Page 49

I

Venice, Italy

Years pass, and as they do, Sabine finds herself at home.

In the palazzo, yes, but that is simply walls and windows, rooms and floors. It is her host and his lover who make it something more.

They build a life together, Alessandro, Matteo, and Sabine. They form a novel kind of family. She sits for the mortal and his art, and spends late nights talking with her host, each of them trading stories of the years before they came to Venice.

She and Matteo are so different, and yet alike.

Alessandro says they are like two blocks of granite: headstrong and stubborn.

But he is wrong. They are not the same. Sabine watches Matteo and his mortal love, sometimes with envy, and others with disdain, and while she understands Matteo’s many rules, she also loses patience with them, and finds herself longing for a change of scenery, or pace.

And so Sabine begins to venture off sometimes, to Tuscany, or Rome.

She goes intent on savoring a night or week or month of freedom, of solitude, the ability to kill as often as she pleases, only to discover that she’s come to crave the drawn-out tension of the hunt. That without the prelude to the pleasure, it comes and goes too quick, leaves her unsatisfied.

Not that she will admit it to Matteo.

More than once, she wanders farther, knowing that when she does return, whether it is in a month, a season, or a year, she will be welcomed back.

Welcomed home.

Inside the palazzo, time goes by, marked only by the paintings added to the walls, the shift of styles in the wardrobes, and the slow alteration of Alessandro’s face, his countenance.

A new century is ushered in, and while Matteo and Sabine look exactly as they always have—as unchanging as the palazzo, the lagoon, the very bones of Venice—Alessandro’s youth is long behind him now.

His once-gold hair has turned a paler shade, his skin now thin enough to see the skeleton beneath. Some of his edges have grown sharper, while others are made soft by age. He walks with a cane, and each season seems to lean more of his weight on the polished wooden stick.

He is still lovely, in that doll-like way.

And Matteo is still in love. A ruinous thing.

He claims he has long made peace with Alessandro’s choice, his inevitable decay, and insists they still have years, that even mortal life lasts far beyond the blooms of youth. Makes jokes about how he will always be the older of the two, while insisting Alessandro only grows more elegant with age.

It is maddening to witness, and Sabine wonders whether Matteo is lying to Alessandro, or himself, or if he thinks saying things can make them real. If that is a power he has, one he has not shown her yet, or if he’s simply in denial, unwilling to accept the truth.

And then, one winter, Alessandro’s chest begins to hurt. His lungs are rattling by spring, and Matteo loses his composure, begins to beg his lover to reconsider their arrangement. To let himself be planted in the midnight soil.

Quiet as they are, Sabine hears the conversations, rooms away.

Stay with me, he pleads, but Alessandro will not waver. If he did not want to be young forever, why would he choose to be old? Life is meant to end. It is not for man to decide when.

Sabine listens, and seethes.

What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose?

Of holding on to someone who cannot hold on to you?

It is Matteo’s fault. His folly. And yet, somehow, the pain echoes through her, too.

Because she has come to like Matteo’s pet, to enjoy his company, mortal as it is, to consider him a friend, and now she feels like she’s been slowly poisoned.

She didn’t want to care about him, but she does, and the impending loss doesn’t make her sad.

It makes her furious.

That last week, Alessandro spends every waking moment in the sun, his tired face tipped up to catch the light.

More than once, Sabine drifts into the courtyard after dusk to find him sleeping in his garden chair, thin limbs crossed beneath a blanket.

More than once, she has to listen for the quiet murmur of his heart, the soft drawing of breath, to make sure he hasn’t left.

More than once, she thinks of putting an end to all this nonsense. Of taking care of him herself. Plant him in the midnight soil, and be damned. Let Alessandro hate her, as she has begun to hate him, for casting this shadow on their happy life.

But then his blue eyes drift open, and he looks at Sabine the way he did on the first night, with that artist’s crisp gaze, as if trying to decide exactly how to paint her.

He has tried a dozen times in these intervening years, but though she does not change, he cannot seem to capture her. And now, she knows, he never will.

