Venom (10 page)

Cass stared at her own hand. She tried to visualize the structures beneath her skin—the bones and muscles, the strange ropelike things connecting the two. It was hard to focus. Falco’s touch was so warm. “I’m not in the habit of staring at myself,” she said, pulling away. “It’s vain.”

Falco shook his head. “How terrible it must be to be a member of the noble class. So many rules. Such restraint. You must feel like a caged bird, battering its wings against the sides of its golden prison.”

Cass didn’t say anything for a second. That was exactly how she felt, and he had put it into words better than she had ever been able to do. She repeated the sentence in her mind, intending to write it in her journal when she returned home. But even though it was true, she didn’t want to admit to Falco that he was right. “I’m no one’s pet,” she insisted.

“You’re not?” Falco raised an eyebrow. The way he was looking at her made Cass feel out of breath. He tucked the bit of parchment into the pocket of her cloak. “Keep it,” he said. “You can hang it in your cage.” Then he turned as if to go.

“I mean it!” Cass cried out. “I’m not like all the others.” She realized she was squeezing her hands into fists.

“Is that so?” Falco turned back toward her, and all of the air went out of Cass’s chest. They were separated by half an inch of space. She
was hot all over, as though someone had lit a fire under her skin. Falco stared at her so intensely, she felt she could fall into his eyes, into the swirling mists she saw reflected there.

“Yes,” she whispered.

His lips quirked into a small smile. “Prove it,” he said.

C
ass studied Falco’s face in the darkness as he pulled away from her again. Breeze whipped through his hair and he looked completely wild.

“Prove it? How?” Cass asked, suddenly feeling wild too.

“Come with me to look for clues,” Falco said.

Cass searched his face for signs that he was joking, but found none. “N-now?” she stuttered. “Isn’t this your general business hour?”

Falco did not reply. Instead, he headed toward the graveyard gate. He paused to allow her to catch up. “Are you with me or not?”

So many thoughts flew through Cass’s brain at once that she couldn’t latch on to a single one of them. “But—but we don’t have any idea where to begin,” she said.

Falco pulled something from the pocket of his cloak. “Wrong. We have this.” A strange ring sat on his palm, a smooth red stone set in sturdy silver. “I found it in your friend’s tomb.”

So that was what Falco had meant when he mentioned a trinket the previous night. She had forgotten all about it in her haste to
escape the graveyard. Cass lifted the ring from his hand. A strange symbol was engraved in the center of the red stone. A six-petaled flower, inscribed in a circle. She had never seen Liviana wear anything like it. “Why didn’t you mention this before?” she asked sharply.

Falco’s eyes glinted in the dark. “
Mi dispiace,
Signorina. I got a bit distracted by the body of a murdered woman.”

“This isn’t Liviana’s. It’s far too big, and it isn’t her style.” Cass handed the ring back to Falco. “So maybe it belongs to the dead girl. Maybe it belongs to the murderer. How does that help us?”

Falco slipped the ring back into his pocket. “I’ve seen this symbol before. Traced in charcoal on a building, abandoned as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s a hideout for a murderer.”

Before Cass could respond, Falco started walking again, passing through the rusted iron gate and skirting the edge of her aunt’s property. Cass hurried to catch up with him. Though he was only a few paces in front of her, the thick folds of mist nearly obscured his form.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, then realized she had just given him tacit permission
to
take her somewhere. She pulled Siena’s cloak tighter around her thin nightgown and added quickly, “I haven’t even agreed to go anywhere with you.”

“And yet here you are, stumbling alongside me like we’re in a race.” Falco’s voice had a lilting, laughing quality to it, despite the fact that they were surrounded by ghostly white clouds, in the middle of a pitch-dark night. Then he said, “The city. The building is in a run-down block of the Castello district.”

“The city?” Cass repeated. She realized they were nearing her aunt’s moldy old dock. Her shoes sank slightly into the damp ground.
She could hear the whispering of gentle waves as they coursed up against the rotting wood. Cass looked north, across the lagoon, toward where she knew Venice proper lay. Madalena had talked of stabbings and brawls that occurred in the streets at night. Cass could only imagine what sort of creatures prowled the dark. Thieves, murderers…vampires. Could Falco protect her?
Would
Falco protect her?

She remembered the way his eyes had blazed when she found him in the cemetery. Violent one moment, joking the next. The wind blew her cloak against her hip, and she felt the weight of the small knife in her right pocket. She was glad to have it.

“Well, it’s too late to go anywhere now,” she said, trying to keep the relief from her voice.

