Beatrice leaned into him, her eyes darting between Tenzin and Stephen, who had stepped forward with a smile.
“Why are they doing the bowing thing again?” Tenzin barked in English. “Did you get new humans? Don’t you tell them I hate the bowing thing?”
Elder Zhang stepped forward. Beatrice could have sworn he rolled his eyes when he saw his daughter. He issued a very polite-sounding stream of Mandarin that Beatrice didn’t understand a word of until Tenzin interrupted him.
“Don’t be rude in front of B. You know she doesn’t speak Chinese, and your English is perfect. And why is Stephen in the hall? I told you I wanted to be here when he was introduced.”
She could feel Giovanni start next to her, and she looked up at him in confusion. Tenzin had known her father was here? How long? She could tell the same questions were running through Giovanni’s mind at lightning speed. The minute she saw his face, she realized he was furious, and she could feel his skin heating as she held his hand.
“I knew you were coming tonight,” Zhang said with a shrug. “Why would I delay their reunion for your whims, my daughter?”
“Because I asked you to.” Tenzin let loose a string of incomprehensible words that Beatrice couldn’t even begin to translate. It didn’t sound like Mandarin. It didn’t sound like any language she’d ever heard before. She looked around, but no one looked as if they understood a word.
Zhang was arguing with his daughter in the same guttural tongue. Beatrice looked up at Giovanni, whose eyes were darting between Tenzin, Zhang, and Stephen with steadily mounting anger.
She slipped her hand along the small of his back, trying to soothe him. Beatrice was starting to feel overwhelmed. The last thing she needed was to worry about Giovanni bursting into flames while she was in a completely foreign environment, her father had suddenly appeared, and her friend seemed way more familiar with him that she ever would have expected.
“What, um… what language is that?” she whispered, trying to distract Giovanni, as Tenzin and Zhang continued their argument, seemingly oblivious to the audience in the hall.
“What?”
“What language are they speaking? No one looks like they understand what they’re saying.”
“They don’t.” Beatrice saw him take a deep breath and a calm mask fell over his face. “It’s their own language. I suspect anyone who speaks it died long ago… or Tenzin and her father killed them so they could converse without eavesdroppers.”
Somehow, that didn’t seem implausible.
Most of the vampires were riveted by the loud argument. The humans skittered to the edges of the room, but the vampires were still and utterly silent. The Elders in the front of the room looked bored, except for Elder Lan. The childlike immortal’s mouth was covered by his or her hands as the vampire looked on with laughing eyes.
“Enough. I’m taking them to my rooms,” Tenzin cut her father off. “You can meet with them there if you want. Tomorrow night.”
“Of course, dearest daughter,” Zhang said with an indulgent smile. “There has been enough excitement for tonight. We have disrupted the business of the court long enough.” He looked over to Beatrice and Giovanni with a smile. “Giovanni Vecchio, Beatrice De Novo, Baojia, you are welcome here. My daughter will see to your needs.”
She felt her arm being pulled toward the back door, but she was still frozen in confusion. “What? Where are we going now?” She looked back toward where her father had just been standing, but he was gone. Beatrice started to panic. “Gio, where’s—”
“Shh, Tesoro, he’ll meet us there. Follow Tenzin. Follow her now.”
“But—”
“Beatrice, do not linger. We have been dismissed.”
His arm was like iron around her waist, but she craned her neck, trying to see where her father had gone. Over her shoulder, she spotted Baojia, who shook his head slightly before catching her eye and giving her a nod toward the door and a quick wink.
Beatrice swallowed the feeling of panic and leaned into Giovanni as he led her from the room, following behind Tenzin, who swept the doors open with a flick of her wrist and a gust of wind. She strode into the dark night, growling at the humans who bowed before her.
He still looked exactly the same.
They were sitting in one of the windowless rooms in Tenzin’s wing of the palace. Beatrice and Stephen sat on low couches across from each other in awkward silence as Giovanni and Tenzin carried on a vicious argument in yet another unknown language. Baojia lounged on another couch across the room, glancing up from his book occasionally with a smile.
Beatrice stared at her father for a few more minutes until the silence became overwhelming. “What language are they speaking?”
Stephen blinked, apparently shocked that she’d spoken to him.
“I—I think it’s Mongolian. Or some variation of it. There are several dialects that Tenzin speaks.”
His voice sounded different. Deeper, somehow, but then she wondered if she had only forgotten what he sounded like in the fifteen years they’d been apart. He stared at her and a pink sheen came to his eyes. He smiled.
“You’re so beautiful.”
Blinking back her own tears, she crossed her arms and took a deep breath, wishing that Giovanni would finish his argument and take her away so she could collapse. “Thanks.”
“You look like Mom… but different, too.”