A Hidden Fire: Elemental Mysteries Book 1 (27 page)

She cocked her head and switched to English.  “You’re sad about the humans?”

“Yes.”

“Did they die protecting your woman?”

“Yes.”

Tenzin shrugged. “They were warriors.  That’s a good death.”

“It would have been better if they hadn’t died at all.”

They walked through the French doors and into the living room.  Gavin was on the phone again, and his eyes widened at the sight of the small woman who skipped in front of him.  He and Tenzin walked through the dark kitchen and into the courtyard with the burbling fountain.

Tenzin stopped, examining Giovanni’s face as he observed the bodies of the two humans he had hired to guard Beatrice.

“This was their fate,” she said gently.

“Tenz—”

He stopped when she held up a hand, her grey eyes pinched in sadness.

“Let’s not argue while the crows can get them, my boy.”

He sighed and bent to examine the two bodies, noting with dismay the deep gashes and bites that could never be explained to human authorities.

“We’ll take them to the country where Carwyn hunts.  I’ll call his friend so he’s expecting us.”

Tenzin nodded.  “This is good.  Then we can hunt, too.  We’ll need it.”

“He’s probably going to Europe.”

She paused for a moment and her stormy eyes seemed to swirl as he watched her.  “Your son is in Greece, I think.”

He frowned.  “Why?  Why Greece?”

Tenzin thought for a moment, but simply shrugged as she hoisted one large body to move it to the garage.  “It sounds right.”

He sighed, frustrated with her typically vague pronouncement.  “But—”

“Think for yourself instead of doubting me,” the small vampire said as she carried the guard into the garage.  “Think about the water.  You may wield fire, but you came from water, and so did your son.  Does that water mean something to him?”

He thought of his sire and the ruins of the school where he’d held them.  He remembered the stories they’d both listened to, the tales of gods and monsters.  Tenzin walked back into the courtyard, and cocked her head.

He nodded.  “Yes, it sounds right.”

Just then, Gavin walked through the kitchen door.  He nodded toward Giovanni and looked at Tenzin, who was hoisting the second body and carrying it to lie with the first.

“Is that—”

“Yes,” Giovanni said.  “It is.”

“Amazing.  I’ve heard stories.”

Tenzin flitted back into the courtyard and over to Gavin, sniffing him a little.  “Are you a wind walker, like me?”

“Well,” Gavin smirked, “not like you.”

“You get your flying yet?”

The Scotsman looked a little embarrassed.  “Uh…no, not yet.”

She shrugged and washed her hands in the fountain.  “You will soon.  And then, I think your life will change.”

Gavin chuckled.  “Well, I hope it doesn’t change too…”  He trailed off when he saw the serious look in Tenzin’s eyes.  He cleared his throat.  “Right then, I’ll be looking for that.”

She nodded and started back into the house.

“Tenzin?” Gavin called.  “Can I—”

She turned back to him with a quick grin.  “You want to see my teeth?”

He smiled a little, before he gave a quick nod.

She floated up to stare him in the face and bared her curved fangs, which resembled nothing less than small scimitars.  She grinned then darted inside the house.  Giovanni shook his head at her theatrics and the normally unflappable Scotsman’s shocked face.

“Now
that
is something.”

“Yes, she is.”

“And they’re always out?”

“Her fangs?” he snorted.  “Tenzin told me once that they used to retract, but she spent so much time killing her enemies her fangs forgot how to hide.”

“Really?”

He shrugged.  “Who knows?  It’s Tenzin.  She likes telling stories.”

Gavin stared off into the distance, while Giovanni stared at him.

“Well?”

“What?”

“Lorenzo?” he growled.

“Ah yes, back to the nasty business.  Shipping.  Water vamp.  Gun running and seclusion.  He’s in Greece.  Apparently, he has his own island.  Sadly, it’s probably going to take a while to narrow it down.  There’s quite a few of them.”

He remembered her terror when they dragged her out of his house, and he felt the flames lick along his collar again.  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm himself.  Tenzin had said he was right to be patient with Beatrice. 

He could be patient.

Because when Giovanni found him, Lorenzo would burn.

Chapter Twenty-one

South Aegean Sea

June 2004

“
D
o you require another drink, Miss De Novo?”

She glanced at the small servant who stood next to her chair before staring back at the ocean that surrounded her.

“No, thanks.”

“You must ring the kitchen if there is anything you need.  Or let your guard know.”  Beatrice glanced at the sturdy Greek who stood near the entrance to her room.  As far as she could tell, he didn’t speak a word of English.  She wasn’t sure he spoke at all. 

But he watched. 

He watched every move she made during the day, unless she ducked into the small bathroom in the chamber where she had been kept for the past week.

“Sure.  Thanks.  I’ll let him know.”  She looked back at the ocean, letting her thoughts drift in and out with the crashing surf.

The servant crept away, following the small trail that connected all the exterior rooms of Lorenzo’s strange house.  She watched him duck into what she thought was the kitchen area of the vampire’s house, which had become her prison.

