”
Arianna didn’t look at him. “I’m taking care of him, Inspector, like I promised I would. Because somebody has to.”
De Luca swore in Italian. “You brought him here? Why would you bring him here in his condition? You’ll kill him!”
“He’s getting stronger,” Arianna said, voice oddly dreamy. “You can see that for yourself.”
They could. Enzo was standing unaided, which De Luca had told Bastian was impossible. According to De Luca, Enzo hadn’t been out of bed in months. He was weakening by the day, had only a year or two to live. Now, though, he was in a cave beneath Vernazza, upright and conscious.
But how? And, perhaps more importantly, why?
“We have to get him home,” De Luca said. “We have to get out of here before the tide comes in.”
He seemed to have forgotten about Matteo and the blood painted on Enzo’s face. He could think only about his brother.
But Bastian saw it now. The savage glint in Arianna’s eye that hadn’t been there before. The strange tone in which she spoke. The consuming love evident in her embrace. The infinity symbols painted across Enzo’s skin.
The truth snapped around him like teeth.
It wasn’t a vampire who had been murdering townspeople. It wasn’t Matteo or the commissario or Enzo, it was—
“You,” he said, staring at Arianna. “You killed them.”
“What?” De Luca said.
“She’s the killer,” Bastian said. “She killed Luna and Emilio and the others.” He fought a surge of indignation and disbelief at who had been trying to frame him.
His mind crowded with questions as he tried to understand.
I’m taking care of him, Arianna had said about Enzo, but how did murder fit into that equation? How did killing benefit Enzo?
“Agh!” Whitby cried, hopping back as water spat through a fissure in the wall. The tide must have risen farther because water gushed into the cave from a dozen holes in the wall. It slopped across the ground, lapping at Bastian’s shoes, extinguishing half the candles that guttered among the rocks.
Whitby chanted Latin under her breath, though Bastian couldn’t guess what she was attempting to conjure now.
“We have to get out of here,” De Luca said.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Arianna said, her gaze falling to Matteo, still lying on his side on the cave floor. “Not until I’ve finished. It’ll only take one more.”
“One more what?” De Luca demanded. He was inching closer to his brother now.
Arianna’s eyes glimmered at him as she reached behind her back with her free hand, revealing a curved six-inch blade with a small wooden handle at each end.
A mezzaluna. Bastian recognized it because he had used one himself while cooking; you held both handles and rocked the blade in order to chop herbs.
Something told him Arianna had put it to a darker use.
“Love always demands sacrifice,” Arianna said. “A show of faith. The giving up of one thing in order to gain something better.”
Bastian almost laughed at the clichés, but he was still processing her words. Sacrifice. He looked at Matteo. The note. The infinity symbols on Enzo’s skin. The deaths weren’t random. They weren’t the result of an insatiable vampire hunger. There was more to it than that.
“You sacrificed them,” he said, feeling like he was on the cusp of grasping her logic, despite its warped nature. “Why?”
Arianna’s chin lifted. Defiant. Proud. She turned to look at an object on the far side of the cave.
Bastian saw a statue of a woman hewn from black marble.
It rested on a flat section of rock, a couple of candles spitting at her feet.
In the dancing light, the marble woman almost looked alive, and Bastian recognized her because of the rebellious expression on her face, not to mention the two snakes dangling in curling loops from her fist, their jaws extended in a venomous hiss.
Sofia di Vernazza, the saint who healed Vernazza.
Arianna’s cheeks colored with pride. “Blood was the only thing that could save Enzo. Blood acquired in Sofia’s name, bearing her symbol, can be used to bring a loved one back from the brink of death.”
Bastian couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Arianna thought an old legend could save Enzo? She must be crazy to believe it, but then again, love could undo even the sanest of minds. It appeared that her love for Enzo had driven Arianna to do terrible things.
Blood acquired in Sofia’s name, bearing her symbol…
“Her symbol?” he asked. “How is the infinity symbol Sofia’s?”
“The snakes,” Whitby said, her gaze trained on the statue. “Look at the way they’re coiled.”
Bastian looked, unsure what Whitby was trying to tell him, but as he moved around to get a better view, he saw it. The way the snakes intertwined formed a shape.
An infinity symbol.
“What the hell,” Bastian murmured. Now that he had seen it, he couldn’t unsee it. It had been right there the whole time, hidden in plain sight.
“Before it was appropriated by vampire allies,” Arianna said, her voice cold, “the infinity symbol belonged to Sofia. For centuries it was a mark of her strength and resilience. Her love and dedication to healing those in desperate need of help.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” De Luca growled, glaring at Arianna. “That’s what we believed at school, as kids.”
“We used to speak her name so she would come to us and heal our pains,” Arianna said.
De Luca threw his arms wide. “But it wasn’t real. Sofia didn’t heal us! She’s just a story!”
Arianna shook her head, clenching the mezzaluna tightly in her fist. “You’re wrong.
Sofia has come to me before. You remember when I broke my leg.
I was five and I came off my bike, fractured my tibia.
You must remember. My grandmother called upon Sofia to heal me, and within a week, my leg was back to normal. She performed a miracle.”
“It can’t have been broken,” Bastian said.
“You were just a child,” De Luca insisted. “You’re misremembering what happened.”
Arianna scowled, baring her teeth. “You want more proof? Just look at Enzo. He’s better than he has been in months, all thanks to her. I called to her, beseeched her for help, and she answered. She answered!”
De Luca was pale with disbelief. He was breathing hard, his heart beating loud in Bastian’s ears.
“You were content to just let him die,” Arianna spat at the inspector.
“Every time I visited, he was a little worse than the time before. A month ago, we were able to talk and share happy memories. A week ago, he couldn’t speak anymore.
He was barely conscious. That was when I knew I had to do something.
I had to help him. His time was running out, and it was my responsibility to do what you were too cowardly to do, because I love him, and I won’t sit by and wait for him to die. ”
“Blood,” Bastian said, peering at the woman. “You said blood was the only thing that could save Enzo.”
“Blood acquired in Sofia’s name,” she said. “Blessed by her divinity and imbibed by the one in need.”
“Imbibed…” De Luca looked like he was struggling to breathe. He was trembling, his whole body shaking, and when he spoke, his voice was an angry rumble: “You fed him blood?”
“It wasn’t difficult,” Arianna said coolly. “You’re never home. It was easy to slip up to his room with his tonic, and he was so thirsty. His body knew what it needed to make him better.”