great grassy meadows that stretched out for miles, with rolling hills beyond them. She pulled her head back inside, intending to check the view from the other side of the compartment.
Suddenly, the carriage lurched violently to the left, throwing her and Madalena against the edge of the window. Cass heard the shrill whinny of the horse, followed by swearing. Metal shrieked on metal. The carriage tilted at a strange angle, leaving the window pointing toward the ground.
“Mada, are you all right?” Cass and Marco reached for Madalena simultaneously.
Madalena nodded, rubbing her side and wincing. “What happened?”
The driver’s head appeared in the window. “Is everyone all right?” he asked, red-faced. One at a time, he helped the girls crawl out through the small opening.
Cass wriggled awkwardly through the window, tugging her skirts behind her. She landed on the dusty ground, where Siena immediately helped her to her feet. One of the front wheels of the carriage had hit something—the wooden axle was broken clear through.
“What now?” Cass asked. The servants and carriage attendants were all milling around, muttering. They had broken down near a crossroads, but both streets were completely bare of traffic. Open meadows stretched around them, with tree-covered hills off in the distance.
Marco cursed. “And only an hour outside of Florence.”
The driver knelt beside the fallen axle. “We can’t move on until the damage is repaired.”
Just then, Cass heard a howl from the trees. She turned toward the noise and saw a pack of wild dogs across the field—four of them in total, slinking around the periphery of the tall grass.
“Marco,” she said, her throat tightening. “Dogs.”
Marco turned. “They won’t bother us, Signorina Cassandra,” he said. “We’re too many. Dogs are cowards.”
The largest dog lowered its haunches to the ground, and the others followed its lead. But Cass couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching her.
Waiting.
She stared back, not wanting to appear afraid, until the rhythmic drumming of hoofbeats drew her attention. A carriage was approaching from the direction of Florence. She watched the cloud of dust draw near, realizing it wasn’t a carriage after all. It was an old wooden cart pulled by a short, squat horse. Two men in leather doublets were perched on the back of the cart, their boots dangling almost to the ground. Another man straddled the horse. When he spotted the disabled carriage, he slowed the horse to a walk and pulled up near the side of the road. Cass headed toward them to see if they could offer assistance. Too late, she realized what the cart was carrying.
Bodies.
She stopped right in the middle of the road, hugging her arms around her waist. The scene brought her back to the night she had discovered Falco’s secret. But these men weren’t robbing graves. Apparently, they were going to dig them.
The two men in leather doublets jumped off the back of the cart with their shovels and traipsed across the field. One of them pounded a wooden cross into the ground while the other began to dig. The third hovered close to the cart, glancing occasionally at the linen-wrapped bodies, as though he thought they might walk away.
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.
eleven
“The Church decrees that the undead must be drowned in holy water, as staking or burning might free the affliction from inside their unholy bodies and spread the scourge of vampirism across the land.”
—THE BOOK OF THE ETERNAL ROSE
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
Cass looked toward the trench and felt nausea welling in her chest. “But what if they
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.
