Tenzin dressed in her regular uniform of black leggings and a body-hugging tunic that moved with her. She and Ben had left their weapons at Tenzin’s warehouse in nearby Pasadena, so while she might have been covered in clothing, she still felt naked.
“I don’t know why you’re being like this,” Ben said. “You’re acting like we could be perceived as a threat.”
“This is the first time we have visited your family home as… whatever we are now.” She glanced up at him. “I do not want to put Beatrice on edge.”
Ben stopped in the street, and she paused with him. He stared at her. “You’re not planning to stay with me, are you? You’re going to go back to the warehouse for the day.”
“Ben, it is not my territory.”
“It’s my family home. You’re my… person. You are staying there with me.” His face was mulish. “They wanted a family visit, you’re part of the family.”
“Your aunt—”
“Beatrice.” He took her by the shoulders. “Beatrice. Who loves you even though she’s angry right now. Beatrice, who loves me. Beatrice, who is as much of a mother as I’ve ever really had. Beatrice will understand that I want you with me. Giovanni said they planned to put us in the guesthouse anyway.”
Tenzin considered it. Giovanni was one of her oldest and dearest friends, one of the few who claimed her loyalty. He was also a fire vampire of enormous power, which meant that distance between them was usually preferable.
But the guesthouse was distant.
“The guesthouse is acceptable. I’ve stayed there before.”
“I know.” He leaned down and pressed a firm kiss to her mouth. “Will you relax a little now? Please?”
They reached the gates of the compound, and the guard immediately recognized them. He opened the pedestrian gate and waved them in. “Ben! Good to see you, man.” The guard held his hand out. “Is this my first time seeing you since the change? I kind of think it is. I was gone the last time you came.”
Tenzin watched as Ben considered it. She recognized the man. Eddie had been on the security team since Ben had been in university.
Ben finally said, “I think it may be. Man, it’s been a while since I’ve been home, huh?”
“You look good!” Eddie cocked his head. “The eyes are different, right?”
“Yeah. They still catch me off guard sometimes.”
“Hey.” Eddie shrugged. “At least you’re not getting old. I catch myself in the hall mirror sometimes and wonder when that old man with wrinkles and grey hair moved into my house.” Eddie turned to her. “Miss Tenzin, how are you doing tonight?” He didn’t hold his hand out to shake like he had with Ben, but his polite nod set her at ease.
“I’m doing well, Eddie. Thank you.” She glanced at the others at the gate. “Beatrice and Giovanni should be expecting us.”
“Hey, the instructions we have? You’re always welcome.” Eddie put a hand to his ear and winked at Tenzin. “I think I hear the welcoming committee now.”
Tenzin heard it as well. Ben’s small sister Sadia had learned to ride a bicycle the year before, and she delighted in telling Tenzin about it. The churn of wheels on concrete grew louder as the girl raced down the long driveway.
Ben took Tenzin’s hand and gripped it. She could feel his amnis in a riot. The mix of emotions—love, protection, fear, excitement—they were a vivid aura around him.
“Beeeeeeeeen!” The girl’s excited shout echoed in the night. “You’re heeeeeeeere!”
Sadia Vecchio whooshed around them at top speed, turning in a wide circle as Tenzin smiled. The girl was a force of nature despite being only six years old.
Dema, Sadia’s nanny, appeared in the distance. She was a former Special Forces soldier, and Tenzin approved of her cautious nature.
“Dema.” Tenzin nodded.
“Tenzin.” Dema nodded back, then turned to Ben. “How you convinced Tenzin to give you a second glance will surprise me eternally.”
Ben put a hand over his heart. “Dema, I know you’re heartbroken that we can never be together and are putting on a brave face, but try not to let disappointment steal your joy. Stay strong. You will find your lobster.”
Was she amused or annoyed? With Dema, it was often difficult to tell.
Sadia abandoned her bicycle and leaped into Ben’s arms. “Let me see your teeth.”
