by Hazel Hunter
“Is it good?”
“Very.”
Sophia let the water take the stress and strain out of her limbs, leaving her as soft and open as a cloud. The tub was perfect for her to rest in, her legs stretched straight and her head pillowed on a waterproof cushion that seemed made for it. She glanced over at Dominic, where he sat on the step leading up to the bath, and she studied him carefully.
“I don't know what you are thinking right now,” she said, the pleasure of the water and the heat taking all of the suspicion and stress out of her. “Can you tell me?”
He looked startled but pleased, and he reached his hand over to cup a bit of the bubbles in his palm.
“Well, I suppose the first thing that I'm thinking is that I am one lucky son of a bitch. I don't know how you came into my life, but I know that I want to keep you here.”
“You've spent less than twenty-four hours with me,” she pointed out. “Many of those hours were all about having the best sex we could.”
He grinned, but it was brief, and then his expression was serious.
“You know that I used to be Italian, right?” he asked her.
Mystified, she nodded. It was a strange way to put it, and as if he could read her thoughts, he shook his head.
“It was very different when I was young. A different country, in some ways. Well, one of the things that all Venetian boys knew of was the thunderbolt. It's love, but it's more than that. When you are standing next to someone who takes your breath away, when you look at them and you can see a world that needs to have the two of you together, well, that feeling is like a thunderbolt that drops out of the sky. It's like electricity that shoots through you from your head to your feet. You're rooted to the spot, you can't move, and you don't want to, not until she gives you permission to do so. In a single moment, the course of your life is altered forever.”
“Is that what love is like for all Italians?” asked Sophia.
She had never heard a man speak so frankly about love before. She had heard them describe sex when they didn't know she was there, and those conversations, full of violence and conquest, had sickened her. This was something new.
Dominic's response was a slightly wry laugh.
“No, and the old-timers used to say that if you were smart, you would never want it to happen to you. My friends and I didn't care however. Everyone wanted to get struck by the thunderbolt, and I'm not saying that I never saw my friends fall in love. But you know, it was something simple. They fell in love, they fell out of love, and every single one was the thunderbolt until suddenly it wasn't.”
“Did you ever see the thunderbolt strike for real?” Sophia asked, fascinated.
Dominic thought for a moment, and then nodded.
“I did. There was an old man who lived in a village not far from Venice, and we went to him because he was the best blacksmith in a hundred miles. He fell to the thunderbolt when he was young, and he and his wife had never been apart for more than a week during their marriage. Then she died, and the life went out of him. When you're struck by the thunderbolt, you are struck, and when she died, she took a piece of him with her.”
Sophia flinched at the idea of loving that well and losing that much, and Dominic leaned over to kiss her comfortingly.
“I am much older now than when I met that old man,” he murmured, “and maybe I'm a fool, but I am still happier that I have been struck than I would be without.”
She started to ask what he meant by that, but then his mouth moved to her earlobe, where his sharp teeth nipped at the sensitive skin there.
“I feel more than I ever have before. I see farther. It makes me more than I am, and whether you choose to keep me with you or whether you choose to send me away, I am more than I was before I met you.”
She started to question that, but then his hands dipped into the water and came up to glide over her shoulders. The soapy film made his fingers slip over her skin with delicious sweetness, and she gave herself over to it. She felt like a prize he had won, and of course prizes must be cared for. She lay quiet under his hands as they slid down her breasts, along her hips and down her legs. Even with the cover of the bubbles, he moved unerringly. When he found her sex again, she spread her legs for him.
This climax, this pleasure was all for her, and she whimpered as he manipulated her with ease. Her orgasm was quiet, but in some ways it felt deeper than the storms she had experienced with him before. She trembled, she tensed, and when she finally cried out, he was there, his mouth on hers, and his free hand buried in her wet hair.
Her eyes drifted open, and she smiled at him. His return smile was as soft as sunlight, and in that moment, she knew that, whatever stood between them, that this was real. This was the two of them together, and it was so beautiful and real. She opened her mouth to tease him about his thunderbolt, but something else came out instead.
“Dominic...what in the world were you going to a blacksmith for?”
Dominic opened his mouth, and to her shock, she could see something break in him. He closed his mouth. He swallowed, and almost blindly, he sought her hand. Startled, she grasped it, wondering what could cause this change in him.
“Dominic...”
“Let me tell you,” he whispered softly. “Let me tell you all of it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SOPHIA LET DOMINIC help her out of the tub. But as he dried her off with solicitous care, she couldn’t help but watch his face. Something in his eyes had become far away and sad.
“You can always tell me anything that you want to tell me,” she promised. “I will always listen.”
His smile was brief, and slightly bleak.
“I won't hold you to that.”
When he wrapped a fluffy robe around her and hugged her through it, she wondered why it felt like they were confronting a sense of loss.
He slipped on his jeans, and then settled himself against the headboard. When she approached shyly, he set her in his lap as if they had been doing it for years.
