Tenzin looked behind her and saw Ben and Daniel standing at the door of the stone church, a leather-wrapped bundle still cradled in Ben’s arm.
Tenzin looked back where Saba and Arosh had been, but they were gone, swallowed into the earth like the myths they were.
With only minutes to find shelter, Tenzin flew down and grabbed Daniel by the collar. Then she tugged Ben into the air, and her heart felt whole again.
“Come on.” She wouldn’t panic. Panic produced nothing useful. “We only have a few minutes to get home.”
Ben wrapped his arm around her waist in midair and moved them so fast Tenzin knew that humans on the ground, looking up into the morning sky, wouldn’t believe what they were seeing.
He was stunning and powerful, a creature of immortal grace so elegantly dangerous that her heart gave two thumps just from looking at his profile. He turned and smiled at her; he’d heard the sound.
“Almost home,” he mouthed, the sound of his words whipped away by the streaking wind around them.
“Always home.” She gripped his hand. “With you.”
Minutes before dawn, they landed in the compound and took shelter from the deadly rays of the sun. Minutes after that, both Ben and Daniel were passed out in the middle of the entryway in the main house.
Beatrice came down and saw the two vampires sprawled on the floor, one of whom was clutching a bundle roughly the size of an American football. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“Is my hair burned?” She inspected the ends she could see, certain she’d smelled Arosh’s flames singeing her.
“I don’t think— Oh, there’s a little spot in the back.” Beatrice patted her head. “Hardly even noticeable.”
“That bastard.” She looked down at the men, then at the windows that would eventually expose them as the sun rose. “Why are they so big?”
“Don’t lie, you like his height and his muscles.” Beatrice bent down and grabbed Daniel by the ankles. “I’ll drag this one into the library if you want to hide in the closet with Ben.”
“It’s not ideal.” She glanced at the bone scroll. “But I have a lot to think about, so I guess that will do.”
“Good luck.” Beatrice was still lugging Daniel toward the light-safe room. “Sadia is going to be awake in an hour, maximum. And I have a feeling she’s going to have a lot of questions.”
Tenzin opened the closet door and pushed and pulled Ben into its safety. “Maybe today is a good day to pretend to be sleeping.”
39
Ben sat at the library table with his uncle at his shoulder, examining the scroll that had caused so much drama.
It was over five feet in length when it was stretched out, with the bones split, polished, and woven delicately with sinew that had grown stiff with age. Giovanni had used subtle heat with his fingers and palms to unroll the scroll to its full length without damaging it, but it still needed some restoration work.
The writing on the scroll was both carved and inked, meaning that even in places where the ink had faded, the writing was still intelligible. The leather casing in the cool, dry cave had protected it beyond what Ben could have imagined for anything so ancient.
“Do you recognize the language?” Ben asked.
His uncle stared at the scroll for a long time. “No,” he finally said. “I recognize the Ge’ez on the back, of course, and this language is in an old cuneiform writing system that was in use in Persia prior to the first century BC, but the language itself?” Giovanni shook his head.
“So there’s no way of knowing what the original language is saying?” Ben asked. “The Ge’ez translation on the back—”
“Will definitely be helpful, but I need to take pictures and take them to a classical Persian specialist. This may simply be a dialect of Old Persian I’m not familiar with, but I’m not recognizing any words at all. An expert in the writing system should be able to transcribe the language somewhat accurately, and then we might be able to decipher it or link it to something more familiar.”
“Or we could depend on the expertise of the Aksumite scribes who translated it on the back.” Ben flipped up the top edge of the scroll to reveal the writing system still commonly used in the Horn of Africa. “That’s probably going to be the easiest.”
Giovanni looked at him with annoyance. “Easiest? Possibly. Most accurate? There’s no way of knowing. Translations from the original script are necessary.”
“Okay, you go ahead and work on that.” Ben rolled the top of the scroll down so he could see the blackened marks where the ancient scroll had been translated. “But I’m going to do what Saba suggested.”
“Which is?”
“Learn to read Ge’ez,” Ben said. “Read the scroll. Try to understand it and what Ash Mithra was attempting to preserve.”
“I admire you.” Giovanni leaned on the library table. “I cannot lie—the energy coming from this scroll is unsettling. You really feel nothing of the sort?”
Ben shook his head. “I mean, I definitely feel kind of in awe of anything that’s survived for this long, you know? And it’s weird as hell to have a scroll made from human bones. But I don’t feel uncomfortable or hypnotized or anything like what you and Tenzin have described.”
“Interesting,” Giovanni muttered. “The blood of Mithra indeed.”
“Gio, we don’t even know—”
“We do.” Giovanni set down his magnifying glass and looked up. “She wouldn’t have lied about something like that. She knows I can confirm it.”
Ben blinked. “You can confirm it?”
“I can confirm your mother’s true name,” he said softly. “And Saba would know that—should you want to explore it—I could do a complete ancestry.” Giovanni slid his hands in his pockets. “If you want.”
Did he want? Ben shook his head. “I know who my family is.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know,” his uncle said. “With wanting to understand her.”
“I understand that—whatever shit happened in her life—she had a kid,” Ben said. “And chose not to protect him. I lucked out when she gave me to you. If she hadn’t, I’d probably be dead.”
Giovanni shook his head. “I don’t believe that. I have no doubt that whatever you chose to do in life, you would have been successful at it. Your character was already rooted when I adopted you.”
“Rooted, maybe.” Ben shrugged. “But you’re the one who raised me. Taught me how to be a man. Taught me what family was supposed to be.”
Giovanni’s hand spread and hovered over the scroll. “Whatever this is. Whatever power or knowledge it may hold” —his uncle looked up and met his gaze— “know that I will never fear you. Never, Benjamin.”
How had he known the dread Ben hadn’t even been able to articulate? “Giovanni—”
“And I agree with Saba. She couldn’t have given it to the keeping of a better vampire.”
Ben voiced the question that had been haunting him since he spoke to Saba in the cave. “Do you think she turned me because of this?”