Venom (5 page)

“The view?” Her voice rang out shrilly. “In a graveyard? At this hour?” Her fear began to give way to irritation. He was clearly lying to her.

The boy gestured around him. In the dark, a group of flowering weeds looked like a giant hairy spider crouched against the side of a crypt. “These flowers actually grow best in cemeteries. Did you know that? Something about the mix of soil and shade. Death and
life, intertwined. One feeding off the other. It’s kind of magical, don’t you think?” He seemed distracted for a moment, like he really was fascinated by their surroundings. Just as Cass was about to respond, he turned to her again. “Plus the company here is much more agreeable than at
la taverna.
And much less likely to talk my ear off.”

Cass felt dizzy. She took one more step back. “What’s on your face?” she demanded, pointing at his right cheekbone.

“What?” He licked a finger and wiped haphazardly at the area Cass had indicated. His hand came away smudged with red. “Oh. Paint, probably. It gets all over everything.” His lips twitched as if he were trying not to smile. “It’s a wonder you aren’t the one being mourned, as accident prone as you seem to be.”

“I hardly think you jumping on me earlier qualifies me as accident prone.” She was surprised by how quickly the response came to her.

“Oh, if I had jumped on you, you’d know it,” he said with a wink. He reached toward Cass to dislodge a twig from her hair. “I’m Falco, by the way.”

Cass narrowed her eyes. Now, since he was obviously laughing at her, she found his mischievous grin annoying. Still, it didn’t seem to be the deranged smile of a murderer. But her heart wouldn’t stop pounding, and when she thought about the mutilated body just steps away from them, inside Liviana’s crypt, her stomach surged. Cass glanced around. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t alone.

“What are
you
doing here, Signorina…?” He trailed off, waiting for her to provide her name.

“Caravello. Cassandra,” she said distractedly, her mind consumed by shadows, by faceless corpses and killers hiding in the dark.

“Cassandra,” he repeated, as though her name pleased him. “So. Did I interrupt something? A sordid little tryst, perhaps?”

“You must be joking.” Cass was in no mood for humor. Besides, the closest she’d ever been to a tryst was when he’d fallen on top of her in the street earlier that day.

“Always. Sadly, you don’t seem like the type of girl who would be up for a midnight…encounter.” Falco’s eyes drifted downward. “Too bad.”

Cass realized her cloak had fallen open, exposing the white nightgown she wore underneath. She pulled the velvet fabric tight around her body. Then the shrubbery rippled once more with unfamiliar movement. Cass’s heart froze.

“We should get out of here,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

“Not safe?” Falco raised an eyebrow. “Why? Because it’s dark and you might accidentally trip over your own two feet? I feel quite safe. In fact, I was just settling in to do some reading.”

Cass furrowed her brow. “Reading?”

Falco wagged her journal in front of her. “This is yours, I presume.” A slow smile spread across his face. “Let’s find out exactly what you’ve been doing, shall we?”

“Give it back!” Cass reached for the journal, but Falco easily dodged her. He opened the leather-bound book to a random page and cleared his throat. Clutching a hand to his chest, he pretended to read aloud in a high-pitched voice. “Oh, how I love the way his fingers explore my soft flesh. The way his eyes see into my very soul.”

This time, Cass managed to snatch the book out of his hands. “That is
not
what it says.”

“I guess that means you won’t be keeping me warm tonight?”
Falco quirked an eyebrow. Before she could muster up a response, he laughed. “Then again, the accommodations probably wouldn’t meet your standards. You’ve probably never slept on anything but the finest satins, have you?”

Cass hoped the darkness camouflaged her scarlet cheeks. Who was this boy to talk to her the way he did? “Is that why you’re here? Looking for a date?” Cass gestured toward a row of pointed headstones. “I do believe you’re in luck. I see some ladies who won’t be able to refuse you.” The words flew out of her mouth before she could rethink them.

“Funny. And correct. Sort of. I was actually just looking for a place to get a little rest.” For a second, the smile dropped from his face, and an expression passed across it that Cass couldn’t identify.

“Sleep in a graveyard?” Cass frowned. “You can’t be serious.” Again Cass felt certain he was lying to her. Could he have had something to do with the body stashed in the contessa’s family tomb? Cass didn’t think so. He was a bit too relaxed for having just killed a woman. Behind him, in the darkness, Cass again thought she saw movement. Her breath caught in her throat, but it was just one of the stray cats, darting out in front of a crypt.

