Page 27 of Tin God

He remembered the hot suck of the blade as it entered the man’s belly, the force of it as he shoved it higher, under the ribs, so that his attacker would die quickly.

Just as he’d been taught.

You were defending Dez. You were protecting the baby.The sound of hospital monitors and the slow beep of a heart monitor behind her quiet words.You did well, Benjamin. You did right.

She’d been the only one to see him cry after he’d killed the first time. The first but not the last. Life was brutal, and immortal life was even more so. He lived in a world of predators, but he’d known that ever since he could remember, and vampires weren’t the predators who scared him the most.

One of Ben’s earliest memories was blood on a shattered mirror and the way it glowed translucent when the morning light hit the reflection. It didn’t stay translucent, of course. Blood dried hard and dark, not like in the movies.

Blood was almost black when it was dry.

Tenzin knew that. She saw that. She didn’t judge him for being a killer. While Ben had tried his best during his years as a human in the vampire world and now as a vampire himself, he had killed again.

Sometimes there was no other choice.

She’s a killer. You have to know that. You have to understand that about her, Benjamin, or you will never understand Tenzin.

Maybe he’d never understood Tenzin. She guarded her secrets more carefully than her gold. Was Carwyn right? Was all this violence—the attack on Chloe, the hikers taken in Northern California, the boy kidnapped in Las Vegas—was it all because of something Tenzin started?

Did he know her at all?

“I want all of you.”

“You have me. As no other has. Can you accept that without asking for more? When I tell you that the blood of Temur is part of a story you do not want and would never understand, can you accept that?”

The flashof her smile in moonlight. The tender way she fed their pet birds, her eyes gentle on the tiny fluttering creatures with the rapid hearts. Her patience with him when he’d been young and angry and pushing her away.

Pushing her away because he was grateful for immortal life and had hated to admit it.

He pressed his eyes closed and whispered into the air. “You leftmethis time.”

They had danced for years, closing in and pushing away, but since the moment they had shared blood, there had been very little time they’d been apart.

He felt her heart in his own chest. He was the only one who could make it move.

“Where are you?” He rose and paced the small light-safe room where Carwyn had stowed him.

Could he accept her? Could he accept that she was a killer? She’d asked him to, and he’d agreed. He’d said yes. He’d made a promise.

Whatever he was going into, Tenzin was his mate. And if she was the cause of all this, he had eternity to work beside her to make things right.

But first he had to find her.

Ben closed his eyes, tore his shirt from his body, and opened his arms wide in the darkness. He drew air into his lungs, suffusing his body with as much of his element as he could.

He reached out with his amnis, searching for the pull of her power. A thread. A flicker of elemental dust in the wind. Anything that could connect them.

They were wind and air and the void. The void was in everything. Even the matter of things in bodies was visible to Ben if he looked long enough. He saw the space between.

He turned slowly, his arms stretched out, searching for her.

He turned south and immediately knew she wasn’t there.

He turned again, spinning slowly as the air around him swirled, caressing his bare skin and traveling from his blood, through tiny cracks in the vents, the seams of the shutters and the windows, through the rafters and into the open air.

Bathed in darkness, his amnis touched the sun and flew away, north and west and over the water. She existed in darkness, and that’s where his element met hers.

I see you.

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