Chapter 5 – Dahlia
Dahlia
“Ciao bella,” Livia says to me as she gets out of her chair to give me a kiss on each cheek. “You look beautiful.”
“Glamor still holding up?” I ask, patting my head as if I have an invisible shield over me, which I suppose I do, in some ways.
“You tell me,” she says, gesturing for me to sit.
It’s Friday afternoon, a few days after our meeting here for coffee.
I tried not to be a nervous wreck all week, and if I was, I tried to play it off as if I was just nervous about my first week of school.
It was hard not to worry that at any moment my glamor might slip and that Professor Aminoff would see me for the witch that I am.
“So far so good,” I tell her. “I think.”
“It’s tiring though, isn’t it?” she says, studying my face in such a way that I wonder if I look haggard.
“Having to keep up the facade. Not just in the sense of all your energy making sure the spell stays on, but the energy it takes to truly hide who you are.” She grins at me, her teeth stark white against her brown skin.
“But I know what helps. I’ll get you a coffee.
Another espresso, or do you want something else? ”
“A macchiato would be nice,” I tell her. “I drink those espressos too fast.”
Livia gives me an understanding nod and gets up to go into the café.
I bring out my mirror from my leather messenger bag and check my face to see just how tired I look.
There are some dark circles under my eyes that even my concealer couldn’t diminish.
So much for looking like a femme fatale who’s about to seduce her teacher.
No wonder I’ve been having zero luck with the professor.
It hasn’t been for lack of trying, either.
Vampires are good at compelling you, but it doesn’t mean they are easily compelled.
I was bold that first day, even bolder the next when I invited him out for a drink.
I thought since he seemed so impressed by my playing that I could further charm him, but he turned me down.
He did it so easily too, like he thought it was amusing that I’d even try.
Can’t say my ego didn’t take a hit. But I’m obviously in this for the long haul now.
“So,” Livia says, coming back with two coffees. She places them on the table and sits back down, folding her hands under her chin, the morning sun peeking over the building behind us and lighting up all the silver rings on her fingers. “Have you made any progress with Valtu?”
I take a sip off the coffee, my eyes shutting briefly as I swallow. The coffee here is strong enough to put hair on your back. “Not yet,” I admit. “These things take time.”
Her smile tightens. “I agree with you. However, I’m starting to think we don’t have as much time as we thought.”
A chill runs down my back, despite the warm and sunny September weather. “What do you mean?” I ask carefully.
“Can’t you feel it?” she asks, her voice dropping. “The change in the air?”
I stare at her for a moment before shaking my head. “The weather?”
“Not quite. I guess you’re still so new to Venice,” she says with a note of disappointment. “Perhaps the glamor is dulling your senses, as well.”
She’s not wrong about that. My senses aren’t as heightened as they usually are and my instincts feel a bit muddled.
Honestly, I hate the feeling but there isn’t anything I can do about it.
All my energy is going toward my facade: keeping the glamor on and my true self concealed, keeping my Italian flowing at a higher degree, and allowing myself to play the organ at a professional level.
“But let me tell you,” she goes on, “that things are getting worse. I can feel it. A few other witches here can feel it too and Bellamy…”
I stare at her expectantly, my heart rate increasing.
“Well, you know how he is,” she says with a knowing half-smile. “He’s aware of everything at all times. He senses it too. Which is why you need to try harder.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” I tell her sharply.
“I get that the vampires have a book that opens portals and that we need to get it from them, but if the professor was such a threat, why wasn’t he dealt with before?
From what I understand, Bellamy originally wanted me to dispose of Valtu.
Why now? I may have been off my game for the last two years, but I’ve had my ears open.
After what happened in Northern Scandinavia, the destruction of both Skarde and Jeremias, Dracula hasn’t done any harm.
If I have been sent here to kill him, why now?
Why not years before? What has Valtu done recently, and more than that, why couldn’t you have dealt with him? ”
Her eyes widen for a moment. “Are you sticking up for a vampire?”
I glare at her for that. “I’d kill all of them if I could.”
“Well, I suppose that’s the answer, isn’t it?
You’d kill them all because you can. I’m just a witch, Dahlia.
