Blood Apprentice: An Elemental Legacy Novel

by Elizabeth Hunter

Giovanni, Ben, and Tenzin gathered furtive looks from a number of immortals as they sat and ordered on the patio, but most gave them only a small nod before they returned to the more pleasurable task of finding a willing human for the evening.

  Ben kept an eye out for anyone familiar. “Did you get an introduction?” he asked quietly. “Does anyone know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “How did you get here?” Tenzin asked.

  “I do own a plane,” Giovanni said. “Occasionally I use it myself instead of loaning it out to the rest of the immortal population. Can we focus on you two?”

  Ben looked at Tenzin, who shrugged.

  “What did you find out at the old man’s?”

  “The map wasn’t drawn by Tomás,” Ben said. “It was drawn by Enríquez.”

  Tenzin narrowed her eyes. “Really? Well… that changes everything.”

  “Does it?” Ben spread his hands. “How? I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

  “I don’t know yet, but it does.”

  “Good to know you’re just as lost as I am.”

  Ben thanked the server when she put the fried snapper in front of him. He took a long drink of his rum cocktail and thought longingly about the view from the deck of their rental house in Quebradillas. “Gio, how long are you staying?”

  “Long enough that I’ll probably have to present myself to the VICs here,” he said, picking at the roasted chicken he’d ordered. “How are they?”

  “Interesting,” Tenzin said. “It’s a trio. On the surface, the male earth vampire appears to be most dominant, but there are dynamics that are not obvious to me. The two females are a water vampire and a wind vampire. There is”—Tenzin stopped to take a drink of her water—“something happening.”

  Giovanni asked, “What?”

  “I don’t know.” Tenzin made an irritated face. “They’re smoke from a volcano and just as predictable.”

  Which meant not predictable at all.

  Giovanni looked at Ben. “What do you think?”

  “The same. There’s something going on, but it’s hard to tell what. There’s a sister too. She’s actually more the day-to-day administrator if I had to guess.”

  Giovanni leaned back. “Okay. So that’s interesting. I don’t think it has much to do with us though. Am I wrong?”

  “Maybe, because one of them is watching us right now,” Tenzin said, looking from the corner of her eye. “One of Los Tres.”

  Ben didn’t follow her glance. Neither did Giovanni.

  “The one we saw here before?” Ben asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Jadzia,” he said under his breath. “The wind vampire.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Is she with anyone?”

  “A human. She’s not actively watching us, but she noticed Giovanni.”

  “Damn,” Ben’s uncle said. “That’s inconvenient.”

  Ben noticed movement from the balcony. He glanced up, then quickly looked away. “We may have more problems.”

  “Who?” Tenzin asked.

  “The other woman in Los Tres. Valeria. She’s here too, and she’s definitely not alone.”

  Tenzin locked her eyes with Ben’s. “Who?”

  “I’m not positive.” Ben switched to Chinese and kept his voice nearly silent, knowing both the vampires would be able to hear him. “But I think it was the general—the one who was consulting with Valeria when we left.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Vasco.”

  “Yes, the one who was loyal to her. That makes sense,” Tenzin said.

  “None of this makes sense.” Ben glanced up and saw the three vampires, Jadzia, Valeria, and Vasco, were all on the balcony now, along with someone else who was very deliberately staying in the shadows. “Why are they here?”

  Tenzin sipped her wine. “It is a very nice restaurant.”

  “The music is very good.” Giovanni gave her a smile. “Tenzin, you want to dance?”

  She laughed, but it was fake. “Not with you.”

  Ben looked between the two of them. “Are you two serious right now?”

  “As serious as we can be.” Giovanni was wearing his plastered-on smile. “Think, Benjamin. They may not understand us, but they’ve heard their names. They know we’ve seen them and they’ve seen us. The last thing we need to look like we’re doing is plotting to take a fortune of gold off the island. So…” He smiled bigger. “Look happy.”

  Ben smiled. “Right.” He glanced at Tenzin. “She’s not looking happy.”

