A Hidden Fire

De Novo.”

A memory from a night in her grandfather’s garage pushed its way to the front of her mind.

“Sometimes, I wish I could just forget him, Grandpa.”

Tears fell hot on her cheeks. “Oh, he is…and he tried to make me forget him,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

She saw him lean forward, suddenly alert. “What do you-”

“The summer I was fifteen, I saw my father. He was sitting on a bench in a park across from the library where I had a summer job. It was just a flash,” she whispered and snapped her fingers. “Like that. I thought I was going crazy. He didn’t look how I remembered him. He was too thin, and his face…that pale face, just like yours.”

He leaned back and reached into his bag to hand her a linen handkerchief. “If you were fifteen, it would have been about three years after he was sired. He would have been in control of his senses and his bloodlust by then. So it’s entirely possible, yes. Many newly sired vampires make the mistake of trying to contact their family.”

“I kept seeing him for months.” She looked as she took the handkerchief and held it in twisted fingers. “I really thought I was going crazy. I stopped going out with my friends. I stopped…everything. My grandparents didn’t know what was going on. I thought I was losing it. And there were these crazy dreams.”

She frowned, dabbing her eyes and trying to access memories she now suspected had been tampered with. She kept feeling the strange itch at the nape of her neck every time she tried to recall more, and the headache began to pound.

“He might have tried to talk to you, and you didn’t react well. If he did, it’s possible he tried to wipe the memories from your mind.” He didn’t try to comfort her, but his presence was soothing nonetheless.

“But he was my father.”

He nodded. “Exactly. Your memories of him would be very firmly entrenched. You would have noticed if he manipulated them. Not consciously…not at the time, anyway. You may have been depressed, withdrawn, and you wouldn’t have understood why.”

“I was depressed,” she whispered. “My grandparents had no idea what was wrong with me. I had handled his death as well as could be expected and this happened years later. I went to counselors, therapists…no one could figure it out. Why would he do that?”

He shook his head. “He was young, Beatrice. He probably had no idea how it could affect you.”

She remained silent for a few minutes, sitting still in the blue light of the broken elevator.

“Why are you telling me all this?” she finally asked.

He paused and she tried to read his expression in the dim light.

“I don’t know. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”

“That’s not true. You should tell me if it’s about my father. Why were you asking about-”

He glanced away, but not before she noticed the sudden light in his green eyes.

“You want something. You want something from me.”

He looked back, this time wearing a carefully blank expression.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She shook her head. “No, not me. You want something from him. From my father. That’s why you were asking about him.”

Giovanni’s stillness made him seem even more inhuman than his fangs, which had slipped behind his lips and out of sight.

“You want what he was looking for in Italy, don’t you? You’re a book dealer. Do you want what he was after?”

She knew she was correct when she saw a minute flicker in his eyes. She laughed ruefully. “Why in the world do you think I can help you with that?”

“Would you like to see your father again, Beatrice? I know he’d like to see you.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Do you know where he is? He’s in Europe, isn’t he? There were phone calls-”

“I don’t know. Not exactly. And I wouldn’t go knocking on his door if I did. That’s not how it’s done.”

She frowned. “Then how is it done? I want to see him.”

He rolled his eyes, whispering some sort of foreign curse before he looked at her again. “Vampires are private. Secretive. Otherwise we don’t last very long.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “You don’t seem all that private and secretive to me.”

“Yes, and I’m sure Caspar will have something very clever to say about that,” he muttered.

“Your butler knows?”

“Caspar’s been with me since he was a boy. He knows everything.”

“How-”

“That’s his story to tell.”

The sat in silence for a few more minutes, the blue fire still rotating above them. She clutched the linen handkerchief he had given her and tried to calm the swirl of emotions threatening her stomach. Pushing past the shock of revelation, she was relieved to know her father was alive, in some way, and had tried to contact her.

Even though he’d apparently messed up her cerebral cortex in the process.

“Giovanni?”

“Yes?”

“Now that I know all your superhero secrets, can you maybe get us out of here?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Oh, of course. No reason not to, I suppose.”

More quickly than she could imagine, he stood, jumped up, knocked the center panel away from the ceiling and, with a flick of his hand, sent the blue fire out the top of the elevator compartment.

“Oh…wow,” she murmured.

“Do you have all your things?” he asked, not even a little out of breath as he stood before her.

She quickly gathered her useless phone and made sure all her belongings were tucked securely into her shoulder bag. She stood before him, suddenly much more aware of how tall he was.

“Okay. Got it.”

“All right. Put your arms around my waist and hold on tightly. Squeeze in, the panel is somewhat narrow.”

“Okay.”

She wrapped her arms around Giovanni’s waist and tucked her body into his. She still felt the strange energy that seemed to radiate from him, and she tried to calm her reaction. She also tried not to think about the muscular torso she could feel beneath his clothes or the grip of his large hand at her waist.

“And Beatrice?”

“Yeah?” She looked up to see him wearing a playful grin.

“You’ll never know all my superhero secrets.”

And in what felt like a quick hop, she was jerked along with him as he leapt from the floor of the elevator to the top of the steel box which hung from thick cables in the dark shaft.

“Hang on.”

“Planning on it,” she gasped.

The blue flame still hovered over them as he swung her onto his back and, using only his hands, climbed the walls of the elevator shaft back up to the fifth floor. She held on to his neck, suddenly grateful he didn’t need to breathe.

Actually, she realized, she wasn’t sure about that.

“Do you need to breathe?”

He made a somewhat strangled noise that sounded negative, so she just kept holding tight. Using one hand to hang onto the service ladder, he pried open the elevator doors with the other, opening them enough to swing her onto the landing. She watched him disappear back down the elevator shaft, only to return a moment later holding his belongings. He flicked his finger, and the blue flame returned to his palm before he spread his hand gracefully, and the flames appeared to soak into his skin.

“And that,” he commented as if he was making a remark about the weather, “is why I prefer the stairs.”

She snorted a little and smiled at him, still speechless from his clearly inhuman show of strength. He turned back to the doors, and slid them closed with the palms of his hands before he turned back to her.