This Same Earth: Elemental Mysteries Book 2 (22 page)

“Am I the only one who calls you Jacopo?”

“You’re the only one who knows my name.”

Beatrice closed her eyes and gave in to the comfort of his warm hands. The low hum that always accompanied the touch of his skin on hers soothed her. As she sat in bed, enjoying the feel of him, she realized if she was robbed her sight, her hearing—of every sense she had—but could only feel his touch, she would recognize him by that alone.

She sighed and smiled, closing her eyes as she relaxed into him.

“‘Tu sei tutta bella, amica mia, e non v’è difetto alcuno in te,’”
he murmured.

“Hmm?” She roused herself from drifting. “What does that mean?”

He tucked her head under his chin. “It means you’re beautiful.”

She smiled and turned her face to press her cheek to his chest.

“Do you dream? I’ve always wondered that.”

 She heard him let out a soft chuckle. “I do sometimes. Not often though.”

“What do you dream about?”

He hummed a little, still sounding sleepy as he played with the ends of her hair. “The past. The future. You.”

She had no idea how to respond to that.
I dream about you a lot, too. Have for years. You’re usually naked.

“So.” She cleared her throat a little. “I’ve been reading Ioan’s book about vampire biology. I remember you said he was a doctor. It’s fascinating.”
Speaking of naked, did you pose for some of those diagrams? I’m pretty sure I recognize your abs.

He reached his left arm around to the table where she had set the manuscript.

“Ah, I remember helping him with this one. Deirdre did some of the sketches. Excellent resource.”

“I’m sure you get tired of answering all my questions, so I thought I’d just take advantage of the library since we have a few days here.”

He smiled. “I don’t get tired of answering because you ask good questions. So feel free to take advantage of me any time you like.”

She swatted his arm playfully. “Haha.”

He only chuckled and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “What a good little librarian you are,
tesoro
.”

“Don’t be patronizing.”

“I’m not. Just teasing you a bit. So, what have you learned, Miss De Novo?”

“That you aren’t immortal, but you are very hard to kill.”

Giovanni nodded. “Yes we are. Fire and losing our head are the only ways I’ve ever heard of.”

“Really? Definitely no wooden stakes, huh?”

He shook his head. “No, though that would take a long time to heal if anyone tried.”

“Unless you’re surrounded by your element, right? Like when you burned Lorenzo and he dove in the water, he knew he would heal faster that way.”

“Yes, though burns still take years to heal completely, unless you’re a fire vampire. But if Carwyn was injured, he could heal very quickly if he went to ground.”

“So Tenzin—”

“Is practically impervious to serious injury unless she’s buried or drowned.”

“Wow.”

“‘Wow’ is a common reaction, yes.”

“And you?”

He shrugged. “Fire feeds me; fire destroys me. It’s a very fine line.”

“So, if you allow yourself to…what do you call it?”

Giovanni chuckled. “Flame up? Manifest fire? Get sparky, as Carwyn likes to say?”

Beatrice quirked her mouth in a wry smile. “Yeah, that.”

He stretched an arm against the headboard. “I’m not going to lie,
tesoro
, when I allow the fire to take over my body, it feels…heady. It’s intoxicating, and it could be very addictive. It does feed something in me and it does help me heal, but at the same time, it’s very, very dangerous.”

“But you control it, Gio. It doesn’t control you.”

He shrugged. “And oddly, we have my sire to thank for that. Without the years of discipline Andros beat into me, I would probably have destroyed myself long ago.”

She paused for a moment, frowning. “I don’t like feeling grateful to him.”

Giovanni gave her a sad smile. “He made me who I am.”

“You made yourself who you are. I’ve read your journals.”

“I wasn’t a good man for a long time. It was Carwyn and then Ioan who helped to humanize me.”

“And Tenzin. Kind of.”

“Kind of, yes. But nothing like Ioan. He was the finest of us,” he said quietly, slouching in the rumpled bed.

Beatrice wanted to erase the grief she saw fill his eyes, but she knew she couldn’t, so she pulled him over to rest his head in her lap and began running her fingers through his hair like she knew he loved.

“How did you meet him?”

He lay with his head on her thigh, and she listened as he timed his breath to match hers. Finally, he spoke in a soft voice, “My father created me to be his idea of the perfect man: a scholar, an artist, a strategist, a soldier…after he was gone, when I had to make my way in the world, there was little need for strategists, artists or scholars. But there was always a need for soldiers. Especially with the talents and training I had.

“I was a known fire vampire. I knew I needed to make a reputation quickly, and I needed to make it frightening, so I used what Andros had given me, and I became the most efficient assassin and mercenary I could be.”

“Who did you kill?”

“Whoever I was hired to,” he said quietly.

She took a deep breath and tried to reconcile the gentle man she knew with what he was describing. Beatrice had read his journals, but it was so much more brutal to hear the truth from his own lips.

He continued when she did not speak.  “After a while, I had built a decent reputation, though I was still targeted regularly. Then I met Tenzin and she wasn’t what I was expecting. At all.”

“Why not?

“Well, I was hired to kill her—”

“What? Tenzin?” Beatrice laughed.

“Ridiculous, I know. She is one of the oldest and most powerful vampires I have ever heard of. But I did not know her reputation when I was hired. I was young—only fifty years old or so. I took the contract, but she is the one who hunted me.”

“Why am I not surprised? Where did she find you?”

