Page 147 of Tin God

Tenzin watchedthe 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 becomenothing.

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.