Page 29

V

Córdoba, Spain

One by one, the books fall down, each landing with a dull thud on the rug.

“Latin. Latin. Greek. Parable,” mutters Hector, pulling them from the shelf.

“What are you looking for?” asks Sabine from the low sofa where she lies, sprawled like moss across the velvet cushions.

He tugs another from the shelf, studying its contents before flinging it aside. “Something I haven’t read. ”

Sabine rolls her eyes. Hector and his books.

It’s been decades since she first eyed the folios in the Olivares house, since she sounded out the names on the bottles in the widow’s shop.

A lifetime, and in that time, she has learned to decipher the marks well enough, can make sense of what she reads.

But she has never understood the draw of doing it for pleasure.

She mentioned, once, that the whole pursuit seemed tedious, and Hector lost his head, went on such a tear about how she simply hadn’t found the right story, how when she did, she’d understand. Sabine only shrugged, and said she was content to amuse herself in other ways.

“How many scriptures does one house need ?” he snarls, casting the good book across the room.

Sabine may not spend her hours reading texts, but she has had fifteen years in which to read Hector and Renata, front to back.

Has studied both enough to know that Renata can be as cruel as she is ardent, always burning hot, while Hector swings like a pendulum between sulking and exuberant, uncanny stillness and sudden bursts of movement.

Tonight, he is restless.

He paces, sits and rises again, a sea churned up, as if possessed, ignited.

It is beginning to annoy her.

Sabine does her best to ignore his manic air, turning her attention to the ceiling overhead.

She studies the seven beams that run from wall to wall, each the width of a well-grown tree, until she finds it, in the grain of the centermost log: a face.

The whorls, like eyes, the darkened groove like a disapproving mouth.

The fire cracks and spits in the hearth, and by its unsteady light, the mouth flickers between indifference and anger.

Sabine scowls back as another book lands on the floor nearby with a muffled thud.

“He gets like this sometimes,” says Renata, drifting through the doorway, “after he’s indulged.” The only evidence of her time upstairs is a single smudge of red across her bottom lip. “One craving begets another.”

She sweeps her arm across the room as she says it.

It is an elegant room in an elegant house, fit for the family of six who lived there, and who now lie strewn about like cast-off clothes, linens wrung dry after a wash.

A man and woman both slumped against the wall.

Another lying in the hall, the gold rope of her hair creeping along the bottom of the doorframe.

The children, now upstairs in their beds.

Sabine has never had a thirst for such small prey, but Renata seems to savor it, likes to sit them on her lap as if they’re hers, rock them to sleep before putting them to bed for the last time. To each their own, she thinks.

There were six at the beginning of the night.

Now, there is only one.

A man, robust and in the flush of youth—perhaps that’s why he’s managed to hold on so long, despite the loss of blood. He’s sitting on the floor, shoulders propped against the side of a chair.

He called her bitch, demon, whore. So many invectives spilling from his bloodied mouth. Now it opens and closes without a sound, and his chest hitches with every shallow breath. Sabine might have killed him faster, if he hadn’t been so rude.

Renata sinks into the cushioned seat and rests her hand on the crown of his head, begins to play with his dark curls as if he were a pet. But his eyes are trained on nothing, his sluggish heart fighting against the downward pull of death.

Hector has finally abandoned the pursuit of books and instead found a fiddle. He begins meandering through a song with the air of someone plucking the notes out of thin air. His fingers stain the bow.

The face on the ceiling smiles. Frowns. Smiles. Glares.

Sabine sits up, and the room sways, the way it did sometimes when they were on the ship. The hearth light blooms in her vision, and it’s been so long since she felt unsteady or unwell that it takes her a moment to recognize this feeling.

Her bare feet land on the rug, and she declares, with equal parts annoyance and amusement, that she feels drunk.

“It’s in the blood,” explains Renata. “What they take in, so do you. At least to some degree.”

Hector stops playing, props the fiddle on his knee. “Blood is blood,” he says, “and yet, that is like saying food is food, whether it be vegetable or venison.” He gestures with the bow. “Yes, it all serves to nourish, but that does not mean it satisfies the same.”

“A difference in the details,” says Renata. “Here, I’ll show you.”

A bottle of Calvados sits half-empty on a side table. With one hand, Renata takes it up. With the other, she knots her fingers in the dying man’s hair, draws his head back and forces the bottle to his lips.

“Drink, my darling,” she says. “I’m trying to make a point.”

He struggles, throat bobbing against the liquor, but soon his protests are forced down. Liquid conquers air.

“Think of it as a decanting,” says Renata cheerfully.

Hector chuckles and rests the fiddle back beneath his chin.

“Come,” she says, twitching her free hand toward Sabine, who has never enjoyed being given a command, and yet, in Renata’s mouth, the word turns playful. In Renata’s mouth, it is soft, and coaxing, and Sabine gives in and goes to her, the room rolling gently beneath her feet.

“Drink,” she says, and that is an easy order.

Sabine kneels, brings her mouth to the man’s straining neck.

Skin breaks beneath her teeth, the blood pours in, and there is the heartbeat on her tongue, the drumming in her chest, the only part she’s ever focused on.

But now, as she drinks, she reaches past it, and finds, folded in the metal tang, the sharp sweetness of winter fruit.

Sabine forces herself to stop, to pull away, not because she wants to, no, only because Renata is at her ear, asking softly, “Well, what do you taste?”