  “If I smiled, I’d scare the humans.”

  “Fair point.” He glanced up at the balcony, but the vampires were no longer looking at them. “Why are they here in San Juan?”

  “I don’t know, but didn’t Camino say he’d had company recently?”

  “You think it has to do with any of them?”

  “I don’t know.” Giovanni took another bite of his chicken. “But I think I might need to pay August one more visit before I leave.”

  They walked back to the house slowly, careful to catch any tails that might have been set on them. None appeared. It didn’t appear that Giovanni, Ben, and Tenzin were attracting any more attention in San Juan than they had been before they went caving, which reinforced Ben’s impression that no one had discovered the cave before and no one was likely to guess their movements. It boded well for the success of their job.

  By the time they’d returned to the house, it was near midnight.

  “August will be sleeping,” Giovanni said. “We’ll have to catch him tomorrow night.”

  “I need new clothes,” Ben said. “I only have these.”

  “And the ones from the cave,” Tenzin said.

  “They’re dirty,” Ben protested.

  “There’s a machine,” Tenzin countered. “Use the machine. Aren’t you always telling me to use the machine? Take your own advice.”

  “Fine.” Ben hated doing laundry, but Tenzin was right. He took his clothes to the small laundry room and tossed them in the washing machine. Then he glanced up. There were three narrow cabinets overhead. He opened the far left cabinet. Nothing. The center cabinet. Nothing there. Would he have to go out for laundry detergent? Were there even any shops open this time of night? Maybe a twenty-four-hour drugstore was open somewhere.

  He opened the third cabinet and was relieved to see a box of powdered detergent. He took it down, shook it to break up the clumps inside, and poured a little into the washer before he reached up and put the box back.

  His hand was still on the handle when the thought hit him.

  Why hadn’t they looked in the third tunnel?

  Because according to Tenzin, it smelled like the dead. She thought it had been used by a vampire.

  But Tomás hadn’t written the map. Enríquez had. And Tomás had disappeared soon after coming into possession of the map. Maybe Tomás had found the treasure. Maybe he hadn’t.

  Or maybe he’d never left the cave in the first place.

  They needed to search the third tunnel.

  “What is this theory?” Giovanni asked him as they walked to August Camino’s apartment the next night. “The third tunnel?”

  “Tenzin was convinced the third tunnel, the dry one that branched off to the right, wasn’t the correct tunnel because a vampire had used it.” Ben kept his voice low as they walked. “She said a vampire using it would have smelled the gold, so it had to be one of the first two—you know, at the time it made sense, but now I think she was just bullshitting.”

  “Yes, you have to be careful about that. She’ll get a thought in her head and focus. Sometimes she focuses so much that she loses sight of the big picture or any alternate avenues of thought. And she can be as stubborn as a mule when she gets in that kind of mood. You have to coax her out of it.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  They reached the building in minutes and climbed the stairs. Ben started to knock, but Giovanni stopped his hand before it reached the d
oor.

  “What’s—?”

  “Blood,” his uncle whispered. “I smell blood.” Giovanni’s face was bleak. “A lot of blood.”

  Giovanni reached for the doorknob and turned it. There were no locks. No chains. The door swung open without a creak. The darkness they stepped into was immense.

  No lamp lit the front room. No sound greeted them.

  Giovanni carefully shut the door as Ben switched on a lamp. A dim, gold light scattered shadows through the forest of bookshelves that made up the library of August Camino. Ben followed Giovanni as his uncle walked silently through the maze.

  They were halfway into the library when Ben smelled what Giovanni had at the door. Blood. The copper-rich tang of it filled the air, making his nose twitch. Two thin legs were sticking out from under a library table.

  “Oh, August.” Giovanni’s voice was aching. “Who has done this to you, old friend?” Giovanni knelt on the carpet and poked his head under the table to investigate.

