The Immortal Greek

by Monica La Porta

  Monica La Porta

  The Immortal Greek

  Book Two of The Immortals

  Copyrights and More Information

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Monica La Porta

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Dedication

  To Roberto.

  Chapter One

  Alexander looked at the room, pleased with the success of his End of Summer party. People crowded the entire floor of his Roman house and spilled outside into the manicured gardens. He followed a stream of inebriated guests jumping from tile to tile on the flagstone path heading toward the pool and showed them the dressing rooms where they could change in privacy. Pietro, his majordomo for the last ten years, gave him a subtle raise of his right eyebrow, and Alexander nodded in response to the silent question if supervision was needed around the pool.

  Tomorrow’s tabloids would be full of fuzzy shots of the socialites gathered to imbibe themselves to drunkenness at yet another lavish and extravagant party at Alexander Drako’s villa in the exclusive Coppedè neighborhood. Little did they know the who’s who of the paranormal society had come together to celebrate another solar year coming to an end.

  People had come to expect an invitation from him somewhere in the middle of August, and he was never one to disappoint people. Year after year, he had thrown parties his guests talked about until the next one. Alexander never catered to just the paranormal society. He also liked his human gatherings. Usually, those parties were for his and a few of his most trusted friends’ enjoyment. He didn’t advertise the events, but his Bacchanalias were quite talked about in both worlds, giving paranormals and humans fodder for gossip. He believed consensual fun was the best type of fun and his rule was never to mix paranormals and humans.

  An immortal blonde with a shirt that doubled as a dress walked to him. Her legs were chiseled columns that terminated at two stiletto heels showcasing her slender ankles. He looked at her with mild interest. The girl’s curves were soft, her smile was charming, and the light in her eyes promised mischief. At a glance, he knew she would have followed him to his playroom no questions asked, but he had a thing for human women. Mortality made them savor life with a different passion, and he liked that.

  Instead of humiliating the blonde with a refusal, Alexander made a beeline for the patio where he could reach the rear door of the kitchen and reenter his house without being seen. Several couples were enjoying the privacy of the covered terrace overlooking the expansive Italian gardens. He paused for a moment to partake of the sight as well—his gardener had done a splendid job trimming the boxwood hedges to create an intricate geometric design—before being swamped back by the partygoers. The moon was covered by clouds, but he knew it would be full in three days. He usually scheduled his End of Summer party the night after full moon to accommodate all the paranormals who shape-shifted into their animal alter egos the night before, but this year the Immortal Council had reserved that date for its annual Gala.

  “Alexander, is there more champagne?”

  A deep but feminine voice startled him back to the present. “What kind of question is that, Ophelia?” He laughed and turned to face one of his favorite friends, the statuesque werewolf who liked to go bar-hopping with him to scare men.

  Standing under a century-old olive tree Alexander had imported from Apulia, Ophelia looked at him batting her long eyelashes. “Well, I’m thirsty and those two bimbos over there have finished a whole bottle before I could claim one sip.” She smiled her radiant smile and tilted her head to point at the two immortals getting close and personal with Pietro, who gently put their hands back to their sides.

  Alexander took her by her elbow and stirred her onto the flagstone path, heading back inside. “I’ll open my special reserve just for you.” It was their private joke; she only drank the best of wines and he only served her from his special collection. Skirting the younger crowd who had decided to go to the gazebo at the other end of the path and play a game of truth or dare, they walked to the porch. Alexander noticed how Ophelia stiffened at the sight of a couple strolling by hand in hand, but didn’t comment on it.

  Ophelia put her hand on his arm and lowered her head to avoid the porch’s wooden beamed ceiling. She would have been taller than many men while wearing flats, but she liked to wear heels so thin and high it was a mystery to Alexander how she could walk on them.

  They made a run for the cellars, but had to cross the living room and several people stopped them. Dark skinned and exotic, Ophelia liked the attention she usually received from both sexes and stayed behind to exchange pleasantries. Tonight, Alexander felt an uneasiness that plagued him more and more often lately and mouthed to her that he would grab the bottle and come back. She nodded from over a vampire’s shoulder and licked her lower lip in a sensual gesture. The vampire visibly tensed and Alexander suppressed a laugh. Ophelia was his twin in everything but blood. People had expected them to become an item sooner or later, but they loved and respected each other as siblings, and they never once considered a romantic relationship.

  Alexander took the stairs winding down toward his cellars two at a time. Three stories below, the walls excavated into the tuff rocks were covered in dew and several degrees cooler than upstairs. Alexander touched the wall to his right and sighed. He loved the feeling of the tuff under his palm. His gym had been excavated from the same natural material and he had never thought of insulating it from the constant humidity the tuff generated. He had a special connection with that rock. His childhood home in Athens had been no more than four walls made of brick tuff and a ceiling, but he had been content there. The faint smell of mold was forever associated with happiness to him. The sounds of celebration reached him down there, and he opened the wooden door to his cellars to get farther away from his own party. A bar ran on one side of the large room with the low ceiling, while the opposite wall was covered in neat rows of bottles. Only a few of his friends, Ophelia among them, had entered his sanctuary. Marcus, his immortal protégé, was another, but it had been a while since the last time they had sipped wine together. He was now busy celebrating his first wedding anniversary with his wife, Diana. If Alexander would have taken a moment to analyze the sense of loss he was feeling, he would have called his friend and told him he missed him. But Alexander wasn’t that kind of person.

