In the Garden of Sin (25 page)

After ruminating on it for a couple of weeks, he arranged to meet her in the Piazza di Maggiore on market day, reasoning— or hoping—that the presence of so many witnesses would keep her fury in check when he cut her loose.

If only.

“Bastardo! Cane bastardo!”
she’d screamed, grabbing a clay flagon of wine from a merchant’s table and hurling it at his head. He ducked, cringing as it exploded against the horse trough behind him. Two goats tied to the trough bleated and scrabbled about in terror.

“Where in Hades does a spineless mongrel like you get the
stones to cast me off?” she demanded. “I’m Galiana Solsa, not some whore you fuck and then toss into the street for the pigs to finish off.”

A matron in a veil and wimple thrust a coin at the greengrocer for the basket of oranges in her hand and herded her three young children swiftly out of earshot. Others stood and stared openly. A butcher said something to his customer in a snickering whisper as he wrapped a coil of sausages in oiled linen.

Oblivious to their audience—or, more likely, reveling in the attention because she saw how embarrassed it was making Turek—Galiana said, “It’s that fat little
porca puttana
with the mole isn’t it? That Clara. I see how you two look at each other. The coy little smiles, the way she fans those long black eyelashes.”

Clara was his landlady, a plumply pretty—
not
fat—little widow with a Cindy Crawford beauty mark above her mouth that Turek wasn’t sure how he felt about.

“Are you fucking her yet?” Galiana asked.

“No! Christ, Galiana.”

“Not yet, eh? When, then? After you’ve gotten rid of me? I’ve been watching you. I’ve seen how she runs outside to greet you when you come home from your saintly efforts among the walking dead. And the little baskets of food she sends you away with in the morning… One would think she’s your wife. It’s what she wants, you know. She’s found herself a nice young wealthy physician, and now she wants to trap him into marriage. She’s no downy little chick, you know. She’s at least ten years older than you.”

As was Galiana herself, a fact that Turek knew better than to point out.

She was right about Clara, of course. There was a slightly
conniving quality to her attentions—the desperate, incessant flirtatiousness and awkward attempts at seduction. Part of him wondered if she only wanted to bed him in the hope of becoming pregnant, or being able to feign pregnancy, in order to ensnare him into matrimony. Regardless of what her motives may or may not have been, Turek found her genuinely desirable, possibly because she was Galiana’s polar opposite, a chirpy, undemanding squab to Galiana’s ravenous bird of prey.

“Go settle between the stout little legs of your precious Clara,” Galiana told him. “Bind yourself in wedlock and spend the rest of your short, dismal human existence filled with misery and regret. It’s what you deserve, what you’ve chosen over my gift of immortality. You spat on that offer. Now I spit on you.”

This she did, before turning and stalking away, her gold-brocaded, sable-lined mantle billowing behind her. Turek wiped his cheek with the back of his hand as the onlookers guffawed.

Partly to avoid a precipitous romance with Clara and partly because of the altruism that had driven him to medicine in the first place, Turek found himself spending more and more time tending to victims of the Great Plague, which overtook Bologna in June of that year after having spent the preceding months crawling northward from the trading port of Messina in Sicily. It was grueling work, not just physically but emotionally. Most victims of that terrible pestilence, no matter what he did for them, succumbed after a mere day or two of fever, vomiting, and diarrhea, with blood oozing from every orifice and their hands, feet, and noses black from gangrene.

During this time, he prayed constantly, not just for his patients but for himself, so that he might be spared the pestilence that had struck them down. In his simple faith and naïveté, he
actually believed this would do some good—until the morning he awoke raging with fever, his lungs seizing up, fingers and toes discolored, lymph nodes swollen to the size of eggs.

The disease progressed swiftly. Within an hour, he could barely move, and disorientation was setting in. By that time tomorrow, he would likely be dead. He was all alone in the house, the other boarders having either fled Bologna or died, and Clara having gone to stay with her sister’s family in the country, where she felt safer from contamination.

The blood trickling from his mouth reminded him of Galiana as she’d looked after drinking blood from the throat of the street cleaner.