“Sadi—”
“Pleeeeeeease,” she begged. “I want to see if they changed yet.” She put her hands on Ben’s cheeks and pressed his lips together.
He was the child of an ancient warlord, a being of unspeakable power, and defenseless against his baby sister. These were reasons why Tenzin loved him.
Ben opened his mouth and forced his fangs down. “See?” His mouth was half-open. “They’re the same.”
Sadia sighed deeply. “But I thought you were married to Tenzin now. Aren’t your teeth going to change to curvy like hers?”
Tenzin’s eyes went wide, and Dema hid her laugh with a coughing fit.
Ben grabbed Sadia’s hand from his mouth. “Who told you that? Tenzin and I are not married.”
“But Baba said you love each other special like Baba and Mama love each other.” She wrinkled her nose. “Do you kiss Tenzin on the mouth?”
“Sadia, that’s none of your business.”
The little girl giggled. “You do.” She flipped back in Ben’s arms and looked at Tenzin upside down. “Tenzin, why didn’t you come visit me before this?”
“We’ve been very busy, habibti.” She pinched Sadia’s belly. “You’re getting very fast on your bicycle. Are you going to start driving race cars soon?”
“No.” Sadia giggled and her belly shook. “Are you going to marry Ben? If you marry Ben, I think then we would be sisters.”
“Sadia,” Ben protested, “will you stop asking if we’re going to get—”
“Marriage is a patriarchal social contract designed to commodify women’s sexuality and reproduction,” Tenzin said. “I don’t ascribe to it.”
Sadia righted herself and frowned at Ben. “What does that mean?”
Ben shot Tenzin a dirty look. “Marriage is also a very special promise that people like Baba and Mama make when they love each other and choose to be a family forever.”
Sadia immediately looked at Tenzin for confirmation.
“Yes,” Tenzin said. “And that as well.”
After general greetings and updates from Sadia about her school, her friends, her dog Percy, and her trampoline, the little girl was supposed to go to sleep. They had created an unusual school schedule for her, allowing her to keep to more of a nocturnal life, but she still attended traditional classes a few days a week. Instead of bedtime, Sadia led them to the kitchen, where a meal had been prepared.
“You promise?” Sadia sat on Tenzin’s lap and stared into her eyes, pressing her small hands to her cheeks as she bid a reluctant goodnight. “Promise promise.”
“I will be here when you wake up in the morning,” Tenzin said. “And you can come visit me.”
“I know you wake up in the day like Mama.”
“I do.”
“So I’m gonna see you in the morning? You’re not flying away?”
“I swear on my favorite sword,” Tenzin said. “I will be here when you wake.”
Sadia’s head fell back. “When are you going to teach me sword fighting? It’s been foreeeeeever since you told me.”
Oh dear. She could almost feel Giovanni’s accusing gaze. “I think I hear Dema calling for you.”
Sadia turned to look, and from across the large kitchen table, Tenzin could feel Beatrice’s cold eyes on her.
Throughout the light meal, Tenzin had deliberately kept her distance from the water vampire. Ben was sitting next to his aunt, speaking quietly with his arm around her as he ate the traditional Mexican food Beatrice and her grandmother had prepared.
* * *
Sadia slid off Tenzin’s lap and went to Dema, the dreaded bedtime enforcer.
>
“Sweet dreams, habibti.”
“Sweet dreams, Tenzin!”
Conversations hummed around her, friends and family catching up and enjoying the occasion of guests to talk about news, family gossip, and interesting bits of life. Tenzin was among the conversation, but still hovering on the outside; it was a familiar position.
Despite Beatrice’s coolness, Tenzin could feel her own blood living in the woman, feel the ancient tie. Tenzin had been mated to Beatrice’s sire, though it wasn’t a love match; it had been a practical and political arrangement. Nevertheless, the blood was there, an eternal link with someone who now burned with anger at Tenzin for making an impossible and inevitable choice.
