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“We need to hide her,” he says, staring down at me. The sight of her lifeless in his arms bleeds my heart dry. “We can have a service for her. But I think the only course of action is to put her in the boat, tie her down with bricks, and put her in the water. We’ll wait till night, take her out past Lido.”
The words are so callous.
“What are you doing with her now?”
“He’s helping you,” Lenore says, taking me by the elbow and pulling me to my feet. “You need to clean up. We all do. Then we need to go to her apartment. Okay?”
I nod and in a daze I let Lenore lead me up the stairs to the bathroom.
I let her clean me up, dabbing a washcloth to get off my own blood.
Then she leaves and I get changed into new clothes. I’m moving so slowly it feels like I’ve come apart from time as a whole. Like I’m operating just outside of it. Being a vampire means you’re very in tune with your body and the world around you, but I’ve never felt more removed. Like the world is ticking on but I’ve stepped outside of time’s path.
It’s only when the three of us leave my house—Solon put Dahlia to rest somewhere until we get back—that I feel a little more life seep back into me. Purpose. Because if I can’t have my love back, I can at least get started on making those that wronged her pay. She wouldn’t have been sent to kill me, she wouldn’t have been corrupted, had Bellamy and the guild of witches not killed her parents and forced her to be a slayer.
Still, the walk to her apartment feels like a dream. Not even a nightmare, because a nightmare would make things feel more real. But that terrible disassociation is back. I’m walking through my beloved city of Venice feeling like a ghost.
When we get to her apartment, just the sight of it makes me freeze. Suddenly the last thing I want to do is go inside there. But Lenore puts a cloaking spell over us to make sure we aren’t seen, and somehow I find myself in the building. Though I’d never been in her apartment, I know which unit is hers and we head up the rickety staircase to the one at the end, facing the lagoon. I had told Dahlia that where she was staying was one of the most haunted areas in all of Venice, and now I’m feeling like hundreds of restless spirits are crowding around me, knowing what I did.
Judging me.
“What is this dark energy?” Lenore says, scrunching up her nose as she looks around the hallway, the floor tiles cracked in some places. “You’d think the guild with all their money would have put her up some place a little nicer.”
“How much money does the guild have?” Solon asks.
“A lot,” she says emphatically.
I stop in front of Dahlia’s door, about to put my hand on the knob, despite knowing it will be locked, when I hear a faint noise from inside. And if I can barely hear it, that means whoever is there is really trying to be quiet.
I give the others a furtive look and put my finger to my lips. We all breathe in deeply in unison, expecting to smell a witch. But there’s nothing.
There’s a moment’s pause before I pull back and then slam my shoulder into the door. It pops open with ease and I manage to see a woman going for the window, as if to climb out.
In seconds I’m at her, hand around her mouth, arm around her stomach, holding her in place.
“Who are you?” I seethe. I’m practically seeing red.
The woman squirms beneath me. She’s strong but not strong enough to fight me off. I know that she might be a building manager, or maybe a classmate of Dahlia’s, and that I’m dangerously close to hurting a civilian, but I can’t think straight either. I just want answers. I just want the pain to go away.
“She’s a witch!” Lenore cries out as Solon tries to close the door behind her. I know we’re being loud, so I pray the cloaking spell holds. “She has a glamour on!”
The woman struggles even more and that’s when I know it’s true. Now that I know what to look for with glamour, it’s something you can figure out. It’s like staring at one of those paintings that look like something and morph into something else when the light hits it from a different angle.
“Search the apartment,” I growl.
“What are we looking for?” Solon asks.
“The blade,” Lenore says as they both start looking in drawers and under the bed. “That’s probably why she’s here too. She wants the blade ofmordernes.”
“So you’re from the guild,” I say to the girl, my words coming out like venom. “Tell me, did you set her up to fail? Was she sent here knowing she would fail in killing me? Was it a way for the guild to get rid of her, just as they got rid of her parents?”
“I found it,” Solon says.
He’s pulling a box out of the cupboard, hidden behind a fake wall. None of us vampires have to look at it to know what’s in the box. We can sense the blade is there, its energy insidious.
The girl starts to struggle again. The stench of adrenaline and fear is high but that doesn’t stop me from holding on so tight that I could break every bone with one twist of my hands.
“Where is she?” the girl manages to say. “What did you do to Dahlia?”
