Chapter Thirty-Seven

Ben sat on the deck of the Nautilus as the humans they'd rescued from belowdecks waited in the falling rain for more ships to come and pick them up. Jennie said human-captained boats were leaving from Juneau with doctors and other day people on board, but they wouldn't reach the bay until dawn.

"We'll need to find shelter before then," Jennie said. "I hate the idea of leaving them here, but?—"

"There are a dozen wind vampires who can wait for a while longer. There are humans on board some of the boats." He was scanning the sky, looking for Tenzin, but though he could feel her near, she wasn't showing her face. "Let your water vampires go back with you, leave the human personnel on board, and go find shelter."

"The bodies have all been thrown overboard." Jennie kept her voice low. "I don't think any will float up, but try to keep them away from the railings if you can."

"I'll see what I can do." Ben wasn't sure that these survivors wouldn't benefit from seeing their tormentors' bodies, but he was no expert.

The fifty-some humans on board were a mix of staff for the cleaning and the cooking—including the missing chef from the Dolphin—a few favorite "pets" that belonged to Paulson's vampires, and random human captives taken from pirated vessels and raids along the coast.

The staff had been better treated than the captives, but all the humans were traumatized except for a few who appeared to have been in thrall to vampire guests on the ship. Those Jennie had already secured in the hold of her cruiser since Katya would need to question anyone who might have collaborated with Paulson.

"I've already contacted Katya. She and Oleg are coordinating to round up every ship in Paulson's shadow fleet using that list that Gavin sent." Jennie narrowed her eyes and drilled her gaze into Ben. "You're sure he's dead?"

"Head. Off." Ben sliced a finger across his neck. "Did it myself."

"I'm still not sure what happened on that bridge, but I'm glad he's gone."

"So am I." Ben needed to see Tenzin. He needed to feed her blood. He needed to have his mate in his arms, and he needed Jennie gone and her people taking charge of the human survivors so he could find her. "I'm going to find Tenzin and check on Carwyn and Brigid as soon as I can."

"I've never seen a fire in this part of Alaska before." Jennie looked out toward the island. "Hope everyone is okay."

"I'll report back to your people as soon as I know."

She finally left on her ocean cruiser, and Ben immediately flew to the island where the fire was burning.

He reached out with his amnis and felt his mate answer. Her need was as ferocious as the burning pain in her side.

Ben flew low over the forest, catching her scent in the branches of a pine tree where she was huddled in what was left of an old eagle's aerie.

"Tenzin?"

She looked up, and Ben's rage roared in his chest.

"Where is Zasha?"

"Dead." Tenzin's lips moved slowly and painfully. "Zasha is dead. I saw Brigid kill them."

"Fuck." Ben cradled her unburned cheek in his hand. "Oh my God, Tenzin. What happened? What happened to you?"

Whatever fire had burned Tenzin had slashed from her right elbow up her shoulder and crawled up her neck to the lower part of her right cheek. Her tunic was burned away from most of her body, and angry red scars marred her pale skin in an angle from her wrist to the edge of her right cheek.

Ben stared at her, his hands hovering and unsure. "What do I do?"

She shook her head. "Nothing. I'll heal. It'll take a long time, but it's surface damage only." She bent her arm, breaking open an oozing wound in the curve of her elbow. "No tendons or ligaments seriously damaged. I can still fight."

"Tenzin, stop moving." He didn't know where he could touch that wouldn't hurt. "I have to be able to do something."

"Nothing." She shook her head. "I just need time."

He remembered something his uncle had said once: Vampire blood could heal human wounds, at least on the surface. That was how they healed fang marks. Maybe it would help Tenzin too.

"Is Paulson dead?" Tenzin was leaning against the tree, but she didn't move more than her mouth.

"You're in pain. Yes, Paulson is dead."

"Life is pain. I'll survive." She blinked, and he saw tears rolling down her cheeks.

Ben wanted to crush something, but there was nothing to crush. Their enemies were dead, but it wasn't without cost.

"I'm going to give you blood."

"And I'll take it," she said softly. "But we need to find shelter first."

"You're going to drink from me as soon as we find shelter." He gently pulled the bloody cloth from the burn. "But first…" He bit deeply into his wrist and watched the blood well up.

"What are you doing?" Her voice snapped at him. "Benjamin, you were just in battle, and I know you haven't fed. We haven't had time to hunt, and?—"

"Tiny, shut up." He pulled his wound open, and the blood flowed over her shoulder. "I know it's going hurt, baby, but I need you to stretch your head so I can put my blood on your neck."

"Do not call me baby," she said through gritted teeth.

Tenzin stretched her neck up with aching slowness, exposing the burned curve of her shoulder, her throat, and her cheek to his gaze. "I've learned to live with Tiny, but I am not a child."

"Fine." Pissing her off was the quickest way to get her mind off the pain. "Keep your chin up."

"Don't order me around."

"Baby, I haven't even begun to order you around yet."

