Christopher Golden - Shadow Saga 01 by Of Saints & Shadows

Author:Of Saints & Shadows [Saints, Of & Shadows]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

VENICE’S HOTEL ATLANTICO IS ONLY A FEW short blocks from Piazza San Marco, or St. Mark’s Square, and its front windows offer an intriguing view of the Bridge of Sighs. Its guests can make love at night with the moonlight streaming in through the windows and the breeze carrying the voices of gondoliers calling to warn their comrades around the next corner that they’re coming through. The gondoliers do sing; that’s not a lie. It’s quite romantic, actually.

On the lower floors, guests must change clothes in the dark and pull the curtains during the day. Gondoliers and their passengers generally have roving eyes. But then, who doesn’t? If a picture interests you, you look. It’s human nature.

Tracey Sacco and Linda Metcalf weren’t there for the romance. They were there to worship, to be taken and used by their masters, the Defiant Ones.

They were volunteers.

Their room at the Hotel Atlantico overlooked the canal. Though they did not know it, it was the same room in which a young couple had offered themselves up to Alexandra Nueva only days earlier. If you looked out the window and to the left, you could see the Bridge of Sighs. Linda and Tracey were ostensibly friends, but they were very different people. Linda was too obsessed with the

Defiant Ones to notice the romance of the city. Tracey, though she dared not mention it to her “friend,” failed in a miserable attempt not to notice it. She felt lonely, and afraid.

Linda had survived Venice, New Orleans, and Venezuela, each time paying the hotel bill of whomever she’d been sharing the room with, each time going home alone. She was sure that this time she’d be one of the chosen, she’d be honored. She was far from stupid. You had to be pretty damn smart to get as far into the circle of the volunteers as she’d gotten. But intelligence, in the long history of man, had never had a bearing on worship.

And she could not deny that worship was exactly what this was. Martyrdom, sacrifice, purification. Faith. Those were the principles of religion. Linda didn’t think she had ever actually seen a Defiant One. She had no idea if they paid any attention to the sacrifices offered up to them.

But she had faith.

Tracey had faith in nothing but herself. That was the way it was and always had been. Tracey had never seen a Defiant One either, but that and the fact that she, also, was far from stupid were the only things the two of them shared. This was Tracey’s first year as a volunteer, though it had taken her three to get into the loop and a fourth to convince Linda that she’d be the perfect roommate. The differences between them would have been substantial even if Tracey had been everything she seemed.

Which she was not.

In truth, she lacked not only faith, but religion. Oh, she believed all right, but she believed because of the things she had seen and heard, believed because she was terrified, and because it made good copy, and making good copy was her job.

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