Ben grabbed Sadia’s hand from his mouth. “Who told you that? Tenzin and I are not married.”
“But Baba said you love each other special like Baba and Mama love each other.” She wrinkled her nose. “Do you kiss Tenzin on the mouth?”
“Sadia, that’s none of your business.”
The little girl giggled. “You do.” She flipped back in Ben’s arms and looked at Tenzin upside down. “Tenzin, why didn’t you come visit me before this?”
“We’ve been very busy, habibti.” She pinched Sadia’s belly. “You’re getting very fast on your bicycle. Are you going to start driving race cars soon?”
“No.” Sadia giggled and her belly shook. “Are you going to marry Ben? If you marry Ben, I think then we would be sisters.”
“Sadia,” Ben protested, “will you stop asking if we’re going to get—”
“Marriage is a patriarchal social contract designed to commodify women’s sexuality and reproduction,” Tenzin said. “I don’t ascribe to it.”
Sadia righted herself and frowned at Ben. “What does that mean?”
Ben shot Tenzin a dirty look. “Marriage is also a very special promise that people like Baba and Mama make when they love each other and choose to be a family forever.”
Sadia immediately looked at Tenzin for confirmation.
“Yes,” Tenzin said. “And that as well.”
After general greetings and updates from Sadia about her school, her friends, her dog Percy, and her trampoline, the little girl was supposed to go to sleep. They had created an unusual school schedule for her, allowing her to keep to more of a nocturnal life, but she still attended traditional classes a few days a week. Instead of bedtime, Sadia led them to the kitchen, where a meal had been prepared.
“You promise?” Sadia sat on Tenzin’s lap and stared into her eyes, pressing her small hands to her cheeks as she bid a reluctant goodnight. “Promise promise.”
“I will be here when you wake up in the morning,” Tenzin said. “And you can come visit me.”
“I know you wake up in the day like Mama.”
“I do.”
“So I’m gonna see you in the morning? You’re not flying away?”
“I swear on my favorite sword,” Tenzin said. “I will be here when you wake.”
Sadia’s head fell back. “When are you going to teach me sword fighting? It’s been foreeeeeever since you told me.”
Oh dear. She could almost feel Giovanni’s accusing gaze. “I think I hear Dema calling for you.”
Sadia turned to look, and from across the large kitchen table, Tenzin could feel Beatrice’s cold eyes on her.
Throughout the light meal, Tenzin had deliberately kept her distance from the water vampire. Ben was sitting next to his aunt, speaking quietly with his arm around her as he ate the traditional Mexican food Beatrice and her grandmother had prepared.
* * *
Sadia slid off Tenzin’s lap and went to Dema, the dreaded bedtime enforcer.
“Sweet dreams, habibti.”
“Sweet dreams, Tenzin!”
Conversations hummed around her, friends and family catching up and enjoying the occasion of guests to talk about news, family gossip, and interesting bits of life. Tenzin was among the conversation, but still hovering on the outside; it was a familiar position.
Despite Beatrice’s coolness, Tenzin could feel her own blood living in the woman, feel the ancient tie. Tenzin had been mated to Beatrice’s sire, though it wasn’t a love match; it had been a practical and political arrangement. Nevertheless, the blood was there, an eternal link with someone who now burned with anger at Tenzin for making an impossible and inevitable choice.
This was why Tenzin was trying to be cautious with Benjamin. Blood bonds were tricky things, and there were few rules to them. She could feel a nascent mating bond forming between them, so she’d pulled back.
They had enough changes to deal with; a blood bond was a complication at this point in their relationship.
The greedy part of her wanted it, wanted to bite into him, steal his amnis and life, devour him and captivate Benjamin until he was in her thrall.
But the new path Tenzin had turned down when Ben’s immortal life started kept her from trapping him. He was still painfully young. Though he’d always been an old soul, his immortal character was still emerging. Ben loved her, but would that love turn and change over decades? Who would he be in fifty years? One hundred years? A thousand? What did “choosing to be a family forever” mean when you actually lived forever?
“Tenzin?”
She looked up and saw Giovanni standing in the doorway. She was sitting at the table alone; everyone had left while she was lost in thought. “What did I miss?”
“We’re going to the library to review what I’ve found so far about the scroll,” Giovanni said. “Join us?”
“Yes.” She stood and followed him out of the kitchen and up the stairs where they had turned most of the second floor of their mansion into a large research library, half with traditional collections of books and the other half with vampire-specific technology that could handle Beatrice’s amnis.
“It’s good to see you.” Giovanni put an arm around her. “My son looks happy.”
“He should be.”
Giovanni smiled. “And so does my friend.”
Tenzin paused on the stairs. “I would kill anyone who threatened his happiness or life. He would not approve of that, but I know you understand.”
Giovanni hung his hands in his pockets. “I do.”
“Is there peace between us, Giovanni di Spada?” She used the name he’d gone by when he was an assassin sent to kill her. The vampire’s startling blue-green eyes had reminded Tenzin of her own child’s, and she had spared his life, forming an unusual and unbreakable bond over three hundred years old.
He looked at the ground, then back at her. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
“To her then?”
“She understands.”
“In her head perhaps, but not in her heart.”
“The one will catch up with the other. I promise. Come on.” He nudged her toward the landing. “Let’s go talk about an urban legend.”
“The bone scroll, if it exists, dates back to an ancient vampire known by the name Ash Mithra.” Giovanni projected an image on the wall that looked like a long-haired monk or holy man drawn in a flat, medieval style. “This is an artist’s rendering, of course. No one knows what he looked like, though some stories say that he originally came from Eastern Africa, in a territory along the Red Sea.”
“How old?” Ben asked.
“No one knows. He would have been contemporaries of Kato, Ziri, and Arosh but likely predates them all.”
“So old,” Ben said.
“Very old.” He clicked a button and another picture appeared. “And this is an artist’s rendering of the bone scroll.”
“It looks like a bamboo scroll to me,” Ben said. “Like most of the ones in Penglai.”
“Only this one was made from polished vampire arm bones.” Giovanni was frowning at the screen.