“How old do I look?” he asked.
Sophia blinked. “That's a funny question, but sure. Um, maybe thirty? Thirty-five?”
“Try five hundred and six.”
Sophia couldn’t help but scowl, because whatever she had been expecting, it was definitely not that. She laughed uncertainly.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was born in the Year of Our Lord, 1506, in Venice. My father was a condottiere, a soldier for hire, and my mother was a woman who worked in a coffeehouse on the canals.”
“There were coffeehouses in the 1500s?” Sophia asked, still unsure how seriously to take all of this. Dominic's smile was brief.
“There were. We called it an African vice, something that would tempt good folk from the word of God, though it was better by far than cocoa, which had come from the new world very recently. Cocoa was irredeemable, you see.”
“You...you're talking as if you were there.”
“Because I was. Sophia, I need you to understand. I was born in Venice in 1506. I am more than 500 years old, and for most of my life, I have been fighting. That was why I needed a blacksmith who was known to be the best in our region of Italy, though it wasn't Italy at the time. I needed a sword that was sharp enough to kill someone swiftly and silently, and for that I needed the best.”
“Kill someone?” Sophia asked faintly.
She felt lightheaded, as if she were pulling away from her body to float above them. There was something macabre about this scene, about the world that felt like it was opening up below her. It felt like she was getting ready to drop down into a deep pit, a place from which she would never emerge.
“It was a way of life back then. My father killed people for pay, and for the longest time, I thought that I was going to follow him. My mother wanted me to work with her at the coffeehouse, but that wasn't good enough for me.” Dominic's smile was a little bitter. “No, the men that the girls all swooned over, the men who always had money
in their pockets and who always wore the bright livery of this house one week or that house the other, they were the condottiere, like my father. It didn't matter to me that my father died when I was barely five, killed in battle with the Lombards far from home. It didn't matter to me at all.”
“How...how can you expect me to believe this?” Sophia finally choked out.
The frightening part of it was how calmly and simply Dominic told the story. She could hear the truth in his voice. She could see the boy he had once been, running along the edge of the canals, dashing between the tables to help his mother serve coffee, and sneaking out whenever he could to follow the soldiers. How bright he must have been, and how frightened his mother must have been for him.
“I don't know if I expect you to believe me,” he said with difficulty. “It is a hard story for you to believe unless you're part of it. What I want most is for you to listen to me, and to realize that even if this is not real for you, it's real for me. This is my life, Sophia, and I want to share it with you.”
After a long moment, she nodded, and she felt him relax underneath her. She leaned close to him, and his hand stroked gently at her damp hair. They sat in silence, and then he started to speak again.
“Witches were terrifying at that point. Venice was a cosmopolitan city, but even we weren't immune to some of the witch hysteria that swept through the country from time to time. I read the books that they write these days. They give dry facts. They say so many were killed, so many questioned, so many driven out to the country to die. They don't understand what it was really like to be in those screaming streets. So I knew what witches were. I knew enough to be afraid of them, but you know, it's like airplane accidents now. You don't think about it most of the time unless you are getting on a plane. I grew up, and I fell in love with this girl.”
Sophia stiffened, and he grinned, kissing her cheek.
“Don't worry, this was five hundred years ago, and I really didn't know what love was. She was a...I guess you would say courtesan.”
“Um, you mean a prostitute?”
“In some ways. She sold sex, but more importantly, she sold an image. She was an expensive, educated woman of impeccable taste, and being one of her lovers, well, that was the mark of a distinguished gentleman. Of course, that's not at all what I was when I was thirteen.”
Sophia burst out laughing, and she could see that too, a young boy in love with a woman who was a superstar as far as Venice was concerned.
“Yes, well, I've always thought that it was important to aim high. Somehow I managed to get through her guards and to present her with the finest gift I could, which was a small handful of coffee I had swiped from the coffeehouse. She had every right to have me beaten and sent on my way, but instead, she smiled, and told me to come looking for her when I was grown. There was only one catch: I had to be pure.”
“Like a virgin?”
“Exactly like a virgin.” Dominic laughed at the memory. “I worked hard, I fought fiercely, and when I turned twenty eight, I went looking for her. She still had every right to toss me out on my ear, but she didn't, and um, well, she sneaked me into her house and she, ah, made good on her promise.”
Sophia wondered if she should feel jealous about the woman from the 1500s, but instead she was fascinated.
“Did you...”
“I believe in the privacy of my lovers,” Dominic said primly. “I am not telling this story for salacious purposes, miss. There is a meaning to it.” Sophia arched an eyebrow. “Ahem. Anyway. So the evening commenced, less magical than I might have expected but still. And then I shocked her.”
“You told her you were really a poor boy with nothing but the sword in his sheath?”
“She checked on that very thoroughly before she let me anywhere near her. No, we had just hit a calm spot after all of the fun, I leaned over to kiss her, and zap.”
“Not following.”
