The Saint’s Heart of Palermo (en Inglés) - Sam

The saint’s heart bleeds on Easter morning, between the second bell and the procession. This year it bled at Carnival.

Processional-banner restorer Bianca, thirty-one, has mended half the saints of western Sicily. None of them has ever bled on her. But the heart of Sant’Elia il Tessitore - kept in crystal in a church above Palermo’s harbour, carried at Easter behind a crimson standard her family has mended for two hundred years - is bleeding six weeks early, in its bicentenary year. Somebody has read the names of the quarter’s Uncounted dead aloud, out of season, and the ancient, hungry House beneath the church is awake in Lent and setting its chairs in rows.

The Easter procession walks the Uncounted to the sea behind the banner, in order, by name. At the left-front pole, where the weight is worst, stands the Extra Bearer: the same tall, dark man in every procession photograph since 1911. Rule the First, stitched in Bianca’s grandmother’s hand inside the banner’s hem: do not ask his name until he has carried the banner a full street. A name earned is a key. A name given is a door left open.

His name is Elia - and it is written in the register of the dead, where he entered it himself in 1829. A funeral magnate and a polished heritage fund have already priced the saint’s empty niche for a touring exhibition. To keep the House from filing its own bearer among the dead at Easter, Bianca must stitch his whole name - in both his alphabets - into the living cloth, and choose, freely, whether the keeping is hers.

Two-hundred-year-old vampire weaver-saint hero. Forced proximity through one long Lent. He falls first - he has carried her family’s answers for two centuries. A heroine who counts the drops twice.

The Saint’s Heart of Palermo is a spicy gothic vampire horror romance for adults: open-door, fully consensual, with a guaranteed happily-ever-after and a city that keeps its dead in order. Book Three of Blood & Vines, after Bound to the Vampire of Villa Gente and The Palazzo That Drowns At Dawn. Each book is a standalone love story threaded through one old Italian Bargain.