If Falco noticed her look of alarm, he didn’t comment on it. “Why not? Normally it’s quiet,” he said, grinning at Cass. “No wild women running about. My roommate and I were drinking at Il Mar e la Spada and got into a fight as usual. Tonight I decided to avoid the inevitable thrashing.” He coughed. “His, not mine.”

Il Mar e la Spada. San Domenico’s finest—and only—taverna. Cass had never been inside the decrepit old place.

“Come on,” Falco said. “I’ll see you safely home to your fancy
sheets. I’d say you need your beauty sleep, but it looks like you’ve been getting plenty.” He took Cass’s hand in one of his own, his warm touch like a bolt of lightning, causing her to jump.

Cass wrenched her hand out of his. “I’m not going home. I’m going to the town guard.”

Falco’s blue eyes went cold at the mention of soldiers. “Why would you waste your time talking to those degenerates? They’re worse than the criminals themselves.”

“I’ve discovered a dead body.” Hearing the words brought back the true gravity of the situation, and panic shot through her all over again. She hugged her arms across her body to keep from trembling.

Falco laughed tersely. He made a sweeping motion with his hand. “Of course you have, my dear. We are literally surrounded by the dead.”

Cass tossed her hair back from her face. “Don’t treat me like I’m stupid,” she said coldly. “When you knocked me down today, I had come from a funeral. My
friend’s
funeral. I just went to her tomb and her body is gone, replaced by another, a girl I’ve never seen before.” Again, the confidence in her tone surprised her. It was the kind of thing she might have thought in her head or written in her journal, but would never have spoken aloud.

“That makes no sense,” Falco said gently.

Cass bristled at his tone of voice. “Exactly. That’s why I’m going to the guard.”

“Perhaps you imagined her to be someone else? Grief does strange things…” For a second, Falco’s eyes softened, as though he were looking at something far away. Then he shook his head. “Or maybe she just looks different to you now. My master often paints the dead
as they’re being prepared for burial. You know, the body changes as it cools.”

Was he accusing her of hallucinating? Of being crazy? Her mouth tightened into a thin line. “Does it go from blonde to brunette?” she asked. Her voice still had an unfamiliar, sharp edge to it.

“Maybe the light played a trick on you. Maybe you were in the wrong crypt?” he persisted.

Cass hesitated. Could it be? Could the light have made Liviana’s hair look dark? No. Why would Livi have an X carved over her heart? But could Cass have wandered into the wrong crypt? Many of the tombs were decorated with stone angels.

“I’ll show you,” she said, unsure of whether she was hoping to prove him wrong or to be proven wrong by him. The graveyard had been her haven ever since moving to San Domenico. She couldn’t imagine having to relinquish it to a corpse-mutilating monster.

Falco consented silently, and gestured for her to lead the way. Cass led Falco back to Liviana’s family crypt, where the door still stood partially ajar. She pointed at the raised letters that formed a semicircle over the door. “Greco—her family name. This
is
the right crypt.”

“You stand watch,” he said. “I’ll make sure no walking dead girls have invaded your little friend’s tomb.” Falco moved through the open doorway, humming to himself. His cheerful mood had returned. “Look, someone even left me a lantern. I might have to avail myself of these lodgings the next time I need a place to stay. Oh, and even a trinket. I think propriety dictates that it is I who should be buying gifts for you at this stage in our—”

Then his voice cut off.

A second later, Falco practically exploded out of the tomb, blue
eyes burning in the moonlight. “Tell me what you saw tonight,” he demanded. “Tell me everything.”

Cass’s heart once again began to batter itself against her rib cage as she looked at Falco’s pale face. He was breathing hard. Something was very, very wrong.

“Nothing really,” she insisted, and all the fear came rushing back. “I thought I saw a cloak flapping in the bushes. But the moon was dim and it may have been a raven, or nothing.” Cass swallowed past the sawdust that seemed to be coating her throat. “Do—do you know her?”

Falco shook his head. “She looks like a courtesan. Young. New to the trade, probably.”

