his lips pursed as he tickled under the cat’s chin gave Beatrice the irrational desire to crawl into his lap and curl up, just to see if she might get the same treatment.
“Beatrice?”
“Hmm?” she asked in a dazed voice as she stared at the cat.
She finally looked up to see him watching her, his eyes hooded and his hand still on Doyle’s back. “Were you going to-” He cleared his throat and looked out the dark window.
“Carwyn. Right. I’ll just…I’ll call-you know, I’ll just walk outside and find him. I could use a…walk.”
She got up and quickly exited the room, just as another burst of laughter rang out from the kitchen. Beatrice winced and walked quickly through the French doors and across the brick patio by the pool.
She didn’t mind her grandmother and Caspar dating. In fact, she was ridiculously happy that they got along so well; it was just somewhat cruel that her sixty-eight-year-old grandmother had a more exciting love life than she did.
A boy from Beatrice's art history class had taken her to dinner the weekend before, and she had enjoyed it. His name was Jeff, and he was polite and funny. She even laughed a little when he related stories about the drama in the office where he was interning and would probably work in the fall. He took her back to her grandmother’s house and gave her a really nice kiss.
She had absolutely no desire to see him again.
Beatrice cursed Giovanni’s superior kissing skills and intriguing personality as she walked through the grounds. Summer had almost settled on Houston, and the air hung heavy with leftover warmth from the day and the smell of honeysuckle. The roses were blooming and, as she rounded the corner near the small gazebo, she heard Carwyn muttering to his dog again.
“-not going to let you come back next year if you keep this up, Bran. And honestly, I don’t understand your fascination with rose roots. Is it just to annoy him?”
She heard the dog snort and half-expected him to respond. After all, vampires existed, so why not talking wolfhounds? She heard additional words that sounded a lot like curses, but she was pretty sure they were in Welsh, and couldn’t understand them.
“Carwyn?” she called across the lawn. The vampire turned to her with a guilty expression, and she watched in fascination as the numerous piles of dirt in Caspar’s prized rose garden started crawling across the lawn and back toward the holes the dog had dug them from. The dark earth didn’t float, exactly, but appeared to simply move by its own volition when Carwyn flicked his fingers at it. It was almost as if the dirt had become a living thing, and small piles chased each other across the dark grass.
“B! No need to tell the professor about Bran’s indiscretion now, is there?”
She just stared at the self-moving dirt.
“That is so freaking cool. How do you-I mean, I know you-that is just so…cool.”
“Thanks. This? This is no big deal. Try fixing the mess that six or seven of these monsters make in a vegetable garden before a scary nun finds them. Now that’s a challenge.”
“Really?” She frowned as she continued to watch the small piles of dirt gradually disappear into the earth. Even the grass seemed to knit itself together where the dog had dug it up.
“No, not really. I’m joking. Moving boulders is a slight workout. Or causing an earthquake, manipulating faults, things like that. Gardening isn’t really much of a challenge anymore.”
“You can cause earthquakes?”
He sighed, a playful look in his eyes. “There’s such a delicious joke there, but I’m going to be good and hold back. With the amount of sexual tension permeating these grounds, even a bad ‘rock your world’ line is liable to ignite something.”
“Very funny.” She rolled her eyes and tried to remember why she came to find him. “Gio’s got a question for you, I think. Something about a private collection in Central Italy? Or maybe it’s the auction he’s curious about, I’m not sure.”
Carwyn immediately ran to the house at vampire speed, leaving Beatrice and Bran in the garden. She looked at the dog, who seemed to smile playfully before he loped off in the direction of the hydrangeas.
“Slowest thing here,” she muttered. “Why do I always have to be the slowest thing here?”
When she reached the French doors, she heard Carwyn speaking in quick Italian into the rotary phone by the small desk in the living room.
Italian and Spanish had enough similarity that she could understand snatches of what she heard. She knew he mentioned books, and she heard the Italian words for “Vatican” and “library” pop up more than once.
He finally put down the phone and Giovanni started in with the questions, this time, at least, they were in English. He kept his voice low, mindful of Caspar and Isadora in the kitchen.
“So? What did the he say?”
Carwyn shook his head and spoke quietly. “Not one of theirs. He says that sounds close to one of the fronts they’ll use in private auctions sometimes-enough that someone who was bidding more casually wouldn’t suspect- but it’s definitely not them. And he doesn’t know about any new Savaranola correspondence, though he sounded like he was practically drooling at the thought.”
Giovanni frowned. “So if it
Carwyn had been leaning against the wall, looking out the dark windows with a finger tapping his chin. Suddenly, he smiled wickedly. “Oh, Giovanni. Virgil himself would be impressed with your virtue. He’s doing it because he’s a clever, clever boy. And clever boys who want to clean money might just use a private auction to do it.”
Giovanni let loose a string of Italian curses and slapped a hand on the table, scaring the cat, who jumped off his lap and ran upstairs.
“What does he do?” Beatrice asked.
They both looked at her as if they’d forgotten she was there.
“I mean…that’s laundering money, right? That’s what you’re talking about? Don’t drug dealers do that kind of thing? Is he a drug dealer?”
Carwyn shrugged. “He’s got his hands in any number of fairly dirty pots. Smuggling mostly, and other types of clandestine shipping. Not all of it necessarily illegal, but most of it…questionable. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has his fingers in drugs or anything else. The question is – why does he need some of his funds clean at this point?”
“He won’t need it to find her father. He has other channels for that. He’s planning something,” Giovanni muttered, frowning again and biting a lip in concentration as he studied the printouts in front of him. “In the human world? Something legitimate?”
Carwyn was still tapping his chin. “Whatever it is, it has something to do with the books.”
“Why?” she asked.
Giovanni was sitting silently at the table, shaking his head. “Too much coincidence. To many pieces moving at once,” he muttered. “Her father. My books. The letters. Now the money…” He kept muttering to himself as suspicion grew in her mind.
Her father. Giovanni’s books. Lorenzo stole the books and wanted her father. A connection started to tickle the back of her brain, but she shoved it to the side for the moment and turned to Carwyn.
“Isn’t it easier to do that stuff electronically? Laundering money? Why is he doing it through auctions?”
Carwyn chuckled. “I’m sure it is, and someone with half a fool’s worth of knowledge in electronic markets could do it better than he could. But he’s not all that up on digital technology, I’m betting.”
“He’s not, though I’m sure he thinks he is. Lorenzo was always overconfident. He was never very good at adaptation. Many immortals aren’t,” Giovanni said. “I know some vampires who took fifty years or so to even start driving a car.”
Beatrice rolled her eyes. “You crazy international men of mystery, you.”
Giovanni chuckled and looked at her. “You think we’re backward, you should meet-”
“Tenzin!” the priest yelled then lowered his voice, looking over his shoulder at the kitchen door, as if suddenly remembering the humans in the house. “Oh, she’s the worst, isn’t she? Has she ever been in a car? I’ve never seen it. And I can’t even imagine her getting in a plane.”
