by Lynsay Sands
Raffaele turned a startled expression to her, but admitted, “I was born in 120 B.C.”
When Jess stared at him in horror, Vasco grinned and said, “Hmm. I could tell he was old when I first saw him, but even I am surprised at just how ancient he is.”
Jess just gaped at the pair of them, unable to believe it. Turning her focus on Raffaele, she pointed out, “But that makes you two thousand, one hundred and—” She stopped and shook her head, her mind boggling. She’d been having crazy monkey sex with someone older than . . . well, anything she could think of. Good Lord! She was lucky parts of him hadn’t snapped off while they were doing it.
A snicker from Ildaria and the men at the foot of the bed drew her attention, and she could see the way they were eyeing her forehead. They’d obviously heard her thoughts. Jess scowled at them for their rudeness, and then turned to glance between Raffaele and Vasco. “How is that possible? You don’t age and die?”
Raffaele shook his head almost apologetically, but Vasco’s eyebrows rose and he asked with amusement, “Well, why did ye think we’re called immortals, lovey?”
Jess just stared at him. Why indeed? she wondered, but looked them each over more closely. Neither of them looked a day over twenty-five or so. Actually, she realized as her gaze slid over the others, none of them did. But Raffaele was over two thousand years old? Then how old were the rest of them? Her gaze slid around the group again and then settled on Vasco and she asked, “How old are you?”
“I’m not sure,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t keep track. It’s just a number,” he said with unconcern. But when thunderclouds immediately started gathering on her forehead, he quickly added, “However, I was born in 1519.”
The thunderclouds dissipated at once, blown away by horror as Jess did the math. “So, you’re nearly five hundred years old?” she asked in disbelief.
“Aye. A mere pup compared with the Notte here,” Vasco pointed out with a grin, as if he thought that might give him a leg up.
Jess just shook her head and glanced around at the others. When her gaze settled on Ildaria, the woman sighed and said, “I was born in 1812.”
At least the woman was younger than the U.S.A., Jess thought, relaxing a little. Her gaze skated to Cristo, but he remained silent and stiff lipped. Shrugging, she shifted her gaze to Raffaele’s cousin Santo.
“I was born in 965,” the big man rumbled, and then added, “B.C.”
While Jess was blinking over that, Zanipolo spoke up, offering cheerfully, “Well, I was only born in 1928, so I guess that makes me the youngest.”
“Dear God,” Jess breathed, and closed her eyes, letting herself fall back on the bed.
Fifteen
“Are ye all right, lass? Ye’ve gone a might pale and don’t appear to be handling this as well as I’d hoped.”
Jess opened her eyes to find Vasco’s concerned face over her. Apparently, he’d feared she’d fainted when she’d dropped back and closed her eyes. Raffaele had too, she guessed when his head appeared as well, his expression also full of concern.
“Of course she’s not all right. Look at her, she’s white as a sheet,” Raffaele growled, and then offered Jess a pained smile and suggested, “Try to take slow and steady breaths, my love. Deep breaths, give your brain a chance to process.”
She was processing. And what she was coming up with was that these people were all really freaking old! Good Lord, Santo was nearly three thousand years old! Raffaele wasn’t much better at more than twenty-one hundred years old, but even Zanipolo, who was the youngest of them, was almost one hundred. Well, a decade or thereabouts short of it, but still . . .
Shaking her head, she breathed, “Dear God, you must all see me as little more than a baby.”
“Oh, lovey, no,” Vasco said at once. “Why no red-blooded man could look at those lovely jugs o’ yers and think ye a baby.”
Jess closed her eyes on a groan at that, but opened them again when Raffaele actually growled. Seriously, he growled under his breath like a dog, and then snapped, “Stop looking at her jugs.”
“I can look all I want,” Vasco snapped back. “This is my ship. So as long as she doesn’t mind, I’ll be looking.”
“Well, she obviously minds,” Raffaele snarled, and then added, “And I certainly mind.”
