Night's Reckoning

by Elizabeth Hunter

  “What are you talking about?” Her voice was scary quiet.

  “I mean I’m not willing to spend my life being at your beck and call. I thought we could be something different, but at the end of the day, you’re always going to see me as your servant.” He brushed his thumb over the small of her back where her shirt had ridden up, enjoying the buzz of skin contact while he still could. “I can’t blame you for it. That’s just who you are. And you’re probably right. What you’ve seen in your life compared to what I’ve seen—”

  “Benjamin—”

  “This is not your fault. I’m not trying to lay blame. This isn’t anyone’s fault. Or maybe it’s mine.” He nodded. “It’s probably mine.”

  “I do not consider you a servant.”

  “Of course you do. You always have. I just had… delusions of grandeur maybe?” He let out a bitter laugh. “You haven’t changed. It’s been ten years, and you haven’t changed a bit.”

  Her eyes went wide. “You’re wrong.”

  “I don’t think I am,” he said quietly. “But I’m not a kid anymore. I need to do something with my life. I need to get a life that’s not yours. So I can’t do this anymore.”

  He released her and she floated away, her face frozen in shock.

  “I’ll finish this job,” he said. “You don’t have to pay me. In fact, I don’t want you to pay me. I don’t want you or Zhang to pay me. Just… pay Fabia. I’ll finish here, then I think I’m going back to Rome for a while. You can take your time getting your stuff from New York.”

  Her voice was wooden. “You’re not going back to New York?”

  He swallowed hard. New York was him and Tenzin. New York was their loft and their roof garden and bickering about weapons and training together and going out for noodles at midnight at the Tibetan place she loved. It was dancing when Louis Armstrong came on the radio and drinking whiskey at Gavin’s pub after a midnight movie.

  Ben said, “I don’t think New York is for me anymore.”

  “You’re not making sense,” she said. “And I’m going to forget you said this, because you’re going to regret it as soon as you walk away.”

  The smile he forced out hurt his face. “I’m not the one who walked away.”

  She had no response to that.

  “‘Tell me to send them away.’” He repeated words he’d confessed on a rooftop in a drunken stupor. “You know I will. I always will.”

  Tenzin took a step back, her eyes fixed on his face.

  “‘Don’t do this.’” He said the words he’d begged on the ship before she’d run away again. Run away from everything they’d lived through and survived. “I even said please that time.”

  All she could do was shake her head.

  “Let’s have one more dance when this is done, okay?” Ben cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. “When we find the sword, when we finish the job, promise me one dance before you take off, okay?”

  Because if there was one thing he knew, she would always take off.

  She said, “You’re being foolish.”

  He backed toward the door. “And you’re being patronizing. But I’m no longer surprised or offended by that.” He took a deep breath. “It’s okay. I’ll see you, Tiny.”

  Ben locked his doors—he double set his locks—but he dreamed about her anyway. They were dancing in the alley behind the restaurant in San Juan. The warm tropical breeze surrounded them, wrapping around them as they held each other close. Music filled the air, and her arms were around his neck.

  He felt her lips against his throat.

  “I love you.”

  Her fangs pierced his skin and she drank from him. The euphoria was swift and overwhelming. He fell to his knees, weak from the pleasure of her bite. He gripped her harder, melding their bodies together. He gasped for air. He called her name, but she didn’t release him. He felt the cobblestones under his knees.

  “I love you.”

  He gasped her name. He cried for more. He would give her anything. He would give her everything.

  The cobblestones dug into his back. Blood dripped from the wound at his neck. He was bleeding everywhere. Blood leaked from his pores. It fell like tears from his eyes.

  “I love you.”

  Tenzin stared at the churning wake behind the ship. She perched on the top railing near the radio equipment and the antennae for the bridge. The sun had set an hour before; Ben was sleeping somewhere. Kadek, Cheng, and Johari had started the recovery of Zhang’s cargo.

  “I can’t do this anymore.”

  He was a foolish, foolish human, and she’d have to be gracious when he realized how wrong he had been. She’d been wrong too. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t nearly ready for the plans she had made for them. He would learn. He would come back. And she would forgive him.

  Eventually.

  “You can’t see what I’m going to do, or what I want, because as many years as you’ve been alive, there’s only ever been one me.”

  He had surprised her. That didn’t happen very often. She took to the air. She wanted to check on her father and her house. The rest of them could manage without her for one night.

  Flying from the ship to the shore, she emptied her mind and allowed the air to fill her senses. She was surrounded by it, buoyed by the elation of space and the swift currents of wind. Even a rainstorm over Hangzhou didn’t slow her down.

  “You haven’t changed. It’s been ten years, and you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  That stupid, stupid man! Why were males such sentimental fools? Her sire. Giovanni. Cheng. All of them ruled by their hearts. Didn’t they realize the moods of the heart shifted more swiftly than the wind?

  “You never change.”

  The memory of another fight burst into her mind, and Tenzin stopped in midair, seized by the pain of memory. Nima had been in the garden and she had been weeping. Her eyes were red and her nose was congested. Tenzin had thought it was from illness. It wasn’t.