The man’s head slumps against his chest, the neat crescent of her fangs already fading. His skin has taken on a ghoulish pallor, and yet somehow his stubborn heart clings on. Sabine closes her eyes and swallows, the taste retreating with the pulse.

“Apples,” she says, with a delighted, dizzy laugh.

That laugh, a sound so foreign in her ears it seems to come from someone else. Renata grins, and rises, drawing Sabine with her. The room rocks, and tilts, the heady mix of blood and liquor buzzing through her, but Renata keeps her on her feet.

Hector has taken up his melancholy song again, but she insists on something cheerful. Obligingly, he changes to a folksy tune. And then they are dancing, Renata and Sabine, twirling barefoot across the rug, careful not to trip on fallen limbs.

It is a moment to press in amber.

A lightness she has never felt.

Until Renata twirls her once, too hard, and then lets go, and Sabine loses her balance, her quick senses rushing to catch up with her slow limbs.

She stumbles, not on a body, but a short wooden stool that breaks beneath her when she falls. The fiddle skids to a stop as the stool snaps, and splinters beneath her, a thick shard piercing her back.

There is pain, but it’s a ghost, a pale echo of the things she once felt, and Sabine thinks little of it as she reaches back, wraps her hand around the wood. She draws it out, sighing in relief, and annoyance. After all, her dress is ruined.

She scowls at the offending stick, then looks up to find Hector’s face contorted, Renata’s hand at her mouth. Twin pictures of shock, horror. As if a bit of wood could fell Sabine.

“What?” she asks, dropping the shard onto the pile. The blood has already stopped, the skin knitting clean. “It is nothing.”

“But it could have been . . .” whispers Renata.

“What have I to fear from a bit of wood?” she answers blithely, but the room’s easy cheer has melted, replaced by something heavy. Hector’s expression darkens.

“I forget, sometimes,” he mutters, shaking his head, “how little you know.”

Sabine bristles, opens her mouth to bite back, but just then the man on the floor summons the last of his strength, and makes a final, doomed effort at escape.

He drags himself across the rug, makes it barely an arm’s length before Hector strolls over and uses his boot to nudge the man onto his back.

Crouches and splays a hand across the man’s heaving chest, though his attention lands solely on Sabine.

“What have you to fear?” he echoes darkly. “Let me show you.”

His fingers dig in, sinking through shirt and skin. The man’s rib cage gives with a sick crunch, the scent of blood heavy on the air, his mouth yawning in a scream that dies somewhere around his throat as Hector tears out his heart.

The body twitches, and goes still, and Hector rises, and walks over to Sabine, and drops the organ in her lap.

If Hector meant to horrify her, he has failed. She is hardly squeamish.

Sabine looks down, weighs the bloody mass in her palm. She has never held a heart before. It is small, but dense, at once heavier and lighter than she imagined. This lump of flesh made lifeless without its host.

“Behold,” he says, “the sole source of our fragility.”

Her fingers tense around the heart, as if willing it to beat. But her grip is too strong, and it emits only a trickle of blood before collapsing inward. Fragile.

Nothing about her is supposed to be fragile now. And yet—

“If that bit of wood had driven deeper, you’d be dead.”

Sabine flinches.

“Are there other ways to die?” she asks, thinking of the widow, crumbling to ash against her dress.

“Yes, and no,” says Renata. “Your bones will set. Your skin will mend. But the heart alone stays mortal. It is the seat of life, and death. If it is ruined, or removed, severed from the head or drained of all its blood, there is no mending to be done. When the heart collapses, so do we. If you must die,” she adds thoughtfully, “a blade or stick is quick, a bite is kind, but fire is a bad end.”

Sabine looks up. “Why is that?”

It is Hector who answers. “Because the heart burns last. ” He fetches up a bit of broken stool, a slice of wood the length of his forearm, and wags it like a finger.

“Fire, steel, wood, it does not matter. Destroy our hearts, and we are destroyed as well. So, I suggest you learn to guard yours better.”

With that, he flicks his hand, and sends the wood slicing toward her chest.

Sabine catches it, of course, he knew she would, but the point is close—too close—and the look in his eye is full of scorn, the air taut as a cord, and there is a moment, only a moment, when she wants to stand and drive the shard up beneath his ribs, just to end this lecture.

Just a moment, but then Renata is on her feet, gliding between them.

“Easy, my love,” she coos at Hector, though she reaches for Sabine.

“She didn’t know. And now she does.” Renata is still looking at her love as she grazes Sabine’s wrist, gently takes the stake from her hand and tosses it into the hearth.

Her head never turns, and yet, that touch is like a small but knowing look, a silent warning.

And then it’s gone, and she is focused solely on Hector.

She strokes his back and says something in his native Catalan.

He sighs and rakes his fingers through his hair, leaving flecks of dry blood in their wake.

And by the time his hand falls back to his side, the pendulum has swung again, the air loosening as he sweeps up the fiddle and begins to play, neither the dirge nor the dance, but something brighter.

And it would be easy to forget, to believe that nothing happened, except the evidence is everywhere.

The broken stool.

The decimated corpse.

The heart, cold and lifeless in her hand.

Later, she will think about this moment as a turning of the tide. The beginning of the end. But for now, Hector finds the melody, and Renata folds herself back into her chair, and Sabine tosses the ruined heart into the fire, and watches as it burns.