IGMS Issue 50 Read Free

from the front of their store. When Ferri says that I'd appreciate a slice of fresh
filone
, the baker's youngest daughter hurries over with the bread.
    Her face is white from flour. Or fear. I'm unable to tell which.
    "I like you," Ferri tells the baker. "The cardinal likes you. But you must stop involving yourself in matters which need not concern you."
    "But
signorina
, this city has a long history. The people merely want to control a little of their destiny. Surely you know what this city could be if the cardinal would only grant us a taste of freedom."
    Ferri smiles her fake smile, revealing her long canines. "I know our history. But history doesn't change the fact that Cardinal Battista is very disappointed in you. Surely you know enough about me to not want to disappoint the cardinal."
    I don't need to guess what results from such disappointment, and neither does the baker.
    "This is not just," the baker yells. "This is not holy. For the cardinal to allow such acts . . ."
    Ferri bows her head slightly as if praying and repeats a Bible verse she once quoted to me when I asked how she'd become a vampire. "There are those whose teeth are swords, and whose jaws are set with knives to devour the poor from the earth and the needy from among mankind." Ferri raises her head back up and stares at the baker's throat. "Should I go on?"
    The baker shakes his head and swears he'll never again intrude on politics.
    Later that night, as we walk up the hill to the cardinal's palace, five men jump from the shadows, rapiers flashing in the darkness. Ferri pushes me out of the way and leaps at the men, moving faster than the rapiers can cut. Blood and screams sing over me until, when the road is once more silent, I walk back to Ferri.
    Four of the men are dead. The fifth lays pale on the ground as Ferri holds the man's own rapier to his throat.
    "Was it the baker?" Ferri asks. The man nods, his eyes never leaving the rapier's tip.
    "Uccello, sing an aria," she tells me.
    The man looks at me with pleading eyes, as if praying I'll intercede on his behalf.
    "My singing isn't so good."
    "It's better than anything he'll ever hear again."
    I remember how Siface came alive in front of an audience. How he'd sworn to never cease performing until the moment he died.
    I stare at the man and sing a quiet, haunting song of love and happiness. I hear all the flaws in my voice but the man doesn't care. His eyes simply plead with me to save him.
    I'm halfway through the aria when Ferri slices the man's throat open with her teeth and drinks his blood.
    The following night, as Ferri and I walk the city yet again, we pass by the baker's empty store. A small note in the window says the baker and his family are visiting sick relatives in the countryside.
    Ferri seems satisfied by this coincidence.
    If the cardinal is satisfied, I can't say.

    And that's how things are with Cardinal Battista. As the weeks become months and I'm still living with Ferri, she shares with me many stories. About the history of Bologna. About the little everyday dramas which encircle the cardinal's servants and fellow clergy. She even shares her assignments with me. But of the cardinal himself she rarely speaks. He seems remote from anything in my life. I live in his palace but I have a closer connection to the stones in Ferri's room than to the cardinal himself.
    One night Ferri and I stop by the town's cathedral after making our evening rounds. Normally we merely pass by the cathedral's massive vaulting stones, but this time I hear the sounds of a choir practicing inside. I can't help but be drawn to the singing.
    I'd assumed Ferri couldn't enter a church, but she shrugs and follows me inside. "If consecrated places bothered me I wouldn't be working for a cardinal, now would I?" she whispers.
    Inside we discover a castrato beginning his solo. I recognize him--Nicolini, a famous mezzo-soprano Siface performed with a few times. He must be performing at Bologna's opera house and