Dominic sighed. “I shocked her like an electric socket. Threw her two feet, and singed a strand of hair that was in my mouth. She passed out for a moment.”
“Oh god!”
“Yes. I had no idea what had happened. I was naked, all I could smell was the burnt air, and suddenly I was convinced that the devil was after me.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I jumped out the window, hit the canal water and swam away.”
“Really?”
“I wasn't thinking clearly. And remember, witch hunts were on in my part of the world that year. I hit up a friend who loaned me some clothes, and I was on the first horse out of town before she could call the church on me. Looking back, I'm not sure she did, but better safe than sorry, or rather, better safe than in the tender care of the inquisition, let's say.”
“Then what happened?” Sophia still wasn't sure how much of this story she believed, but she knew that he believed it.
“I got to Florence and then, I just started over. You could do that in those days. No one respectable moved around, so when I came in and said my name was Antonio, no one much cared or noticed. At that point, I didn't know anyone and when I was mad I threw sparks like a blacksmith's hammer. I decided I was damned and I might as well make the most of my time on earth before Lucifer came looking for me.”
Sophia made a sad wounded sound, and Dominic hugged her.
“It was pretty bad. I'm not going to lie, but it was a long, long time ago. I got reckless, I got money as a duelist fighting for spoiled jerks who never learned how to hold a sword, and eventually, my mentor Matteo Salvestro found me. He told me I was Wiccan, that I needed training, and that was that.”
He paused, and Sophia took a deep breath. The hairs on the back of her neck were rising. She realized she believed him. The man with whom she had spent a glorious night in bed was really someone who had lived half a thousand years, and he was telling her something unbelievable.
“What does this mean?” she asked, her voice small and strained.
He sighed. “It means that I control electricity the way that you might use a remote control, and that as far as anyone's concerned, I'm effectively immortal. I can be hurt, and I can be killed if I suffer enough damage, but I look right now more or less the way I looked way back in the sixteenth century.”
“I mean, what does it mean for us?”
Dominic turned her to face him, and for a long moment, they searched each others faces. Dominic broke the silence first.
“It means that I love you, and I want to be with you. I was struck by the thunderbolt, and believe me, coming from someone who makes electricity do tricks, I know what I'm talking about. I'm not supposed to tell you any of this, but damn the rules. I love you, and I need you to know all of this about me.”
“You...you love me?” Sophia's head swam, but she could sense the truth in him, in how fiercely he held her, in the tone of absolute conviction in his voice.
“Very much so. And I want you to know. I want you to know what loving me is like.”
“That I'll grow old, and you'll stay young forever.”
Dominic nodded soberly.
“It's not easy. I've seen other Wiccans with mortals, and the relationships are beautiful, but they are not easy for either person. I want you to walk with me, or rather, I want to walk with you, wherever your path takes you.”
His words took the breath from her as she realized that she did love him. Whether they had a short time together or a long time, she wanted it.
“I...”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say she loved him.
The small quartz crystal on the nightstand by the bed lit up bright blue, and then it shaded to red.
They both froze.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DOMINIC HAD BEEN a man of action for five hundred years. Salvestro had always accused him of leaping first and thinking about the beehive that he leaped into second. All in all, given a long track record of going off half-cocked, he thought that his response to the quartz lighting up and giving him
a positive reading was fairly restrained.
“I think there's something you haven't been telling me,” he said calmly.
Sophia leaped off of his lap, and the look on her face was a combination of guilt and terror.
“I...I don't know what you mean.”
She looked so afraid that it made his heart hurt, but there was also the pressing concern that she might do something more drastic. Dominic thought for a moment. Instead of moving towards her, he picked up the crystal instead.
“My best friend is Stephan. He's Wiccan like I am, and like me, he's in the Magus Corps. The Corps does a lot of things, but one of our most important jobs is looking for new witches and warlocks. A lot of them, like me, don't know what's going on after they've awakened.”
“Awakened. You...you mean had sex?”
“Yes. After a witch or warlock's first sexual encounter, they come into their powers. We all have our talents. That's why I managed to shock that poor woman the first time I got into bed with her. That's why Stephan is an absolute genius when it comes to putting magical properties into things like this crystal. See how it’s lit up with red? What it tells me is that I've found the person I've been searching for. I've found you.”
Sophia's laugh was false and tinny. It hurt Dominic to hear it, but he did his best to stay calm. He was afraid that if he spooked her now, he would never find her again. Given how long she had been fooling Stephan's toy, that was a serious concern.
“Your friend Stephan must not be as good at this as you thought he was,” she said nervously. “He's wrong. I'm no witch.”
“Actually, Stephan would tell you he's never wrong, and I think you are a witch. And if you've been hiding this long, you're a damn good one.”
Sophia shook her head, and to Dominic's dismay, she shrugged off the robe and started putting her clothes on again with jerky motions. He didn't move to stop her, afraid that if he did, she would disappear right under his fingertips.