It was sprawling, built into the half-moon bay of what she had been told was Lorenzo’s own island.  Cliffs speared up from the surface of the water and the house was nestled in the crook above the rocky beach.

She knew there were other rooms, built back into the cliffs where the sun could not reach.  All the exterior rooms faced the water and opened to the ocean with large doors not unlike a garage.  She wasn’t locked in, per se.  But unless she wanted to jump fifty feet into the vast expanse of the Aegean, there wasn’t anywhere she could go.

When she had woken after being dragged from Giovanni’s house, she immediately heard the sound of large engines droning.  She thought she was in the belly of a cargo plane of some sort, though it was outfitted luxuriously with plush seats, tables and beds.

She saw Lorenzo, lounging in a pair of white slacks and shirt that only emphasized his inhuman paleness.

“Where are we?”

He looked up with an indulgent smile.

“You’re awake!  On my plane, of course.  Headed to what will be your home for some time.  Do you want any refreshment?” She glanced at his own crystal glass, filled with a thick red liquid she assumed was human blood.  Lorenzo noticed her looking.

“I’m not a heathen like Giovanni.  I drink human, of course, but I don’t like drinking from the tap.”  He shuddered.  “So disgustingly intimate, in my opinion.  I only like getting that close to someone when I’m fucking them or killing them.”

He winked at her when she blanched.  “No need to worry about that, my dear.  I want you fresh and unharmed when your father comes begging for you.”

“Where are we going?”

Lorenzo sighed with a smile.  “Somewhere far more temperate than Houston.  I don’t know how you stand the weather in that horrid city.”  He shivered.  “Absolutely horrendous.  We’re going to a little private island in the Aegean, my dear girl.  A special place.  Only a very few people know about it, so you should feel privileged.”

“Be still my heart,” she said dryly.

Lorenzo laughed, his sharp fangs falling down in his delight.  “Oh, there you are, Miss De Novo, I knew I would like you once I got you away from my father.  He’s so stifling, isn’t he?  Terribly boring vampire.  And I was sure you had that quick wit that so delighted me with Stephen.

“Even when I was torturing him,” a wistful expression crossed Lorenzo’s angelic face, “he would come up with the most inventive barbs.  What a treat he was.”

A sick feeling churned in Beatrice’s stomach, and she thought she might throw up again, but she forced herself to take a deep breath and change the subject.

“How are you flying?  I mean, doesn’t your wonky energy mess up the plane and stuff?”

He chuckled.  “What an excellent question.  Yes, it would if the cargo compartment had not been especially designed for me.  All sorts of wonderful, insulating materials they’ve come up with in the last few decades.”

“Yeah?  Well, God bless chemistry, I guess.”

He chuckled, but continued paging through the magazine he’d been perusing.  It appeared to be something about boats, but she couldn’t read the language on the front cover; she thought it might be Greek.

“Just consider this trip a vacation, my dear.  After all,” an evil grin spread across his face, “you’ll have an ocean view room.”

Ocean view room, my ass
. 
She stared at the endless sea that imprisoned her.  The small interior door to her room was always locked.  Any traffic in or out came by way of the large ocean-facing doors she was currently sitting in front of.  They could be pulled up completely, so her room was always open.  In the morning, her silent, watchful guard came and unlocked her, throwing open the room to the ocean breeze.

If she hadn’t been a prisoner, it would have been beautiful.

She had no privacy except the small washroom that contained a toilet, a sink with no mirror, and a shower with no curtain.  She could not lock the door, and lived in fear of someone walking into the bathroom if she lingered too long.  The room had come stocked with clothing; when she arrived, two silent women undressed her and threw her clothes into a garbage bag, leaving her naked and crying on the floor of her room.  She crawled to the bed, intending to cover herself with a sheet until one of them came back and wordlessly opened the small chest of drawers was filled with pure white clothes.

There were white pants and white shirts.  Looking in the top drawer even netted her a wealth of white bras and panties, all in her size.  There were bathing suits and sundresses, all in white, all without any other identifying feature on them.  She hastily dressed herself and crawled into the corner of her room for the next two days, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Beatrice had been captive a week and fallen into a monotonous rhythm.  She woke.  She took a quick shower and dressed herself in the white clothes, dumping the towel and dirty linens in a basket by the ocean door where another silent servant would carry them away at some point in the morning.  No one ever talked to her.  Her guard would open the door and she would sit in one of the chaises that faced the ocean, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing ever did.

When darkness fell, she could hear scurrying movements farther along the cliff to her left, but she never made any attempt to investigate the sick laughter or sounds of revelry that drifted to her room.  Darkness meant vampires, and Beatrice may not have liked her human guard, but at least she didn’t think tall, dark and silent was going to rip her throat out if he got hungry.

Her door wasn’t shut until well after dark, so she often sat staring at the moon as it reflected off the dark water below her.

One night, about a week and a half after she’d been taken, she heard footsteps approaching.  She tensed, but refused to run back to the corner, knowing that anything that came after her would just consider that an easier and more private meal.

To her surprise, it was Lorenzo who peeked his head around the corner.