This was why Tenzin was trying to be cautious with Benjamin. Blood bonds were tricky things, and there were few rules to them. She could feel a nascent mating bond forming between them, so she’d pulled back.
They had enough changes to deal with; a blood bond was a complication at this point in their relationship.
The greedy part of her wanted it, wanted to bite into him, steal his amnis and life, devour him and captivate Benjamin until he was in her thrall.
But the new path Tenzin had turned down when Ben’s immortal life started kept her from trapping him. He was still painfully young. Though he’d always been an old soul, his immortal character was still emerging. Ben loved her, but would that love turn and change over decades? Who would he be in fifty years? One hundred years? A thousand? What did “choosing to be a family forever” mean when you actually lived forever?
“Tenzin?”
She looked up and saw Giovanni standing in the doorway. She was sitting at the table alone; everyone had left while she was lost in thought. “What did I miss?”
“We’re going to the library to review what I’ve found so far about the scroll,” Giovanni said. “Join us?”
“Yes.” She stood and followed him out of the kitchen and up the stairs where they had turned most of the second floor of their mansion into a large research library, half with traditional collections of books and the other half with vampire-specific technology that could handle Beatrice’s amnis.
“It’s good to see you.” Giovanni put an arm around her. “My son looks happy.”
“He should be.”
Giovanni smiled. “And so does my friend.”
Tenzin paused on the stairs. “I would kill anyone who threatened his happiness or life. He would not approve of that, but I know you understand.”
Giovanni hung his hands in his pockets. “I do.”
“Is there peace between us, Giovanni di Spada?” She used the name he’d gone by when he was an assassin sent to kill her. The vampire’s startling blue-green eyes had reminded Tenzin of her own child’s, and she had spared his life, forming an unusual and unbreakable bond over three hundred years old.
He looked at the ground, then back at her. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
“To her then?”
“She understands.”
“In her head perhaps, but not in her heart.”
“The one will catch up with the other. I promise. Come on.” He nudged her toward the landing. “Let’s go talk about an urban legend.”
“The bone scroll, if it exists, dates back to an ancient vampire known by the name Ash Mithra.” Giovanni projected an image on the wall that looked like a long-haired monk or holy man drawn in a flat, medieval style. “This is an artist’s rendering, of course. No one knows what he looked like, though some stories say that he originally came from Eastern Africa, in a territory along the Red Sea.”
“How old?” Ben asked.
“No one knows. He would have been contemporaries of Kato, Ziri, and Arosh but likely predates them all.”
“So old,” Ben said.
“Very old.” He clicked a button and another picture appeared. “And this is an artist’s rendering of the bone scroll.”
“It looks like a bamboo scroll to me,” Ben said. “Like most of the ones in Penglai.”
“Only this one was made from polished vampire arm bones.” Giovanni was frowning at the screen.
Ben blinked. “What the fuck?”
“Do you know what happens to our bodies if we die?” Tenzin asked.
Ben frowned. “We turn back to our element within days.”
“True.” Beatrice spoke for the first time from the back of the library table. “But there is one odd quirk. If we lose a limb—any body part really—it will usually decompose normally. The amnis seems to… abandon that limb, and it becomes just another human relic.”
“So Mithra cut off vampires’ arms to make—”
“Oh no, he used his own arm,” Giovanni said. “Reportedly. He cut it off, waited for it to grow again, then cut it off again.”
Ben blinked. “I’m sorry, that is so messed up. Why would he—”
“No one really knows, but he was trying to accomplish a unique goal,” Giovanni said. “Mithra believed that he had discovered the secret for a single vampire to control every element and, for some reason, that was how it needed to be preserved.”
“Holy shit.” Ben sat gape-mouthed, and the thought churned Tenzin’s stomach.
She had cultivated power in her lifetime, learned to master her element and bend the air to her will. She knew others of similar skill with their own elements and respected them highly even if they were enemies.
But no one vampire needed that much power. No one good. No one bad.
No one.
“That’s why we’re here,” Tenzin said. “I have decided that we need to find the bone scroll and keep it from Arosh or steal it back if he has it already.”
