Dragon Bones: a Nia Rivers Novel (Nia Rivers Adventures Book 1)

by Jasmine Walt

  “I agree with you.” Zane stroked his long fingers into my hair with his fingertips and then kneaded my neck with his thumb.

  Loren, who had puffed herself up in anticipation of an argument, paused and stared at him. Then she leaned in as though she thought she’d found a fellow fox in the hen house. “Did you know that Michelangelo launched his career by passing off a replica of the Sleeping Eros as an original?”

  Loren didn’t wait for Zane to acknowledge that he did indeed know that fact. And the reason Zane knew it was because he had been the one to teach the young artist how to make the copy.

  “Michelangelo sold the sculpture to a cardinal who was a relation to the Pope,” Loren continued. “Today, that would be like selling to the nephew of the king or president, the highest officer in the land. And when the cardinal found out it was a fraud, did he get pissed? No, he was impressed by the quality of Michelangelo’s work.”

  “I know,” Zane said, nodding. “Cardinal Raffaele Riario even hired Michelangelo to do more work—his own original work this time. The cardinal became his first patron.”

  “Too bad there are no cardinals like him nowadays.” Loren huffed and took a sip of her wine.

  Zane winced. I hadn’t met this Riario, but by Zane’s pinched expression, I assumed the cardinal’s reputation hadn’t been all glowing.

  “In the Renaissance,” he said, “apprentices in the arts learned by copying the works of the masters. Their mentors knew they had become artists in their own right when the mentor couldn’t tell the difference between the master’s work and the student’s.”

  “Like a final exam?” said Loren.

  “Exactly.” Zane nodded.

  “So, mimicry is a sign of ability.” Loren leaned back in her chair, looking smug.

  Zane gave a slight shake of his head. “Mimicry is an art, but the crime is in the lie of passing off the work as authentic.”

  Instead of responding, Loren shrugged and took another sip of her wine. Zane chuckled and grabbed the check. He bussed me on my temple, then stood and disappeared inside the cafe to pay the bill. Loren scoped out his backside as he passed her by. I narrowed my eyes at her brazenness.

  “Don’t worry,” she said when she caught my gaze. “I’m just looking. He’s not my type.” Loren frowned and cocked her head, still openly studying Zane. “Too perfect.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “I like a bad boy who I know I have to keep my eye on. Zane seems like one of the good guys. You know, trustworthy.” She wrinkled her nose. “Those men give me anxiety. You never expect them to do anything wrong, and then inevitably they do.”

  I looked at Zane. He leaned against the counter, chatting up the barista who counted out his change. The barista counted slowly, obviously trying to keep Zane engaged in the conversation. But like always, Zane’s gaze found mine. That tilt-a-whirl smile canted even more. Those hooded eyes opened wider, showing me everything. But I was the one hiding an entire world of secrets inside.

  “In my life, I’ve found that when something or someone is too good to be true,” Loren said, “it’s usually because they are.”

  Her words were said casually, but her gaze on Zane’s backside was appreciative. She shrugged and turned back to me, staring at me for a moment. Pulling her lower lip into her mouth, she tugged at the top of her dress. She tugged it in the wrong direction—up instead of down.

  “But like I said,” she smoothed out her skirt, “I’m not going to try and steal him away from you or anything.”

  My shoulders jerked, and I sat erect in my chair. “It’s not like you could.”

  “Well, I’m not going to try,” she said firmly, and then her mouth twisted. “I know girls don’t take kindly to that.”

  “No, Loren, they don’t.”

  She crossed her arms over her covered chest. “I grew up with a single dad who was a cultural anthropologist who studied polygamous peoples and communal living. So, some of my social education is askew. You have to admit, in the animal kingdom, monogamy is a strange and infrequently observed practice.”

  I stared at her before bursting out laughing. “Well, I thank you for your consideration.”

  She shrugged. “What are friends for.”

  “Is that a question?” I chided.

