The night he’d kissed her. And she’d kissed him back.
And what a kiss it was, she thought with a sigh.
Remembering it was enough to raise her temperature. The way his lips had moved against hers, and the barely perceptible shiver she’d felt from him when her tongue touched his fangs. His arms. The heat. His hands on her back ...she shook her head and tried to push back the memory, but she could feel herself blushing as she sat at the table with her grandmother.
She cleared her throat. “I doubt Giovanni is sulking. Caspar just likes to pester him.”
“How long as he worked for Gio? Caspar talks about him like he’s known him his whole life.”
She didn’t know the whole of Caspar’s story, but she knew Giovanni said they’d been together since Caspar was a boy.
“You’d have to ask him. I think he may have worked for Gio’s family.” There, that was vague enough. She’d let Caspar fill in whatever details he wanted.
While her initial promise to set Caspar and her grandmother up on a blind date had been in jest, the more Beatrice had thought about it, the more it made sense. When she’d asked Caspar about it, he’d been enthusiastic at her attempt at matchmaking. They’d gone out the night before and Isadora was glowing.
“Well, he’s lovely. And has such a wonderful sense of humor.”
“Unlike his boss,” she muttered as she drank her coffee. She may have said it, but she knew it wasn’t true. Though he had a dry, acerbic wit, Giovanni’s humor was one of the things she liked most about him.
And she couldn’t deny she liked him. Though she had been attracted to him from the beginning, the more she learned, the more she was drawn to him. He could be so aloof, but she was beginning to see the “opposite of frosty” side Carwyn had told her about weeks ago.
That kiss, she thought again as her grandmother chattered on about her date.
“Beatrice, you should go back to work. You’re avoiding him. Does this have anything to do with feelings you may have developed—”
“Nope,” she lied, cutting her grandmother off. “No feelings. He’s my boss. I’m just taking some time off. I have some projects that need my attention, Grandma. And I don’t want you and Caspar gossiping, okay? I’m just…taking some time off. That’s all.”
She gulped down the rest of her coffee, ignoring the almost laser-like stare she knew her grandmother was giving her.
“Well, aren’t you full of shit! Also, Caspar and I will gossip about anything we please.” She smiled sweetly at Beatrice, who finished up her toast and stood to leave. “Working tonight? It’s—”
“Wednesday. Yeah, night hours.” She had taken the previous Wednesday night off like a coward but refused to avoid it any more. She’d just suck it up and ignore her conflicting feelings for the man…vampire…whatever. After all, she was a professional.
“Have a nice day, Mariposa. I’ll see you tomorrow. I have a date with Caspar tonight.”
“Cool. Have fun. Don’t do anything…you know what? I don’t even want to know or imagine. Bye!” She kissed her grandmother on the cheek and walked to the door.
She spotted the minivan parked down the street as she backed out of the driveway. It followed her down the street, always keeping that careful distance she’d become accustomed to. At first the ever-present family car had freaked her out, but when she noticed Giovanni giving them a satisfied glance when he saw them one night, she knew it had been his doing.
First, it had pissed her off. Then, it had freaked her out. But the more she thought about how many things had changed in her world, and the danger that Giovanni and Carwyn had hinted at, the more the thought she could get used to having someone keeping an eye on her safety.
She glanced in her rear view mirror as she took the exit for the university. Yep, she thought, still there.
She wasn’t dumb; she’d known Giovanni had an ulterior motive for hiring her, but she was also willing to put up with it if he could really find her father. It wasn’t until the letters had arrived that the gravity of the danger she was in began to sink in.
If her father had been killed because of something he found out about these books, who was to say her life wasn’t in danger, too?
“What the hell kind of mess did you get me into, Dad?” she wondered for the thousandth time as she pulled into one of the crowded lots. She wondered if her father even knew he had put her in danger. She wondered if he thought about her at all.
Every time she asked about her father, Giovanni simply said he was still waiting to hear. From who or what, she didn’t know.
By the time she walked to the library for her shift, she had successfully managed to shove all thoughts of Dr. Giovanni Vecchio from her brain. This was immediately ruined when she got up to the fifth floor and saw Dr. Christiansen and Charlotte bent over a now familiar shipping box she knew would have a return address from the University of Ferrara in Italy.
Dr. Christiansen looked up with a smile. “Another letter arrived!”
“Of course it did,” she muttered.
She set her bag down behind the reference desk and walked over to look. She glanced at the parchment, but quickly grabbed the notes that accompanied them.
“I’ll go make a couple of copies for the next flood of professors,” Beatrice said as she took the notes—which she knew would include a translation—back to the copy and imaging room.
Hours later she sat in the empty reading room, perusing the translation of the fourth Pico letter. Word of the new document hadn’t spread yet, so the reading room was deserted as she looked over her notes. It was another letter from the scholar, Angelo Poliziano. He talked more about the mystical books in Signore Andros’s library, some trip to Paris Pico was taking, and asked after the little boy, but it was the third section which caught her attention.
