Loose mortar had crumbled away, leaving peep holes in the brick wall that gave me cover. Through them, I scrutinized every centimeter of the chamber around the stairway leading down into Sulla’s shop. I listened, waiting for that one faint sound that would tip me off to the hunter’s location. Nothing. Was I going nuts? Imagining pursuit where there was none?
Move. He may or not be here, but you need to move.
I couldn’t get caught. There would be no trial for me. To be apprehended meant execution. What if the hunter wanted money, more than he wanted to steal my life’s energy? He could herd me in a specific direction just by following me and making his presence felt at critical points in the chase and flush me out into the open at the exact spot where a whole unit of the council guard waited to snatch me up.
Double-back. Get behind him and follow him.
I continued on, but instead of searching for a safe place to hole up for several days as I’d planned, I picked my way cautiously through the series of basements ringing the campo. Faster and faster I pushed myself, running on my toes to lessen the crunch of my footsteps on brick dust and sand. I obsessively checked each new corridor or room to make sure they were empty before entering, pausing every minute or so to listen for pursuit. Not once did I hear the hunter, though I kept my knife at the ready.
Damn, this guy was good. Preternatural.
And that was the problem. Who escaped a fae hunter after he locked on?
No one.
By the time I’d completed my circuit of underground rooms surrounding the campo and returned to the chamber housing the steps down to Sulla’s cistern home and shop, I knew I was screwed. I couldn’t tell if he was behind or ahead of me, if I’d shaken him off or he’d suddenly leap out of some nearby patch of darkness to stop my heart with a single touch of his hand.
So overworked and confused was my thinking that the bright glow from the stairway leading down to Sulla’s door didn’t set off a warning for me. Instead, I wondered what was going on. When had the dealer ever left his door open wide like a beacon to every roving gang of thugs in the district?
Here I am! Come beat up Alice and me, and take everything we own!
Answer: never.
I crept over, peered down the stairway, and searched for movement from within. I heard water dripping, but when and where did you not hear water dripping in Venice? And anyway, that was far away, not down there. Down below, all was still. If not for the light pouring out of the doorway, Sulla’s place reminded me of the entrance to a catacombs.
Though I felt exposed standing in plain sight and leaning over the stairwell to get a better look, the compulsion to know what was going on gripped me and wouldn’t let go.
“Sulla?” I said, probably too quietly for him to hear. “Are you down there?”
Idiot. Of course, he was down there. Sulla never left. His cistern was to him what a shell was to a mussel clinging to the pier at a vaporetto station. He was fused in place.
Since I’m here, I might as well get my mask.
I tip-toed down the steps.
“Sulla?”
His upper body sprawled across the buckled plywood, my carnival mask pinned beneath it. His head was twisted to the side, mouth open, sunglasses knocked out of place, revealing one of his eye sockets. The eye inside had been caught in mid-change when he’d quit breathing, neither the human nor fae-blue version having snapped into place. Strangely, his legs remained locked and standing behind the counter, supporting him just as they’d done in life. I saw no wounds, no blood. No sputum or foam surrounded his lips. His skin looked like it always did, sallow. From all appearances, he’d died like one of his electronic antiquities, from a sudden loss of power.
Alice lay crumpled in the doorway to the couple’s bedroom, also without any visual signs indicating a cause of death.
Overhead, the sloped brick ceiling rumbled and shook. Dust showered onto everything. I could hear the booted feet charge across the paved campo above.
Run. Don’t just stand there. Run.
They were coming for me.
5
I’d first discovered the charred skeleton of a boat repair shop off the Canali di Venezia when I was fourteen and used to hide from a gang of Lost Girls who’d tried to forcibly recruit me into their ranks. Like me, Lost Girls were without family, abandoned as early as age four. Anyone younger typically didn’t survive her first night on the streets.
“Hey, Lost Girl!” Hecklers sometimes shouted the words at me as I passed them. “Hey, Magic Bitch, how about you cast your spell on this here?” And then they’d grab their crotch while trilling and flicking their tongues to bait me into responding.