  The old man hadn’t died where he lay. Dark brown smears marked the ground where something had been dragged. Ben followed them back to the source, which lay in front of a wooden cabinet with the door hanging open. There was a safe bolted to the ground inside, sitting undisturbed by the pool of blood at its feet. There was no blood on the safe. No marks or dents. Papers were strewn on the ground and books had fallen from the shelves around it.

  There had been a struggle. Someone had wanted the safe open, and Camino wouldn’t open it. Whoever had wanted the safe hadn’t bothered to try to pry it open. They’d simply killed Camino and left.

  Impulsive thief? Or did they plan to come back to retrieve the safe? It was a fairly simple combination lock. With the right tools, Ben could crack it in minutes. Of course, he didn’t have the tools with him.

  “Did a vampire kill him?” Ben asked quietly. Vampires weren’t the best at cracking safes. They tended to try to break through barriers, not finesse them open.

  Giovanni said, “Yes.”

  “There’s a safe here.”

  “Is it open?”

  “No. It doesn’t even look like it was touched.”

  Giovanni walked away from Camino’s body and toward Ben. “Let me.”

  “Do you know—”

  “Unless his habit has changed over the years, I know the combination.” He glanced at Ben and pointed at Ben’s phone. “Look on your phone. Find the lottery numbers from last Saturday.”

  “Which lottery?”

  “The New York one of course.”

  “Dude, there’s like a dozen of them.” Ben lifted his phone. “Are you talking New York State? The multistate ones? Which?”

  Giovanni huffed out a breath. “Is there one that draws on Saturday?”

  “I’m sure there is.” Ben started to search the internet from his phone. “Uh… Powerball. Lotto. Pick Five—”

  “Lotto. Is that specific to New York?”

  “Yes.” Ben tapped on his phone. “New York lotto. Every Wednesday and Saturday.”

  “Tell me the last three numbers from the last Saturday draw.”

  “Twenty. Fifty. Fifty-four.”

  Giovanni quickly spun the lock, but it didn’t open. “The Saturday before that.”

  “Seventeen. Forty-six. Fifty-six.”

  That didn’t work either. Giovanni frowned. “He’d never go two weeks without changing the combination.”

  “What about bonus numbers? Would he use them?”

  “Possibly. Give me the first set again, but with the bonus number.”

  “Fifty. Fifty-four. Forty-six.”

  The lock clicked and swung open just as Ben heard footsteps at the door. “Shit. Someone’s here.”

  “I hear them.” Giovanni grabbed the stack of files crammed in the safe along with a small leather bag. He stuffed the bag in his pocket and shoved half the files at Ben as well as a leather-bound book with bloodstains on the cover. “Take these. We’ll go out the kitchen.” He closed the safe, spun the lock, and wiped the area around the lock with a handkerchief from his pocket. “Go, Benjamin.”

  “We’re just going to leave him here?”

  Giovanni’s expression was halfway between angry and confused. “What do you suggest we do with him? That’s likely to be the police at the door.”

  Someone pounded on the door. “Señor Camino? Señor August Camino?”

  Giovanni shoved Ben toward the kitchen. The swinging door nearly slapped Ben on the back of the head. There was more disturbance in the kitchen, and Camino’s lovebirds started shrieking when Giovanni and Ben entered the room.

  “We can’t leave them,” Ben whispered.

  “The birds?” Giovanni was incredulous. “Ben, the birds—”

  “Just don’t.” Ben shoved his stack of files toward Giovanni, then he threw the cover over the birdcage and unhooked it from the stand. “Go out the balcony. I was here before; it connects to a fire escape.”

  Giovanni cracked open the french doors and stepped onto the balcony. Ben waited for him to start climbing down before he stepped outside with the unwieldy bird cage.

  What the hell are you doing, Ben?

  The birds hadn’t stopped shrieking. They hopped around the cage, making it swing wildly as he held them.

  Giovanni ambled down the fire escape in the darkness with the grace of an immortal. Ben followed him, trying not to whack himself in the face with the two angry birds. He heard windows opening and voices shouting into the night, but the apartment windows stayed dark, and Ben knew the night was too black for him and Giovanni to be identified.

