Carwyn slapped him on the shoulder. “Come, my friend. Let them do what they do best, and we’ll get on with finding the legendary missing vampires in their mythological fortress in the Caucasus Mountains using only vague directions and landmarks that haven’t held the same names for four hundred years. If we’re very lucky, Arosh will burn us before Kato pulls the water from our bodies and leaves us shriveled husks of the vampires we once were.”

Giovanni nodded. “But we have a letter.”

Carwyn turned and walked to the car. “We do. And it better be a damn good one.”

Giovanni followed him. “Speaking of letters…”

“I’m not going to tell you who I was writing, so stop asking.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Residenza di Spada

August 2012

“Yes,” Ziri said, “that is the formula that I remember."

Lucien and Dez were sitting at the desk, going over the printouts from the hard drive that Giovanni and Carwyn had sent from Istanbul. Dez had spent the previous week going over the contents with a fine-tooth comb. Since Beatrice still had trouble accessing electronics, the printer had gotten a workout.

Dez had quickly pinpointed the shipping information of the single truck that had taken the first shipment from Bulgaria to Rome. There were only five boxes on the manifest. Apparently, someone hadn’t wanted to wait. Jean and Gavin had immediately called contacts in the area, and the truck had been delayed in Serbia. They left the following night, hoping to intercept it before their favors were preempted by whomever Livia had in her pocket.

Ziri was still speaking. “It is amazing to me that they manufactured it so quickly. It took us months to put it together, even after Jabir perfected the formula.”

Beatrice perked up from her chair by the fire. “Ziri?”

“Yes?”

“How did Jabir perfect it? Did he test it on humans before Fahdil and Kato tried it? What did he do?”

Ziri walked over and sat across from her. Beatrice could feel Lucien and Dez’s eyes on them.

“He did test it on humans first. There was no shortage of ailing people in that part of the world, but he only tested it on the sickest of them. The first attempts did little. The human’s metabolism destroyed any benefits our blood might have offered. But slowly, there were small improvements. An extra hour before the blood was rejected. Then a day. It took over a year, but he finally found the exact formula to keep the human body from rejecting the blood. From there, the results were quite startling. One elderly woman in particular showed an amazing recovery.”

“Yeah, I remember reading about her in the journals.”

Ziri smiled. “He was always so careful with his language in those. Careful to conceal what we were and what we were doing. I’m very impressed you and your father figured them out.”

“I doubt we would have had we not known about vampires already.”

“True.” Ziri sat back in his chair and stroked his chin in a thoughtful manner. “I do wonder how Livia and Lorenzo were able to interpret them so quickly."

“Gio thinks that there were notes that the monks made that Lorenzo stole when he ransacked the monastery. He said that Fu-Han had made progress.”

“That was Zhang’s old apprentice?”

“Yes. Giovanni said he had figured it out. Lorenzo must have taken his notes.”

“Interesting.”

“But Gio also said that Fu-han told him right before he died that there was something Lorenzo would not understand about the elixir.”

Ziri cocked his head. “What? What wouldn’t he understand?”

Beatrice shook her head. “He didn’t say. He just said something about the fifth element. Not even Gio knew what the hell he was talking about. There are only four elements.”

Dez piped up. “No, there’s not. There’s five.”

Beatrice’s head swung around. Dez was still sitting at the desk, and her eyes were glued to the monitor. Lucien was sitting to her left, studying the screen intently. He turned in his chair to address her.

“Dez is right,” Lucien said. “The four elements are more philosophical than scientific. There are consistencies and variations across history. While four elements were named in ancient Western tradition, Aristotle added a fifth, aether.”

“Aether?”

“The essence. The… aether. It’s hard to explain. Aristotle described it as that which the heavens were made of. The eternal elements. All earthly elements are, in reality, unstable. They can be changed in many ways. Aether, the essence of the eternal, could not.” Lucien smiled. “Call it what you will. The soul. The spark of God. Eternity. Aether is that which does not change.”

“That’s not science.”

Lucien chuckled. “My child, God has existed long before science. He created it, after all.”

“The fifth element was more prevalent in the East, Beatrice.” Ziri broke in. “The ancient Babylonians had five elements, the sky being one, which you could relate to the Greek concept of aether.”

Lucien continued, “Hindu philosophy and Bön have five elements as well. Bön has always held a fascination for Eastern vampires. Its study is what Tenzin’s father is so well known for—well, that and bloodshed. Bön names five elements: fire, earth, wind, water, and space. The philosophy says that everything is related to these five elements. The four earthly elements influence everything about an individual, with the fifth, the space or aether, tying all things together.”