“Hello, my dear.  How are you enjoying your stay?”

Eying him warily, she took a moment to answer. Her own voice sounded strange to her ears.

“Well, I have no privacy, no human contact, and nothing to read or listen to other than the ocean.  But at least your prison decorating skills are top notch, Lorenzo.”

He walked over to her and stretched out on another chaise, dressed from head to toe in loose white linen that made his inhuman skin glow in the moonlight.  “You like it?  I’m so glad my home meets your approval.”

“Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s just so…white.  And
white
.  And with all those white accents.”

Lorenzo smiled, his fangs dropping down.  “Is this why Giovanni kept you around?  To make him laugh?  You smell as lovely as your father, so I’m sure he must have had to control himself if he didn’t bite you.  It does make me wonder.”

She clenched her jaw for a moment.  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Because he traded you?” Lorenzo shrugged.  “Giovanni never cared for much besides his books and himself, to be honest.  Don’t take it personally.”

Her mind flashed to a hundred different moments of kindness between them, but she didn’t want to dwell on those memories when the reality had turned out to be so much different.  “I just have better things to think about.”

“I was expecting him to show up.  I was so sure it was you he was smoking about in the library that day…but he hasn’t by now, so he probably won’t.  If he cared for you at all, he’d be far more territorial.”

She stared at the ocean, remembering Giovanni’s fiercely protective behavior around Carwyn and Gavin.  It had annoyed her at the time; but the moment she’d really wanted him to protect her, it had fallen away to nothing, so she didn’t know what to think.

“Something tells me he still has something up his sleeve.”  Lorenzo flicked at a bug on his pants.  “After all, one doesn’t hire expensive security for dinner.  So…yes, I’m expecting something.”

“Yeah?” she muttered.  “I’m not.” 

She suddenly remembered him laughing over a bite of lemon cake she’d forced him to try.  He’d made the most hilarious face, and she had leaned over and kissed his cheek in delight, laughing at his disgust and tugging the ends of his hair.

“You need a haircut.”

“I do not.  Do you know how long it takes my hair to grow?”

“It falls in your eyes all the time and annoys you.  Just a trim.  I’ll do it for you; I used to cut my grandfather’s hair for him sometimes.”

“You’d cut my hair for me?”

“Sure.”

She felt tears come to her eyes, and she bit her lip until it bled, forgetting for a moment about the vampire sitting next to her in the dark.  She glanced at him, worried he would try to bite, but he only handed her a white linen handkerchief and chuckled at her expression.

“I’ve had requests for you to join us in the evenings, but I doubt you’ll do that.  But there’s a full library for you to enjoy, as well as plenty of music.  I even have a music player you may borrow, if you like.”

“What’s the catch?”

His delighted laughter pealed out.  “No catch, my dear.  Xenos can come with you.  He’s your personal guard, you know, chosen by me.  No one will touch you or harm you in any way.  After all,” he winked, “I need to have you in good condition when your father arrives.”

Her heart dropped.  “My father’s coming?  When?”

“I have no idea.”  He shrugged.   “Crafty little boy to have eluded me for so long.  I’d really find it quite endearing if I didn’t want to kill him so much.”

Beatrice shuddered at his matter-of-fact tone.  “Why?  Why do you want to kill him?  You made him a vampire, now you want to kill him?”  Her frustration boiled over.  “I don’t understand any of this!  I feel like I got caught in some giant game all of you are playing, and I don’t even know why.”

Lorenzo’s head cocked; he almost looked amused.  “I suppose it would be confusing to a human—even a bright girl like you.”

“So why don’t you enlighten me, Lorenzo?  Since I’m here and no one seems to be coming to my rescue.”

He stared at her with the inhuman stillness she had come to associate with them.  Finally, his lips cracked into a smile.

“You met my little mouse at the library, didn’t you?  Scalia has been my mouse for many years, long before you were born, and long before he met your father in Houston when they were in school.  It was pure chance that they met again in Ferrara.”

“My father wasn’t in Ferrara, he was in—”

“Yes, he
was
in Ferrara, researching some correspondence about Dante, of all people, and his exile in Ravenna, blah, blah, blah.  Very boring.  He was in the old library and had the unfortunate luck to stumble upon some books of mine.  Books I had hidden there.”  Lorenzo’s expression darkened.  “Books that my little mouse was supposed to be guarding for me.”

“So you killed him?  For finding some books?” She felt the tears slide down her cheeks.  “He probably didn’t even know what he was looking at.  Why did he have to die?  Why—”

“It didn’t matter that he didn’t know, Beatrice.  Scalia found him and your father began asking questions of his old school chum—questions I didn’t want
any
human asking.  When Scalia told me about it, like the good little mouse he was, I decided to get rid of him.  It seemed like the simplest thing.”  Lorenzo rolled his eyes.  “It’s my own fault I let myself be swayed to turn him.  I thought he could be a replacement for Scalia, who had disappointed me, but sadly, your father was too bright.”

“And he ran away.”

“Yes, he did.”  Lorenzo grimaced.  “Though not before taking some books he knew I valued.”