“Not even a bright fae herself could make that thing in your pants long enough to work,” used to be my standard response when I was feeling especially brave and pissed off. Mostly, I walked past them, head down, speeding up to get by as quickly as I could.
Though I didn’t dress like one of the heavy-magic fae wannabes that made up these gangs, to men and boys who called down to me from a palazzo balcony or leered at me while loitering against a ponti railing, all girls unaccompanied by bodyguards were Lost Girls, regardless of whether they were part of a gang or not. It wasn’t until I was nineteen that the gangs stopped trying to recruit me. Though the crude catcalls didn’t end because of my age, they became less about magic and more about straight up aggression.
While the boat repair shop’s walls stood, all but a third of the roof had fallen in, and by the looks of the plastic food containers moldering away inside, it had definitely happened before the first fae-human war, perhaps during the apocalypse itself that marked the end of human-only Venice.
Small boat hulls were flipped upside down and piled to the rafters, crowding the storeroom, strangled by amphibian seaweeds able to live half their lives on land without drying out, just another example of how joining fae and human worlds had changed the ecosystems of both. While not exactly sentient, the seaweed moved on its own, entire canopies migrating in and out of the water, timed to the phases on the moon. During waning and new moons, the plant colonies spent their time on shore. During waxing and full moons, they slithered back into the water.
Virtually every dinghy and boat in the workshop was rusted, rotted, burnt, or its fiberglass hull shattered beyond saving. Other than the seaweed and canal rats, no one had an interest in salvaging the remnants. This made the workshop an ideal place to stash a boat that was seaworthy like mine.
Sunset cast the towering piles of wrecked craft in burnt-red shadow as I slipped inside. I halted and waited just inside the entryway but heard only the occasional wet rustle of seaweed, scuttling of crabs and flittering of insects. I was alone.
Back at the cistern, the council guard may have anticipated scooping me up and delivering me to the scaffold, but the bodies of Sulla and his wife had distracted them. How else could I explain my escape? Unsettling cries and confused shouting pursued me through the labyrinth of basements and corridors leading away from the dealer’s shop, but their voices were all that followed. Gradually, those faded away, too, the more distance I put between them and me.
Dashing into the open and across bridges connecting one block of Santa Croce to the next proved the most hazardous part of the journey here, but Venice was made up of a hundred and fifty-three islands, thirty-six more than had existed in the twenty-first century. Bridges were unavoidable. Fortunately, with the city gripped in the last days of winter, no one thought much of a hooded figure racing in and out of the cold from an alley on one side of a canal to a doorway on the other.
I jumped at the loud click and whir from an old propeller spinning to life centimeters from my head. My pulse skyrocketed. What the hell? Motors all over the workshop suddenly tried grinding to life. Engines that had lain idle for more than a hundred and fifty years fought to start, gears screeching before eventually seizing up.
Damn. It was the fate cell.
I carried magic in my backpack so powerful it anima
ted technology, both mechanical and electronic, that would normally be no longer fit to run.
I unslung my backpack, looked inside, and sure enough, the drawstring on the brocade bag holding the cell had worked its way loose, the top of the bag open. I cinched it tight, tied a complex knot suitable for containing errant magics, and the clicks, whirs, and screeches quit at once.
My dinghy was stored on its side behind a massive stack of dead boats in a sheltered corner of the workshop. I pulled it out of its hiding spot, leaving the small outboard motor for a second trip, and hauled the aluminum boat to the canal’s edge outside. A small fuel can stored next to the motor was little more than a third full, but it held enough to take me out of the canal, around the northwest end of Cannaregio and into open water.
Hopefully.
I couldn’t chance using the fate cell to power the boat until Venice was at least half an hour behind me. Magic that strong drew too much attention.
