When she’d stabbed her second and final vampire, Victoria stopped, silent and still for a moment. The back of her neck was no longer cold and prickling, so she slipped her stake back into the deep pocket of her man’s coat.
“They came from this way,” Michalas said, starting off into the darkness.
Victoria was glad to follow. One could hardly call that brief skirmish a battle—she could have done it in full court dress, without Michalas. Perhaps they would find something more interesting if they continued.
She finally saw the shape of the villa, rising wide and dark in front of them, just past the lower gated wall through which the vampires had come. It was dark as a tomb, large and black and quiet.
“It must be here somewhere,” Michalas said from the darkness. She realized he was walking along yet another wall, this one angling off from the shorter one and stretching into the darkness, toward the back corner of the villa.
“What?”
“La Porta Alchemica,” he said as she joined him. “The Door of Alchemy—the door to Palombara’s laboratory. I’ve not seen it, but I’ve heard about it.”
“It’s too dark,” Victoria said, peering up at a particularly overbearing pine that obliterated every bit of residual light from the moon. “I don’t know how we’ll find it.”
Michalas tsked. “If only we had some source of light…Why does Miro not invent something practical like that for us? How many times have I wished for something that I could turn on or inflame at a moment’s notice. We spend so much time in the dark and cannot see. All the fancy weapons he spends his time on—pah! An ash stake is all I need. Or perhaps a little bit of something that could be set to explode at will.” His smile flashed at her.
Privately, Victoria agreed with him that the best weapon was a stake, but since the Venator weapons master was working on a special garment for her, she felt it would be inappropriate to complain.
“Eh, perhaps this is it. Feel here,” Michalas said.
She moved next to him and felt around the great stone lintel that framed a massive stone door set into the wall. The moon peeked out from behind the trees and clouds just enough to illuminate the smooth white door and the shadowy carvings on it and its frame.
“It’s locked with three keys, and I understand it cannot be opened without all three of them,” Michalas told her. “This must be it. Feel the round disk in the center? And the carvings on it? There are more carvings on the lintel, and legend has it that the symbols and words there are taken directly from an alchemical journal that came into the possession of Palombara before he disappeared.”
“Do these symbols contain the secrets to immortality, then?” she asked in a wry voice, feeling the moss and dirt beneath her fingers as she felt the crevices of the carvings.
Michalas was moving around in the dark behind her now, back in the direction from which they’d come. Suddenly she heard the unmistakable sound of him tripping and then the “Oof!” when he fell.
Even Venators, apparently, had moments of gracelessness.
“By the bloody rood,” swore Michalas quietly.
“What is it?” she asked, coming toward him where he crouched not far from the gate through which the vampires had passed.
“You…perhaps you don’t want to see this,” he said, straightening and turning as if to block her view. “Eh, it is not a pleasant sight.”
Remembering the carnage she’d seen at Bridge and Stokes, a private club in London, Victoria shook her head. “What is it?”
She nearly stumbled over them herself in her effort to show she wasn’t hesitant. There were four of them. She could barely make out the details in the low light, but she could see enough.
Still clothed. One in a dress. The other three in breeches and shirts.
Humans.
Headless.
Just like Aunt Eustacia.
The memory shot into her mind. Blood everywhere.
Victoria took a deep breath, closed her eyes. Her heart was slamming hard. Her stomach roiled, but she managed to keep from losing control. She waited a moment, swallowing hard. “What are they doing? Why cut off their heads?”
“They were taking them somewhere, probably out of the estate.”
Victoria looked at Michalas. “No coincidence that there’s a pile of beheaded animal carcasses nearby. Let’s go see if…if there are other bodies there. But…we can’t leave them here.”
“No…eh…shall we bring them somewhere outside these walls so they’ll be found? So perhaps they’ll be identified? I’ve not heard any reports in the city about finding headless corpses,” Michalas added. “I’ve a cousin who works with the polizia, and he tells me of all the goings-on.”
“But why take off their heads? They’re vampires,” Victoria asked again, if only to keep her mind from thinking about the morbid task at hand. They certainly couldn’t leave the bodies; Michalas was right.
In the end they moved the four corpses and left them in a small courtyard several blocks away from the Palombara estate. Michalas would suggest to his cousin that he might wish to investigate that particular viuzza, and then the police could at least attempt to find the families of the victims.
By the time they completed the task of moving the bodies, Victoria was filthy and bloody and quite nauseated, but she still wanted to see the pile of animal carcasses, so Michalas took her to where he’d found it, which was only two streets away from the broken wall of the estate.
The pile was still there, in the darkest corner of an overgrown courtyard behind a half-burned-out apartment. She had no idea how Michalas had ever come upon it.
According to him, the pile was larger now. Rotted. The stench was stomach-turning. And it was composed only, as far as they could tell, of dogs and cats, perhaps a wolf or two.
But it would be too much of a coincidence to believe that the four dead humans were not intended to be added to the pile.
“Now we know there are undead involved,” Victoria said as she and Michalas walked away from the dark courtyard, still on the alert for more undead. “But the question becomes: What are they doing with the heads?”
Three
In Which Victoria’s Idyll Is Invaded
Victoria and Michalas finished the night by patrolling the rest of the rione near Villa Palombara. They staked a measly three more vampires before returning to the Consilium at sunrise to report their findings to Ilias. They found him on his way to speak with Wayren.