“I don’t care what you mind or don’t mind,” Vasco assured him grimly.
Jess closed her eyes on their bickering, thinking that for all they were supposed to be so ancient, they still sounded like children fighting over a toy. Three thousand years old, her mind screamed silently. How was that even possible? Ildaria had said—
She sat up abruptly, forcing the men to stop arguing and straighten to avoid banging heads with her, and then glared accusingly at Ildaria. “You said you were immortal not a vampire, and that it was because of science not some paranormal nonsense.”
“Sí.” Ildaria nodded, and moved closer to the foot of the bed.
“But Santo is nearly three thousand years old,” Jess pointed out, and glanced to him to see him nod solemnly, confirming his age. Turning back to Ildaria, she arched her eyebrows. “What the hell kind of science was around three thousand years ago? They didn’t even have toilet paper back then, for God’s sake.”
“They did in Atlantis,” Zanipolo put in, stepping to the foot of the bed too.
“Atlantis?” Jess asked, staring at him blankly.
“Actually, Atlantis did not have toilet paper,” Santo rumbled, moving forward as well.
“Then how did they wipe their arses?” Cristo asked with surprise, joining the others so that Jess found herself alone on the bed but almost surrounded by the group.
“I gather they had a system not dissimilar to the bidet seats that are now being developed and sold,” Santo said with a shrug.
“Bidet seats?” Ildaria asked uncertainly.
“Oh! Yeah, yeah,” Zanipolo said suddenly, and nodded. “I know what you mean. Those seats they’ve brought out with the washing and drying thingies in them.”
“Sì,” Santo rumbled. “I was told that they would have considered toilet paper to be barbaric and—”
“Hello,” Jess growled, not interested in the toiletry habits of Atlanteans. Or anyone else, really. Glaring at Ildaria, she pointed out, “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Zanipolo did,” Santo said solemnly.
Jess peered at him uncertainly. “All Zanipolo said was that Atlantis had toilet paper.”
“Sì, which is wrong,” he informed her, just adding to her frustration. She really didn’t want another go-round on potty talk.
“What Santo means,” Raffaele said, appearing to recognize her mounting irritation, “is that it was Zanipolo’s way of saying that Atlantis had the advanced technology to create immortals, and did,” he explained quietly, and when she turned to him, he added, “Although it was not wholly on purpose. Originally, they were just trying to develop a noninvasive way to heal injuries and fight disease.”
“Noninvasive,” Jess murmured, and then her eyes widened. “The nanos!”
“Sì,” Raffaele said with surprise. “How did you—?”
“Ildaria mentioned them earlier. She said nanos decided we were life mates, but didn’t explain what exactly the nanos are.”
“Ah.” Raffaele nodded. “Well, they are tiny bioengineered robots that are injected into the bloodstream. They use blood for . . . well, everything,” he said wryly. “To travel through the body, to propel themselves, to effect repairs, and even to create new nanos if more are necessary to tend to matters.”
“Aye,” Vasco said now. “The scientists of Atlantis were brilliant. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how ye look at it—after developing the nanos and getting them to work with the body, the bastards didn’t bother to program them right.”
“What do you mean?” Jess asked with surprise, but it was Raffaele who answered.
“He means that rather than program nanos for each individua
l possible wound or sickness that might occur, the scientists made one program with a map of both a healthy male and a healthy female body at their peak condition, and instructed the nanos to keep their host at that peak condition.”
“It was only once they started poking them into people that they realized what they’d inadvertently done,” Vasco said dryly, and when she peered at him in question, he explained. “The human body is at its peak at between twenty-five and thirty years old. After that, it’s all downhill.”
“So, if one of the people they tested it on was older . . .” Jess said slowly.
“The nanos repaired the damage aging had caused and they became young again,” Raffaele finished.
“But that wasn’t the only surprise they encountered,” Zanipolo said now. “The nanos were supposed to deactivate, break down, and be flushed from the body when they finished their work. But between air pollution, pollens in the air, and the traces of viruses on every surface . . .” He shrugged. “They just never deactivate.”