A sea witch if you want my specifics. I’m not a slayer.
I wasn’t trained to kill vampires. I didn’t go to school for it.
I wasn’t hand-picked by Bellamy at a young age.
You know very well I can’t do what you do.
Vampires can’t be killed by anyone but a slayer and with the blade of mordernes . ”
“That’s not true,” I point out for argument’s sake. “I’ve heard of non-slayer witches killing vampires before. Hell, I’ve heard of normal humans killing vampires before.”
“By luck or accident. Believe me, if Bellamy or anyone in the guild thought that I could be the one to take out Dracula, I would have already done it. I can’t glamor myself as well as you can and I don’t know how to get close enough to kill him, let alone actually have it stick.
In the end, you’re the one with the blade.
” She pauses, taking a sip of her coffee. “There’s not many of you out there.”
“I know,” I say tiredly. “I keep getting reminded of it.” When Bellamy showed up at my aunt’s house, days after my parents were killed, he told me I was needed because there were so few of me left in the world. If I didn’t take vengeance on the vampires who did this to my parents, who would?
“Then you understand how important you are and that we’re all relying on you.”
I sigh heavily and tear open a sugar packet, pouring it in my cup to soften the blow of the coffee. “Gee, no pressure.”
“Listen,” Livia says, placing her hand across the table and leaning forward, her expression softening. “I don’t want to scare you. It’s just that when I talked to Bellamy on the phone, well, he scared me. The longer that portal is open, the more that…things will come out. I’ve seen them, Dahlia.”
I frown at her, that chill returning. She looks scared for once. “What?”
She presses her lips together tightly, until her mouth resembles a line of chalk. “The monsters,” she whispers. “I’ve seen them come out of the canals.”
Her eyes dart to the canal beside us and my eyes follow.
A gondola has just finished passing through, the gondolier singing in Italian to the selfie-taking couple on the boat, the dark, murky water filled with small whirlpools from the gondolier’s oar.
Though the sun sparkles off the surface, I get these uneasy feelings, as if I’m sensing the depth beneath the water.
I’m seeing the limestone walls that form the foundations for the buildings, sunken boats, tires, thick clay at the bottom, and this sense of something hiding in the muck.
“What did the monster look like?” I ask her.
She just shakes her head and looks back to me. “I didn’t want to say anything in case it turned out to be nothing.”
“In the event that it is something…what did it look like?”
“I don’t know. It was dark out and I was walking back to my apartment at night and it…
at first I thought it was a black garbage bag floating in the water.
I was ready to head over to it and pull it out, I thought it was some garbage from tourists, you know?
But then it moved . It reached out of the water with long black fingers,” she holds her hand out, fingers stiff in exaggeration, “and I…I froze. And then it pulled itself up into the shadow until I couldn’t see it anymore but I could hear it.
I could hear it walking, this wet, dripping…
slithering sound. It was big, Dahlia. It was very big. ”
I’m no stranger to the supernatural. My parents were witches and my mother was big on holding séances in the attic, but it was to contact our relatives and nothing scary or bad ever happened during those times, usually just my grandmother turning the lights on and off or my grandfather’s disembodied voice coming through the spirit box, telling us he was fine.
Later, when I was at university, my dorm room was haunted by a ghost called Mary, but again, she was harmless.
Annoying, when she was trying to talk to me in the middle of the night and I had an exam the next day, but still harmless.
What Livia is talking about though, that’s something else entirely.
Monsters. The only monsters I knew of were vampires.
They were the only ones I’d seen with my own eyes. Everything else was just myth.
“It’s probably a vampire,” I say, trying to reassure her. “You know that some vampires have other forms. Their original selves. The mad ones.”
“And if it’s not? If it’s one of the creatures that has come out of the portal? Then what?”
“Then…” I say, exhaling as the weight on my shoulders gets heavier, “I guess I need to try harder.”
She straightens up, putting on a brave face. “Good. I’ll let Bellamy know.”
“Is there a reason he’s not contacting me about any of this?” I ask carefully.
“He seems to think that if you talk to him, it will make your glamor fade. Better not to take the chance.”