  He shrugged and walked to the row where he stored his bottles of Brunello Di Montalcino. Ophelia was partial to that red. He reached for one of the bottles and pulled it out from its wooden holder, then grabbed a second. Dust covered the glass and hid the deep red sloshing inside the bottles. He walked to the sink and cleaned them. Steps resonated from the stairs and he hurried outside to meet whoever had wandered there. Ophelia almost collided with him.

  “No need to hurry. I got your red.” He showed her the labels on the bottles. When he didn’t receive the usual exuberant thanks from his friend, he raised his eyes to look at her. “What is it?”

  Ophelia hesitated a moment, then sighed. “You must come upstairs at once.”

  “Why?” He started climbing the stairs and noticed the silence.

  Ophelia touched his elbow and made him stop on the second to last step before the door to the living room. “I don’t know how to break it to you, but a young immortal jumped from the balcony.”

>   “Has the Paranormal Hospital been called?” Alexander’s first thought was about the trouble the Immortal Council would give him as soon as the news reached their ears. The Council had tried to shut down his parties for years. It wasn’t a coincidence the Gala had been scheduled the date that had been his since the eighteen hundreds. The official reason was that, out of respect for the were-shifters community, the Council had to postpone the night of the celebration that otherwise would have coincided with the full moon. If that were the case, the Council could have postponed it a whole week or a month. Instead, they had scheduled the Gala his night.

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  Alexander breathed a sigh of relief, climbed the final step, and lowered the handle with his free elbow.

  Ophelia squeezed his arm when he pushed the door with his hip and stopped him again. “The boy is dead.” Alexander almost dropped the bottles, but Ophelia secured them in her hands. “I already called the Council, and someone is coming.” She waited for him to say something, then led him into the house to deal with the shocked crowd.

  Alexander let the werewolf walk him through his house as if it belonged to someone else. An immortal dying as a result of a fall meant only one thing, and he didn’t want to acknowledge the truth until he had to. They crossed the whole length of a living room he had never realized was that big. Several mirrors, antique findings he was proud of, reflected the image of a tall, black Ophelia, and a pale version of himself he didn’t recognize. He saw her dropping the bottles on a table as she passed by. People parted as they approached. Low murmurs followed them as they navigated the length of the house and reached the gardens. Not far from the pool, under the second floor balcony corresponding to the guest rooms, a posse stood huddled over a covered shape lying on the ground.

  “Who was he?” Alexander hadn’t thought to ask the question until now.

  “Nobody I personally knew.” Ophelia walked to the small crowd and touched someone’s shoulder to communicate their arrival.

  Everyone moved out of the way, and Alexander was left with an unobstructed view of the covered body. Someone had used one of Alexander’s embroidered tablecloths as a shroud. The ivory of the fine linen was stained red in several spots. The Brunello he had meant for Ophelia to drink would have left the same deep burgundy stains. Blood seeped from under the still form and filled the canals between the terracotta tiles. He leaned and picked a corner of the tablecloth, slowly raising it. An immortal lay on the floor at an unnatural angle. The young man’s face was peaceful.

  Alexander had fought for the Roman Empire, then he had been a mercenary for centuries. He knew death in all its ugly, horrific aspects, but he had seldom seen beauty reflected in it. And yet, despite the ravaging the body had suffered at the impact, the boy was beautiful in death.

  Alexander bent closer and saw the youth’s lips were curved up in the hint of a smile. “Please, all of you, go back inside. There’s nothing we can do for him now.” While he lowered the linen, he heard Ophelia corralling the crowd toward the house. Without knowing what to do with himself, he crouched, then sat on the floor, his head between his knees.

  ****

  Ravenna listened to the hostess reciting the safety procedures to follow in case of any disaster. She had been flying since airplanes had started taking passengers, but any time she boarded one, she always thought of how terrible it would be to crash somewhere isolated and remain there forever without being able to die. She had morbid thoughts about immortality, but her therapist had reassured her it was normal.

  “Miss Ravenna Del Sarto?” The hostess looked at her as if she had already asked that question once before.

  Ravenna nodded.

  “We’ve been informed you have an important call waiting for you at the terminal. My colleague will escort you out.” The redhead sounded annoyed.

  After years of disruptions of her schedule by the secretive, all-reaching hand of the Immortal Council, Ravenna knew better than to ask the woman what it was all about. Instead, she unlocked her belt, put back the safety brochure and the in-flight magazines, and stood. She passed a hand over her skirt to smooth the wrinkles, reached for the overhead compartment, opened the latch, and finally lowered her briefcase. She always travelled light and bought anything she needed when she reached her location. She followed a second equally annoyed hostess out of the plane and back into the terminal. They walked to a small booth, where a third woman behind a desk asked a few questions to confirm Ravenna’s identity.