Jess bit her lip, putting together everything she’d learned, and then said, “I suppose they need a lot of blood to do their work?”
“More than a human body can produce,” Raffaele said quietly. “In Atlantis, they dealt with that issue through transfusions. But when Atlantis fell—”
“How did it fall?” Jess interrupted with curiosity. A society as advanced as that shouldn’t have fallen easily. At least, she didn’t think it should.
“Earthquakes or some such thing,” Vasco said with a frown. “Apparently, Atlantis slid into the ocean. Everyone was lost except for those who had been experimented on with the nanos.”
Jess smiled wryly. One point to Mother Nature, then. No technology could beat her.
“The survivors,” Raffaele continued, “found themselves crawling out of the ruins to join a world that wasn’t nearly as advanced as theirs.”
Eyes narrowing, Jess tilted her head and asked, “How is that possible? I mean, how could the Atlanteans have been so advanced when everyone around them was still living in huts and huddling around fires?”
“Apparently, Atlantis was isolated from the rest of the world by mountains and ocean. It discouraged anyone from approaching them and left them to develop at their own speed, which was obviously faster than everyone else.”
“Okaaayyy.” Jess drew the word out with disbelief. “But what about the Atlanteans? If they were messing with nanos, they must have had modern forms of transportation that could have got around those mountains and the ocean. So, again, why were they so isolated? Why didn’t they go looking outside of Atlantis?”
She watched the others peer blankly at each other, and then Raffaele admitted, “I don’t know. My grandparents never explained that and I didn’t think to ask. I guess I shall have to do that when next I see them.”
“Your grandparents?” Jess squeaked.
“Sì,” Raffaele smiled faintly. “They were among the people the nanos were tested on in Atlantis.”
Jess remained silent for a moment, but her mind wasn’t silent. It was squawking up a storm. Dear God, the man was over two thousand years old and still had grandparents who lived! Most people she knew started losing them under twenty, in grade school even. One grandma or grandpa would have a heart attack or something and pass here, and another would follow a few years later, maybe of cancer. And from what she could tell, most people had lost them all by the time they were fifty. Yet, Raffaele still had his. And they’d been alive since before the fall of Atlantis, whenever that had happened. Obviously, before Christ since Raffaele was older than that.
Unbelievable, she thought. As unbelievable as everything else she’d been told, she supposed. And yet Jess believed it all. It was just too nuts to be made up. Besides, she doubted they’d all got together to come up with such a fantastical story.
Sighing, she shook her head and thought that if they lived that long, they definitely deserved the name immortals. The thought made her frown.
“So, you can’t die,” she said now. “These nanos will just repair any injury, and fight off any disease?”
“We can die,” Vasco said even as Raffaele opened his mouth to respond. “We don’t age, we don’t even get sick, and killing us is hard to do, but can be done.”
Jess narrowed her eyes and guessed, “Beheading?” That was how zombies were killed, she thought, and noted the winces from the others around the bed.
“We are not zombies,” Ildaria said stiffly.
“And beheading won’t necessarily kill us if ye stick the head back on the neck quick enough,” Vasco informed her, and then added, “The nanos heal it up. I had it happen once.”
“What?” Jess asked with dismay, and he nodded his head, which didn’t fall off his neck, despite having once been removed.
“Aye. I was executed for piracy around about 1535,” he explained. “I was just a lad of sixteen at the time. Considered a man then, but really, too stupid to be out on me own. I hooked up with a bad lot o’ pirates. We got caught and boarded on my first voyage with them, and were all executed. But me brothers took me body away right fast and put me back together. The nanos did the rest.” Grinning at her horrified expression, he lifted his chin to show her his neck. “Not even a scar.”
Jess shifted to her knees and moved to the edge of the bed to get a closer look at his neck. But there was nothing to see, not even the hint of a scar. His skin was as smooth as a baby’s bottom, she noted with wonder.
