Chapter 4 - Marella
Once upon a time, the moon called us in like the tide. It pulled us to the surface and danced across our skin. The moon was second only to water in its ability to sustain us.
It made sense that the witch cursed us to live only when its face was completely hidden. Every month, without fail, we felt it slip away into the blackness of space. Only when it was completely erased could we move again.
I usually woke up first, and this month was no exception.
It always began with a prickling sensation in my toes, thousands of needles plunging into my skin.
I slowly began squeezing them against the pads of my feet, then rotating my ankles, slowly moving and stretching as the concrete fell from my skin before I was finally free, standing with my sisters, clothed in fabric that shifted month-to-month, staring at the still-present stone sarcophagi to which we’d soon return.
Across the city, I knew that more of us, representatives from other families who had chosen to stay and fight, were also waking up.
I was never sure how the witch had glamoured the fountain to hide our monthly resurrection from the humans milling about the square, but none of them ever seemed to pay attention to our sudden appearance.
On occasion, a small child, or sometimes a dog, would look my way, and their eyes would widen in fear and confusion for half a moment.
But it was always fleeting, a glimpse of recognition that disappeared before they once again forgot us.
I didn’t wait for my whole family to wake up this time. As soon as the stiffness left my bones, I started striding away from the square, following the same path I’d seen the men take as they stumbled away the day before.
It had been more than satisfying to see them leave with their tails tucked between their legs.
So satisfying that, for a brief moment, I let myself forget that the human who came to my rescue was one of the Fratelli.
Instead of the robes, I saw a nervous but brave man, voice strained from the effort of staying steady, blue eyes blazing with a need to prove himself to his older companion.
The brief swell of affection made my stomach churn.
"Marella!" a voice behind me called. I contemplated ignoring her—I was faster and nimbler than my older sister, and she wouldn’t be able to catch me if I were to slip into the shadows and run away.
But she was drawing attention to herself as she ran across the square, so I stopped and turned to face her, crossing my arms over my chest.
"What, Ordina?" I snapped when she was close enough to whisper.
Her white-blonde hair shimmered in the low lights of the square, and I rolled my eyes as men and women alike tried—and failed—not to stare at her.
She was the inverse of me in almost every way, bright where I was dark, wiry where I was full.
My black hair had appeared cropped to my chin one night around thirty years ago, and it had never grown long again.
Ordina reached out to grab my hand with both of hers. "You’re not going to go looking for them, are you?"
I stared at her flatly.
"Marella, don’t be stupid," she hissed. "You won’t find them. And if you do, there are five of them, and one of you."
"They don’t always move in packs, Ordina." I pulled my hand from her grasp.
"On vacation, they tend to."
"I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it."
I turned my back on her and began marching away again.
"And what if you run out of time?" she asked, just before I was out of earshot.
With a sigh, I turned to face her again. "I won’t."
Her pale eyebrows rose. "If you spend the entire night searching for one group of random men, you very well might."
"Then I run out of time!" I shouted, throwing my arms into the air and causing enough of a scene that the passersby began staring without even attempting to hide it. I pursed my lips before continuing. "It’s not like my situation can get any worse, can it?"
"Becoming permanently encased in stone because you didn’t take the time to properly… hydrate… is quite a bit worse, Marella." She glanced over her shoulder at the fountain in the square, where our other sisters were now fully awake.
Notably, our father was not. He hadn’t woken from the stone in over a decade, when, one moonless night, he’d decided to go hunting for the witch. The hunt had consumed his mind, and he’d run out of time to do any actual hunting before sunrise, leaving him parched and tired upon his return.
He didn’t drink any blood that night. And he never pulled himself free from the stone again. More than one of the others had already succumbed to the same fate. If we didn’t feed while we were freed, we would never wake up again.
Ordina stared pointedly at his figure in the streetlights. "I don’t think I could bear the thought of losing another of us. We’re already so few."
I released a long, slow breath. "I won’t run out of time, Ordina," I said finally, forcing gentleness into my tone.
