Blood Infernal: The Order of the Sanguines Series by James Rollins, Rebecca Cantrell Page B

one person he could trust with his secret.
    Another immortal who, like him, had lost her immortality.
    She’ll know what to do .
    6:25 P . M . CET
    Venice, Italy
    Standing in the middle of the convent’s garden, Elizabeth Bathory adjusted her broad-brimmed straw hat to cover her face, to shade her eyes from the low-hanging spring sun. To protect her skin, she always wore a hat when she worked outside, even here in the tiny herb garden inside the walled courtyard that served as her prison.
    She had been taught centuries ago that those of royal blood should never have skin the same hue as the peasants who worked the fields. Back then she had her own gardens at Čachtice Castle, where she had grown medicinal plants, studying the arts of healing, plying cures out of a flower’s petals or a stubborn root. Even then, she had not gone outside with her clippers and baskets without some manner of shade.
    Though this small herb garden paled next to her former fields, she appreciated her time among the convent’s fragrant collage of thyme, chives, basil, and parsley. She had spent the past afternoon clearing out old, woody growths of rosemary to fill in those new spaces with lavender and mint. Their homely scents drifted up into the warm air.
    If she closed her eyes, she could imagine that it was a summer day back at her castle, that her children would soon run out to meet her. She would pass them her gathered herbs and walk with them through the grounds, hearing their stories of the day.
    But that world had ended four hundred years ago.
    Her children were dead; her castle in ruins. Even her name was whispered as a curse. All because she had been made into an accursed strigoi .
    She pictured Rhun Korza’s face, remembering him atop her, the taste of her own blood on his lips. In that moment of weakness and desire, her life had been forever changed. After her initial shock at her transformation into a strigoi , she had come to embrace that damned existence, to appreciate all it offered. But even that had been stripped from her this past winter—stolen away by the same hand that had given it.
    Now she was simply human again.
    Weak, mortal, and trapped.
    Curse you, Rhun .
    She bent down and savagely clipped a branch of rosemary and tossed it to the flagstone path. Marie, an elderly nun, worked the gardens with her, sweeping the path behind her with a handmade broom. Marie was a wrinkled-up apricot of a woman, eighty if she was a day, with blue eyes filmed with age. She treated Elizabeth with a kind condescension, as if the nun expected her to grow out of her troublesome behavior. If only she knew that Elizabeth had lived more centuries than this old woman would ever see.
    But Marie knew nothing of Elizabeth’s past, not even her full name.
    None at the convent was given this knowledge.
    A twinge in one knee caused Elizabeth to shift her weight to the other, recognizing the pain for what it was.
    Aging.
    I’ve had one curse replaced with another .
    Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Berndt Niedermann crossing the courtyard on his way to the dining hall for dinner. The elegant German lodged in one of the convent’s guest rooms. He was dressed in what passed in this era for formal: pressed trousers and a well-tailored blue jacket. He raised a hand in greeting.
    She ignored him.
    Familiarity was not yet called for.
    At least for the moment.
    Instead, she stretched a kink from her back, glancing everywhere but in Berndt’s direction. The Venetian convent was not without its charm. In the past, the convent had been a grand house with a stately entrance overlooking a wide canal. Tall columns flanked a stout oaken door that led to the dock. She had spent many hours staring out her room’s window, watching life travel by on the canals. Venice had no cars or horses—only boats and people on foot. It was a curious anachronism, a city largely unchanged from her own past.
    Over the last week, she had chatted with the German lodger on