I will not linger in this letter, but hope to hear a response from you soon regarding the matter of G. Do not think that your unsigned correspondence has gone unnoticed. Your sonnets have been read in the very rooms of Lorenzo’s home. While they are beautiful work—some of your best—I beg of you to be more discreet in your admiration. You are fortunate so many ladies share the fair skin and dark hair of your muse, as their generality may yet prevent you from becoming embroiled in another scandal.
She shook her head, scribbling nonsense in the margins of her notebook.
Was this truly Giovanni? she asked herself as she finished the letter. Friend of Lorenzo de Medici? Philosopher at age twenty-three and contemporary of some of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance? A poet who longed for another man’s wife?
The man who seemed so cold and yet kissed her with such passion?
She closed her eyes and forced herself to think with her brain instead of her hormones.
When Beatrice had gone through her darkest teenage years, she had turned to almost anyone who seemed to offer a little warmth. Now, she shuddered to think how foolish she had been and how self-destructive. She had forced herself to take a break from the opposite sex since she decided that dark and destructive weren’t nearly as attractive as she had thought they were at seventeen.
But she didn’t like being alone, and she had the same desires that most twenty-two-year-old women had. A part of her thrilled at the idea of her interest in Giovanni being returned, but the other part of her had the cold realization that a relationship with a five hundred-year-old vampire, who probably wanted to drink her blood more than he wanted to cuddle, was the textbook definition of unhealthy.
On second thought, she was pretty sure most textbooks didn’t cover that one.
She heard the door to the reading room open, tucked the notes in her bag, and braced herself before she looked up.
And Carwyn stood in front of her.
“Surprise!”
She glanced at the smiling vampire before her eyes darted to the doors he had just walked through.
“Oh, Count Stuffy della Prissypants is not with me. He had to venture to the fair ci
ty of New York to negotiate purchase on a certain prize his awesome assistant found.” Carwyn clucked his tongue at her and winked. “And you didn’t even tell me. I would have taken you to a horror movie, a really bad one.”
She mustered up a smile. “It's good to see you. I wasn’t expecting—”
“No, I expect you weren’t from the sad, little look on your face. But cheer up!” He pulled a chair over and sat next to the desk. “I’m all yours for the night. And I won’t even pretend to transcribe an old book so I can stare at you longingly from the corner of my eye.” He kicked his feet up on the desk. “Thank God none of the boring professors are here.”
“Carwyn,” she said with a smile. “Have I told you lately that you’re kind of awesome?”
He winked. “No, but I’m always game to hear it. Forget the Italian, darling Beatrice. Run away with me. We’ll go to Hawaii.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I’ll make us a cave by the sea where the sun won’t touch me and we’ll spend every night swimming naked and drinking fruity drinks while we make the fishes blush.”
She giggled and shook her head at his mischievous grin. “You…are something else.”
His grin suddenly turned sweet as he looked at her.
“As are you, darling girl. As are you.”
He opened his mouth again, as if to say something, and she felt a faint stirring in the air, but finally, his grin returned and the tension seemed to scatter.
“Could you really make a cave?”
“What?” He looked surprised by her question. “Oh, yes. Of course. Volcanic rock is very soft.”
She shook her head. “That’s so crazy. I wish Gio would tell me about that stuff.”
“Well, what do you want to know? No one here but vampires and crazy people.”
She snorted. “Well,” she thought, “what can all the different vampires do? There’s four kinds, right? Like the four elements? You can make caves, Gio can make fire—”
“Well, strictly speaking—”
“Yeah, yeah,” she waved a hand, “static electricity, manipulation of the elements, got that part. So, it’s probably the same with all of them then.” She frowned. “How do you know what element you’ll be? Do you get to pick? Is it something that happens right away when you get…”
“Sired? Or turned. Those are the proper terms in our world.” Carwyn sighed and leaned back in his chair. “With my children—”
“Your children?”
“Yes, I call them sons and daughters. It depends on the sire, but immortal families can be very much like human families. We just tend to look a bit closer in age,” he said with a laugh.
“How do you—I mean how do you become…” She paused, unsure of how to phrase her question.
“Most of the common myths are true about that,” Carwyn said. “When I sire a child, almost all of their blood is drained, either by me or someone else. The important thing is that the majority of the blood is replaced with my own. That is what creates the connection.”
“And what is the connection? Do you…control them or something?”
“Sadly, no,” he laughed. “I can’t compel them to do my bidding.” Carwyn paused for a moment and a wistful look came to his eyes.
“It’s very much the way I remember feeling about my human children, to be honest. Only much more…intense, as everything is. It’s not an easy decision, choosing to make a child, and it has such long-term consequences. If nothing violent happens to myself or my children, we will be a family for eternity. It’s a very strong commitment to make to another being and, as a consequence, I do have quite a lot of influence over my children. We’re very close.”
“What about your sire? Is he—”
“She, actually. And my sire is no longer living.”
She could sense from the look in his eyes that it wasn’t something the normally open vampire wanted to talk about, so she changed the subject.