“Obviously, you did not learn your lesson,” Raffaele said stiffly, drawing Jess’s gaze his way. “You still sail a pirate ship and act the rogue.”
When Vasco lowered his head to eye Raffaele narrowly, Jess dropped back to sit on the bed with a sigh. Hoping to prevent the two men from arguing again, she asked the first question that came to mind. “So, if beheading doesn’t do it, how can you be killed?”
The men continued to glare at each other over her head and it was Ildaria who said, “Beheading can kill us if the head isn’t returned to the body quickly enough. But the surest way to kill us is fire.”
Jess glanced to her with surprise. “The nanos don’t protect you against that?”
“The nanos will heal us if we survive a fire,” Zanipolo assured her. “But their one flaw is that they’re highly flammable. And they make us highly flammable too. Fire is death to us.”
“Oh.” Jess considered that and then said, “So, the nanos weren’t programmed to give you fangs and . . . stuff,” she finished, waving one hand vaguely.
“No,” Raffaele assured her, withdrawing from his war of glares with Vasco to smile at her faintly. “That evolved after the fall. The world the survivors found themselves in after Atlantis . . . Well, they obviously didn’t have blood banks and intravenous gear. There was no way to get the blood they needed except from the people the Atlanteans found themselves living among.”
“Surely a couple of your scientists survived and could cobble together something?” she protested.
Santo shook his head. “None of the individuals given the nanos were scientists, or even doctors.”
“Of course they weren’t,” Jess said dryly, thinking that the people who had got the nanos had been little better than lab rats to these scientists who wouldn’t have risked trying them out themselves until they had them perfect. Their loss, she supposed. Only those lab rats had survived.
“So?” she said now, and prompted, “The Atlanteans were suddenly in a new, much less advanced world, and . . . ?”
“Well . . .” Raffaele frowned, seeming to need a moment to regather his thoughts, and then said, “The nanos had been programmed to keep their hosts at their peak condition. They needed blood to do that. So, they took it upon themselves to ensure their hosts could get the blood they needed. To do that, they forced a sort of evolution on their hosts.”
“Like the fangs to get the blood they needed,” Jess suggested.
“Aye,” Vasco said. “And increased strength, and speed to be better hunters.
”
“Better hearing and sight,” Ildaria put in.
“Plus, amazing night vision too,” Zanipolo added. “And the ability to read the minds of, and even control, their quarry so that they could get what they needed to survive.”
“That was before blood banks, though,” Raffaele said, taking up the thread again. “When we didn’t have a choice. Now that society has progressed to having blood banks and such, most of us are socially evolved enough not to want to bite mortals to get the blood we need. We prefer to get it through bagged blood from our blood banks, supplied by voluntary donors. In fact, North America and South America have both outlawed feeding any other way except via bagged blood,” he announced, and then added, “Except in an emergency or cases of consent between an immortal and a mortal lover.”
Jess frowned at Raffaele’s words, knowing how they would affect Vasco and Ildaria. It seemed obvious Raffaele had no idea why Vasco did what he did and that he did it in international waters, so wasn’t actually rogue. It was equally obvious that he didn’t think much of the man because of that, and was poking him. Deciding it was high time he knew, Jess said, “Raffaele, Vasco isn’t—”
She paused and glanced sharply at Vasco when he touched her arm to get her attention. The contact had sent a shaft of awareness and excitement shooting through her arm. They were both silent for a moment, staring at each other, and then Vasco cleared his throat, and smiled at her gently.
“Ye needn’t defend me, lass. I don’t give a rat’s arse what he thinks o’ me.” Turning his gaze to Raffaele then, his voice grew chilly as he added, “And ye’re not wholly correct, Notte. Biting under any situation is considered rogue behavior here now. The emergency and lover provisos were redacted by our Council.”
Raffaele stiffened and frowned. “Really?”
“Sí. So, I hope ye’ve not bitten our beautiful lass, here. If so, and an Enforcer or someone from the Council reads it from her mind, you might find yourself on a pyre o’ burning wood.”