“Come to keep me company?” he asks, a faint rasp behind the words.

“Actually,” she says, “I’ve come to spar. You look in need of practice.”

A soft, unsteady chuckle. “Tonight,” he says, “you might just have the upper hand.”

The humor drops out of her voice. “You are a fool,” she seethes.

He smiles, and closes his eyes. “I know.”

She is not there the night he dies.

She is out, walking the streets, unable to bear the sound, his heart, like a clock someone has failed to wind, the beats slowly losing pace.

She is not there, but she knows, the moment she returns.

It is not just the stillness in the house.

It is the air, stained black with pain. Not Alessandro’s, but Matteo’s.

Matteo, who has kept his mind well guarded all these years, who to her has always been opaque.

But now his grief is splashed against the floor, it slicks the walls like paint.

It is all Sabine can smell. All she can taste.

She hovers at the bottom of the stairs as the minutes turn to hours. She has held a hundred humans as they died, felt them turn to corpses in her arms. And yet, she cannot bring herself to go upstairs and see this body for herself.

She sleeps in Alessandro’s studio, surrounded by his art. Two days and nights Matteo stays inside his room. Until the house begins to smell of rotting flesh as well as pain. Until Sabine can’t stand it anymore, and sends word for the physician, who comes to take the corpse away.

Alessandro Contarini, fifty-nine, and buried in his family plot.

In the nights and weeks that follow, Sabine avoids the house. Leaves Matteo to his misery, sure that it will pass.

And yet, it doesn’t.

Matteo acts as though he’s died as well.

He is a specter. A ghost. He moves out of their room.

And into another. And another. And another.

Searching for a bed that will hold one instead of two, before at last he abandons the pursuit and takes over the salon instead, pulls the curtains and blocks out the light of Venice before collapsing on the couch.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s play a game.”

But he will not.

Visitors come by day and night bearing their condolences, but the knocks all go unanswered, flowers left to wither on the stoop. Gone, too, are the gondola rides, the public demonstrations, all effort at keeping up pretenses.

At night Matteo sits so still out in the courtyard that it’s a wonder the wisteria does not begin to grow around him. Sabine wonders how long it will take for him to starve.

That year Carnevale comes and goes without a single mask, or ball, or game, and Sabine grows tired of his sulking.

If only he would rant, or rave, rampage through the house, break the furniture and rend the curtains, tear the walls apart, do something, anything to clear the air, to let it out. Instead, he seems to calcify.

Matteo does not eat.

He does not sleep.

A month, and the whole place still hangs thick with sorrow. And she cannot bear it anymore.

“Enough,” she says.

“Get up,” she says.

“We’re going out.”

But Matteo is lost inside himself. And it is maddening. Another month of this, a season, two, and Sabine has had enough.

“You chose to love a mortal man,” she snaps.

“You refused to change him. You knew what would happen. You knew, and you brought it on yourself. What right have you, then, to be surprised by grief? To be so undone by it? If you cannot rouse yourself, you might as well go lie down beside him and let the grave dirt take you.”

Sabine knows that she is being cruel.

She does not care.

Once she starts, she cannot seem to stop. The words come spilling out like bile. Perhaps she is only trying to rouse Matteo from his grief. Perhaps she needs to purge her own as well.

“ Mateusz, ” she snaps at last, and that, at least, earns some reaction. The name lands like a blow, and he winces, turning toward her, the pain in his eyes so black and bottomless that she recoils.

But he says nothing, and Sabine cannot stand it anymore.

She leaves. Spends the winter in Verona, shaking off Matteo’s grief. Watches the old year die and the new one begin with flower-strewn effigies carried through the streets, the air full of church bells and candle smoke and hope.

In February, Sabine returns to Venice, unsure what she will find.

She steels herself against whatever ruin waits within the walls of the Palazzo di Contarini.

Decides that if she must, she will drag Matteo out.

She is surprised, then, to find the windows lit, the courtyard swept, the ivy freshly trimmed, thinks perhaps Matteo has abandoned the house, sold it and fled.