She hissed at him, and the corner of his mouth went up. He much preferred angry Tenzin to quiet and hurt Tenzin.

The blood started to work, flowing over the open, angry wounds and smoothing them out until they weren't weeping fluid. The skin would still be rippled and would probably take years to regrow since vampires healed slowly, but it wasn't breaking open every time she moved.

"I didn't lose an arm or anything bad," Tenzin said. "I lost my right hand a long time ago. That took nearly a hundred years to grow back."

A hundred years? "Fuck me."

"Maybe tomorrow night." She let out a slow breath. "After I hunt."

"That wasn't an order, but feeding from me will be," Ben muttered.

He coated the surface of her wound again, smearing his blood from her neck down her shoulder and to the curve of her elbow, covering every inch of the wound. By the time he was finished, her skin had knitted together in angry red swirls that looked almost like an intricate flame tattoo over a quarter of her body.

Ben let out a sigh of relief. "Okay, that should help— Whoa."

Tenzin lunged at his neck, sinking her fangs into his vein and settling in his lap as she wrapped her unhurt arm around his neck and stroked the hair at his nape.

Ben blanked out the pain of her bite and stroked a hand down her back as she fed. "Good." He traced his fingers lightly across her back. "Take everything you need."

She was safe. She would heal.

Paulson was dead. Zasha was dead.

His mate was wounded, but she would heal.

As soon as they found shelter, he could rest.

Two years before

Tenzin watched the small bird hopping down her arm. Harun the green lovebird tossed her an indignant whistle before he flew across the glass house and perched next to his mate in the branch of a ficus tree, glancing at Tenzin before he started grooming the feathers along Layah's peachy-orange neck.

They had been in Penglai for the winter holidays, and even though her sire had tried to persuade them to stay for the Lunar New Year, Tenzin had been anxious to return home.

Now she was stripped down to a thin tank top, staring at the remarkable plants she and Chloe had managed to keep alive through the chilly winter on a rooftop in New York City. The heater was running, as was the humidifier, creating a mild sauna effect in the glass house that kept the plants and the birds warm.

She stared at the lush greenery but could only picture a frozen night in Siberia and the wailing cries of a vampire whose mate was dead.

The same cries she'd echoed on a riverbank in the Wuyi Mountains in the not-very-distant past. Tenzin leaned forward and stared at the weeping, arched branches of a potted maidenhair fern.

She whispered, "The blood of Temur remembers who you were."

Stephen's body lay in a bed of wild ferns on the edge of a beautiful river that tumbled over rocks, and Tenzin knelt beside him, stroking his cold cheek.

In his brief years of immortality, this water vampire had never learned to regulate his body temperature to appear more human. He'd never enjoyed the taste of blood. Her mate, in the end, had not been particularly good at being a vampire.

But he had been kind. He had loved. He had made her remember gentleness and laughter. Stephen had woken Tenzin's frozen heart, which had been so angry after Nima refused immortality.

She heard whispers in the back of her mind, taunting laughter she'd suppressed for centuries. There was a keening wail in her memory, the wrecked sobs of an immortal watching their mate's body dissolve into its element.

Tenzin hadn't waited to see Temur's blood return to the wind when she'd killed his last descendant so many centuries before, but she remembered when Stephen had died. She'd watched his body return to the water as the white strips of his burial clothes flowed away like ribbons cast into the air.

She could imagine now what that weeping vampire had felt because she had lost a mate too, experienced the wrenching pain, both physical and mental, of half your amnis dying in the body of another.

The fact that you survived it was as good as another death.

She laid his head next to his body. She would have to wrap him to give him a proper burial. His daughter would help her prepare him, but only after he appeared whole. She could feel others standing over them, watching as Stephen's body grew stiff and his daughter wept in the arms of her mate.

For the first time in Tenzin's immortal life, she understood grief.

She watched Harun and Layah flick from branch to branch, singing their song back and forth, the secret language of lovers who existed in a world of their own making. Tenzin might have built the glass walls of the garden where these birds lived, but the world that they created was their own.

What secrets did these creatures understand that she didn't? What colors did they see? What scents could they perceive? She was a prisoner of her own existence, only understanding through the senses she'd been given.

Mortal life in all its forms was brief, painful, and precious because of its brevity. Her birds' lives would pass like the flash of a wildflower in the grass, and they were all the more precious to her for it.

"Your blood will be part of this river." She bent to her mate's ear and whispered in her own language so the others would not listen. "You're not dead, Stephen. Not really. Your body will return to the water. Your tears will return to the sea." She closed her eyes and listened to the cries of her mate's beloved child.

It was one of the things that had connected them. She had told Stephen about her children because he understood.

"One day," she continued whispering, "the blood that stains this grass will fall as rain on the earth your daughter walks on. And your spirit will exist in me forever. Nothing is wasted in the end." She closed her eyes and repeated to herself, "Nothing is wasted."

