Children of the Night

by Zan Safra

  She looks to each of us, one to the other. “You must leave. Tonight.”

  Andreas slams his fist against the armrest. “I won’t allow it!”

  “I won’t run. She’ll kill everyone in Venice if I run!” Her breath seethes through her teeth. “She’ll add them to her army and move on. That’s what she must mean to do. God knows how many will die!”

  “It isn’t your responsibility!”

  “It is! I—”

  “You can’t do this alone!”

  Andreas’ voice crashes about the room, thick with terror. Ayanda tightens her hands, one flesh, one metal, gripping the back of the chair.

  “I killed a Dead creature tonight,” she says.

  The light plays over her face. The flat shine I glimpsed in the corridor flickers in her eyes. They are darker now, black as the sky, her pupils hollow voids.

  Her voice fills with a coldness I have never heard. “I stabbed him through the heart and watched him crumble to dust.”

  Something changes in the mirror at her back. The edges of her reflection blur, shimmering, melting into smoke.

  “I’ve done it once.” Her hollow eyes pass over us in turn. “I shall do it again. Alone.”

  “No,” Yurei whispers.

  Ayanda’s reflection snaps solid. Her eyes return to their ordinary darkness. All of us turn to Yurei. His eyes burn in the darkness, sulfur aflame. The shadows writhe about him, wisps coming alive.

  “Not alone,” he says.

  Jette murmurs, “I have never encountered the likes of this.”

  She lifts her gaze. The firelight fills her transparent eyes, turning their irises to red rings. “But they have never encountered the likes of me.”

  She grits her teeth. “Not alone.”

  Ayanda stares openmouthed. All turn to me.

  Icy fingers sink into my neck. I met the fiend. I looked into her eyes. They were corpse eyes, dead, embalmed things, but something burned behind them, something hideous. Nothing I could have said would have swayed her. I could not have reasoned with her if I tried.

  The volta in my heart gives a flicker, brightening. I will not be weak for long…

  No.

  I have never been weak. I escaped the strongest alchemical prison on the Continent. I destroyed a giant automaton. I defied the fiend to her face.

  I will not run from her. I will not abandon the Venetians. I do not care that they are Naturals. I do not care that they fear me. I will not let them die.

  I will not let my friends die.

  I straighten my spine. “Who better to destroy a monster than a monster?”

  The room falls quiet. I feel a change in the air, like the faintest echo of a storm. I look from one face to another. Griffin. Phantom. Jekyll. Draculesti.

  I end on my own reflection. Frankenstein.

  Andreas forces a smile. “Very well,” he says. “Let’s kill ourselves a vampire.”

  Act Three

  Chapter Twenty

  Ayanda

  11 February 1865

  Night

  I REST MY HANDS on the cupola’s railing, looking out over the city. The Shadow Palace’s disguise casts a sheen over the rooftops and sky, making the domes of the distant Baxelega quiver like a mirage. The Campanile bell clangs, striking ten.

  Venice is silent but not still. I feel motion, tuggings inside my heart, movement rippling down the strands anchored in its core. They stretch from me, invisible filaments of black oil, leading to San Michele.

  I concentrate on the threads. I feel the Dead creatures stirring, roaming through their tunnels. When I reach out with my mind to touch a thread I sense feeling from the creature, though vague and dull. Hunger. Frustration. Confusion. Fear.

  The Lesser Dead can’t understand what’s happened. They’ve no leader, no one to command them. Not since I killed him.

  But it wasn’t me. That presence, that thing seized me, jerked me about like a marionette, using my mouth to speak words I never imagined, my hand to stab Don Giacomo through the heart…

  I tried not to think on it. I’ve not even tried to reason it out, as though if I pushed it from my mind it would erase what’s happened. But the past can’t change.

  The wind slices through my shawl. I back into the shadow of the cupola’s pillar, sheltering from the cold. The strands shift again as a strix leaves the cemetery island, flapping towards the mainland.

  I know what it means, why I sense these things, why I’m bound to these creatures. It’s how it happens among the Greater Dead. When I killed Don Giacomo his thrall passed to me.