“It was in the mountains of southern Siberia, perched in the branches of an evergreen. She jumped on my back like she does, and I was too shocked by her appearance to do anything but try to run away.”

“But she caught you?”

“Oh yes. She laughed and told me that she’d seen me long ago. That we were fated to be great friends, and that we would work together.” He cocked an eyebrow. “We would be more powerful than any other vampires walking the earth.”

“Talk about appealing to your ego.”

He chuckled. “I’m not going to lie, I didn’t believe her about fate, but she was persuasive, and I could see how powerful she was. She’s always known how to get me to do what she wants me to. And then, well, she just knew things. It was Tenzin who took the contract in London that led us to Carwyn. She always seemed to know the exact moment to get out of one situation or into another. Tenzin always... Well, she always...”

He drifted off and she noticed an odd, almost childlike, look on his face.

“Gio?  What were you saying about—”

“Why did I go to the library where you worked?”

“What? You went to transcribe that manuscript, remember?”

“Yes.” His eyes lit up. “The manuscript for Tenzin. The one she just had to have copied.”

“Gio?” she whispered, but he could only stare at her in wonder as his head lay on her lap. He reached up to smooth away the frown that had gathered on her forehead and slowly pulled her face down to feather a kiss across her mouth.

“You are my balance in this life. In every life,” he murmured against her lips.

“Gio?”

“
Tu sei il mio amore,
” he said with a brilliant smile.

“I finally learn Latin and you switch to Italian on me, Jacopo? No fair.”  She frowned against his insistent lips.

“I don’t want you to get bored.”

“Because that’s so likely, isn’t it?”

He just grinned at her. “Were you bored without me?”

Beatrice didn’t want to answer but knew she should considering how open he was being.

“Never mind,” he said. “It’s not my business. It’s your—”

“Yes.”

Giovanni cocked his head, as if surprised she had responded.

“I was bored without you,” she continued. “I had a good life, but it wasn’t anything…”
It was monochrome instead of color
.

“I hated being away from you, Beatrice. Even when I convinced myself it was necessary.”

She blinked away the tears that tried to surface and pulled away from him. He still lay in her lap, looking up at her with an unguarded expression.

“What are we doing, Gio? I had so many questions for so many years. Why is everything suddenly not a secret?”

“Don’t you know?” he murmured.

She looked into his eyes, which had once been veiled and enigmatic. Now, they were open, and Beatrice was beginning to realize that everything she thought she knew about the previous five years might have been wrong.

“I think…I’m starting to know,” she finally said.

He shook his head; she could see the disappointment.

“Tell me more,” she begged. “When did you meet Carwyn?”

A smile touched the corner of his mouth.

“I was a little over two hundred years old. Tenzin and I were still working together, but I had grown weary of it, no matter how efficient we were.”

“You were tired of killing vampires.”

“I was tired of killing
anything
. I mentioned a contract that Tenzin found. We’d taken a job from the old guard, the vampires that used to control London. There was a band of rogues that was terrorizing the human population in Cornwall, and we were hired to get rid of them and clean up the mess they’d left. By the time we got there, Carwyn and Ioan had already taken care of most of the problem. Carwyn had killed the young vampires and Ioan was altering all the memories of their human victims and healing those he could. It had been going on for quite some time, so there was still a lot we were able to do.

“Tenzin and I offered to share the bounty with them for the vampires they had killed, but they both refused. It intrigued us both, and we went to spend some time with them in Wales. Eventually, I decided to stay with them and leave mercenary work. I was exhausted.”

“Was Tenzin mad?”

“Not really. She had begun to attract more attention than she normally liked, so she was ready to lie low for a few hundred years to let the rumors die down.”

Beatrice snorted. “Just a little while, huh?”

He smiled. “I told you, she’s very old. I stayed with Carwyn’s family for a time and slowly remembered what it was like not to spend every night looking for who would attack me next. I remembered how much I loved books, and music, and quiet. Eventually, I became convinced that I could choose to live another way. Carwyn and Ioan helped me see that.”

“I’m sorry I’ll never meet him,” she whispered and rested her hand against his cheek.

“I’m sorry too.”

“What happens when vampires die? The book was kind of vague.”

He took her hand and knit their fingers together before he rested them on his chest. “If we’re not burned, we return to our elements. What was left of Ioan’s body lingered for a few days and then crumbled into earth. Water vampires almost melt away, but again, it’s not instantaneous. And wind…well, they just disintegrate. Eventually, there is no trace of them.”

“And fire?”

He shrugged. “I’ve never beheaded a fire vampire. I don’t know. Usually, we burn.”

She paused. “Why did you leave me your journals in Cochamó?”

“I wanted you to know everything. Like when I told you to tell Dez about your life. There can be no future with that many secrets,
tesoro
.”

“But why didn’t you tell me all that before?” she asked gently. “You always held back with me.”

He sat up and moved to her side, looking into her eyes when he answered.

“When we first met, I didn’t know if I could trust you. And when you left for Los Angeles, I wasn’t sure you wanted to be part of my world. Which I understood. So I tried to shield you, Beatrice. There was no reason for you to be burdened with all of this if you were only going to touch the edges of it.”

“Gio.” She shook her head. “I think it’s pretty obvious at this point…”

She didn’t finish, and he leaned forward. “What? What’s obvious?”

She stopped short of admitting she loved him. She still wondered, when the current mystery was solved, whether he would disappear from her life again. This time, she knew the hole she felt from his absence when she was younger would be dwarfed by the immense vacuum another departure would leave.