He was alone in a dark place, but every instinct warned him that danger threatened. The very shadows seemed alive with whispers and rustles of movement. Only he was frozen in place, paralyzed by fear… Dread overwhelmed all his ONI training, and froze Lee Crane to the deck like a hypnotized rabbit unable to flee as some unknown predator crept closer…
"Son…" A voice he had almost forgotten, a breath in his ear. His father had died when he was ten years old. There was no possible way Captain Benjamin Crane could be here, now…
But here he was, stepping into Lee's line of sight, immaculately clad in the dress whites he'd been buried in at the end of summer some twenty-five or thirty years ago. Every lovingly remembered line of his face was clear and distinct. "Son, you've been trained for this." The words carried a note of command that Lee responded to instantly, stiffening to attention. Shaken loose by the rebuke, his mind began to race, thinking of ways to break free of this darkness.
His father turned away from him, toward the shadows that cowered from his commanding presence, just as the monsters of Lee's childhood had cowered. But somehow, Lee knew it wouldn't last. This was only a breathing space, a moment to gather himself together.
"Wake up, son!"
His father's voice, razor-sharp, in full officer's bellow, carried Lee out of sleep. For a moment, he lay, listening to the dying echo of that much-loved voice; then dread drove him out of his bunk to turn on every light in his cabin. Even the sudden blaze of brightness couldn't ease his disquiet. Something was wrong with his boat…
Always listen to your ship, son. She'll let you know when danger threatens…
The voice was as clear as if Benjamin Crane were standing here, once again giving those words of advice as he gave Lee the captain's tour of the destroyer, Maitland, as proud of that ship, fresh from the shipyard, as Lee was of Seaview. He could almost feel his father's presence here, and found it somehow comforting. It was odd the way he never felt alone when he was in the greatest danger of his life. His father's voice always breathed words of advice in his ear. Words of advice that Lee had never ignored. Seaview was loudly telling him that something was wrong; he strode to the door, determined to discover what it was…
*She looked down at her prisoner, shivering a little at her audacity. He was not one of the men she had feared and hunted tonight. Both of the men she had stalked had had a protector; a bright guardian who had forced her to flee, gathering the shadows around her.
So she had gone after the one who kowtowed to them, the short, stocky man with the chevrons on his sleeve, but he, too, had a protector… She had known then that she would have to be careful, that they had begun to be armored against her…
So when she had found him, sitting alone in his office, and realized that he was vulnerable, she had acted in desperation… And now she regretted it. He wasn't like the others. There was no reason to fear him. He wasn't dangerous, and unlike the others to whom she was drawn despite her fear, she wasn't afraid of him… He had offered her no harm, and she didn't think he could.
But they respected him, in a way that she understood only too well. If she wanted to draw one of them to her, perhaps this way was best. But she was hungry again, and she hated to feed on someone she had no reason to fear…
She'd wanted the one who looked like her brother, wanted him desperately. Memories of her brother seared her soul; he had been cruel to her after her father's death, locking her in for hours at a time, refusing food and water until she bent to his will. He had wanted her to marry a man older than her father with stinking breath, and palsied hands… She had only escaped because the plague had come, and she had fallen ill like hundreds of others…
So he had sent her to the Plague Island, where the doctors wore the plague masks, their features hidden behind the strange bird-like beaks, and she had grown worse and worse until they had carted her to the burial pit, before she was even dead… Tossed upon the brittle bodies of those who had gone before her, she shivered and sweated by turns, her lips clamped together so that she wouldn't moan and cough like the others around her did… She could hear them die, one after the other, their death cry rattling in their throats as the breath left their bodies…
She lay there for three days before the pit was full and they began to toss the dirt in on her… By then she was unbearably hungry and blue with the cold. Her fingers – numb and shaking, like the hands of the old man her brother was forcing her to marry – cramped as the clods of dirt fell on her, and she didn't even have the strength to cry out and warn them that she was still alive…
Instead, she had succumbed to the blackness, praying for death…
And yet, she hadn't died… Instead, she had clawed her way out of the ground, and crept about in the darkness, starving and hating and hurting… Somehow she had found a way across the channel that separated the island from Venice, and walked the streets of the city, shrouded in darkness…
A memory she hadn't had before; she was beginning to remember what had happened to her in the blackness of forgotten years. She wasn't sure that she wanted to remember, and yet… And yet, the anticipation excited her like nothing had for many days. Could it be that sailing away from Venice, from the city that had been her home all her life had shaken loose the part of her mind that she had closed off?
She had prayed for death in the plague victims' burial pit. She watched as the man she had taken began to shake himself awake, and smiled… "You will pray for it, too," she promised him in her soft voice as his eyes opened…
She couldn't see her reflection in his pupils; wondering what he saw when he looked at her, she closed in to feed.
* signifies a scene change