  I touch my fingers to my neck, feeling my heartbeat. It makes no sense. This shouldn’t be possible. I’m alive, I’m not one of them…

  Dhampiresa…Dracula…

  The door to the stairwell opens and Madrina emerges. “Ayanda, why are you here? In this cold!”

  She wraps a wing about me like a cloak. I can’t look her in the eyes. If I do she’ll see that something’s wrong. She always knows.

  I stare hard at the distant domes. I wish…I wish so terribly I could tell her…

  But what could I possibly say?

  “Fiorella is overjoyed with your gift,” she says, smiling. “In her own way.”

  The clockwork butterfly. It follows Fiorella as it should, even perching on her head at breakfast. I can’t help but smile. Now it’s far easier to find her when she hides to escape her lessons.

  Madrina looks out over the city. “Your padrino was a master of metallaria,” she murmurs. “He would have loved you so.”

  “We’ve no proof he’s dead.”

  Madrina shakes her head, sadness darkening her smile. “Do you remember your expedition?”

  Heat rises in my face. “I was a child.”

  “A brave one. You’d never met him, yet you set out nonetheless.”

  Him, my padrino, the godfather I’d never met. He’d vanished the year before I was found. Madrina couldn’t go in search of him and leave children to fend for themselves, so I took matters into my own hands, a seven-year-old child mounting a rescue mission to parts unknown. Andreas caught me at the wharf, a tiny bonneted girl dragging an overpacked carpetbag up a gangplank.

  Madrina brushes a hand over my hair, tucking in a loose coil. “I knew you were a special one when I found you,” she says. “Such a courageous child. You were wounded, suffering, yet still so strong.”

  I?

  I turn to her. “I thought Andreas was the one to find me.”

  Her smile falters. “Yes. Yes, of course. I misspoke.”

  Before I can speak the door flies open again and Pia bursts through, wailing, “Madrina!” She thrusts out a smoky hand. “It bit me! It bit me!”

  Beatriz storms into the cupola. “She asked for it!” She brandishes a fanged plant with charred leaves. “Look what she did!”

  “It was an accident!” Pia bawls.

  “Not here! Out of the cold! Ayanda, you as well!” She ushers them into the stairwell and beckons me after them.

  I leave them at the fourth floor and follow the carpeted corridor, trying to order my thoughts. Madrina misremembered. That’s all.

  She misremembered rescuing a blood-drenched child in a snowstorm.

  The hall clock strikes a quarter past ten. I quicken my steps. All five of us are supposed to meet at the Palaso Rurico at midnight to plan our next move. I may as well prepare.

  A note sounds from the music room ahead, the bell-like chime of a pianoforte. More notes follow, without melody, like drops of falling rain.

  The carpet muffles my footsteps as I follow the sound. The door to the music room is ajar. Moonlight floods the chamber, shining on the dark wood of the pianoforte and silhouetting the black-clothed figure before it.

  Yurei?

  He sits at the pianoforte, bent over the keys. They glow in the dimness, carved from bars of light. He presses a low key, a toned rumble like a musical growl. After a moment
he touches one of the highest, an icy chime.

  The note dissolves. In its wake I dare speak. “You said you weren’t musical.”

  Yurei leaps up. The bench topples over, spilling pages of music over the floor. He lunges to gather them up. I go to help him, kneeling to sweep up the music. We reach for the same page and knock our heads together. He recoils. “Forgive me!”

  “It’s all right. No harm done.” I gather up the last of the music and tuck it back into its folio. Yurei fumbles with the bench and sets it upright. “I’ll go—"

  “No!”

  I catch his hand. Yurei freezes, startled, and I let go just as quickly. Heat rises in my face again. “I didn’t expect you to come.”

  A silence settles over us like a wet fog. Yurei runs his hand over his hair, trying to smooth it. It falls in his eyes again.

  I grab for something to say, anything to break the quiet. I want to bombard him with questions, to finally, finally discover something of who he is, but too many words crowd my brain at once. All that trickles out is, “You play the pianoforte?”