She still looked skeptical.
"If I feel like it’s becoming a risk, I promise I’ll pull the first random schmuck I find into an alley with me." I winked at her. "You know how much they all love the alleys."
Finally, she smiled halfheartedly. "You could let me come with you."
Taking one step back, I shook my head. "You know I always hunt alone."
"Yes." She bit her lip. "But it would be nice to actually spend time together. We haven’t really spoken in… well, years."
I chewed on the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from snapping again; the air was balmy, but the nights were already growing shorter, as we’d passed the summer solstice.
If Ordina truly cared about my ability to complete the task and return to the square before daybreak, then she needed to let me go.
"Next month," I promised hastily, already regretting it. "We’ll hunt together. I promise. I’ll take you to all my favorite seedy bars, and we’ll feast on as many lowlifes as you can hope to encounter in one night."
Her eyes softened ever so slightly. "Promise?"
"Promise."
And this time, when I turned on my heel to walk away, she didn’t try to stop me. By the time I’d reached the edge of the square and began slipping into the shadows of a narrow street, she’d already disappeared in the other direction, as had the rest of my sisters.
As the night activity picked up around us, I drifted into the city like a wraith, letting my tongue drag across my canines.
The most key component of the witch’s curse, the part that hurt the most, was that water had become toxic to us.
We could touch it while encased in stone, let it flow over us as part of the fountain, but when we awoke, we could not drink nor touch it for long periods of time. If we tried, the results were… painful.
But we still needed it to survive.
And unfortunately for the humans milling around me like ants, there was only one reliable source of water readily and consistently available to us:
Blood.
The witch’s curse had turned us into the monsters the Fratelli made us out to be centuries ago. But I’d long since stopped caring about the morality of our plight.
On nights like tonight, I loved being a monster. I just needed to find the right prey.
As a general rule, I never took blood from someone innocent.
Or, at least not from someone who had not done wrong in my vicinity.
I was well aware that drunken nights in foreign cities led people to decisions they’d otherwise never make.
It was an unfortunate twist of fate that they chose to do those things in my presence.
Either way, I never simply grabbed random people off the street. They didn’t always die from our feedings, but it happened often enough that I felt the need to operate under some guise of a moral code; this helped me feel like the good kind of monster.
Mostly, at least.
Unfortunately, it was looking more and more like I’d have to break that code if I wanted to avoid breaking my promise to Ordina.
I also wanted to avoid the fate that had befallen my father, but, strangely, that desire echoed less in my mind than the stubborn urge to simply prove to Ordina that I could manage both finding the men and returning home full and satiated with their blood.
But it was well past two in the morning, and I’d not encountered them in any of the tourist bars I’d slipped into.
Rossaia wasn’t a huge city, but the number of bars, restaurants, and carved-out holes in the wall where tourists could find alcohol was high.
High enough that I couldn’t possibly hope to make it to all of them in one night.
Could I have misjudged them? I’d been targeting the kinds of places where young, wealthy tourists could snap photographs with overpriced alcohol and drink in the crumbling remnants of stones that once belonged to churches and universities—the kinds of places that begged for proof of the experience.
But after hours of searching, I’d not seen the slightest trace of them.
Maybe, apart from drunkenly assaulting statues after lunch in broad daylight, they were actually more mature and discerning humans.
Maybe they were drinking 100-year-old wine in a basement enoteca.
Maybe they had already imbibed for the evening and were curled up safely in their hotel beds, dreaming of the stories they’d soon be able to tell their friends overseas.
I refused to let myself think that they’d already left the city. In my bones, I needed them to still be here.
But just in case, I began scanning the crowds for something else as well. Leering stares and drunken conversations, unwanted hands drifting too close to non-consenting bodies… the kinds of actions that would allow me to feel no remorse as I sank my teeth into the soft flesh of a neck.
Many, if not most, places in Rossaia had already closed for the night, and my options were dwindling. But that also meant that the people still out partying were sloppier, drunker, and more ready to reveal their true natures.