He tossed a silver denaro down to a boy on the street and asked him to fetch Galiana Solsa from her villa. “Tell her I’m dying and that I’m sorry for everything, but that I need her to come to me as soon as possible. She’ll know why.”

She did come, only to laugh like hell when he begged her to turn him into what she was. “Desperation has made a believer of you, eh, Anton?” she asked as she poured herself a glass of wine.

He didn’t know what he believed, except that he didn’t want to end his days being hurled into a burial pit with hundreds of other reeking corpses. He knew all too well how impotent the medical profession had proven itself in dealing with this hellish contagion. Galiana was his only hope.

She taunted him as he lay curled up on his sweat-soaked straw mattress, shaking, weeping, pleading… “I’ll do anything you ask of me, give you anything you want…”

“What do you have that I could possibly want, you pathetic
pezzo di merda
? I have wealth, beauty, immortality…”

“For Christ’s sake,” he groaned. “Why did you come, then?”

She chuckled as she sipped her wine. “If you had the opportunity
to watch someone you despise bleed to death from the inside, his eyes filled with terror, would you not take it?”

“Christ. No.”

“No?” With a nonchalant shrug, she said, “Then perhaps it is just as well you die now. You wouldn’t make much of a bloodsucker with that attitude.”

She mocked and tormented him through the night as he grew steadily weaker and more insensate. She said she’d been spending much of her leisure time these past few months planning his murder, amusing herself by concocting scenarios that would maximize his suffering. It wasn’t just an idle fancy, she told him. She had fully intended to put him to death in as gruesome and painful a manner as possible. “It would appear that fate has taken the burden of dispatching you out of my hands.”

At one point, she removed her little jeweled dagger from its sheath on her girdle and told him that when he died, or sooner if she grew tired of waiting, she was going to cut off his
cacchio
and have her cook fry it up for her like a sausage.

A while later, complaining of hunger, she knelt at the side of Turek’s bed, opened his linen drawers, and withdrew the organ in question. Laughing at his consternation—“Just a little sip, Anton, something to tease my palate, eh?”—she removed her false teeth, pulled back his foreskin, and pierced the glans very shallowly and delicately. He felt a sharp sting, then the warm pressure of her lips closing around him and the rhythmic caress of her tongue as she encouraged the flow of blood. It rushed into his cock, causing it to fill and rise despite his weakened state.

She sucked and stroked him, then got on top of him and started fucking him hard and fast. Using the dagger, she slit the bodice of her silken gown and chemise to expose her breasts
so that she could rub her nipples. The suction of her tight little snatch, especially when it started pulsating with her orgasm, undid him, and he came much harder than he would have thought possible under the circumstances.

As the night wore on, he continued to beg her to turn him; she continued to refuse. Only when he was literally on the verge of death, with his last breath rattling from his throat, did she pierce her right nipple at the very tip with her dagger and slide it into his mouth. He suckled as eagerly as a newborn infant as she stroked his hair, murmuring endearments, calling him
“il mio piccolo cucciolo affamato.”
Her hungry little puppy. In the Piazza di Maggiore, he’d been a
cane bastardo
— a bastard dog.

Turek was too far gone at that point to register the reduction in rank. In fact, so delirious was he that he initially mistook the sensations of vampiric conversion—the euphoria, vertigo, and intense sexual arousal—for the process of death. When it was all over and he realized she had turned him, he was pathetically grateful, falling to his knees before her. He kissed her hands and thanked her for her mercy.

“You think this was an act of mercy?” she asked with a smile that looked almost pitying. “You really don’t know me at all, do you? I came to realize after you so summarily discarded me that it was really for the best—from
your
point of view— that I hadn’t turned you. I realized you aren’t the right sort to make a good vampire, that you could never be at peace with it, that you would always, on some level, think of yourself as evil, wrong, unclean. Make no mistake, Anton, my turning you was not an act of mercy, but of retribution.”

“Even so,” he said, “you saved my life.”

“I
replaced
your life with another, very different form of existence. Had I wanted to save it as it was, I could have done so. I could have cured you of the plague and let you live out the
rest of your tedious human existence, but that would hardly have satisfied my appetite for vengeance, and as I—”

“You could have
cured
me?” he said. “There is no cure for the plague.”

