“Not any god you know,” Tenzin said. “But maybe one you never expected.” She held it in her hand, marveling at the weight and the heft of it. Bone wasn’t as light as she’d anticipated. Oiled sinew was strung and stretched, woven through the polished human ivory of Ash Mithra, connecting the work of his eternity into one piece.
“The bone scroll.” Tenzin held it in her own hand, and she didn’t want to let it go. In one instant, the world and all its power opened to her, laying itself at her feet as she realized that this mythical object belonged to her.
It belonged to her.
In that moment, not a single vampire in the world was her equal. Not Zhang. Not Arosh. Not even Saba. None of them could do what she could. None of them held the power that she did.
Not four elements. Five. There had never been only four. A foolish presumption of the infantile West to only consider four. The potential of five elements sparked in her mind.
Wind.
Water.
Fire.
Earth.
* * *
Amnis.
Call it the ether or the void. The space between, which was Tenzin’s true home. She held the potential for all of it in the palm of her hand, her fingers curling over the etched markings that whispered their secrets.
Take me.
Use me.
I am yours.
“Tenzin.” Male arms came around her, and a stubble-roughened cheek brought her back to the cave. “Hey, Tiny.”
Her voice felt rough and unused. “Benjamin.”
“Hey.” His voice was achingly casual, painfully easy. “Why don’t you wrap that back up to keep it safe until we can get it back to Giovanni?”
Her fingers curled over the scroll.
No. It was hers.
“Tiny?” His cheek pressed to hers. “Wrap the bone scroll in the coverings. Please. We don’t want it to get damaged, right?”
In a swift moment of clarity, she wrapped the pile of bones in leather and silk, turned, and shoved it into Ben’s chest. “Take it from me. Don’t ever let me touch it again.”
34
Ben held the scroll in his hands, refusing to even look at it. He didn’t know what kind of trance had overtaken Tenzin in the chamber, but as they walked farther into the tunnel leading away from the Ark chamber, following the smell of fresh air, Daniel kept turning to him.
“Anything?”
“Nothing.” Ben had held the scroll with bare hands and tried to use amnis to manipulate the earth around them or draw water from the canteen they’d brought, but nothing happened. Whatever secrets were held by the bone scroll must have been in the contents of the writings and not the physical scroll itself.
“I can feel that thing,” Daniel said.
The earth vampire had already earned a handsome commission, but Ben was tempted to hire him on full time. He’d opened two doors that Ben hadn’t even been able to see, the rock was cut and set so finely. Without Daniel’s help, Ben knew they’d have been crawling back up through the church.
Ben frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know.” Daniel almost seemed to shudder. “Just… Can you stay back a little bit? There’s something very wrong about it.”
Ben reached for the backpack he’d brought to the site and took it from his shoulder. “Should I put it in my bag?” He didn’t understand what the big deal was. Maybe it was because he was so young, but nothing about the scroll felt any different to him. It was a bit heavier than similar scrolls made of bamboo he’d encountered in Asia, but the construction was similar.
“Don’t put it away,” Tenzin’s voice was low and almost a little strained. “Keep it in your hands.”
Daniel nodded. “Yeah. It feels duller somehow when you hold it.”
“Okay, I guess.” Ben frowned. What was up with the two of them? “Daniel, can you tell which direction we’re going?”
“North, but that’s all I can tell. The path is relatively even.”
As they walked, tunnels broke off and branched in different directions. Ben was depending on Daniel’s inherent sense of direction to get them where they needed to go.
It was pitch-black except for an old flashlight Ben had taken from his backpack and pointed at the ground. It had enough light that it illuminated the tunnels nicely with the enhanced vision that came with immortality. Daniel had more candles, but Tenzin had objected to them; she didn’t want the smoke or the scent, adding that she needed to keep her senses clear.
For what, Ben had no idea.
He heard nothing in the heart of the earth. He smelled nothing but stone, a little bit of damp, and every now and then a touch of frankincense. The silence around them was more than deep; it was profound.
Before him and behind him, however, he could feel his companion’s tension.
“It’s the scroll that’s making you both edgy?”
Daniel shook his head. “For the life of me, I cannot understand how you’re carrying it like that. Something about it makes me want to grab it and run away, but it also makes me want to cry.”
“Cry?”
The vampire’s shoulders shuddered slightly. “Something about it is very unnatural, Ben. That’s the only way I can describe it.”
Feels like a fucking scroll to me. He resisted the urge to put the damn thing away. He kept bumping into corners, and it would be nice to have both his hands back.
“The path leads up,” Tenzin said quietly.
A moment later, the slope started upward.
Ben looked over his shoulder. “How did you know?”
“I felt the air.”
It was going to be a long, long time until he felt as connected to his element as Tenzin was. For her, the air around her was a living organism, a true extension of herself.
For Ben, controlling the air sometimes still felt like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.
“There’s light,” Daniel said. “Just ahead. It’s indirect, so we could just be entering a cavern that leads to another tunnel.”
Halfway toward the light, Tenzin stopped dead in her tracks. “He’s here.”
Ben didn’t need to ask to know who Tenzin was talking about—he could feel the shift in his bones. “They found us.”
“How?” Daniel asked. “We’re returning by a completely different route than we—”
“If Saba always knew the scroll was here,” Ben said, “then she likely knew roughly where the king had hidden it. Maybe she didn’t want to enter a church. Maybe she just didn’t want to go crawling around in tunnels.” Ben looked at Tenzin. “We were wrong. She was just using us as errand boys.”
In the distance, a shadow partially blocked the outline of the doorway.
“Son of Vecchio,” the vampire called down the passage. “Bring Mithra’s scroll to me, and I shall spare your life and the life of your companions.”
Ben heard something at the back of his mind, a tangled rush of whispers that drifted into his mind and slipped away before he could grab them.
Take it.
You are more than he…
The blood of Mithra—
Fly.
We are more than…
Fly.