“Did you ever, I mean, do vampires ever turn people that they love? Like, if your wife had been living—”
“I wouldn’t have turned her myself,” he said quickly. “Well, not if I knew the consequences of it. It’s not a romantic connection, Beatrice. The feelings really are more paternal, so it’s not an ideal situation if a vampire falls in love with a human and they're turned.”
“Why not?”
“If the human does choose to become immortal, they would have to be turned by a vampire other than their lover, and then that other vampire would have a very strong connection and influence over the one turned. Your feelings toward your sire run very deep, positive or negative. It could become quite complicated.”
She looked down at the desk. “Right. I guess that makes sense,” she said quietly. She opened her e-mail and busied herself checking the news online. Carwyn was silent, but she could still feel him watching her.
“You know,” he said suddenly. “All my children are earth vampires. It runs in families that way.”
“Oh really?” she said as she typed.
“Yes, it’s almost unheard of for a vampire to sire out of their element. Water from water. Earth from earth. Wind from wind, and so forth.”
“Huh, that’s interesting. So it’s kind of genetic, I guess.”
“Except for fire.” Her eyes darted up to find Carwyn watching her.
“Oh really?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Yes, they tend to just pop up like the bastard redhead every now and then. Anyone can sire them. Water, Air, Earth. Very unpredictable. Bit of a shame, of course.”
She leaned back, curious to see where the clever priest was going with his train of thought. “And why is it a shame?”
“Let’s just say I’m glad I’m not a fire vamp.” His voice dropped. “Glad to never have sired one, either.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat, almost afraid to ask her next question.
“And why is that?”
He put his feet down and rested his arms on the desk. She watched him, transfixed by his vivid blue eyes as the air around her became charged. When he finally spoke, his voice had a low, hypnotic quality to it.
“You see, Beatrice, it’s a dangerous thing to wield fire. Dangerous for yourself, and dangerous for those around you. More than one sire—even a good one—will kill a son or daughter that shows the affinity toward fire almost immediately.”
“Why—”
“And if the sire doesn’t kill them, the young vampire will often kill himself—purely by accident—and they’ll likely take a few others with them. Very, very volatile, those fire vamps.”
“But,” she stuttered, “Gio—”
“Those that do live are usually very gifted, and very strong,” he continued. “And their sires will take advantage of that. Because if you control a fire vampire , Beatrice, you control a very, very powerful weapon.”
Her chest was constricted as she absorbed the implication of what Carwyn was saying. “Did Gio’s sire—”
“Now, I would never want that life for a child of mine. I’d never abuse my influence like some would; but even without my interference, to live in peace, my son or daughter would have to develop almost inhuman self-control.”
Like him, she thought, suddenly gaining new perspective on Giovanni’s dispassionate demeanor.
“And you’d have to be very careful how you used your power. Ironically…you’d probably seem a little cold to most people.”
She flashed back to the heat that poured off Giovanni when he held her. What would have happened if he’d lost control? What had Carwyn written to her?
‘Opposite. Of. Frosty.’
“No, I wouldn’t want to be a fire vampire, because if I managed to live—and wasn’t manipulated as a powerful weapon by the one who made me—I’d most likely live a very lonely life,” Carwyn said quietly. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She nodded and cleared her throat a little. “I understand.”
The now solemn vampire leaned back to relax
in his chair. “I knew you were a clever girl.”
“So,” she swallowed the lump in her throat. “If you ever had a fire vampire for a child, do you think…they’d always be alone?”
He shrugged and smiled a little. “I think that all things are possible for him who believes.”
She smiled. “Oh yeah?”
“And I also believe that love can work miracles.”
“Love?” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “What about friendship? Can that work miracles, too?”
Carwyn rolled his eyes. “Silly B, love is friendship…just with less clothes, which makes it far more brilliant.”
She burst into laughter, glad he had finally broken the tension that hovered between them. “You are the most ridiculous man I have ever met. And maybe the worst priest.”
“Or the best,” he said with a wink, as he reached for the romance novel in the bottom drawer. “Think carefully about that one.”
She snorted. “I’ll take it into consideration.” She turned back to her computer and opened a paper she was supposed to be working on. Carwyn opened the book and began to read, still sneaking glances at her until she finally sighed in frustration.
“What now? I really should get some work done.”
“Come back to work. He’s far more of a pain in the ass since you’ve been gone. He pretends nothing’s wrong, but he’s all mopey and has no sense of humor. I think he might hurt my dog if you don’t.”
“Nice blackmail, Father.”
He shrugged and only looked at her with hopeful eyes.
She finally smiled. “I wasn’t going to stay away forever, you know.”
“Will you tell me why you left?”
She shook her head firmly. “No.”
“I tell you all sorts of things,” he muttered.
“You have got to be the most immature thousand year old I’ve ever met.”
He folded his arms and scowled. “I’m not even going to offer the most obvious retort to that.”
She smirked as she watched him but realized, if there was one person she instinctively trusted in this whole messy world she had found herself in, it was Carwyn. As far as she could tell, he had no ulterior motive to tell her anything, and he always answered her questions.