Florence, All Hallows’ Eve
There’sa ball raging beneath my feet.
Music, laughter, perfume…the pulse of mortal life.
They call it a Halloween celebration. I call it fucking torture, which is something coming from a master of the art of making humans and vampires alikebeg for mercy and call it deliverance.
Hell, centuries ago, I was handsomely paid to tutor the Spanish Inquisitors in exquisite pain. Spent decades teaching them that suffering, properly orchestrated, could sound almost like prayer, could bring them closer to whatever deity they chose to worship.
Every year, my staff insists on throwing one of these infernal masquerades in my honor. They say it keeps the mortals loyal, gives the illusion that Lucien D’Armand—the reclusive patron of half of Florence—is just a decadent old nobleman who enjoys a little theatricality.
They don’t know that every flicker of candlelight, every rustle of silk, every heartbeat and lustful gasp below me grates like a blade across my mind.
Halloween washerseason.
Elara loved it. The smell of autumn with its promise of ice and cloaks, but especially the way the veil between worlds thinned. She used to say it was the one night she could feel magic humming through her bones, like the universe itself was paying homage to something sacred.
Two hundred and fifty years, and I still hear her laughter in the wind.
I’ve forbidden anyone to disturb me tonight.
The revelry unfolds in the grand ballroom, but I am above them, locked away in my private observatory, where the glass dome frames the bruised night sky. Stars burn cold over the Arno, and the full moon glints off the rooftops like spilled mercury.
I sit in the shadows, the fire guttering low in the marble hearth. A decanter of blood-dark wine stands untouched beside me. My reflection shimmers faintly in the tall windows, a ghost of a man I no longer recognize.
It’s been three weeks since that courier arrived in New Orleans with her photograph and my existence shifted from decay to obsession again.
Since I discovered the other thing he brought. The note that read:She’ll be unveiled until dawn on All Hallows’ Eve.
Three weeks of hunting through the underbelly of Florence, prying secrets from witches, priests, and the kind of immortals who think pain is a currency. I’ve carved through enough of them to paint the Arno red, but every answer leads back to the same whisper:she lives.
So I stayed. I scoured every chapel and catacomb, every candlelit vigil, every rumor of a woman with eyes like stormlight.Each night narrowed to one thought—if she breathes, she bleeds, and if she bleeds, I will find her.
Now the trail ends here, under my own roof, on the night mortals pretend to honor their dead.
A fitting stage for retribution.
The hunger tightens my body, sharpens my senses, makes everything too vivid. But it’s not thirst that drives me mad tonight. It’s memory.
Elara, with her storm-grey eyes and clever mouth and greedy hands. A witch’s beauty and a saint’s cruelty. I’d loved her beyond reason, beyond sanity. She was my heart’s equal, my obsession and my salvation.
Two and a half centuries I’ve searched.
Every seer, every witch, every fool who claimed to speak with the dead. I hunted them all. And still, nothing.
At first, I dismissed it as another cruelty, a rumor designed to coax gold from a dangerous man. But the source was one I trusted once, long ago, before trust became a language I forgot how to speak.
But since my arrival, my clever torture has revealed a few more morsels. A gathering of La Confraternità della Notte Bianca—an old Florentine sect of witches masquerading now as a charity, devoted to “honoring the souls of the lost.”
They were planning on holding their annual masquerade ball in the city.
So I bought thepalazzothey intended to use before the ink on their invitations dried. I had the lease sealed in blood, the wards reset to my own design. A few of their members disappeared quietly; the rest confessed under persuasion.
One of them, young, devout and terrified, finally spoke the words I’d been waiting two hundred and fifty years to hear.
A woman who looked exactly like Elara had come to them in secret recently, seeking sanctuary.
Pale. Silent. Cloaked in black. She’d asked to attend the vigil for the dead.
