Looking at her prisoner, wilted down on the raised deck surrounding the small pool of brine, she remembered again the island of plague victims, ministered to by doctors wearing masks that were supposed to protect them… This one was a doctor, too. She remembered one doctor's gloved fingers stroking her heated forehead, speaking to her in a soft voice that failed to hide his melancholy. She had known then that she was going to die…
She felt the shock in every bone, as if she had been struck… As if this one stray memory had somehow opened the floodgates, and all her memories had come tumbling back, assaulting her mind with terrible visions…
She had roamed Venice, until she'd returned again to her father's spice shop… Her brother's shop, now. She had watched him hungrily, but never let him see her, afraid of how he would react. Even then her vision had changed; the red tide flowed under her brother's skin, warming it, giving him a flush that was handsome and appealing to her eyes. He had been a handsome man, her brother. And he had parlayed his looks into a good marriage. She wondered if his wife were happy, or if he made her as miserable as their father had made their mother. She wondered if the woman's fate would be the same as their mother's… Would her brother murder his wife?
She hungered… Shying away from her brother, she wandered the alleyways, trying to eat the bread that was thrown out by their neighbors, even stooping to tearing it away from the rats, but it only made her sick and miserable…
One night, she had found a stillborn child tossed away in the alley like garbage. Its blood was cooling, but she licked at it anyway, swallowing it down, despite the roiling in her stomach. And she hadn't been sick… She knew then what she had become…
The chewing dead… They came back to prey upon their families, their friends, their neighbors, those who had wronged them. Her brother had wronged her: He had tried to force her into marriage with an old, palsied man who had disgusted her… Giacomo had wronged her: he had touched her without her permission and told her he would tell lies to her brother if she ever spoke of it… Her neighbors had wronged her: they had known what her father had done to her mother, but none of them had ever said a word, or even tried to denounce him. She felt joy surge inside her. She had known she could punish them all then…
But she hadn't realized what punishment meant. She hadn't known that it would steal her soul, until she was nothing more than a predator, no better than the men she punished…
She had taken Giacomo, and imprisoned him in the basement of an abandoned house. For weeks, she had fed on him, slowly drinking his blood, weakening him, torturing him with her teeth and her nails, laughing when he begged for mercy. He knew what she was, and there was power in his fear of her… But she had taken too long, and someone had heard Giacomo's screams…
Her brother had come for her with an army of his neighbors. She had taken her toll of them before they ran her to earth. Then they had held her, and bound her in chains, before forcing a brick between her jaws… She could remember being dragged through the streets to her brother's home, being forced to watch as they dug her grave in his basement, where the water came in the flood season… They had laid her in it, wrapped in chains, chewing furiously on the brick that silenced her voice… She had felt the first clods of dirt began to fall, and knew fear. They would bury her here, and she would never be able to break free of the chains…
And then she had known nothing more until the water had flooded in around her, and washed her up onto the steps of the basement, and she had torn free of the ancient rusty chains… How long? How long had she lain there, with the brick in her mouth, desiccating without blood, without life? A handful of years? A century? Longer? How many years had been stolen from her?
Anger filled her… They were all responsible for the things that had been done to her. She hated them all… Her brother led them… Oh, he smiled as if he were different, as if he were changed, but she knew him for what he was. His handsome face and winning ways might fool others, but they could never fool her. No matter how many centuries had past, she recognized her brother on this boat. She knew he would come for her again… He would bury her again if he could… Bury her in the dark embrace of the ocean depths without a qualm, as if she were a criminal…
She had tried for her brother, but that man, so like her father had driven her off. She had tried for his Scandinavian friend, a face she didn't recognize, as beautiful as her brother's face, but in a different way. The woman with her pale face, and the deep longing in her brown eyes had denied her. Her path to the two she hated most had been blocked… So she had tried for their servant, the man with the chevrons on his sleeve… But he, too, had had a powerful protector, a short stocky man with a flattened nose and a strident voice… She had had to abandon the servant, too.
The one she had taken had had no protectors at all. She looked at him again, pleased at how pale he was, at the blood that ran from the wounds on his throat. He would be so easy to kill. And the more she killed, the more powerful she would be. She was done with being hungry. This doctor, this man who had failed to save her, was the only one she could touch. So he would suffer for the rest of them. And then she would begin to plot and scheme. Her brother would die…