A courtesan. Of course. As a child growing up on the Rialto, Cass had been fascinated by the city’s glamorous women who gave favors to men in exchange for clothes and jewels and other payment. She had often seen them hanging out of windows along the main canals, waving coyly and flashing just the slightest hint of nipple to attract wealthy patrons, but she had never actually known one. They had always seemed both perfectly normal and strangely exotic, like vividly colored birds.

Falco’s eyes flitted quickly between the crypts and the bushes and the path back to the gate. “We need to get moving. I wish you’d never shown me this. Whoever killed her might have seen us go in here. He might be looking for us. He might be looking
at
us, right this second.”

He might be looking at
me, Cass thought. But no, Falco couldn’t be a murderer. Not with that smile. Besides, if he were the murderer, Cass would already be dead. Right? She thought back to the flapping cloak, the movement she had sensed in the shrubbery. She glanced
out into the dark. There were a million places for a killer to hide, and there was only one way out.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Falco grabbed her hand, and this time she allowed it. The rounded gravestones blurred like gray ghosts against the black night as they ran. Cass and Falco paused outside the gate, gasping for breath.

“So you’ll come with me?” Cass asked. “To see the guard?”

Falco shook his head violently, his longish brown hair flapping from side to side, as he continued toward Agnese’s estate. “No, we can’t tell the guard about this. Go home. Forget what you saw.”

“What?” Cass stopped walking. “But that’s outrageous. A girl’s been murdered. And a body’s gone missing. A contessa’s body.” Cass wasn’t sure if she was more disturbed by the body she’d found, or the fact that Livi’s seemed to have completely disappeared. “The guard can go to the Rialto and tell the
rettori.
The councilmen look into crimes such as this. They could send an
avogadore
to investigate.”

Falco spun around to face her again. “Who is she? You don’t know. Who killed her? You don’t know. Even if the guard stopped drinking and playing dice long enough to row over to tell the rettori, I doubt the magistrate will be concerned. They only care about crimes that upset the merchants or that scare away tourists. They won’t care about a robbed tomb out here on San Domenico, or about the murder of an unknown courtesan.”

“Maybe you’re afraid they’ll think
you
killed her.” Cass lifted her chin, forcing herself to meet Falco’s eyes, searching them for signs of evil. She saw none. And yet, there had to be a reason he was so opposed to reporting a murder.

Falco folded his arms. “And what will they think about you, trolling the graveyard, unchaperoned, with a stranger? A commoner, no less. What will your parents say when the soldiers drag you home? Won’t they be shocked to find out what late-night company their lovely daughter has been keeping?”

“My parents are dead,” Cass said simply. She didn’t say it to make him feel guilty. It just came out of her mouth instinctively. She’d probably said it a hundred times, so often that the words themselves felt dead to her, meaningless.

Falco softened. “Your guardians, then. They won’t believe that we weren’t…” He trailed off. “It’ll be the talk of the city by daybreak.” He reached out and stroked her hair. “Fun thought, though, eh? A girl like you with me?”

His soft touch made Cass warm and cold at the same time. He was right. Aunt Agnese would lock Cass inside the villa if she found out where Cass had spent the evening. And if she found out Cass was consorting with a commoner? Well, that would be very bad, possibly exiled-to-a-nunnery-in-Spain bad. If Cass did anything to mess up her engagement to Luca, it would bring shame on her family name. Agnese’s nephew Matteo would probably toss Cass and her aunt out on the street as soon as he came of age. Agnese would never forgive her.

Falco’s hand dropped from her hair to her shoulder, and Cass instinctively stepped away from him.

“You’re right,” she admitted. She cast a glance through the tangled branches at the old villa beyond. “My aunt would kill me, or worse, never let me leave the house again.”

“And the guard would use this as one more reason to harass my
friends and me,” Falco said. “They’d like nothing better than to run us all out of town.” His voice was soothing, coaxing. “It’s terrible, what happened, but there’s nothing we can do.”

Cass looked back toward the graveyard, biting her lip. She wondered how Falco knew so much about courtesans and murderers and the town guard.

“Come on.” Falco reached out for her hand again. “You shouldn’t be out at this hour, and dressed in so little.” This time, he did not appear to be teasing her. He kept his fingers twined through hers until they crossed the wet grass to where her aunt’s property started. “I assume this is you?” He pointed at Agnese’s crumbling villa, so old that in the night it almost looked like an extension of the ancient church that sat adjacent to it.