The Bleeding Dusk Read Free Page A

inkwell and a small book.
    She had not yet fully come to terms with the grief of losing her great-aunt Eustacia so horrifically a month ago, for it had happened only a year after her beloved husband, Phillip, had been turned into a vampire. It seemed sometimes too much for her to bear, to think about losing two people whom she’d loved so briefly, yet so deeply—two people who each understood a single side of her bilateral life.
    â€œWhy do you not wear both of them?”
    â€œWear two vis bullae ?”Victoria watched as the woman next to her trailed just the tip of her forefinger in the brilliant water. “Is that permissible?”
    Wayren, a tall, slender woman with hair the color of wheat, pulled her dripping finger from the water. As she had been every time Victoria saw her, she was dressed in a long, simple gown gathered loosely at the waist with a woven leather belt. Her sleeves, fitted tightly at the tops of her arms, flared into wide points and hung from her wrists nearly to the floor. She looked like a medieval chatelaine, and even though she was wearing fashions centuries older than the flounce-hemmed, ankle-length gown Victoria wore, she did not look out of place.
    â€œ Permissible is an odd choice of word for The Gardella to use,” Wayren replied with a beatific smile. With her customary ease and grace, she moved the leather-wrapped braid that fell from her temple back over her shoulder, where it merged with the rest of her long hair.
    Wayren was not a Venator. She was…Victoria wasn’t ever exactly certain who or what Wayren was, except that her library of old books and scrolls seemed infinite, and she was the one to whom the Venators always turned when they needed information and advice.
    â€œA single vis bulla is forged specifically for each Venator as he or she is called. As it is created for each one individually, there are no two alike, and the amulet becomes an intimate part of them. When possible, the vis is always buried with the Venator, but of course this didn’t happen in the case of your aunt. I’ve not known a Venator to wear two vis bullae, but there has probably not been a time when one has had the opportunity to have two of them. It is not as if there are extras lying about. And as you are the new Summa Gardella, there is no one who should say you nay.”
    â€œI can scarcely comprehend that less than two years after I had the dreams that led to my calling to be a Venator, I’m now the one to whom everyone will turn. Even those who have been Venators far longer than I.”
    Victoria’s aunt had been eighty-one, one of the longest-living vampire hunters ever, when she died. As the only other person bearing the direct bloodline of the Gardella family, Victoria had inherited the title—and responsibility—of Summa Gardella: The Gardella.
    â€œYou may be younger—in fact, you may be our youngest Venator,” Wayren told her with that same smile, “but you are well deserving of your title. What you have accomplished in the last eighteen moons would have been a challenge for even your aunt when she was in her prime fighting years.”
    Victoria looked away from Wayren’s serene gaze, focusing on the spill of glittering holy water next to her. She hadn’t accomplished running off Lilith from London last year, or killing Nedas, the vampire queen’s son, a month ago, without Max’s help.
    Wayren was speaking again, perhaps in an effort to draw Victoria from her unpleasant thoughts. “The vis bullae are precious amulets. They cannot and should not be destroyed, and they’re worth nothing to one who is not a Venator. Did your aunt tell you from whence they come?”
    â€œThe crosses are forged from a silver vein under the hill at Golgotha, in the Holy Land,” Victoria replied. “And they are held in holy water blessed by the pope” —she gestured at the fountain— “until they are