  “You never change.” Nima’s voice wasn’t angry anymore. It was different. Softer.

  Defeated.

  “I am a vampire; I cannot change.”

  “I’m not talking about the outside, Xīngān. I am talking about who you are. Your mind and heart. I cannot spend eternity with someone who will never change.”

  “You would rather my love for you change like the wind? Like one season turning into another?”

  Nima shook her head. “I will change and you will not. Then the person you loved will be gone, and you will leave. I will be alone. For eternity, I will be alone.”

  But she had changed. She had changed after Stephen was killed. She had changed even more when Nima died. And knowing Ben…

  They were wrong. All of them were wrong.

  Tenzin made it back to Shanghai in less than three hours. It was some of the fastest flying she’d ever done, and she didn’t remember half of it. It was as if part of herself had moved through the air while the other was lost in memory.

  You were.

  You are.

  You will be.

  The whispers at the back of her mind were quiet, but they grew louder the more she thought about the past, which was why she did not think about the past. She thought about the future. She had made plans that included Benjamin. For now, those plans would be put on hold.

  Don’t think of it.

  For now, she would focus on the job at hand, finding the Laylat al Hisab. Bringing peace to Arosh and Zhang and staving off a conflict she could feel brewing across the Old World.

  She landed in the courtyard of her house and saw her sire sitting at a table, talking with Jinpa and drinking tea. He looked up and smiled when she approached.

  “Min zuvu.” Zhang called her his little bird. “What brings you home?”

  It was an endearment Tenzin had once used with her daughter, who had died from a fever before the age of three. She both hated and loved the term.

  “A prog
ress report.” She wiped the pain of memory from her mind and sat cross-legged on the cushion across from Zhang. She waited while Jinpa fetched her a pot of tea. “And wondering why you are here.”

  “I feel I am needed.”

  “For?”

  Zhang took a drink of tea while Jinpa poured Tenzin’s.

  “The Laylat al Hisab,” he said, “was only ever a symbol.”

  “Symbols are important.” Tenzin sipped her tea and nodded to Jinpa, who left for the kitchen.

  “They are.” He waited for Tenzin to set her cup down. “Who sent the earth vampire?”

  Tenzin wasn’t surprised he knew about Johari; she was surprised he didn’t know who sent her. “Saba.”

  “Do you trust her?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Zhang sat completely motionless. “She won’t give you reason to distrust her until it is too late.”

  “It could be that Saba has relented.”

  “No. She never approved of Arosh’s peace agreement with me. She believes too much peace is dangerous.”

  “Is she correct?” Tenzin thought about the lawless areas of Central Asia where there were constant turf wars between immortals jockeying for power, resources, and influence over human governments. “When you ruled in Kashgar, it was peaceful.”

  “Then there was war and Arosh ruled there.”

  Tenzin took another sip of tea. “Yet between those wars, there was extended peace, and both you and Arosh kept a watchful eye on those territories. Now no one pays attention to them and there is corruption, violence, and a constant immortal struggle for power.”

  Zhang sat motionless for a long time. “I will think about what you have said.”

  “You should,” she said. “Progress on the shipwreck is going well. We have found the ship, and the humans have documented it. It will bring honor to the scholars at the university.”

  “That is excellent news.” Zhang smiled. “I am pleased they will receive recognition for their work.”

  “So far there is nothing that would alert them to anything being out of the ordinary. We do not have to worry. And Benjamin…” She surprised herself by stopping.

  “What about young Vecchio?”

  He is leaving me.

  Tenzin swallowed the knot in her throat. “He is coordinating between the vampire team and the human one, smoothing relations between the two of them to make sure communication flows appropriately and the recovery is seamless. He organized a party on the ship for better relations.”

  “A clever idea. It seems he is an invaluable addition to the team,” Zhang said. “You were wise to insist on his presence.”

  “Invaluable.” Tenzin picked up her tea. “Yes, he is invaluable.”

  21

  Ben watched Johari surface in the early-morning hours. The survey of the wreck had lasted three days while the human team took 3-D images of the wreck site and documented everything by video and photograph as well as sonar scan. Ben suspected that they had noticed various storage jars going missing from accessible parts of the wreck, but they didn’t say a word.

  There was nothing more they could document from images, so official removal of artifacts had finally begun, and Cheng had brought Johari down to the wreck to move the sediment as delicately as she could.

  “What is it this time?” Ben called down while Kadek’s men lowered a basket made for human rescue.

  “Timbers from the hull,” Johari said. “Are there tanks large enough?”

  “Yep. Fabia will want to do wood analysis if she can.” According to Fabia, letting any object dry out or shocking it with freshwater would cause damage, so it would be the job of the university to desalinate them properly. The holding tanks were only temporary.

  What Cheng was doing with the artifacts he’d taken for himself, Ben didn’t know, and he wasn’t asking. He’d come to terms with his role for this job. He had given Zhang his word that he’d finish the job, so he would. Anything beyond that wasn’t his concern. His job was to recover the sword or whatever was left of it and return it to Penglai.