Decaying sections of Ponte della Libertà, the old bridge that had once connected the city to the mainland and allowed trains and cars to cross Venice Lagoon, tilted in the low, choppy waves tossing my boat. Melted concrete and soot-stained iron turned to brittle charcoal testified to terrifying, arcane powers that had waged battle along its nearly four-kilometer length. On the other side of the sad remains, the new bridge—if anything that could have been built in my great-great-great-grandmother’s day could be considered new—gleamed the same silver as the moon in the twilight. Spell threads of glowing amethyst light twined around the elegant piers supporting it, weaving in and out of the stone erected by non-human hands to span the lagoon in a single, dizzying arch. Nothing in this world spoke so forcefully of the passing of dominance from one civilization to the next as the two bridges side by side. If not for the twin councils, one human, the other fae, both granted equal power to govern Venice, humans wouldn’t stand a chance. To be honest, I couldn’t figure out how we’d lasted this long. Our old weaponry was all gone, and our resources were no match for the fae. If another war broke out? We’d be extinct in about ten minutes flat.
As my dinghy puttered through the apocalyptic remnants of the human bridge, bright fae strolling the new span glanced down, watching me without really looking. I might hold all the fascination for them of an old water bottle floating on the tide. Most humans avoided direct eye contact with the brights. Dark fae, your eyes could tolerate. Brights? They were just too…bright. Too pure. And I don’t mean pure the way the fireheads spouted the word, laced with bigotry and dumbass meanness. I’m talking about physical perfection so honed by nature, their version of nature, anyway, it reached a point where the human eye—normally drawn, mindless and drooling, to anything of extraordinary beauty—turned away in weird revulsion. Bright fae were from another world where stunning wasn’t good enough. If asked, I doubted they were any more pleased than we were about the Merge. They probably thought their lives had gone to hell after it was thrust on them.
Which made it odd when one of them, a male with shining bronze hair and a jawline not even Donatello could have sculpted, caught my eye, and I didn’t avert my gaze. Instead, I stared back in defiance for as long as it took for me to navigate the waters out of his sight.
I don’t know why I forced that silent confrontation. I can’t say why I picked some random, alien stranger as the focus of my rage and hurt, but I was hurt and hurting left me without a rational thought in my head. I was so monumentally pissed off at having to run away in order not to die—for reasons no one had explained—that I couldn’t have talked if I’d wanted to. I could only glare at the first person who took a mild interest and that happened to be a bright.
Strange, I didn’t feel anything looking at him. The sight of him or his perfection did not overwhelm me. Nor did he show surprise or discomfort at having a human engage him in a staring match. We were meters apart, but if I had to guess from his expression what he felt, it would have been curiosity.
Finally, my boat cruised under the bridge where waves slapped listlessly at the piers and magic bleeding into the water set it alight in shades of amaranth and wine. Everything about the Brights was breathtaking and everlasting. Their magic rarely grew old, and I knew this bridge would be here forever, tinting fish purple at night and transforming scallops into living jewels that flew through the lagoon’s depths the way sandwich terns glided over the barren marshlands toward which I now fled.
No one on the bridge would report me to the council. None of the Brights gave a shit about the council’s internal affairs, and humans didn’t use the bridge. Its soaring height and lack of railings—fae never got the human desire for safety precautions—killed any attraction it would have had for us when we could easily take a boat.
I drove out from under the arch and headed northeast into the dark. Within minutes, I was surrounded by nothing but water, moving farther and farther away from any recognizable landmarks. Behind me, the lights of Venice, primarily those in the wealthy, rebuilt districts of San Marco and San Polo, as well as the added districts raised from the lagoon during the Merge, no longer reflected off the clouds above. I had only the last slip of waning moon to guide me.