  “No,” she said after a moment of consideration. “I think I’ve got the basics down now.”

  Later that night, Zane and I lay in bed. He traced swirling patterns on my bare skin. I wondered what he was drawing. I knew I only had to ask and he’d tell me.

  “What’s between you and Tres?” I asked instead.

  He huffed a small laugh. His breath was hot on my skin, but his words were cool. “Gimel and I have never seen eye to eye.” Zane used Tres’s Aramaic name. “He sees the world as something to conquer and tame. I prefer to look for the beauty in the natural state of things.” His fingers spanned my back and gave a squeeze, then he began tracing the swirling patterns again.

  “There was a coldness between the two of you.”

  “We have lived a very long time, Nova. We’ve all seen one another at our best and at our worst.”

  “Has he ever been at his best?”

  Zane left his pattern-making and lay down alongside me. “It would take too long for me to dig through my memories to find an example.”

  I pressed myself up on my side. Splaying my hand over his heart, I looked into his smoldering eyes. “Zane?”

  “Oui, mon coeur?” He dipped his head and nudged at my hand on his chest until I gave him my fingertips to kiss.

  “Have you ever forgotten someone?”

  “I have forgotten a lot of people.” He ducked his head until my palm pressed into his temple, rubbing his face against my hand like a large cat seeking attention.

  “No,” I said as I acquiesced to his demands and ran my fingers through his hair. “Have you ever forgotten one of us? Another Immortal?”

  He reached up and wound his fingers in my hair before he pulled me in for a kiss. When we parted, he peered into my eyes. “Ask me what you really want to know, Nova.”

  I’d known about Zane for over a thousand years, even though we hadn’t met face to face until about five hundred years ago. It was surprisingly easy to avoid other Immortals if you tried. I had no recollection of encounters with Tres during the time we may have shared in Greece, or any other time before that. But, apparently, an encounter had happened.

  “I think Tres and I knew each other in the past,” I said. “But I can’t remember him.”

  It felt beyond awkward asking the man I loved if he knew if I’d had a relationship with a man he clearly didn’t like, a man I clearly didn’t like either. If there had been something between Tres and me millennia ago, it obviously wasn’t worth remembering.

  “He has animosity toward me now,” I said. “I don’t know what I did to him.”

  “You likely rebuffed him. He’s the type who’s used to getting what he wants. But that is not what’s truly bothering you, is it?”

  My heartbeat quickened as Zane rolled me onto my back. He ran a gentle hand along my throat, and I felt breathless. When he planted a soft kiss at the edge of my lips, my mouth went dry, damming up the words inside.

  “When are you going to tell me what’s really bothering you?” he asked. “The real reason you’re here in China.”

  I swallowed, but my throat was thick. I had to force the words out. “The bones?”

  “No, the Lin Kuie.”

  I took in a sharp breath. The tips of my fingers, where I held onto his biceps, tingled. “I never said that name to you.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Not while you were awake. But you’ve said it many times in your sleep. You’ve had nightmares for hundreds of years.”

  My hands fell away from his biceps. I folded them at my chest and looked away from the man I swore I knew better than anyone in the world. “You’ve never said anything.”

  He took my chin in his thumb and
forefinger and turned me back to face him. “Neither have you. We spend more time apart than we do together. There are bound to be things we prefer to keep to ourselves. But now you’re here in China.”

  I swallowed again, not knowing why it was so hard to tell him this. Zane loved me—no. He worshiped me. He wouldn’t think any less of me. “I think I may have done something in the past.”

  “What something?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”

  He studied me for a moment, regarding me through a lens of time that only an Immortal could see through. “We’ve all done things in our past,” he said. “Many things that we’re not proud of. But that doesn’t make us who we are. We are not the sum total of our past. Not with how often the wind has shifted over our lifetimes.”

  I sat up, pulling the covers around my chest. “What if I’ve killed people?”

