All You Desire (2 page)

HAVEN HAD LET herself hope that it would all last forever. But now she and Iain were leaving Rome, and it felt as if their golden year might be reaching its end. For more than a week, Haven had sensed something was wrong. It had started with a quick glimpse of a figure dressed in black crossing the piazza below her balcony. She hadn't gotten a good look at the man. It could have been anyone. And that was what worried her most. After that, the city seemed to be hiding secrets from her. The days grew darker, and the weather turned colder. Haven always suspected someone was watching, and every time she turned a corner, she held her breath, expecting to find the dark figure waiting for her around the bend.

At first she'd kept her suspicions to herself. But after the encounter with the three girls on the Appia Antica, Haven knew she and Iain needed to act quickly. The danger was real, not imagined. If they stayed in Rome, they risked being discovered. Iain thought she was being too cautious, but he happily suggested a trip north to Tuscany. There was something in Florence, he'd said, that Haven might like to see.

 

HAVEN GRABBED ONE of her dusty suitcases by the handle and lugged it out into the hall. Inside the closet, a bag of fabric scraps teetered and tumbled to the floor. Haven groaned as she stooped to gather the pieces one by one. Then her fingers brushed against a canvas at the back of the closet. She'd almost forgotten it was there. The painting had been a housewarming present from one of the few people outside her family who knew where to find them. Haven pushed a heavy coat to one side and peered between her cluttered heaps of belongings. Up close, the artwork was a swirl of color. Only when she took a step back did forms begin to emerge from the chaos.

The painting was part of a much larger series. A few others like it could be found hanging on the third floor of a run-down house not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. The remaining works—several hundred of them—were slowly rotting away in a warehouse in Queens. Not even the most morbid art collector would have chosen to display them. Each showed some tragic scene from the past—and together they formed a catalog of disasters large and small. Shipwrecks and fires, betrayals and heartbreaks, all set in motion by the same mysterious figure who could be found lurking somewhere in each image. But only if you knew where to look for him.

The day the painting had been delivered to the apartment, Haven had ripped away its wrapping, eager to see what lay beneath. The artist, Marta Vega, was an old friend of Iain's. For years Marta's work had been inspired by terrible visions of the past. The visions had stopped once she'd escaped New York and settled in Paris. There she'd started a series of paintings that reflected her newfound hopes for the future. Haven had been expecting to find such a work beneath the brown paper. Instead, she found a sinister image with a bright yellow Post-it attached.

This was the last one I painted,
the note read
. I know it was meant for you.
After a single glance, Iain had whisked the painting away and stashed it behind the coats and dresses inside the hall closet. Later Haven had overheard him on the phone with Marta, his voice an angry whisper. He told the girl she should never have sent him the painting. It was the last thing Haven needed to see, and he hoped she hadn't had a good look. The time would come for them to face their demons. For now, he didn't want Haven to worry.

But Haven had seen the image, and it had left an indelible impression. For days afterward, she thought of little else. The painting showed two people—a young man and woman—surrounded by an angry mob. The faces weren't clear. But Haven recognized the girl's unruly thatch of black hair as her own. And she knew it was the only painting Marta Vega had ever created that showed not the past but the future.

Now Haven studied the painting for the first time since its arrival, looking for the minuscule figure in black that Marta inserted into each of her works. This time, he was nowhere to be found. And yet his absence wasn't a comfort. It felt as though he had stepped off the canvas and into Haven's life again. He was out there somewhere. If not in Rome, then not far away. The man in the picture—the figure in black—had been following Haven for centuries.

“Haven,” she heard Iain call, a trace of alarm in his voice. “What did you find in there?”

Haven crammed the painting back into the closet. “I'll be ready to go in ten minutes,” she answered, ignoring the question. “Ask the driver to get here as soon as he can.”

CHAPTER TWO

Haven had seen it all before. Strolling along the banks of the Arno River, she was overwhelmed by the sensation that she had walked the same path countless times in the past. Most people would have glibly dismissed it as déjà vu. But Haven knew better. If she had the feeling she'd seen Florence before, then it was fairly certain she had. Just not in
this
lifetime.

