Innocent Blood by James Rollins, Rebecca Cantrell

on his way to the window. The long nose of his mask curved downward like the beak of a crow. The smell of the well-crafted leather from which it was made filled his nostrils. A woman swept by, her heavy scent lingering in the air long after she and her partner had moved away across the floor.
    Judas knew these dances and countless more. Later, after more wine, he would join them. He would choose a young courtesan, perhaps another Moor if he could find one. He would try his best to lose himself in the familiar steps.
    Fifty years ago, in his last pass through Venice, he had met the most enchanting woman he had seen in his long life. She, too, had been a Moor—dark-skinned , with luminous deep-brown eyes and black tresses that spilled over her bare shoulders to her slender waist. She wore an emerald-green dress with gold trim, pinched in at the waist as was the fashion, but between her breasts, hanging from a slender gold chain around her neck, rested a shard of bright silver, like a piece of a broken mirror, an unusual adornment. The scent of lotus blossoms, a fragrance he had not enjoyed since his last sojourn in the East, lingered around her.
    He and the mysterious woman had danced for hours, neither needing a different partner. When she spoke, she had a curious accent that he could not place. Soon he forgot that and listened only to her words. She knew more than anyone he had ever met—history, philosophy, and the mysteries of the human heart. Serenity and wisdom rested in her slim form, and he wanted to borrow her peace. For her, perhaps, he might find a way to rejoin the simple cares of mortal men.
    After the dancing, at this very same window, she had raised her mask that he might see the rest of her face, and he had lifted his as well. He had gazed at her in a silent moment more intimate than he had ever shared with another. Then she had handed him her mask, excused herself, and disappeared into the crowd.
    Only then did he realize that he did not know her name.
    She never returned. For more than a year he had searched Venice for her, paid ridiculous sums for incorrect information. She was the granddaughter of a doge. She was a slave from the Orient. She was a Jewish girl who escaped from the ghetto for a night. She was none of those.
    Heartbroken, he fled the city of masks and strove to forget her in the arms of a hundred different women—some dark as Moors , others fair as snow. He had listened to a thousand stories from them, helped some and forsaken others. None had touched his heart, and he left them all before he had to confront their aging and deaths.
    But now he had returned to Venice to banish her from his thoughts, fifty years after he had danced with her across these floorboards. By this time, he knew, she was likely dead, or a wizened and blind old woman who had long forgotten their magical night. All he had left of it himself was his memory and her old leather mask.
    He turned the mask over in his hands now. Black and glossy, it was a thick flat ribbon of leather that slashed across her eyes, with a tiny paste jewel glittering near the corner of each eye. A daring design, its simplicity at odds with the ornate masks worn by the women of those times.
    But she had needed no further adornment.
    He had returned to these bright halls to cast that dark mask into the canal tonight and banish her ghost to the library of his past. Gripping the old leather, he glanced out the open window. Below, a gondolier poled his slim craft through the dark water, ripples lit silver by moonlight.
    Beyond the canal’s banks, figures hurried across stone tiles or over bridges. People on mysterious errands. People on everyday ones. He did not know, did not care. Like everything else, it wearied him. For one moment, he had believed that he might find connection, until she left.
    Reluctant now to part with it, he stroked the mask with his index finger. It had rested in the bottom of his trunk for years, wrapped in the finest silk.