She huddled in a room with a pool of brine in it; she had fled from the closet, drawing the shadows around herself for protection. No one had followed her; no one had seen her. Her stomach was full for the first time since she had awakened in her father's flooded basement, but she shuddered at what she had done… She hadn't thought, had only reacted, knowing that if those men had found her there, they would have taken her back to Venice. She didn't want to go back to Venice; she wanted to stay here, to watch and listen to the men going about their business… She knew they were all men, though she wasn't exactly sure how she knew since she had only seen a handful of them. Some in red and blue working on the deck, and three or four in uniform, giving orders and supervising. The three who had surprised her in the closet were the first she had seen in the boat itself. All the others she had seen on deck…
She thought back to the two young officers she had seen leaving the boat to walk through Venice, remembered that she had thought them both handsome, but now a second description attached itself to them, born of the blood she had drunk in the closet… Prey… They were all of them her prey. It was no wonder that she hadn't been able to eat common food. Somehow she had become a predator, hunting for blood… She shrank from it, but at the same time longed for it… Being a predator might at last give her some power. She had never been free to do as she liked; always someone had held her under his thumb. Her father, until he died, then her brother, until… Until… She couldn't remember what had happened to her brother. That memory was locked away in the black void between her father's death, and her awakening…
Blood… She could live on blood, and it was all she could live on. The gnawing hunger that was consuming her could only be sated with blood. She licked her lips, tasting again the blood of the men who had found her. Two of them she had tasted; the third had somehow gotten away from her and taken the others with him. But as she'd slipped out of the closet, she'd seen the men gathered in the hall, had seen them give way before the fair-haired man she'd admired on the dock. He was dangerous. So was the dark one whose warm Mediterranean coloring reminded her of her brother. Sooner or later, she would have to hunt them down and destroy them, but her heart wept at the thought… She didn't want to kill… did she?
The first faint rumblings in her stomach reminded her that she needed to feed again. She had been hungry for so long that she craved blood incessantly. She wondered if she would have to destroy the entire crew of this strange craft before she was sated. She could barely face the thought without flinching. She wasn't a killer… But if she were to be a successful predator, she would have to learn to kill.
She remembered the feel of her teeth sinking into the hard muscle of the first sailor's shoulder. It had hurt at first; her teeth had felt fragile, but she had instinctively defended herself by biting. That felt odd to her now, but then it had felt absolutely right. By rights, she should have broken a tooth, but she hadn't. Instead, it had become much easier to shred flesh as her fear had heightened. Her preternatural senses had warned her that there was more than one man in the room, and her abhorrent fear of men had done the rest.
She had always been afraid of men; since her father had killed her mother in front of her she had feared them. Sometimes, she hated them, too, though it was harder to hate than it was to fear. She had always been a poor reflection of her mother's passionate nature. But passion had gotten her mother killed… And no one had accused her father of the deed, or blamed him for it. She couldn't understand that… Surely it was wrong for a life to be snuffed out so quickly with no one to care…
Yet wasn't that exactly what she had become? Someone who killed to feed? Who ripped and tore like an animal? She shuddered, and felt her eyes burn, but they were dry. She had no tears to shed…
And she had come onto a boat full of men, when she feared men… Why? Simply to be carried away? Or had she sensed them as her rightful prey, and longed to hunt them?
A memory flashed through her head, tethered to nothing that could pierce the black void between her life ages ago and the here and now… Yet it had the feel of a real memory, a terrifying one because it showed her herself as an animal, a seductress, a fiend of hell… A man, chained to a wall in the basement, unable to escape her as she drank him dry… She had kept him alive for weeks…
No! She hadn't! She couldn't do that to anyone, not even a man she had feared and hated like she'd feared and hated her father… And yet the image was so real… She knew the place, she felt the hunger… She knew the man… Giacomo, who had taunted her so often, touching when she didn't want to be touched, promising to betray his caresses to her brother… She had feared a beating… or worse… She had feared what had happened to her mother…
But she hadn't taken Giacomo and made a begging, bloodless, wreck of a man out of him… She refused to believe it. It was only an image that hung in her thoughts, born of the blood she had drunk and her longing for the chase…
She closed her eyes and saw his face: eyes wide with terror… mouth moving, as abject whimpers had leaked from him… face wet with tears and twisted into something broken and bestial. An animal afraid of her power… It held a certain seduction…
She shook it away, lifting her hands to her ears as if she could stop the memory of those terrible, animal cries… And yet, she felt the power of it, knew the thrill of the kill…
It hurt the piece of herself that she could touch inside… Her heart, if not her soul. She had made a vow not to kill. She remembered that; Giacomo's murder was not a real memory… Because if it were, she would have broken her vow, and become a monster…
Hard on the heels of that thought came the decision to test herself. She was not a murderer. She would call one of her victims to her here, and she would prove that she could abstain from blood and death. She knew instinctively that she could call out, and one of them would come… She only had to close her eyes and picture the man in her thoughts, and he would come… She built the image against her eyelids: not the first man, the one she thought she had killed. The second, a softer man, who had depended on the other two to help him… The one who needed looking after… He had had soft brown hair and lovely dark eyes that had widened as he looked at her. She had wiped his mind of her image, even as she had drunk his blood… But she couldn't help wondering if he had thought her beautiful…
How she had changed from the shivering, starving rat that had circled the Grand Canal, looking for food… With her eyes pressed shut, she lifted her arms and called out to him in her mind. He would come, and she would prove she wasn't a killer… She had to prove that she wasn't a killer…