4
Ben was stunned by the revelation, so he wasn’t expecting the quiet snort from Beatrice.
“You decided,” she muttered. “Yeah, you decide a lot, Tenzin.”
Ben turned to his aunt. “Hey. I told you—”
“You told us that Zhang came and laid this all out, but I’m not getting a lot of facts here.” Beatrice’s voice cut through the silence of the library. “I hear a lot of rumors and a lot of fairy tales, but no one knows if this actually exists, Zhang has only heard rumors, and now Tenzin wants to drag you to the other side of the planet—again!—on a wild-goose chase that could put you in a hell of a lot of danger, Ben.”
He was stunned by the bitterness in her voice. “Beatrice.”
Tenzin stood. “Why don’t we go outside and talk.”
“Talk.” Beatrice rose as well. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Why don’t we go talk, Tenzin?”
The two stormed out of the house, and Ben could almost see the electricity between them. He tried to follow, but Giovanni grabbed his arm.
“Wait.”
“They’re going to go kill each other.”
“No.” He frowned. “Not kill. Possibly maim, but they’ll recover.”
Ben’s eyes went wide. “And you’re okay with that?”
Giovanni patted Ben’s shoulder. “You still have a lot to learn about women.”
Tenzin followed Beatrice at a distance. The cool, polite mask was gone, and the anger she had been repressing had simmered over into a raging boil. Beatrice walked to their sparring studio at the back of the house, next to the indoor pool.
“I understand why you’re still angry with me,” Tenzin said. “If you want to—”
“Angry?” Beatrice reached for a dagger off the wall and pivoted, flinging it close enough to Tenzin’s head to gust her hair off her neck. “You do not understand what I’m feeling if you think it’s anger, Tenzin.”
The sensation of the knife whispering against her skin set Tenzin’s teeth on edge. “Feel free to thank me anytime.”
Beatrice grabbed one of the hook swords she favored and didn’t wait for Tenzin to grab a weapon before she swung it in a circle over her head. “You think I should thank you?”
“Absolutely.” Tenzin flipped heels over head, grabbing a pike from a bracket on the wall as she land
ed. “We both know you wanted him changed too.”
“Only if he wanted it!”
“Bullshit.” Tenzin parried another strike from Beatrice’s blade. “If he’d been dying in your arms, what would you have done?”
“I would have protected him,” Beatrice yelled. “He wouldn’t have been in a situation where—”
“You and Gio put him in that position when he was a child!” Tenzin knocked her blade off-balance and thrust the head of the pike toward Beatrice. “He had to kill a man when he was sixteen years old! Were you there? No. I was.”
“Fuck you!” Beatrice grabbed the second sword and hooked it on the first, creating a lethal, whirring orchestra of blades coming ever closer to Tenzin’s neck.
The wooden shaft of the pike cracked; Tenzin tossed it aside and reached for a blade of her own. The steel clashed between them, and sparks flew in the darkness. Beatrice was an expert swordswoman, and since Tenzin was keeping to the ground, they were evenly matched.
The clanging ring of steel filled the air, and every instinct in Tenzin’s body went on alert. She had to focus everything she had on not killing her opponent.
That would be bad.
“He cried in my arms,” Beatrice said. “He kept saying, ‘I might have lived. I might have been okay, B.’ Did you even once consider taking him to the goddamn hospital?”
Tenzin nearly tripped. “And let the human butchers gamble with his life?”
“Well, what were you doing?” Beatrice reached for the handle of her second sword and gripped it in her left hand.
“I saved his life.” Tenzin locked her sword in Beatrice’s handle and pulled up, dragging the woman closer. “I refused to gamble with his life. I had to be sure; I didn’t have any other choice.”
“So you took him to your father?” Beatrice was crying bloody red tears that tracked down her face. “After everything Zhang did to you, you gave Ben to him?”
The Bone Scroll: An Elemental Legacy Novel Page 3