Haven's gloved hand squeezed Iain's arm. “I know this place.” Ahead of them, a bridge spanned the narrowest part of the river. It was flanked on both sides by rickety buildings—orange houses and saffron-colored dwellings that jutted out over the Arno. In the icy gray waters below, two fat muskrats paddled around a pier. “I saw that bridge get swept away by the river. I must have been very young when it happened, but I remember it clearly. And then I watched them build it all over again.”

Iain's frozen breath hung in the air when he laughed. “I was wondering when you might say something.” His memories of the past were much better than Haven's—his memories were better than
everyone's
. “It's called the Ponte Vecchio. It was destroyed by a flood in 1333. They rebuilt it in 1345.”

“Were we here then?” Haven asked. “In 1345?”

“
You
were here in 1345,” Iain replied. “I died the year before, when I was sixteen years old.”

Haven still winced whenever Iain mentioned one of his deaths, even if it had occurred hundreds of years in the past. It didn't matter how many previous existences they'd shared. Every life that had been cut short reminded her how fragile their current lives could be. “You died at sixteen?”

“I fell off my horse on the road to Rome. Broke my neck. But a lot of people would say I was lucky. Half of Florence died three years later—of something much worse than a broken neck.”

“What's worse than a broken neck?”

“The black death.” Iain took Haven's hand in his and pulled her away from the river and between the tall gray columns of the Uffizi Gallery. The winter sun was losing its strength, and the courtyard of the museum felt frigid. Patches of black ice expanded and multiplied in the shadows. A group of Spanish tourists shivered inside their goose-down parkas. The women among them gaped at Iain as if one of the museum's statues had suddenly sprung to life. A few pointed and whispered. Iain didn't notice—he rarely did—but Haven smiled and pulled the handsome boy even closer.

When the couple emerged in the Piazza della Signoria, Haven's feet froze. The square was empty but for a man dressed in a black robe so long that it swept the street behind him. Beneath a wide-brimmed leather hat, he wore a hideous mask with a long white beak. Spectacles with red-tinted lenses shielded his eyes. He might have been a monster from the depths of hell. But Haven recognized his costume as the protective suit of a medieval plague doctor. She watched as the man stood over a motionless body that lay on the paving stones and poked at it with his cane. Then the doctor glanced up at Haven. His face was hidden, but she could sense his disapproval. She, of all people, didn't belong in the plaza. Haven blinked and the whole scene disappeared.

“Come on. I have something to show you before it gets dark,” Iain urged, and Haven realized he'd seen nothing unusual.

 

EIGHTEEN MONTHS HAD passed since Haven had learned the truth about the strange visions that came to her. They weren't hallucinations or fantasies. She now knew they were memories—scenes she'd witnessed in previous lives. The doctor in the terrible mask didn't belong to the twenty-first century, but he had once been as real as the boy who was holding her hand.

The visions had started when she was just a small child. For years, Haven would faint and find herself inside another life—that of a beautiful young woman named Constance who had perished in a fire. Haven's uncontrollable “fits” frightened most people who witnessed them. They insisted the girl must have been sick or disturbed. Only Haven's father suspected that his daughter was visiting the past each time she fainted. When he died unexpectedly, he took that secret to his grave, where it had remained for almost a decade.

Shortly after Haven turned seventeen, the visions returned, and it was then that their true meaning was finally revealed to her. The glimpses of the beautiful young woman were memories of one of the many lives that Haven had led. Driven by the need to know more about Constance's untimely death, Haven had fled her hometown in Tennessee and made her way to New York. There she discovered her murderer, her soul mate, and the dark figure who'd been chasing her across oceans and continents for more than two thousand years.