  When they reached the ground, Ben continued following Giovanni, darting between trees and ducking under clotheslines as the shouting in Camino’s apartment grew louder. It was the police. A neighbor had called when Señor Camino hadn’t opened the door. They had found the body.

  Ben asked, “How long—?”

  “I think late last night or early yesterday morning.”

  “And you’re sure it was a vampire?”

  “I’m sure. I got their scent.”

  “They?”

  “Yes. A man and a woman.”

  They walked toward the high fence at the back of the courtyard, opened the gate, and stepped into the flow of evening pedestrian traffic in Old San Juan.

  “The birds.” Giovanni grimaced. “Ben, what were you thinking?”

  They are my sweethearts. My little friends to keep me company.

  “Camino wouldn’t want a stranger to take them,” Ben muttered. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “They can’t go back to New York.”

  “I know.”

  “If you’d just left them there, someone would have—”

  “I know, okay?” He should have left them there.

  He couldn’t have left them there.

  They took a circuitous route back to the house, watching for anyone following them, but in the hubbub of Friday night, no one noticed two men who could have been locals walking down the street with a covered birdcage and an armful of paperwork. They reached their rental house without any incident.

  Ben set the birds on the patio and made sure they had food in their dish. He refilled the water that had splashed out and checked the paper lining the bottom of the cage. The longer they were sitting in one place, the more they settled.

  Tenzin was outside before he could leave the birds. “You brought home birds. In a cage?”

  “I know you don’t like—”

  “Caging birds destroys their nature, Benjamin.”

  “I understand that, but—”

  “Birds in cages cannot fly. It is in a bird’s nature to fly. Caging them denies their—”

  “Shut up!” He felt his anger spike. “I understand that you find caging birds morally reprehensible, but these are tiny domestic birds raised to live in cages, birds who have never had to fend for themselves, and their person just died.” He took a slow breath. “So can you just not mess with them, please? Just leave them alone u
ntil I can find someone who will take care of them.”

  Tenzin’s face went blank. “Their person died?”

  “Yes.”

  “The old man?”

  “Yes.”

  She was silent for a long time. “Where’s Giovanni?”

  “Inside.”

  Tenzin disappeared into the house, and Ben spent a few more minutes watching Camino’s birds. They were quieter, but they were still puffed up and nervous, hopping around their cage and keeping close together.

  “You’re safe here,” he said. “I’ll figure out a safe place for you.”

  The birds huddled together.

  “I’m sorry about Camino.” Ben reached into their cage to grab a sunflower seed to give them, but the larger bird hopped over and bit at his finger. Ben pulled it back, shaking it as the bird glared at him and jumped back to his mate.

  Ben rose and walked inside to see Giovanni at the table, hunched over the papers and the book he’d grabbed. Tenzin stood on his left, and her arm was around his shoulders.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “And there’s no way he could have been a threat?”

  “He was ninety-two, Tenzin. He’d been retired for nearly fifteen years.” Giovanni sighed. “It’s so unfair. He loved it here. He’d talked about retiring to the island for years.”

  “He lived a good life, my boy. A long life. Especially for a human in our world. He was respected and he will be remembered with honor.”

  “I’ll have to inform O’Brien, and it will have to be soon. As far as I know, he was still under their aegis. This will not go over well. August and Cormac were very close friends.”

  Ben stepped toward them. “It would help if you could tell Cormac who the murderer was.”

  “If I can get close enough, I’ll recognize the scent.”

  Tenzin looked at Ben. “Ideas?”

  “It was a male and a female,” Giovanni said. “Both vampires.”

  “Jadzia or Valeria?” Ben offered. “But they would know Camino was powerfully connected. Why would they risk it? And who could the male be?”

  “The general? Vasco?”

  “There’s no way of knowing without Gio meeting them. And what proof do we have? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of vampires in San Juan.”