Page 19

Chapter Nineteen

The Empire’s rape and pillage of Rome continues. The next time the moon is full and bright, it hurts my eyes less. The time after that, it does not hurt at all.

“I found something for you.”

I lift my head from the stone floor of a rich man’s house. Manod and I drank from the man for days. I took the rest of his family quickly, claiming a lack of self-control. I simply couldn’t bear the suffering I knew my master planned to inflict.

There’s food here. I pinch bits of bread. At first, they make me want to retch, but I hold them down as if I’m claiming crumbs of my humanity.

My master has shown me the liminal space between life and death.

I go there to practice changing into a crow, shifting my clothing into my consciousness so that it will reappear on me when I return to the Manifest. That gray place is one of contentment, peace, belonging.

I can travel quickly, but not over water.

In the liminal, water is needy and dangerous—pulling us down to die over and over.

Only in the liminal am I more able to think around the overwhelming hunger.

In the Manifest, I have no control over it.

I am made of constant starvation. Sometimes, after I feed and before sunrise, when I sleep, I remember that I have a wife who hates me and a son who needs me, but then I wake and all I can think about is blood.

I have no space in my head to consider the morality of killing my prey, or to wish for more for myself.

I am no more, no better, no worse than an animal.

Manod can find me easily there, but I still go to find peace.

I have passed others of my kind. One greeted me with a nod then disappeared.

Another clung to me like a man driven wild with loneliness until Manod ripped him away and threw him back into the Manifest, saying the cast out shall never return.

“Why do we hide, Master?” I say with the appropriate amount of respect. “We are stronger in every way. Why don’t we live openly in our power?”

He harumphs like a father impressed with his child’s question, when the answer is obvious to any adult. “They have to feed themselves. Breed themselves. They stop when we hold them in captivity. They fight.”

“We can beat them.”

“We can overpower ten or twenty. A hundred of them will be inconvenient. More are a danger. And if they are afraid, they are worse. Better to pick off the weak ones.”

He doesn’t pick off the weakest. He enjoys taking the strong and playing them like puppets.

Last night, he released me to hunt, following easily as I sped around corners so fast I barely felt the earth under me. Jumping from balcony to balcony, roof to roof, I was assaulted by a tapestry of scents.

“When you smell weakness and inattention,” he whispered over my shoulder, “you follow it.”

“That’s not a scent, Master.” I have become a docile pupil and remained a man with too much pride to accept inconsistencies.

“It smells like love.” He took me by the jaw and pushed me against the stone wall. I was used to being manhandled by him, so it didn’t distract from the scents my brain was now able to parse. “Close your eyes and mouth. Breathe. This alley reeks of it.”

I closed my eyes and cataloged what I smelled. Death. Fear. A pillage without end. He didn’t want me to tell him how that smelled. He’d taught me fear on the first night.

“Fresh fish.” I was consumed with hunger. I could barely remember a time when that smell would have made my stomach rumble. “Salt. Burning wood.”

“Close. More. Pay attention.”

Something gamey threaded through my perception. “Lamb.”

“Yes.” He dropped his hand, leaving behind lingering pain. “That is love. It makes men weak and makes women…” His eyes fluttered closed for a moment as he shook his head slowly. “It makes women more charming to the tongue.” He opened his eyes and barked in my face. “Go! Before I take them myself.”

The lamb scent led me to a couple groping each other in the shadows. I drank them both dry.

Now, waking in the tunnels, I am ravenous all over again.

“Look at you.” He’s naked, as he prefers, with his erection a sign of his enduring admiration for me.

I wince a little with the memory of my humanity being ripped away.

“This?” He laughs, pointing at his dick.

“You’re worried.” He steps forward slowly enough to perceive.

The torture is in the moments of terrible anticipation.

“If I was in the mood, I could overpower you and take you, but—” In a split second, I am on my back and his foot is on my throat.

“Without drinking from you, it’s not as much fun. ”

He leans down, putting more weight on my neck. I twist his foot. He flies instead of falls, turning into a raven, to land on his feet far away.

“You are my kindred. I sired you. We are both vampires. Think of it. Me, piercing your skin with my teeth, sucking the blood from your veins, drinking what I gave to you.”

A wave of disgust thrashes through my body and mind. So many distasteful, loathsome things have been done by me and to me. Somehow, what he’s describing is the most physically revolting.

“Follow me.”

I have no choice but to obey. My hunger is worse than the thrall he held over my human self.

Rome in the autumn of 1527 is a dark place, even with the moon blazing.

It is night again, and the streets are mostly empty.

Everyone who can, gets behind a locked door.

Old blood stains the walls in splatters and streaks, marking the places where things happened.

I know blood. I know which splashes were made in August and which were made yesterday.

The screams and cries are fewer than our little crew from the brothel heard on that first night, but if you stand still any time of day or night, listening with the ears of a predator, you can hear their song.

Manod put on pants and an old shirt, but his feet stay bare as he creeps up the hill, close to the wall as if any man in Rome can get the better of him.

It’s not men he’s cautious of. It’s the kindred colony of Charles III.

They are bats as we are corvids. We cannot gauge their numbers from the dead they leave behind—not when there are so many dead by human hands.

When the ribbon of sweetness crosses my nose, I grunt as if I’ve been shoved.

“You smell it,” he says.

“I remember.” Sundays and Paolina. I grip my chest to rip it open and stuff that smell inside.

“You scented the Strega.”

He takes me by the back lapel and jumps to the second floor, hovering in front of the window of a woman standing at the foot of a bed, stripping for a cock-fisted squirrel of a man.

His clothes are draped over a chair to reveal the insignia of the Empire.

The woman is a black-haired beauty, and even with her bare back to me—I’d know that ass anywhere.

“Paolina,” I whisper, knowing that, for a single mouthful of her blood, I would—no, I will —happily rip her to shreds.