CHAPTER 57

Famine didn’t like moving around in daylight. He felt conspicuous, vulnerable. He had built his identity as an assassin around darkness, because when it came right down to it, everyone was afraid of the dark, and when he was in it, they were right to be. The shaved head, the filed teeth, the overlong fingernails had all been extensions of a certain physical oddness that had always been there.

And it wasn’t just physical. He had embraced his strangeness when the world had decided it didn’t like what it saw, but what the world had seen wasn’t ultimately about what he looked like. It was about the blankness in his eyes, the hollow-ness, the inability to care. It wasn’t an animal lack of humanity the world saw in those pale irises; quite the contrary, it was extremely human. It was an impulse to casual cruelty.

He lived to make others afraid. He fed off their panic, their terror when they saw him coming, when they sensed what he might do to them. He lived for that. Needed it. It slaked his famine, an appetite no amount of blood could truly quench.

This was not his kind of mission, this running about in the sun, armed with pistols, looking for the quick kill. But success in such things brought him more satisfying meals, longer, slower banquets of the macabre and the horrific. So for now he would do as he was asked, let them give him the orders as they always did, reliant as he was on their protection for his various indiscretions . . .

The phone bleeped once. Knight was signaling again. He wasn’t far, right outside the Basilica of St. Nicola. The signal lasted no more than thirty seconds, flickered for almost as long, and then vanished again. He’d gone inside, and Famine, ever hungry, rejoiced in silence as he felt for the haft of the knife in his pocket.

 
“Did you see that?” War demanded into his phone.

“Yes,” said Pestilence. “Famine is on the scene and closing. He’s in the basilica.”

“Get there. Cover the exit. If the target emerges, shoot him down. Worry about witnesses later.”

“If I can get away, no one will identify me,” she said with a grim smile. “All they’ll see is the habit.”

 
Famine scanned the interior of the great church. There were a handful of tourists, a few solitary worshippers, but no services, no crowds. He kept to the shadows on the edge of the nave, moving deftly, keeping the hood of his coat up so that no one noticed him at all. He liked that. He liked the idea of cornering Knight somewhere and getting good and close before showing himself. He’d be paralyzed with fear. He might even scream. Famine felt a rush of pleasure expand from his loins.

He had almost completed a circuit of the nave. There was no sign of Knight, but somehow Famine felt his presence like a scent in the cool, still air of the ancient church where the dust turned in the colored light from the high windows.

He began his descent into the crypt.

“Tomba del santo,” he read silently to himself.

Indeed.