Tai glanced around the room. “Zhang knows many people in many places.”
“There was a woman there, at the oasis. She was watching me. She knew my name.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought so.” He jerked his head toward Zhang’s rooms. “So she wasn’t one of his people?”
“Not that I know of, but he doesn’t tell me everything.”
“She told me to answer my mail.”
“Ah.” Tai raised a finger. “That I can help you with. It arrived yesterday.” He paused and looked at Ben. “It’s… substantial.”
“I told Chloe just to send the important stuff.”
“And I believe she did.” Tai pursed his lips. “But you have to remember, you knew many vampires in your human life, and you were sired unexpectedly to a very powerful ancient.”
And rumors flew fast and loose among the immortal. “Okay…?”
“Try to remember what our world runs on, Ben.”
Ben shook his head. “Money?”
“Power,” Tai said. “And favors. Both of which you are a source of now.”
“Shit,” he muttered. “Just how many letters am I looking at here?”
“Two hundred and thirty-seven?” Ben tried not to yell into the phone. “Chloe, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Excuse me?” Her tone said she wasn’t having even a little bit of it. “If you recall, I tried talking to you about your mail on a weekly basis. I said something every time I talked to you, and you kept brushing me off. Fabi’s been sending things from Rome. Caspar’s new guy… uh, Zan?”
“Zain.”
“Yeah. He’s been sending stuff too. You’ve been getting mail here, in LA, and in Rome. And it all comes to me, okay? I’ve been paying all your bills and dealing with your shit here, but it’s not my job to answer things addressed to you. Did you even notice the piles were organized in chronological order?”
“I did notice that,” he muttered. “Thank you. Did she take care of any of them?” He stopped short of asking if Tenzin was in New York. He didn’t want to know.
Probably. Maybe. Maybe he wanted to know just so he could avoid her.
“Tenzin took care of anything addressed to the two of you or to the business.” Chloe huffed out a breath. “But she’s not going to touch your personal mail, Ben.”
“Oh, now she respects boundaries?”
“I am not getting into this with you! Do not put me in the middle of your relationship issues.”
“We don’t have relationship issues because we don’t have a relationship.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” Chloe let out a long breath. “Seriously, every time I talked to you. Every single time I told you—”
“Yes, I know. You told me I had mail.” Ben looked at the boxes of correspondence that had been delivered to the communications room in Penglai. “I just had no idea how much.”
“One thing I noticed was that there were multiple letters from the same people. So it’s possible that when you sort things out, it’ll just be a lot of the same people writing you about one thing. It’s not necessarily two hundred thirty-seven different things on your to-do list.”
He murmured, “It’s a good thing I’m in Penglai.”
“Why? Because you have servants you can order around?”
“Yes.” Zhang had many servants, and while Ben was usually reticent to ask for their help, this time he wasn’t going to be shy. “My skin is delicate now, Chloe. I might get a paper cut.”
She snorted. “Right. One suggestion?”
“Fire away. I promise I won’t ignore you ever again.”
“Promises, promises.” He heard her shuffling papers. “There are probably tons of random requests. Tenzin explained that some of this is the vampire version of you winning the lottery. Every vampire you’ve ever met who thinks you like them—”
“Sadly, there’s probably a lot of those.”
“You weren’t exactly known for being a standoffish human. Most of them are probably going to be ‘Hey, my brother needs a kidney’ kinds of things.”
“Who needs a kidney?”
“No one probably. I just don’t know what lottery winners hear. I’m guessing. Sort through the randoms, but the one you really, really need to deal with is Radu.”
“Radu?”
“He sent a letter by private courier about six months after you went to Mongolia.”
That stupid icon. Ben had forgotten all about it. “Don’t you think she could deal with it?”
“He addressed it to you because you’re the one who responded to him in the first place.”
“Because Giovanni referred him to me.” Ben didn’t get headaches anymore, but if he did, he would name his headache Radu. The Romanian vampire had been trying to hire him for something like three years now to find a lost Russian icon.
But first they’d had to go to Puerto Rico to look for pirate treasure.
And then they’d had to go to the East China Sea to help out Tenzin’s sire.
And then… Well, life—or undeath—happened.
“I’ll deal with Radu,” Ben said. “I may just lay things out for him and tell him we’re not—”
“One thing you should know.” Chloe cut him off. “With his last letter, he sent a down payment.”
Okay, that was interesting. “How much of a down payment?”
“I’m not sure. But whatever the down payment is weighs about seven pounds and it makes Tenzin’s eyes light up.”
Both of Ben’s eyebrows went up. “Gold?”
“Gold.” Chloe cleared her throat. “I didn’t send that part. International postage is a bitch.”
“Right.” Ben tapped his fingers on his knee. Did the woman in Kashgar have anything to do with Radu? She could have been Eastern European. And if he’d sent roughly a hundred grand of gold with a letter and been kept waiting for an answer for as long as Radu had, he might want the recipient to “answer their fucking mail” too.
“Okay,” he said. “Radu first. Where’s his letter in the pile?”
“I went ahead put that one right on top.”
3
It took Ben a week to fly from Penglai to Los Angeles. He was still figuring out how to move efficiently through space, and he couldn’t fly as fast as Zhang or Tai. But even with slower speed, the feeling was exhilarating; moving through the air was effortless. He was cocooned in his element and often he nearly slipped into a trancelike state, especially when he was going long distances.
Moving only at night meant he often had to take the long way around to avoid large bodies of water, but he didn’t mind. Seeing the world from the air was awe inspiring.
As he flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles, he watched the lights below, dipping down to smell the familiar scents of salt water and kelp that were flung into the air with each crashing wave.
It was familiar and it wasn’t. Ben was seeing everything through an immortal lens, and while the night’s darkness was deep to humans, to Ben the reflection of the stars off the moon-pulled water was as bright as an early-morning sunrise. Nothing about the night was dark anymore. In fact, he often craved true darkness, which was much harder to achieve as a vampire.