Delicate flakes of snow fell on the roof of the glass house, melting at the first touch of the warm surface. The water in the air gathered on the walls, dripping down the cool glass so it looked like the walls of the garden were weeping.

The blood of Temur remembers who you were.

She knew the vampire who had attacked the house in Louisiana with a terrible, angry fire. She recognized the hate, and she remembered the rage.

She remembered the rage.

A low, vibrating anger crept into her mind, mixing with the raw grief of her mate's loss. Tenzin rocked back and forth, one hand on Stephen's cheek and the other over the place where his heart had once beat when he was human, before his life had been stolen by a ruthless vampire bent on revenge.

She would kill Lorenzo. If it was the last thing she did, she would watch the life drain from his eyes, see his body dissolve into water, and watch him become nothing.

Nothing.

Tenzin stood, watching the birds fly in circles around her as she paced back and forth in the small confines of the glass house. The air smelled of earth and water, of green, verdant life cultivated in the bitter winter of eastern North America. She'd brought plants from Yunnan and the Caribbean to fill this garden. She'd hung orchids from Colombia in baskets along the walls and stacked rocks in the corner to make a fountain filled with water blessed by her worshippers in Tibet.

Life persisted even in darkness and cold. It cycled and turned into something new. Perhaps the water in that fountain contained elements of the mate she had lost. Perhaps the earth that grew her plants held the bodies of her children. Her mate's amnis lived in her even as she tied her life with another.

Stephen lived.

Temur lived.

And that was the truth she'd never wanted to admit.

Life persisted. In freezing winter. In fire and blood and loss.

Life persisted, and her quest to eliminate Temur's blood from the earth—the blood of those who had killed and raped and maimed—was as futile as a single snowflake falling on warm glass.

"Tenzin?" Ben tapped on the glass. "Hey. I was looking for you."

His smile was brilliant in the darkness.

Her amnis leaped in recognition, reaching out to draw him in from the cold.

"What are you doing up here?" He cracked the door open, and Layah flitted to his shoulder. "Hello, beautiful." He reached up and touched the tip of his pinky finger to Layah's curved beak. "Are you telling Tenzin your secrets?"

The ground on the riverbed was soft under Tenzin's knees as she knelt next to Stephen's body. Ancient words sprang from her, pleading prayers from a nearly forgotten part of her memory: "My mothers, guide my beloved to the tree of souls

My fathers, take his bones to build his next life

Beloved, let your soul rise to the stars

I will sing you to your next life

I will sing you to your next life

Your soul will not be lost when the mothers take you to the tree

Your body will return to build another with the fathers' help

You will not be lost if you follow my voice

I will sing you to your next life."

"What are you doing up here?" Ben asked again.

Trying to be philosophical about death when I would relentlessly hunt down anyone who made you frown. "I've been thinking about what we talked about on Penglai."

Ben blinked and his eyebrows rose. "About?—"

"You told me only dead things don't grow. And that I was not dead."

Ben sat on a wooden stool by the door, and Layah flew back to the ficus tree. "Because you're not."

"And I told you that it was my right to judge Temur's descendants. That I would kill who needed to be killed if I encountered another vampire with Temur's blood."

Ben's voice was soft. "I remember."

"And I realized tonight that continuing that quest is futile. In the end, hunting down any trace of Temur's descendants—especially now—would be useless."

Ben nodded slowly. "Why?"

"I'm telling you that you are right." She forced the word out. "Can't you simply accept that?"

"No." He plucked at a thread on the seam of his pants. "Because I love you, and I want to know what led you to this."

She walked over and knelt beside him, slicing the thread to the seam with the edge of her fingernail so he didn't ruin his pants. "I was thinking about Stephen."

His hand lifted; then he clenched his fingers into a fist. "Your other mate."

"Who died." She sat back on her heels and looked up. "Except he didn't. His amnis lives in me. In Beatrice, his daughter. Even in Giovanni, because he is mated to Beatrice."

"In me."

"Yes." She nodded. "Our bodies and souls contain worlds, my Benjamin. Nothing ever truly dies. We are made of every life that came before us." She smiled. "Do you realize that in the past five hundred years, over thirty thousand people had to meet, mate, and keep each other alive for you to even exist?" She put her hand on his and squeezed. "Did you know that?"

Ben blinked. "What? No. That's?—"

"We are worlds, Benjamin. Were I to hunt down every drop of Temur's blood, I would be destroying worlds." She took a slow breath and looked up to meet his eyes. "And you told me once that you didn't want me to destroy the world."

He put a hand on her cheek, stroked the skin there with his thumb. "See?" he whispered. "Only dead things don't grow, and you're the most alive person I know."

"I'm not going to hunt them again," Tenzin promised herself. "But that doesn't mean I won't protect what's mine. If you are in danger, if Chloe or Arthur or Giovanni or Beatrice or Sadia are threatened…" She shook her head. "I will still kill those who need to be killed. And I will never apologize for it."

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to hers. "I would expect nothing less."