  That was it. And that would be the end.

  He paced along the edge of the deck, enjoying the whip of wind across his chest. He’d been diving in the morning, taken a nap to recharge, and woken to find his cabin sweltering from an afternoon heat wave. He stripped down to a pair of board shorts and walked up to the deck to observe the vampires and take advantage of the breeze.

  He hadn’t seen Tenzin for two nights, and he hadn’t looked for her.

  Cheng’s men used the crane to bring the long timbers up from the surface and onto the deck, shouting orders at each other while they worked. Ancient wooden pieces passed the modern metal hull of the research vessel. Boards that had been hewn in East Africa and had once sailed the ocean were loaded and handled like porcelain as the sailors moved them from the basket to the saltwater tanks.

  Ben heard Johari dive again as Cheng surfaced. He was carrying two large storage jars in a bamboo basket. The area around him was glowing green from floodlights they had secured around the dive site.

  “Hoist!” Cheng yelled, and the men came scurrying.

  Ben walked over to see what they had already brought up. Fabia was overseeing the tanks, moving and bracing each jar with whatever she could find to keep it stable.

  “How’s it going?”

  “I can’t complain,” she said. “They’re moving fast, but they have an earth vampire who can literally move the sediment around each jar, so there’s little to no damage. Look at this.”

  She pointed toward yellow tape that had been tied around the handle of one jar. “It has depth readings and measurements on it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that once we collect all the data and the scans, we’ll be able to match each jar to its location on the ship.”

  “Wow. So they’re not just taking stuff out.”

  “They’re documenting it. It’s extraordinary. The most careful human excavation can’t match these results.”

  Her confidence reassured Ben, who was trying to ignore Tenzin’s warning about the earth vampire.

  “Johari might be trustworthy, but there will be no assumption from me. Watch her and wait. Don’t suppose that we are all working toward the same goal, Benjamin.”

  Nothing about the woman said she wasn’t on their team. She was doing an extraordinary job with not a single complaint, unlike Kadek, who regularly grumbled about any task Ben asked of him.

  Still, he couldn’t criticize any of their work. The artifacts recovered were in better shape than he’d hoped, and the farther they went under the sediment, the better they’d been preserved. Some of the glass and metal objects looked like a simple clean and polish was all they needed.

  Fabia had explained that they needed far more than that, but to Ben’s eye, what they had found was extraordinary.

  Storage jar after storage jar of intricate glass objects. Lamps and bottles. Bowls and platters. All in brilliant colors with gold trim and painted filigree. Silver plates and goblets. They hadn’t found any gold yet, nor any jewels, but they’d barely started.

  Ben was making notes about the artifacts already brought up when Kadek climbed over the rail, following another basket of storage jars.

  He took a towel from one of the crew, wiped off his face, and walked over to Ben. “Johari is invaluable.”

  “Good.” Ben tucked his notebook under his arm. “So things are moving quickly?”

  “If we had an earth vampire like her who could move that comfortably in water, we’d work every job twice as fast. Maybe three times. She can move the sediment without disturbing the visibility too. I don’t know how she does that.”

  “She’s the daughter of Saba,” Ben muttered, watching Johari climb onto the deck. “I imagine Saba’s daughters are taught very strict control over their element.”

  “She’s powerful too.”

  “Her mother is an ancient.”

  “I suppose you
’re right.” Kadek shook his head. “Nothing that looks like a chest so far. Nothing with dimensions like a sword. No glass ingots. I don’t know why Tenzin was so fixed on them.”

  “We’ll keep looking. You’re still working on the first layer.”

  “True.”

  Ben said, “Any ideas how we’re going to explain to the human crew how all this has been taken out without disturbance?”

  Kadek laughed as he walked back toward Johari and the crew. “That’s your job, Vecchio. I’ll be resting by then.”

  “Thanks.” Ben heard something flutter overhead and looked up.

  Tenzin was perched on the top railing of the ship’s measurement tower. He saw her hair moving in the breeze, but otherwise she was motionless.

  Fabia looked up. “How’s all that?”

  He could be generous now that he’d come to a decision. “It’s fine.”

  “Sure it is.”

  Ben had told Fabia he’d decided to return to Rome with her after the job finished and that he was seriously considering the job Ronan had offered working for Emil Conti. Fabia hadn’t said much, but she’d nodded a lot and had looked skeptical.

  Just like she was looking now.

  Ben started taking notes again. “I know you think I’m not going to follow through, but I am. I’m done. I need to move forward.”

  “You say that,” she said, “and yet I don’t think either of you looks any happier or more relieved. Do you know Tenzin came and sat with me at dinner the other night?”

  “What?” Ben looked up. “What did she say?”

  “Nothing. Literally nothing. She just sat next to me and ate.” Fabia shook her head. “It was strange.”

  Ben frowned and lowered his voice. “Was Johari around?”

  “She and Kadek were talking about artifact removal at the next table.”

  He shrugged. “She was spying. It’s what she does. She’s suspicious of everyone.”

  “Then why didn’t she sit with them? It wasn’t exactly a secret conversation.”