But the door swings open under her touch, and no one else’s will is there to meet her on the threshold, push her back.

Sabine steps into the carriage hall, braced for the fetid gloom she left behind, but it is gone, Matteo’s pain no longer hanging in the air. She slips off her shoes, lets her bare feet settle on the marble floor, starts toward the staircase when she hears it.

The shift of a body in a chair.

The crack of parchment turning.

Sounds that reach her not from overhead, but down the hall, the room at the end, which was Alessandro’s studio, until it wasn’t. That door has been shut fast ever since his burial, but it hangs open now, a soft glow spilling out.

Sabine stops short in the doorway, her whole body snagging there as if repelled.

But it’s only surprise.

At seeing Alessandro.

The blond curls unspooling down his face. The long, pale lashes, over eyes that shocking shade of blue. His body stretched on the low sofa, long fingers paging through a book. Alessandro, restored to beauty, youth.

He looks up at her and grins, flashing pointed teeth.

And it is not him. Of course it’s not. Alessandro is still dead.

The knowledge hits her like a dull blow.

“You must be Sabine,” he says, this interloper, abandoning the book and leaping to his feet. The easel has been put away, but the smell of paint lingers, ghosted onto every surface, and her first thought is that he shouldn’t be here. In this room. It isn’t his.

“Matteo has told me much about you!” says the stranger with a manic cheer, and as her shock fades, so does his resemblance. It’s true, he has Alessandro’s features, but they’ve been arranged in a different way. His body, moving with a different tempo.

When Alessandro was alive, he had a smooth and steady manner, as if anything too quick might startle them.

The stranger’s voice is louder and lower at the same time, his movements sudden and halting, as if he isn’t used to his new strength, or speed.

His thoughts are just as messy, tumbling into the air around him, clouds of want and interest and amusement. And of course, hunger.

“Ah,” says a voice from the doorway, “I see you’ve met Giovanni.”

Sabine turns and finds Matteo, as he was the night they met, thirty years ago, hale and hearty, shoulders broad and back straight.

Gone is the man made haggard by loss. The thicket of unkempt curls has been combed back. The mustache neatly groomed. The wrinkled linens replaced by black breeches and a pale tunic with pearl buttons, polished boots, an emerald cloak pin at his throat.

“I have indeed,” she says, arching a brow as if to ask, but his eyes are flat, his mind shut fast, the air around him silent. Giovanni flings an arm around Matteo’s shoulders, less like a man staking claim and more like a pup longing for attention.

“We are going out,” announces Giovanni. “You must come, so we can celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” she asks.

“That you are here, of course! Matteo will stop sulking now that you are back, and we are all together.”

Together. It shouldn’t chafe, and yet it does.

Matteo hands Giovanni a coat, but he waves it away.

“It is supposed to snow,” he chides.

“E allora? I am not cold.”

“It is not a matter of your comfort,” he says with the exasperated air of a parent explaining things to a small child. “It is about other people’s notice.”

Giovanni sighs, and holds out his arms, and Sabine shakes her head, watches in bemusement as Matteo dresses his new pet.

Watches as he bows his head and plants a kiss on Giovanni’s shoulder, the way he did Alessandro’s so many times.

But that was love, and this something else.

It has the hollow motions of performance. An actor going through his marks.

Giovanni pulls away instead of leaning in.

“I am so hungry,” he declares, his good mood suddenly replaced by a dramatic sulk.

“You just ate,” says Matteo placidly.

“That was last night! When I was mortal, I ate two times a day, sometimes three. Surely it’s the same.”

“It isn’t, I promise you.”

“But I feel like I will starve!” he declares.

Sabine and Matteo share a look. An almost-smile.

They step out into the courtyard, and Giovanni—Gio, he insists on being called—loops an arm through hers as he complains that Matteo has so many rules.

“He does,” Sabine agrees.

“I do not see the point of them.”

“The point,” says Matteo, “is to survive.”

“How boring!” declares Gio, sucking in a breath he doesn’t need, just to blow it out again. “But Sabine is here now. And surely she will be more fun.”