  “We’ll wait five minutes, then we must leave,” the woman said while handing Ravenna the phone.

  “I understand. Thank you.” Ravenna let them go before taking the call.

  She tilted her head, let the thick curtain of her straight black hair fall behind her right shoulder, removed her pearl earring from her right earlobe and brought the phone to her ear. “Ravenna.”

  “Samuel,” the fallen angel answered. Samuel was fairly new on the job as a liaison within the paranormal community in Rome. Being the eternal city in the biggest paranormal community in all Europe, the assignment had been a promotion for him, but there were suspicious rumors about his fast-moving career.

  Ravenna didn’t care if he had bedded his way up through the Immortal Council as long as he did his job and kept the paranormals in check. “What is it this time?” She thought to have heard a long sigh from the other side.

  “The Immortal Death has struck again.”

  Ravenna massaged her temple with her left thumb and forefinger. “Who’s the victim?”

  “A young immortal.” A pause on the line. “As usual.”

  She switched the phone to her left hand to turn her right wrist up and look at the time on her watch, a small jewelry piece gifted to her by Karl, her fiancé. The white gold band of the watch-bracelet was a braid with dangling charms Karl had chosen one by one. She absentmindedly played with the small Eiffel Tower. “Where?”

  “Rome. Alexander Drako’s residence.”

  Ravenna lowered the phone to her shoulder, then composed herself, took another look at her watch which had slid to the inside of her wrist once again, and raised the phone back to her mouth. “I’ll be there in an hour.” She heard Samuel’s parting line, but she had already put the phone back on the desk with a clank and was heading outside of the Leonardo Da Vinci airport. The ticking of her high heels hitting the marble floors of the empty international departures terminal was the only sound interrupting the silence pervading the cavernous space at three o’clock in the morning.

  She turned on her cell and called a taxi, then paced back and forth in the narrow strip before the terminal door, making the glass panels open and close in a perpetual loop that would have unnerved her if she weren’t consumed by her thoughts about the youngster’s death. And Alexander Drako.

  Despite the cab company’s assurance that one of their men would pick her up in ten minutes, she waited for more than half an hour before anybody showed up. She was cold and annoyed by the time the orange car pulled to the curb. Plus, she needed to use the bathroom, but the sliding door had locked her out for security reasons twenty minutes into her wait, and she hadn’t been able to go back inside.

  “Where to?” the cabdriver asked soon after giving Ravenna a once over that lingered on her chest long enough to be creepy.

  She decided to ignore the man and gave him Drako’s address, but he made it harder for her to keep on ignoring his behavior when he raised his eyebrow and smirked at her from the rearview mirror with a knowing look. Bashing the man’s head against the dashboard held great appeal, but she was weary of the paperwork associated with such an act. The women on the Immortal Council would have probably recommended her for a medal, but she had a job to carry on before the sun came up.

  The only redeeming quality of having to cross Rome at this time of night was that the Raccordo Anulare, the circular highway connecting the city proper to its suburbs, was empty. And so were the internal roads that led from the Raccordo Anulare to the
exclusive Coppedè neighborhood on the Tagliamento Avenue where Drako resided.

  Ravenna knew where the Greek immortal lived. Everybody in the paranormal community knew. As well as many humans who knew of him as the millionaire playboy the gossip magazines adored.

  The cabdriver pulled the car to a stop before one of the most prestigious addresses in Rome and whistled low. “Late-night call, ah?”

  The man didn’t see it coming. Ravenna’s left elbow struck the back of his head over the steering wheel. His forehead was pushed against the horn, which in turn woke several stray cats who weren’t happy about it. He tried to say something, but Ravenna shushed him to silence, while pointing her lipstick against his right temple.

  “One word and I’ll shoot you. I’m sure nobody will miss your winning personality.” She pushed the open, circular case to his skin, leaving an indentation resembling the hollow muzzle of a gun.

  The man managed to open his mouth and say in a high-pitched voice, “Let me go. Free ride.”

  “Of course my ride is free. Also, you never picked me up and I’ll report you to your company for negligence because you left me stranded at the airport.”

  “Sounds about right.” The man was crying.

  Ravenna brought her armed hand to her side before the man realized she had just left a red lipstick mark on his temple and left the cab. Smiling a satisfied smile, she opened the wrought iron gate leading inside Drako’s villa as the car left with the sound of squealing tires. She looked up at the eclectic Liberty Style house illuminated inside and out. All turrets, nooks, and colonnaded terraces, it was the late architect Coppedè’s wild dream come true. She had met the architect once and smiled at the memory. Interesting man.

  The front windows were open and she could see people everywhere. Samuel hadn’t mentioned a party, but she should have assumed it given where the death had happened. She remembered Drako’s End of Summer celebration falling around this time of the year and put the two together. She had received his invite, as everyone else working for the Immortal Council had, but she hadn’t opened the ivory envelope sealed with the A and D initials in black wax. As she did every year, she had torn the invite, threw it in the garbage bin, and forgot about it.