“No it isn’t,” Falco said, gesturing toward Agnese’s gondola, bobbing in the shallow water. “Come on.”

“But I’m not even dressed!” Cass protested.

Falco snickered. “You’re dressed enough. What? Do you need to run home and have your servant lace you into a proper gown before you can go sneaking around in the night?” He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Or are you just scared?”

“You’re not afraid at all?” she asked, lifting her chin and deliberately avoiding his question. “My friend swears the city is crawling with evil spirits at night.”

“I don’t believe in that superstitious nonsense,” Falco said.

Cass looked around them at the hanging mist. If she squinted, she swore she could see faces swirling in it. When she was younger, she had often walked along the shore and imagined the mist was full of the spirits of people who had died at sea and now floated the shores to greet other souls who suffered their same fate.

“You don’t believe there are evil spirits lingering here on earth? Forbidden to enter the kingdom of heaven?” Cass asked.

Falco shrugged. “Heaven. Hell. Just more superstitions. Superstitions that cause people to behave with ignorance and stupidity.”

Cass stared at him, certain he was joking, but his expression remained neutral. “But…but then where do you think spirits go?”

“I don’t know where spirits go, but I know what happens to bodies. They rot. It’s that simple. It almost seems ludicrous to lock them up or bury them in dirt.” Falco began to fade away into the fog as he headed for the edge of the dock.

Cass reached out for him. Her hand landed on the center of his back. She could feel ridges beneath her palm. Muscle and bone. “What would you have us do?” she asked. “Burn them?”

The ridges moved beneath Cass’s palm as Falco shrugged again. “There’s got to be a better answer,” he said, turning back to face her. “Maybe we should be studying them. Learning. After all, death and life are just two phases of the natural order of things. It seems silly to embrace birth and fear death.”

Cass was so surprised, she could hardly speak. “Studying? As in…
dissecting
? Mutilating? That’s sacrilegious.”

“Science is my religion,” Falco said. “I care about facts, not fleeting beliefs with no grounding in the real world. Everything can be answered through science.” He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “Your problem is that you do believe in all of that nonsense. And that’s why you’re scared.”

“I’m not scared,” she insisted, but even she wasn’t convinced by the thin protestation.

“Yes, you are, or you wouldn’t be asking all these questions. You’re stalling.”

Falco bent down and started untying the gondola’s rigging. His hands worked through the ropes easily, as if this were a trick he’d performed many times before. “Hop aboard before I let it go completely loose.”

Cass swore she saw him wink at her through the gloom. “My aunt will positively murder me if she finds out I took her gondola without asking.”
In the middle of the night. With a strange boy.

“Oh, don’t get your laces all in a knot. We’re just going to borrow it. We can have it back before your precious auntie realizes it’s missing.”

Cass stood by the dock, staring at the sleek gondola. The early morning was cool, but the blood racing through her veins kept her warm. As long as Falco was certain they could return before anyone found out…

Falco knelt in the middle of the boat, one hand held out in Cass’s direction, the other poised to release the gondola from the dock with a quick tug of the rope.

“I understand if you don’t want to come. So many rules to break.” Falco’s voice still had that lilting quality to it, but his eyes were serious. “It is safer in the cage, isn’t it?”

It
was
safer. If her parents had stayed in Venice instead of plunging themselves into plague-afflicted foreign cities, they might still be alive. They had wandered outside the little circle of safety and expectations, and had paid the ultimate price.

But Cass didn’t want to stay in the circle. She wanted to
live.

Besides, if there really
was
a murderer out there, and he had his eye on Cass, what was the point in sitting around waiting for him to come to her?

Cass glanced back over her shoulder. The hanging mist reminded
her of Liviana’s burial wrappings. It beckoned like a white death. Suddenly, Cass felt certain that if she turned back toward Agnese’s villa by herself, the haze would devour her and her body would be torn to shreds.

She took a step toward the gondola. “I want to go.”

Falco grinned. “I knew you would.”

Cass paused, her hand on the side of the boat. She looked up at Falco. “Why is that?”

This time, he definitely winked. “Not every girl likes to wander through graveyards in the middle of the night.”

“I guess I’m not every girl,” Cass said, allowing him to take her hand and gently assist her into the gondola.

An indecipherable look flashed across Falco’s tan face for just a second. Then he smiled. “No, Signorina,” he said. “You are definitely not. You’re different, and I like it.”

Cass couldn’t help but think that Falco, with his teasing manner and bizarre beliefs about life and death, was also quite different.

And she, too, liked it.