Fiona Paul - Belladonna

Cass wondered why they would be taken so far outside of the city to be buried. Curiosity outweighed her fear, and she started across the road again. Madalena followed her.

“Be careful.” The man—the driver—positioned himself between the girls and the cart.

Cass glanced down at his hands. He wore a plain silver band around his thumb. “Are they . . . infected?” A ripple of fear moved through her. Luca’s own father had contracted the plague from one of his servants. He had died in less than a week.

“Oh, they are infected all right,” the man said. “With the Devil’s own affliction.”

Cass struggled to understand his thick Florentine accent, but she was pretty sure she had heard him right. She leaned back from the bundle. With one hand, the man delicately parted the burial shrouds around the first body’s face. The dead girl looked like her, with freckled skin and auburn hair.

And she had a brick jammed into her mouth.

“They are vampires,” he said grimly.

Vampires?” Mada squeaked. Cass could only stare. The brick had been forced so far down the girl’s throat that it looked as if her jaw had been dislocated.

“Bitten, anyway,” the man said. He let the white shroud fall back over the girl’s face. “We bind their hands with silver and put the bricks in their mouths so that they cannot escape their shrouds if they turn.” He looked Cass and Madalena up and down with his dark, sharp eyes. “You’d best be careful if you stop in Florence. There’s been a run of vampire attacks recently, mostly on young women.”

“A girl is attacked by a vampire and your solution is to kill her and dump her body in the countryside?” Cass asked, her voice rising in pitch.

The man glanced over at the two men digging. The pile of soil at the edge of the trench was growing in size. “There is no cure once you’ve had the bite. You’ll either die or become a vampire yourself. We’ve started drowning them.” He spat on the ground. “The magistrate won’t allow us to stake them or burn them because he thinks the blood and ashes might spread the affliction. The way I see it, no matter what, we are doing them a favor. ”

Cass looked toward the trench and felt nausea welling in her chest. “But what if they do wake up in there? They’ll be trapped underground, for eternity.” Before anyone could stop her, she headed across the high grass toward the wooden cross and the hole in the ground beside it. Mada hurried after her, and the maidservants followed.

The girls stood around the open grave. Cass couldn’t help but remember the nightmare she’d had before she left Venice. The one of herself stretched out beneath the ground, bound to the bones of her parents. As she and the others watched, the two men flung shovel after shovel of dirt onto a pile. The hole grew deeper and wider, like a mouth waiting to swallow them whole.

The men ignored the girls completely. When they were satisfied with their work, they dropped their shovels and went to retrieve one of the bundles from the cart. Madalena looked positively horrified as the men carried over the first girl.

The first body.

The first vampire.

Cass took a step back from the edge of the grave, again envisioning herself encased in dirt, white-wrapped bodies falling from the sky, as they had in her dream. She couldn’t help but wonder what Falco would have thought of this scene. He didn’t believe in vampires. To him this would be madness. Paranoia. Murder sanctioned by the Church.

For the thousandth time, she was struck by the differences between herself and Falco. The two of them had lived in the same city, but in completely different worlds. Cass was foolish to ever dream they could be together. Her parents and Aunt Agnese, they had been right all along. Luca da Peraga was the proper man for her. Regardless of whatever charges Dubois had trumped up against him, Luca was a good man who believed in the Church. In right and wrong. Luca was the same as she was, when it came to the things that mattered.

A second white-wrapped body went into the hole, sending up a sudden draft from deep beneath the ground. Cass shivered. She wished Feliciana and Siena would step back from the edge of the grave.

A clap of thunder sounded. Cass glanced up at the sky. Billowing gray clouds were rolling in. She could just barely make out the hazy tips of the Apennines behind them. The third body landed with a soft thud.

A guttural wail broke the grim silence. Cass snapped her head around to where the pack of dogs had been. They were scattering into the trees, as though even they could not bear to stand witness to this. The two men with shovels began to replace the dirt over the white-wrapped corpses. There was no funeral, no priest. There were not even any words spoken.

“What of their families?” Cass asked, her voice trembling. “Is there no one here who will speak over their bodies?”

“They don’t have families anymore,” one of the men said. He pulled a dirty handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat from his brow. “They are not human. No priest will speak for their souls.”

The sky rumbled again. The air was still dry, but the wind had picked up. “What proof was there that they were bitten by vampires?” Cass crossed her arms, warming herself.

“They have all the symptoms,” the man said grimly. “Weakness, pale skin, delirium.”

“But that is nothing,” Cass protested. “Maybe they just fell ill. Maybe they succumbed to a new strain of plague.”

The man shook his head. “They had the marks too. Puncture wounds on the neck, all identical.” He looked back at Cass. “Fangs,” he said, as if she hadn’t understood.

Marco had stayed near the wagons this whole time, overseeing the men struggling to fix the broken axle. Now he strode across the grass and joined the girls by the freshly dug grave.

“This is far too gruesome a scene to attract the attention of ladies so lovely.” His voice was light, but he drew Cass and Mada firmly away from the gravesite. “The axle is almost fixed and a storm is brewing. We should be under way shortly.”

“But Marco,” Mada protested. “These men say that Florence is overrun with vampires.”

Marco touched his hand to Madalena’s lower back and steered her across the grass. “Come, my goddess. You’ll have nightmares.” A gust of wind stole away part of his next words. “. . . die before I let anyone hurt you, right?”

Mada rotated her face in toward Marco’s chest. “But you’re going to be so busy.” She sounded childlike, honestly afraid.

Marco kissed the top of her head. “Not too busy to protect my beautiful wife.” He led her back toward the carriage, and the rest of the girls turned away from the grave as a group.

The driver took the repaired carriage for a short test loop around the uneven ground of the field and then declared it fit for travel. Cass hopped back into the travel compartment and pulled the curtains closed across the window. Within moments, the group was heading toward Florence again.

A clap of thunder made the seat beneath Cass tremble. Parting the curtains with her fingers, she peeked out, expecting to be pelted with cold rain. But the air was dark and dry. The storm was chasing them, but it hadn’t yet caught up.

They left the field and the graves behind, passing through a series of rolling green hills. A sharp breeze tickled her skin as Cass leaned slightly out the window. She could just barely make out a jagged skyline in the distance. Florence. After a grueling week of travel, they were finally there.