  Yurei glances at it, eyes traveling over the keys, then lowers his gaze. “No. I know nothing of it.”

  I set down the music and hurry to the door, motioning for him to follow. “Come with me. You must meet my godmother.”

  Yurei doesn’t follow me. I stop, my hand on the doorknob. “Haven’t you come to stay?”

  He blinks, bewildered. “Stay?”

  “Of course. You can’t go back to La Filomena. The fiend knows where to find you.”

  Yurei stares at me. Changing emotions flit through his eyes, but I can’t say what they are. I wish so much that I could see his face. If I could only see his face I might better understand…

  He turns away. “I don’t belong here.”

  “Of course you do.” I leave the door, going to him. “Why else did you come?”

  He stares at the floor. “To apologize.”

  “Apologize?”

  “For what I said in the crypt,” he murmurs.

  I remember the sight of him, the scream that rattled my soul. He was a different person then, a creature of only pain and fury. Perhaps he still is. Perhaps that storm is locked inside him, hidden along with his face.

  I strengthen my voice, trying to sound firm and confident. “You were hurt and frightened. We’d nearly died. Anyone would have grown upset.”

  “No. It was wrong.”

  “I haven’t suffered as you have. I know I can’t possibly understand.”

  He clenches his jaw. “It was wrong.”

  “Yurei…”

  Yurei goes to the window. He stares out and quickly glances away, down at the rooftops below, as though afraid to glimpse his own reflection.

  I go to join him. We gaze out at Venice in silence.

  “Have you come from a city?” I ask.

  Yurei blinks, startled out of his thoughts. “No, a…” His eyes narrow as pauses, as though searching for a word. “A citadel,” he says. “Far from here.”

  “Citadel?”

  “Built of white stone, in a desert waste.”

  He says nothing else. Another silence falls.

  It comes out. “I-I don’t know whence I came.”

  Yurei turns to me, confused. It’s too late. I can’t take back the words.

  I draw out my medallion. “This is all I carried when I was found.”

  I give it to him. Yurei studies it, running his thumb over the engraved letters. “You name?” he asks.

  My insides clench. “I…I suppose.”

  Draculesti. Even in my mind the name has changed, turned to only harsh consonants, spiked edges.

  I take back the medallion. “Please stay. You can belong here. You needn’t be alone.”

  I touch his shoulder. He flinches. His gaze meets mine, wavering as though he longs to look away, but he doesn’t…

  Now I’m the one to look away. I slip my medallion’s chain over my head and let it fall beneath my collar. It’s clear. Fighting vampires has broken my brain.

  “Why do you do it?” His reflection turns to mine. “You needn’t do any of this. You’re safe here. You needn’t fight the Dead.”

  Why.

  A sickness rises within me, a nauseating acid eating at my insides. I sink onto the window seat. Why.

  It isn’t that I’ve the knowledge or a unique bond with the Dead. It never was.

  Yurei’s voice thickens with worry. “Ayanda?”

  I swallow hard. I’ve not spoken of the child since it happened, though I remember every detail. It hasn’t the vague haziness of other childhood memories. It might have happened yesterday.

  “There was a child,” I say. “A Natural girl.”

  Yurei sits beside me, tentative. “What happened?”

  The wall of memory cracks like a glacier. A sea of words pours through. As I speak it all returns, the sounds, the feelings, the dark.

  “It happened at the witching hour. I was a child myself, of eight years. It was past moonset, nearly dawn. I was meant to be abed.”

  I remember the quiet of that long-ago night as I sat at my desk by the light of a single candle, glaring at the fragments of the necklace whose pieces I’d forged the night before. I was still unused to my latest metallaric arm, clumsy and imprecise, my new fingers not yet nimble enough to string a single silver bead. I felt stupid, bumbling, and finally flung down my jeweler’s pliers with tears in my eyes. The noise of them striking the desk shocked me. In the silence the sound seemed loud as a breaking dish.

