Free Summoning Shadows: A Rosso Lussuria Vampire Novel by Winter Pennington Page B

through.
    “Padrona, they have returned.”
    Renata did not raise her voice when she said, “Let them in.”
    Dominique opened the door and Anatharic entered the room, standing to all his great height on his hind legs. He carried something swathed in a cloak in his arms.
    Renata stood without hesitation and made her way toward him.
    “Place him on the bed.”
    Anatharic did so as the others began to spread out through the room. Nirena’s white-blond hair was speckled and matted with blood. A cut on her cheek had healed, but where the cut had been, the blood was just beginning to dry.
    Vasco strode into the room behind the others. A few specks of drying blood decorated his brow and cheeks too.
    My heart soared with relief. He smiled and came to me.
    He wrapped an arm around me and murmured. “I keep my promises.”
    I touched his hand when he drew back. “I’m glad you do.”
    I turned my attention from him and the others and to the still figure laid out on Renata’s bed. She sat beside the figure and ran a hand through his dark red hair. Renata murmured his name and my chest tightened.
    “They bound him to a tree so that he would burn come sunrise, my queen,” Nirena said. “He had been tortured when we found him.”
    “You were right to bring him back,” Renata said and I could feel her closing down as she put a steady hand over her emotions.
    She unwrapped the cloak from around him and revealed his bare torso. His chest was lined with old blood and numerous cuts, some deeper than others.
    In the middle of his chest was a larger cut, a cut shaped into an unmistakable X. I had once worn the same X between my shoulder blades.
    The room turned in my vision, and Vasco caught my elbow when my knees gave out from under me.
    “Renata,” I said, feeling the blood I’d drunk earlier spin uncomfortably in my stomach.
    “I must try to heal him, Epiphany.”
    Vasco pulled me to my feet and held me close to his chest. I let him without protest. I let him comfort me while a sense of dread continued to unfurl within me.
    Neither Vasco nor Renata addressed the sense of my dread or its cause, but I could feel empathically that they too felt it. They too thought about it and had an inkling of what that mark cut into Dante’s chest meant.
    While Renata tried to heal Dante, I wondered how it could be possible. Surely, Lucrezia could not be alive out there somewhere. Renata had executed her, she had taken her heart and head. She had left nothing salvageable of her body.
    Witches , Cuinn muttered, always playing with darker magics than they should.
    Renata lowered her shields and the room crackled with her energy like a biting wind. Slowly, she narrowed that energy, shaping it and driving it none-too-gently into Dante. I let Vasco’s tall frame ground me against the tide of emotions that swelled within me.
    I pray it is not true.
    Aye, Cuinn’s ears flattened behind my closed lids. But ’tis better to be well prepared of the possibility than to deny and live in ignorance. A danger foreseen is half avoided.
    A ragged breath shattered the silence and Dominique and Anatharic were suddenly beside the bed to help restrain Dante and keep him from thrashing about.
    Renata stepped away with something akin to defeat. Dante’s green eyes were wild and completely unlike him. There was nothing recognizable in his gaze. He bared his teeth at Vito and Vittoria when they approached to help and then he began to scream, a high-pitched and panicked sound that vibrated inside my ears and made me wince.
    It was then I knew that Dante’s captors had broken his mind.

    *

    We learned from those who had ridden out among the Cacciatori that they had ridden hard through the woods in pursuit of a cloaked figure, presumably one of the witches that had been working with the Dracule. The cloaked figure had led them to Dante, bound by silver chains to a large tree.
    It had been a trap, an ambush. Severiano recounted three Dracule. With Anatharic’s