Still, the visions hadn't stopped once the mystery of Constance's death had been solved. Haven seldom fainted now, but at night she journeyed to distant times and exotic lands. In the darkness, her dreams were vivid, but they always faded at dawn. Most days, while the sun was shining, Haven remained free from her visions of previous lives. But the whiff of a familiar fragrance, the sound of a long-forgotten name, the sensation of Iain's breath on her skin could blend Haven's pasts and her present together. She would find herself giddy with love for a boy who had shared Iain's lopsided grin. Or overwhelmed by a potent mixture of old fears and desires that she still couldn't comprehend.

 

“DOES THAT PALAZZO REMIND you of anything?” Iain released Haven's hand and pointed at a mansion at the end of a cramped little square. Haven looked up at his face before she followed his finger. She still felt a rush of excitement whenever she locked eyes with him. Even with his wavy brown hair tucked under a knit cap—and his nose red from the bitter cold—he barely passed for a mortal. For a moment she couldn't have cared less about her former life in Florence. If she hadn't been able to share it with Iain, it must not have been worth living.

Haven reluctantly turned toward the building in question. It looked more like a fortress than a palace. The bottom floor had been constructed with huge square blocks, and enormous metal doors were set in three separate arches. Each door was high enough for a giant to enter, and all three were tightly sealed. But Haven knew that beyond them lay a courtyard. And she knew the stairs that led to the living quarters on the second and third floors could be withdrawn if the house were ever attacked. The world had been a dangerous place when the building was erected, and the wealthy had been determined to defend their fortunes.

Haven's eyes fluttered. She felt her legs pumping, fighting against heavy skirts that encased them. All around her, the walls were painted in dazzling colors, reds and golds. The wooden floorboards protested as she ran to the open window. She wasn't quite tall enough to see out of it, so she hoisted herself up on the sill and surveyed the square below, her little body dangling dangerously over the edge.

A teenage boy was sprinting away from the palazzo. His blue tunic and red stockings looked two sizes too large for him. “Run! Run!” she shouted at the kid, laughing so hard there were tears in her eyes. “Don't let them catch you!” The words sounded foreign to Haven's ears, though she had no trouble understanding their meaning.

“Beatrice!” A woman's sharp voice came from behind her. “Get down from that window. What has your brother done now?”

 

“I LIVED HERE,” Haven mumbled as the twenty-first century took shape once again. “My name was Beatrice, and I had a brother.”

“So you saw him?” Iain asked with his crooked grin. “Was it anyone you recognized?”

“Recognized? I didn't really get a good look at the kid. I only saw him running away.” Haven stopped. “Wait, are you saying . . .”

Iain crossed his arms like a pompous professor and began to deliver a lecture fit for a history class. “The palazzo before you was purchased in 1329 by Gherardo Vettori, a wealthy wine merchant. Observe the Vettori family coat of arms above the door. It features three rather sinister dolphins carrying bunches of grapes in their mouths. . .”

“Drop the act, and stop teasing me!” Haven demanded, knowing that if she let herself laugh, it would only encourage him. “Are you telling me that my brother in that lifetime was . . .” She couldn't quite say it.

“Despite a raging libido and a roving eye, Gherardo Vettori only managed to sire two children. You were one of them. Your friend Beau was the other. His name back then was Piero Vettori, and he was a world-class delinquent.”

For a moment Haven found herself at a loss for words. She'd known for some time that Beau Decker, her best friend from Tennessee, had been her brother in a previous existence. But she had never expected to find herself gazing up at the house where they had fought and played and consoled one another seven hundred years earlier.

“I've been meaning to bring you here since we came to Italy,” Iain explained. “I've been saving it as a surprise.”

“You knew Beatrice's brother too?!”

“I was friends with Piero before I died. And I was madly in love with his little sister. He wasn't terribly happy about that.”

Haven recalled the boy in the oversize tunic and the love his young sister had felt for him. Beatrice Vettori had worshipped Piero. He couldn't have been more than thirteen at the time of Haven's vision, but his sister would have told anyone who would listen that he was fearless and brilliant. She knew other things about her brother as well, secrets only the two of them shared.