  Zane sat up behind me. His strength and warmth surrounded me. He rested his chin against my shoulder. “You have killed before. We all have. For survival. As an accident. For a host of other reasons that we might want to forget.”

  “Doesn’t make it right.” I hugged my knees into my chest.

  “Digging it up won’t change it.” He crossed his arms over mine, enveloping me in acceptance and love. But I still couldn’t break free of the guilt and shame of the unknown.

  I turned to peer into his eyes. They shone brightly with understanding and adoration. “You don’t think I should go?”

  He released me with a sigh, lying back against the headboard. “Two weeks of hacking through China, or two weeks where I ravage you? If you have to think about it, I’m not as good as I thought.”

  I looked at my lover sprawled on the bed. It wouldn’t be a choice, not normally. I would jump at the chance of seeing Zane. I winced as a cramp took hold of my leg. The allergy, that humanizing effect that happened when Immortals got too close for too long, didn’t normally hit me so hard and so fast. But I’d been around an Immortal every day this week, not to mention two of the oldest. And then there were the ninjas. The symptoms were compounding and rendering my body pervious to the discomforts of humanity.

  When Zane saw my discomfort, he took the matter in hand. He rose and ran his fingertips down my thighs, then kneaded his knuckles at the spot that had seized. After a few moments of his care, the tension eased. I relaxed under his nursing and the unease fled my body, chased away by his skilled hands.

  “You could come with me,” I said.

  He smiled sadly and shook his head. “You’ll need your strength. My presence would only slow you down.”

  With the cramp now gone from my thighs, he spread them apart. His hands kneaded the creases at each of my thighs. I inhaled as his thumbs brushed the naked skin of my core once, twice. Then I moaned with need.

  “Go quickly,” he said, lowering himself to the mattress. His hands pressed my thighs further apart. “Find what you need and then return to me so that I may worship at the apex of your thighs.”

  Zane lifted his head and looked out the window at the dawning sun.

  “It’s a new day,” he said. “Time for my morning devotions to my goddess. Amen, mon coeur.”

  And, with that, his head disappeared at his ready-made altar and he began his worship.

  19

  I left Zane lying in bed the next morning. We never said goodbye at airports or train stations. One of us always left the other in bed. That person was usually me.

  I was the one often gallivanting around the globe. Zane was a homebody. He was happiest in his studio surrounded by his paints, canvases, and clay. He didn’t feel the need to go out and seek answers. Didn’t care to interact with the modern world or reminisce about past lives. He was content to paint and mold the world as he saw fit.

  I envied him that. I was never satisfied with the status quo, and I always needed to dig deeper, ask more questions, uncover the hidden truth. And so I left him tangled in the sheets after a night of lovemaking so tender that I cried into his shoulder at my release.

  He held on to me until the morning, promising he’d never let me go no matter how far I was from him. I was his True North, he repeated, and he would always gravitate back to me.

  He would be flying out later this evening, back to France. He said he’d wait for me at the villa, no matter how long I took, and we’d pick up where we left off.

  I had a headache and my eyes were puffy as I boarded the train out of Beijing. The headache was from the allergy, the puffy eyes were from the ache in my heart. I felt weak, but it was due more to the distance being placed between me and my lover than because of the time we spent together. It had only been three days, but multiply that by three immortals and it might as well have been a month. The fatigue had settled in.

  The train ride into the Gongyi province was twelve hours long. It was long enough to get over the headache, to soothe my heartache, and restore my energy. I hated to admit it, but Zane was right. If he’d come with me, we both would’ve been miserable from the allergic reaction to each other.

  I rested my head back on the headrest and looked out the window at the scenery passing by, looking for any familiarity in the landscape. If I had been here two thousand years ago, much would have changed in that time.

  Much of the countryside was industrialized with factories dominating old, rundown temples and squat homes. As we moved further away from the city, the air and sky got clearer, the buildings more spaced out, and the roofs lower than the horizon. At intervals, there was sometimes nothing but greenery—trees, fields, and foliage-covered mountains. But we never went for long without seeing a touch of humanity.