My bravado from my encounter with the fae on the bridge faded, and I started to feel idiotic. I was out here where any passing ship might mow me down, ripping the dinghy to pieces as its bow ran over it, sucked me under and fed me to its propellers. I tasted snow on the icy wind that cut through my jacket. I hadn’t had time to search among the leftovers at my place the night before for a heavier one. If the weather worsened, I could be in real trouble and not only from the risk of dying of exposure. My little boat wasn’t made for rough seas. On top of this, I hadn’t slept in over a day and was exhausted. Combined, the situation was a cocktail for disaster.
What could make things worse? Oh yeah. I had no idea where I was going. No map. My backpack might be stuffed with antique smartphones and tablets I’d snatched back from the dead Sulla on my way out his shop door, but these were all in need of refurbishing by fae technicians. Without satellites or networks to run them, and those things no longer existed, technology required magic to work. Ironically, though I had probably been one of Sulla’s top suppliers of salvaged devices, I’d never been able to afford one of those brought back to life. I had a compass tuned to Ashia Hollow’s peculiar magnetic poles, but without a map, it wasn’t much help.
Staring into the grey-black distance, my mind wandered into a repeating loop. What could I possibly have done to bring the morte dal consiglio down on my head? It had to be a mistake on the council’s part, a fatal one for me. I hadn’t ticked off anyone lately that I knew of. In fact, until last night, I hadn’t spoken a word to anyone in at least three weeks. Not a single ciao, grazie, or mi scuzi. No. That wasn’t right. I talked to Whisper. We had long conversations every time she stopped by, mostly one-sided, though she occasionally replied with a barely audible meow.
Had replied.
I closed my eyes, swallowed past a sudden constriction in my throat with the threat of a new onslaught of tears, and took a deep breath. I wished she was here in the boat with me. She’d probably hate it; too much water and no place to hide, but that didn’t stop me begging the universe to return her to me here and now.
Give me back my friend. Can’t you, please?
The loop continued on to the stunning confrontation with the fireheads in my apartment. What had I done? How had I done that? Five men slaughtered each other because I dreamed it? I’d begun to doubt I was responsible. They had probably argued about who would get what, and my dream world interpreted the fatal skirmish in the way it preferred. My dreams had always been my dreams. They didn’t involve others, and I’d long ago decided they were connected to fits I guessed to be a form of epilepsy. True, they produced unnerving phenomena like an eye embedded in my apartment wall or the time cockroaches in the attic rained down on my bedroom, each and every one of them turned inside out, but I’d always categorized those events as…as…
; As what, Lunari? Explain those to yourself.
I couldn’t. I didn’t even have a name for them. Side effects? Manifestations?
I wasn’t a heavy magic user like the Lost Girls, who ridiculously believed they could change themselves into Fae if they only purchased the right combination of body changes and spells. Genetics were genetics, and no amount of borrowed magic would change that. Things like the eye and cockroaches, those had been happening to me from the time I was six, but I never considered myself responsible for them. Just like the Lost Girls, I was human. I didn’t have any magic of my own. Back then, I’d lived in a convent orphanage where anything other than prayer and saintly behavior was shunned.
What had the council guards made of the mess at my place once they’d stumbled into it? Had they discounted it as a gang fight? Or would they believe I was responsible for the fireheads’ deaths?
Does it matter? They can only execute you once.
Same question about the bodies they’d found at Sulla’s shop; they couldn’t believe I’d had anything to do with that, could they? Instant death with no outward signs was a hallmark of the dark fae. They had to know I’d been there, or else why send their storm troopers to the dealer’s shop? What sort of evidence had I left behind to implicate me?
Again, it hardly mattered.
My thoughts shifted to the hunter who had pursued me through the storm drain and afterward, perhaps even last night after I’d left Sulla’s. At moments, I’d thought I’d sensed him close by, still tracking me, while at others I was confident I’d lost him. He was a he, too. Not a female hunter. I’d never been on a hunter’s radar, but my instincts told me I’d been dealing with a male Fae.
At least that was one thing I could be grateful for at this hour. I’d left him behind on land. Nothing about me was so special that he’d find a boat to follow when he could simply move on to easier prey.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 5