A pale face, with light hair. A body that moved away through the bushes, using the same lithe movements as the one who’d thrown the sugarplum at her.
But before she could react, something shoved her to the ground again, and she landed with a whump, face-first into the slick grass. The black canvas came flying down over her, covering her face and down over the front of her before she could roll away, and it clung to her when her attacker lifted her up.
Strong arms wrapped around her, holding the canvas and her own arms close to her body. Suffocating under the heavy material, Victoria kicked and twisted until she landed two good blows against the legs of the man who held her, then slammed her head backward.
The satisfying crunch and the sudden loosening of her person told her she’d hit the mark, even as her head swam. She tumbled to the ground, and it took her more than a moment to fling off the folds of the canvas and scramble to her feet.
By the time she was upright, Zavier was standing in front of her. His red hair stuck out in tufts at the edge of his crown, and he was breathing heavily. “All right?” he asked with a satisfied grin.
She looked around. Their assailants were gone and it was just the two of them, panting in the middle of a dark graveyard. She turned toward the brush, where she’d seen the face she was sure she’d recognized. Nothing was there but flattened bushes and broken twigs—both from her own tumble into the foliage and whoever had been watching.
“They got away,” she said.
“Aye, they did. Surprised me—three of them all at once. A stake wasna much use against ’em,” he said companionably.
He was right, and Venators didn’t generally fight with guns or knives. Their prey was the undead, not human threats. But it didn’t seem to bother him that their attackers had gotten away.
“Who were they?” she asked, looking around. “And why did they want to abduct me? Did they try to kidnap you too?”
“No, it just seemed they wanted me out of the way so they could get to you. They all ran off when they saw they couldn’t get the best of us.”
Victoria looked up. The wall of the mausoleum stretched above her, and she could see the impressions of the family name. She couldn’t make out all of the letters, but she saw enough to know that the face she’d seen in the bushes, the person who had caught her attention by throwing the sugarplum so hard, had indeed been Sarafina Regalado.
But the question was, what was Max’s fiancée doing at her family tomb in the middle of the night?
Five
In Which a Message Is Delivered
On the last night of Carnivale, the Corso was filled with a blaze of light.
The entire population of the city seemed to fill the broad strada and its connecting piazza to bursting before it spilled into the narrower Ripetta and other streets. Each person held tightly in one hand to a large twisted candle, or moccoletto, and a long switch topped by a handkerchief in the other. The small blazes danced and glowed, painting the buildings and masked faces and elegant carriages in a yellow-white splash as the partygoers used their handkerchiefs to flick at the flames of nearby candles.
The game was to extinguish someone’s light or have one’s own extinguished, all in a frenetic, rollicking mass of milling Romans.
Victoria had never seen the like, this blast of illumination from thousands of Romans crowding the street. They even called down from crimson-draped balconies—one of which hosted Lady Melly and friends—holding their moccoli aloft. Victoria could barely breathe, the area was so thronged with bodies and carriages, and tinged with the scent of burning wax, the smell of so many people packed so tightly in the street, the overriding crispness of the cool air. Victoria was thankful the propellants of last night’s plaster sugarplums had given way to the friendlier, softer touch of flapping handkerchiefs.
This final night of revelry, the eve of Ash Wednesday, was the wildest, loudest, most beautiful festival she’d ever experienced, and although she would rather have been seated safely in a high barouche where she could gape all she liked, Victoria had other responsibilities.
Her switch, in fact, was more than a bit thicker than the ones other revelers were holding. In fact, it was not only thicker, but had been whittled to a lethal point on the bottom end.
Eschewing the long-beaked peregrine mask she’d worn the night before, Victoria had donned a more manageable one tonight. The upper part of her face was covered by a gold mask painted with glittering streaks of blue and green, sparkling curlicues of orange and pink, and had no protrusions that would catch on nearby shoulders. White feathers sprouted from the top and sides, and long curls of red ribbon hung from the edges to her shoulders. Only her mouth and chin were free, which made eating those delicious roasted chestnuts and speaking much easier than the previous evening’s disguise.
“Senza moccolo!” a man masked as a banditto shouted in her ear, and he flicked his switch toward her candle.
As she had quickly learned to do, Victoria shielded her flame whilst grabbing at the handkerchief, and plucked the switch from the person’s hand. With a nod behind her own mask, she tossed away the handkerchief, but left off from dousing the switch holder’s taper.
Zavier looked at her. “You are very quick,” he said with a smile beneath the heavy-brimmed sombrero he’d chosen to wear this night. She wasn’t certain how he’d gotten away without wearing a mask when Ilias had insisted she do so. “You protect your candle like you protect those of this city.”
“This is madness,” Victoria said, looking about. All she could see were large, painted masks and acres of shoulders and necks and throats everywhere, everywhere. Cast in shadows below arm level, lit from above, glowing and stark by turns in the night, loud and more of a crush than any ballroom back in London, the extinguishing ceremony was by turns breathtaking and horrific. “Even if I knew a vampire was about, I’d never be able to identify it, let alone get to him or her.” She had to raise her voice to be heard above the din.
“Aye, so perhaps we ought to just enjoy the festivities as much as possible until the candles are doused at midnight and everyone begins to go home. After that it will be much easier to move about.” The way he looked at her, so intently for a moment, as his hat brushed the feathers of her mask, made her stomach do a little flip.
But before Victoria could reply, a sudden prickle at the back of her neck intensified into a chill. She turned quickly, sensing the presence of an undead in close proximity, and her shoulder slammed into the angel next to her, and then into a gypsy, and then into an owl, as the masked people pushed past her.
Glancing back toward Zavier, she saw him starting off in the opposite direction as if he, too, had felt something and was pursuing it. Despite their agreement about the difficulty of identifying undead in this crowd, neither of them would stand aside and do nothing when a vampire was near.
They were well separated by now, and as Victoria turned once again and tried to move in the opposite direction from the people near her, she scanned the crowd, looking for red irises behind the masks that streamed past her, or for a disguise that could be covering the face of Sara Regalado.
She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to sense which direction to go after the creature that skulked nearby, and finally set off toward the left, through the milling people. The chill at the back of her neck began to intensify as she made her way through to the edges of the crowd. Suddenly, not so far from the darkness that lingered beyond the revelry, she saw the glowing red orbs in a masked face two persons away.