Elizabeth Hunter - This Same Earth

She sighed and smiled, closing her eyes as she relaxed into him.

“‘Tu sei tutta bella, amica mia, e non v’è difetto alcuno in te,’” he murmured.

“Hmm?” She roused herself from drifting. “What does that mean?”

He tucked her head under his chin. “It means you’re beautiful.”

She smiled and turned her face to press her cheek to his chest.

“Do you dream? I’ve always wondered that.”

She heard him let out a soft chuckle. “I do sometimes. Not often though.”

“What do you dream about?”

He hummed a little, still sounding sleepy as he played with the ends of her hair. “The past. The future. You.”

She had no idea how to respond to that. I dream about you a lot, too. Have for years. You’re usually naked.

“So.” She cleared her throat a little. “I’ve been reading Ioan’s book about vampire biology. I remember you said he was a doctor. It’s fascinating.” Speaking of naked, did you pose for some of those diagrams? I’m pretty sure I recognize your abs.

He reached his left arm around to the table where she had set the manuscript.

“Ah, I remember helping him with this one. Deirdre did some of the sketches. Excellent resource.”

“I’m sure you get tired of answering all my questions, so I thought I’d just take advantage of the library since we have a few days here.”

He smiled. “I don’t get tired of answering because you ask good questions. So feel free to take advantage of me any time you like.”

She swatted his arm playfully. “Haha.”

He only chuckled and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “What a good little librarian you are, tesoro .”

“Don’t be patronizing.”

“I’m not. Just teasing you a bit. So, what have you learned, Miss De Novo?”

“That you aren’t immortal, but you are very hard to kill.”

Giovanni nodded. “Yes we are. Fire and losing our head are the only ways I’ve ever heard of.”

“Really? Definitely no wooden stakes, huh?”

He shook his head. “No, though that would take a long time to heal if anyone tried.”

“Unless you’re surrounded by your element, right? Like when you burned Lorenzo and he dove in the water, he knew he would heal faster that way.”

“Yes, though burns still take years to heal completely, unless you’re a fire vampire. But if Carwyn was injured, he could heal very quickly if he went to ground.”

“So Tenzin-”

“Is practically impervious to serious injury unless she’s buried or drowned.”

“Wow.”

“‘Wow’ is a common reaction, yes.”

“And you?”

He shrugged. “Fire feeds me; fire destroys me. It’s a very fine line.”

“So, if you allow yourself to…what do you call it?”

Giovanni chuckled. “Flame up? Manifest fire? Get sparky, as Carwyn likes to say?”

Beatrice quirked her mouth in a wry smile. “Yeah, that.”

He stretched an arm against the headboard. “I’m not going to lie, tesoro , when I allow the fire to take over my body, it feels…heady. It’s intoxicating, and it could be very addictive. It does feed something in me and it does help me heal, but at the same time, it’s very, very dangerous.”

“But you control it, Gio. It doesn’t control you.”

He shrugged. “And oddly, we have my sire to thank for that. Without the years of discipline Andros beat into me, I would probably have destroyed myself long ago.”

She paused for a moment, frowning. “I don’t like feeling grateful to him.”

Giovanni gave her a sad smile. “He made me who I am.”

“You made yourself who you are. I’ve read your journals.”

“I wasn’t a good man for a long time. It was Carwyn and then Ioan who helped to humanize me.”

“And Tenzin. Kind of.”

“Kind of, yes. But nothing like Ioan. He was the finest of us,” he said quietly, slouching in the rumpled bed.

Beatrice wanted to erase the grief she saw fill his eyes, but she knew she couldn’t, so she pulled him over to rest his head in her lap and began running her fingers through his hair like she knew he loved.

“How did you meet him?”

He lay with his head on her thigh, and she listened as he timed his breath to match hers. Finally, he spoke in a soft voice, “My father created me to be his idea of the perfect man: a scholar, an artist, a strategist, a soldier…after he was gone, when I had to make my way in the world, there was little need for strategists, artists or scholars. But there was always a need for soldiers. Especially with the talents and training I had.

“I was a known fire vampire. I knew I needed to make a reputation quickly, and I needed to make it frightening, so I used what Andros had given me, and I became the most efficient assassin and mercenary I could be.”

“Who did you kill?”

“Whoever I was hired to,” he said quietly.

She took a deep breath and tried to reconcile the gentle man she knew with what he was describing. Beatrice had read his journals, but it was so much more brutal to hear the truth from his own lips.

He continued when she did not speak. “After a while, I had built a decent reputation, though I was still targeted regularly. Then I met Tenzin and she wasn’t what I was expecting. At all.”

“Why not?

“Well, I was hired to kill her-”

“What? Tenzin?” Beatrice laughed.

“Ridiculous, I know. She is one of the oldest and most powerful vampires I have ever heard of. But I did not know her reputation when I was hired. I was young-only fifty years old or so. I took the contract, but she is the one who hunted me.”

“Why am I not surprised? Where did she find you?”

“It was in the mountains of southern Siberia, perched in the branches of an evergreen. She jumped on my back like she does, and I was too shocked by her appearance to do anything but try to run away.”

“But she caught you?”

“Oh yes. She laughed and told me that she’d seen me long ago. That we were fated to be great friends, and that we would work together.” He cocked an eyebrow. “We would be more powerful than any other vampires walking the earth.”

“Talk about appealing to your ego.”

He chuckled. “I’m not going to lie, I didn’t believe her about fate, but she was persuasive, and I could see how powerful she was. She’s always known how to get me to do what she wants me to. And then, well, she just knew things. It was Tenzin who took the contract in London that led us to Carwyn. She always seemed to know the exact moment to get out of one situation or into another. Tenzin always… Well, she always…”

He drifted off and she noticed an odd, almost childlike, look on his face.

“Gio? What were you saying about-”

“Why did I go to the library where you worked?”

“What? You went to transcribe that manuscript, remember?”

“Yes.” His eyes lit up. “The manuscript for Tenzin. The one she just had to have copied.”

“Gio?” she whispered, but he could only stare at her in wonder as his head lay on her lap. He reached up to smooth away the frown that had gathered on her forehead and slowly pulled her face down to feather a kiss across her mouth.

“You are my balance in this life. In every life,” he murmured against her lips.

“Gio?”

“ Tu sei il mio amore, ” he said with a brilliant smile.

“I finally learn Latin and you switch to Italian on me, Jacopo? No fair.” She frowned against his insistent lips.

“I don’t want you to get bored.”

“Because that’s so likely, isn’t it?”

He just grinned at her. “Were you bored without me?”

Beatrice didn’t want to answer but knew she should considering how open he was being.