  I pulled out the copy of the photo of the dragon bone that Loren had given me and stared at my writing. I spoke, wrote, and read every language known to man. But this was the first time I couldn’t decipher my own writing.

  My name at the bottom was clear as day to me. I pieced together the symbol that read Lin Kuie. But I was sure that that bit of understanding had gotten through the locks in my mind because of the guilt I felt at the center of my chest. This mystery wanted to be solved, but it wouldn’t give up its clues so easily.

  “Have you figured out what that says yet?”

  I looked up to see Loren. She’d returned from the food car with two rice bowls and drinks. I took the bowl in one hand and looked back down at the photograph I held in my other hand.

  Shaking my head, I let out a heavy sigh. My eyes squinted at the photograph in the waning light of the day. There were characters I’d etched into the bone that didn’t make sense. Above the symbol for the Lin Kuie, I also picked out the symbols for sacrifice and queen. Beside that symbol were two others I couldn’t place in any Chinese dialect.

  “Right now, it’s just a series of characters and symbols having to do with the Lin Kuie making a sacrifice to their queen.” I squinted again, trying to determine if I’d wrote to their queen or of their queen. I wasn’t sure which type of sacrifice would be worse.

  I sat the photograph down and cupped the warm bowl of rice in my hands. Flexing my fingers around it, I tried to release some of the tension I’d gathered there from tracing the etchings in the picture. Then I picked up the chopsticks and shoveled the food into my mouth.

  Loren picked up the photograph from my lap. “Lin Kuie? Isn’t that also from a video game? Mortal Kombat? One of my exes used to play that game ad nauseam. Thought he was a real ninja because he took classes at a dojo in a shopping center.”

  I shrugged as I swallowed another heaping of the rice. “Many of the history books, folklore, and legends say the Lin Kuie were the first ninjas. They were basically mercenaries who worked for the upper classes. None of these men were highborn. They came from the ranks of the lower classes, trained to be secretive about their existence as well as their actions.”

  Loren twisted her mouth before she spoke, as though she wasn’t sure of her words. “Do you think any of this was real? The queen or the … ninjas?”

  I stud
ied the scenery before I answered her. If she hung around with me, she was very likely to run into some real ninjas. I owed her something of the truth. “There’s always a kernel of truth in every story told. I believe there are likely men, people, in the Gongyi who want to protect their heritage. Some may try to do it through the legal system, like Mr. Xu, while others may take a more mercenary approach.”

  Loren settled back in her chair beside me. She turned her body to face mine and tucked her long legs under her. “The ninja, the Lin Kuie, written about on the bone, you think they were just trying to protect the queen?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, playing with the last dregs of rice in my bowl. “They were either trying to protect her … or sacrifice her.”

  “So my dad was right? They had a female monarch?” Loren’s grin was triumphant, but it soon fell as she thought through to the second part of what I said. “But why would they sacrifice her?”

  I set the empty bowl aside and picked up the photograph again. “Same reason some tribes sacrificed animals to the gods, that Abraham was set to sacrifice his son to God, that there are coups in kingdoms, pirate ships, governments, and militaries—for power.”

  I looked again at the photograph. To or of? I didn’t often write cryptically, especially not when I wrote down my records. I spent too much of my time deciphering old relics. But the way I’d written this could mean either a sacrifice to the queen or a sacrifice of the queen.

  Loren leaned forward and peered at the photograph. “I’ve seen that one before.” She pointed to the symbol that was my name. “It was on the dragon bone my father found.”

  I tilted my head to peer back at her and raised an eyebrow. “You mean the one he manufactured.”

  She leaned away from me with a tightened jaw and a harsh squint. “No, he found it and then he copied it. Much like taking a photograph. Or like a famous Italian artist we both know.”

  I rolled my eyes and leaned my head back in my chair. The headache was returning. Loren snatched the photo out of my hands.