“As a matter of fact, I can cure many conditions subject to humans—and Follets, as well—by the simple expedient of replacing their blood. I have developed the ability to not only extract blood through my fangs but to expel it, enabling me to transfer it from what I call a provider pigeon to a recipient. I simply feed on the provider in the usual fashion, thoroughly draining him, and then—”

“Thoroughly
draining him?” Turek said. “The provider would have to die, then, for this… transfer to take place.”

“Only if he’s human. I will choose a human provider in good health if the point of the transfer is to cleanse another human’s body of some deadly pestilence, which I will do from time to time in return for a pledge of enslavement. But the provider can also be a Follet with some blood-borne attribute that the recipient, human or non, wishes to adopt, like shape-shifting. Follet providers don’t die. They simply generate a new supply of blood, and in less than a day, they’re good as new.”

“But then how do you replace the recipient’s blood?” asked Turek. “If you were to bleed him dry first, he would die.”

“Again, only if he’s human, but it isn’t necessary to empty his veins completely before refilling them. After having thoroughly tapped the provider, I open a major artery in the recipient, and while he’s bleeding out, I pierce a second artery with my fangs and begin discharging the new blood. As it flows through his vessels, it helps to flush out the old. When the transfer is complete, I lick the wounds to close them up.”

The physician in Turek was astounded and intrigued. “Will I be able to do this, too?”

She gave a scornful little laugh, as if the question were ludicrous. “The ability to transfer blood is exceedingly rare, Anton. Most Upír don’t even realize it’s possible. It took me almost two millennia to acquire the gift, and a great many years to perfect my technique. I’ve been able to do it successfully only for the past few centuries. As vampires age, they grow steadily stronger and more powerful. You shall see—if you manage to survive as a vampire, which is by no means certain.”

He asked her why he didn’t have fangs. She told him they would develop within his gums over the next few days. As they grew, they would push on the two incisors to either side of his front teeth until those teeth loosened and fell out, to be replaced much as a child’s adult teeth grow in to replace his milk teeth. She told him that from now on, sexual arousal and hunger would be inextricably linked. In fact, for the foreseeable future, he would be unable to satisfy the first—in other words, to achieve orgasm—without being in the process of satisfying the second. Over time, as his body acclimated itself to its new vampiric physiology, he would develop the ability to climax when he wasn’t feeding—although the blood-haze tended to produce orgasms that were incredibly powerful.

She explained which veins and arteries on the human body provided the best access for their purposes, the most efficient and commonly used being the carotid on the side of the neck. Telling him it was best for him to work up a healthy appetite before his first blood-feed, she removed all the food and wine from his room, leaving him only a bucket of water for washing and drinking. He was still too weak and confused to question or resist her, even when she took his keys and locked him in, promising to return when he was good and hungry with “a nice little pigeon for you to break your fast with.”

The next three days were interminable as Turek paced the little room waiting for Galiana to return. He felt strong and whole again—better than ever, in fact—and that was something, but there was a crawly sensation in his upper gums that was maddening, and he’d never been so famished in his life.

When his lateral incisors were loose enough to yank out, he did so. Behind their empty sockets he felt two bony ridges in the roof of his mouth. The flesh covering them stretched out thinner and thinner until at last the fangs themselves were exposed, folded back into channels, like scalpels tucked into scalpel-shaped niches in a satin-lined case. He pushed and prodded them, trying to get them to unfold, to no avail.

Eventually he fell asleep and dreamed of pigs being slaughtered, their screams filling the air as the blood sprayed from their throats, drenching him. He awoke with an adamantine erection, his fangs fully extended and throbbing. He stroked them, fascinated with the curved smoothness of them, their length, their hollow, pinpoint tips. The gums from which they emerged were so sensitive that rubbing them felt like rubbing his cock. He was excruciatingly aroused, so much so that he felt certain he could ease his lust by his own hand without being in the process of feeding, regardless of what Galiana had said. However, all he achieved for his efforts in that regard was frustration and eventually pain.