Chapter 2: A Favor in Venice

Chapter 2: A Favor in Venice

“This is, without a doubt, the single most irresponsible decision you have made since you tried to pay the dwarven mining guild in cryptocurrency.”

Elara’s voice was a tight coil of fury, barely contained within the hushed, leather-and-mahogany interior of the Aeturnum corporate jet. They were thirty thousand feet over the Alps, slicing through the stratosphere at a speed that defied mortal aviation laws. Below, a sea of jagged white peaks clawed at the sky.

Caleb, lounging in a cream-colored leather seat that was more comfortable than his bed, didn’t look up from polishing the hilt of his weapon. The Damascus steel, folded with meteoritic iron and quenched in holy water, seemed to drink the cabin light. It was a relic, a tool of his bloody trade, and seeing it out of its arcane sheath felt more natural than the signet ring of the CEO he was supposed to wear.

“Bitcoin is the future, Elara. The dwarves are just afraid of progress,” he said nonchalantly.

“They are five-thousand-year-old beings who literally eat rocks and forge treasures from the planet’s core. Their currency is gold and blood oaths. You offered them imaginary numbers on a screen.” She pushed her glasses up her nose, her knuckles white where she gripped her tablet. “This is the same thing. You’re offering the Board an imaginary excuse to cover for a joyride.”

“It’s not a joyride. It’s a strategic alliance opportunity,” Caleb corrected, admiring the way the light caught the blade’s lethal edge. “Massimo Bruneli is the Doge of Venice. His court is ancient, powerful, and, most importantly, not officially on the Aeturnum Board. His vote is unaligned. If I solve his little pest problem, he owes me a favor. A favor I can cash in when Lord Valerius and his flaming garbage emojis try to oust me.”

It was a sound argument, and they both knew it. That was the most infuriating part for Elara. Beneath his infuriating, reckless swagger was a sharp, tactical mind she had seen him use to devastating effect on the battlefield. The problem was getting him to apply it to anything that didn't involve fangs and claws.

“And you need me for this… ‘strategic alliance’… because?” she pressed, her skepticism a tangible force in the cabin.

“Because you’re my corporate advisor,” he said, finally looking at her. His eyes, so recently bored and weary, now held a glint of the old fire. The Slayer’s fire. “You’ll advise me. Corporately. Besides, you had the dossier on Venetian supernatural politics, including a list of Bruneli’s favorite blood types, ready before we even left the tower’s airspace. You’re indispensable, and you know it.”

He wasn’t wrong. She had spent the two-hour flight not sulking, but working. Her tablet now displayed a web of alliances, grudges, and economic ties that made the Venetian court tick. She’d already cross-referenced flight manifests against known supernatural movements and flagged three minor djinn who had entered the city under suspicious credentials. Her frustration was a fuel, and her work was the engine. She hated that he knew how to exploit it.

The jet began its descent, and the view outside the window shifted from icy peaks to the impossible blue of the Adriatic. Soon, a smudge on the horizon resolved into the dreamlike silhouette of Venice, rising from the lagoon like a city from a forgotten age.

As they dropped lower, Caleb felt it. A pressure against his senses, a weight in the air. The magic here wasn't like the clean, crackling energy of Aeturnum Tower. This was old magic, thick and layered like sediment, soaked into the very stones of the city. It smelled of saltwater, incense, and secrets a millennia old. It felt heavy, but it was a familiar weight, like shrugging on a well-worn coat of armor.

A sleek, black water taxi, its engine humming with a silence that was anything but mundane, was waiting for them at a private dock. A stoic, hulking man in a dark suit who introduced himself only as ‘Giotto’ ushered them aboard. He didn’t speak another word as the boat cut through the green-black water of the Grand Canal, gliding past opulent palazzos that watched them like ancient, sleeping beasts.

Elara was a silent storm of analysis, her eyes scanning every building, every sigil half-hidden in the architecture, her fingers tapping silently on the tablet in her lap. The key tattoo on her wrist seemed stark against the pallor of her skin. Caleb, however, simply leaned back, letting the ancient city wash over him.

Giotto didn’t take them to the Doge’s Palace. Instead, he guided the boat into a narrow, shadowed canal and docked beside a nondescript building of crumbling brick. He led them up a series of echoing stone staircases to a sparsely furnished room. It was a secure space, a neutral ground. Clean, sterile, and warded against magical eavesdropping.

Another figure was waiting for them, a woman with the ageless, sharp-featured beauty of the elder vampire kind. She introduced herself as Caterina, Massimo’s chief of security. Her eyes held no warmth.

“The Doge will see you this evening,” she announced, her voice like chilled wine. “First, he wished for you to be… briefed.”

She gestured to a steel table in the center of the room. On it lay a single, magically sealed evidence folder.

Caleb stepped forward, Elara at his shoulder. With a flick of her wrist, Caterina broke the seal. The file opened.

It contained a single, large photograph.

Elara’s sharp intake of breath was the only sound in the room. The picture was of a man, slumped in an ornate Venetian chair. His eyes were wide with a terror that had been frozen at the moment of his death. His skin, a sallow, waxy yellow, was pulled taut against his skull, looking more like parchment than flesh. His lips were peeled back in a rictus, revealing dry, pale gums. He was a husk. A human-shaped piece of dessicated jerky.

“The third victim,” Caterina stated, her voice devoid of emotion. “Giovanni Manin. A book dealer of some repute.”

Caleb leaned in, his gaze intense. He ignored the grotesque horror of the face and focused on the details. The clothes were undisturbed. The room showed no signs of a struggle. His Slayer’s Sight, the inherited ability to perceive the echoes of magic, prickled at the edge of his vision. He could sense a faint, cold residue clinging to the image, a spiritual stain that felt greasy and wrong. It wasn’t vampiric. It wasn't demonic. It was something else.

“He’s been drained,” Caleb noted, his voice low.

“Completely,” Caterina confirmed. “Of every fluid. Blood, water… everything.”

Elara, recovering her composure, switched into analytical mode. Her eyes scanned the photo with the detached precision of a forensics expert. “Where are the puncture marks?”

Caterina’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows rose a fraction. “I beg your pardon?”

“The bite marks,” Elara clarified, pointing a decisive finger at the victim’s neck in the photograph. “Or entry wounds of any kind. If he was drained, there has to be a point of access. I see no lacerations, no bites, no signs of penetration on any visible skin. The tissue is unbroken.”

Caterina was silent for a moment, her ancient eyes reassessing the hyper-competent human beside the legendary Slayer. “None of my people noted that,” she admitted, a hint of grudging respect in her tone. “They saw a bloodless body and assumed a rival. They were looking for a bite, not the absence of one.”

Caleb pushed away from the table, a grim understanding dawning on his face. This was why Massimo had called him. The Venetian vampires, for all their power and age, were predators of a specific kind. They saw the world through the lens of their own nature—a world of veins and arteries, of seduction and the bite. They were looking for a monster they understood.

But this wasn't their kind of monster.

No bite marks. No wounds. Just a desiccated corpse left in a locked room, every drop of life drawn out of it as if through a thousand invisible pores. This wasn’t a feeding. It was a harvesting.

“This isn’t a pest problem,” Caleb said, his voice a low growl that made the very air in the room seem to cool. He looked from the photograph to Caterina, the full, dangerous weight of his legacy settling into his gaze. “This is an execution. And your Doge is right. You need a butcher, because whatever is doing this doesn't just drink blood. It erases people.”