  The corridor clock began to chime, reminding me of the lateness of the hour. Everyone was sleeping, even Andreas, who often stayed awake past mistrise. I wasn’t tired, but I knew that I had mathematics lessons first thing in the evening. I’d be useless at equations without a proper sleep.

  Then I felt the chill.

  It struck me so violently that I gasped. I ran to snatch a blanket from my bed and huddled beneath it, shivering like a rabbit. Fear gripped me, a deep rattling horror like nothing I had yet felt, not then, and I knew that something was terribly wrong.

  I felt a guiding, like an invisible chain attached to my breastbone. It drew me out of my room, down the darkened corridor and onto the balcony overlooking the square.

  Utter quiet soaked the night. Not even the sea wind fluttered the leaves of the spiderbone vines. A strange, stagnant smell poisoned the air.

  My shivering worsened. I wanted nothing more than to run, to slam shut the doors and dive under the blankets of my bed, but the pulling only strengthened, drawing me to the balcony’s edge.

  I heard the song.

  A sibilant voice slithered through the night, singing a strange melody. It wasn’t the voice of an ordinary woman. It echoed oddly, as though several voices sang in unison, a ghostly chorus hidden throughout the square.

  I knew what it was. I knew.

  A woman appeared at the other end of the square, a silhouette wreathed in an unearthly glow. Her hair was dark and glossy, ribbons of black against a gown that shone with an eerie shimmer. Her face was impossibly lovely. Her movements were graceful, each footfall like the step of a dance.

  I knew what she was. I knew that she was Dead.

  The vampire passed below. Her gaze swept about, searching. Hunting.

  I shrank back, cocooning myself in the blanket as the vampire moved on. I knew everything of her, her varianta, her manner of preying, and the precise prey that she craved.

  I had never been so frightened. But I knew I had no choice.

  I let the blanket fall, clambered over the balcony’s railing and jumped for the net of spiderbone vines. I climbed barefoot down their branches, my nightdress snagging on their bark. I dropped to the ground and followed the Dead woman down the lane, staying well back, only near enough to keep her in sight. I didn’t know what to do, only that I had to stop her, somehow…

  The creak of hinges scraped through the quiet.
The vampire stopped. I darted behind a corner, peering out. The Dead woman stood perfectly still, a statue carved from snow.

  She spoke in a whispery voice, with the barest hint of a laugh. “I hear you...”

  A door opened. A small girl appeared, younger than I was, blinking sleepily. Her gaze alit on the vampire. “Who are you?” she gasped.

  The vampire whirled on the spot with a crystalline laugh, her hair and gown flying about her. “Will you play, little one?”

  The girl stared at her in wonderment. “Are you a fata?” she whispered. “A fairy?”

  A slow smile spread across the Dead woman’s face, a pointed slash filled with glittering teeth. “Yes, dear.”

  The vampire extended a delicate hand. “Would you like to play?”

  The little girl shrank away. The Dead woman took a step forward. “Come away with me, to the fairy island.” A strange lilt slipped into her voice, a singsong lullaby. “You can play…and dance…to your heart’s…delight...”

  The girl blinked. The sleepy expression crept over her face again. She let go of the doorframe and stepped over the threshold.

  A reddish gleam bloomed in the vampire’s eyes. A white tongue flicked from her mouth and passed over her lips. Her other hand hung at her side, fingers curling, unsheathing her claws.

  “Forever and ever,” she breathed. “Forever and—"

  I dashed from my hiding place and screamed, “Stop!”

  The vampire spun to face me. Her beauty flickered, revealing a flash of a livid red mouth, bulging bloodshot eyes, but then the illusion formed again. The lovely face returned, smiling as before, but there was no hiding the hunger in her gaze.

  The girl looked between us in confusion. Though the terrible fear still gripped me, I forced the words from my throat, crying out, “Run! She’s not a fata!”

  Anger sparked in the Dead woman’s eyes. Her smile hardened, fixing to her face. “Of course I am, little one.”

  She reached for me. “Will you—”

  “I know what you are!” I balled my fists at my sides and screamed the varianta’s name. “Baobhan sith!”