The Den of Shadows Quartet (6 page)

She is weak and not a threat to Aubrey’s claim on this dark corner of the city, so he tolerates her presence. Per haps he shows off occasionally simply to keep her afraid. But he knows she will never challenge him. I am Aubrey’s own blood sister, created by the same dark mother. If he tolerates me I could be as much a threat to his position as a mongoose in a cobra’s nest — not because I am stronger, which I am not, but because it will appear to others of our kind that he fears me, and his pride is too strong to allow that.

I hunt and leave my prey dying in the street. Perhaps it is foolish to bait Aubrey this way, but I have lived too long beneath his shadow and refuse to cower any longer. Aubrey himself does not challenge me as I feed, and my suspicions rise. Where is he, I wonder, that he does not know I am here? Or is it simply that he does not care? Is he that sure of his claim?

I return to my home in a dark mood, but as I enter my room my thoughts turn to ice.

I can sense the aura of one of my kind, one of my kin, and I recognize it very well. Aubrey. Aubrey with black hair and black eyes, Aubrey who saw the blood falling from my hand and smiled, Aubrey who laughed when he killed my brother.

Aubrey is the only vampire I know who prefers using a knife to using his mind, teeth, or hands. I touch the scar I bear on my left shoulder, the scar given to me only a few days after I died, created by the same blade that took my brother’s life. The scar that I swore, on the day it was dealt, to avenge, along with my brother’s death.

A
FTER THE DAY
when I lost my mortal soul, I never went back to my old home. I understood I no longer belonged there. I hated to think what my papa was going through, but I hated even more the idea of his learning what I had become. I wanted him to believe me dead, because it was better for him to think I had simply disappeared than for him to know he had lost his daughter to a demon.

I fed on one of the true monsters — one of the many “witch hunters” who interrogated and jailed the accused, seeking guilt where there was none.

How humans can do such things to their fellows is beyond me. They torture, maim and kill their own kind, saying it is God’s will.

I no longer try to understand the ways of humanity. Of course, maybe I’m being hypo critical. My kind is often just as cruel to our own. We are simply more direct. We need no one else to blame our violence on. If I kill Aubrey, I will do so because I hate him, not because he
is evil, or because he kills, or for any other moral reason. I will do so because I wish to do so, or I will not do so because I do not wish to.

Or I will not do so because he kills me first, which is the end I expect.

Soon after I was transformed, I brought myself up to the Appalachian Mountains for a time. I had been told about them, yet had never seen them. It was incredible to be in the mountains at night. I was a young woman, alone in the wilderness. Had I been still human, such a thing would never have been allowed. I lay in a treetop, listening to the forest and thinking about nothing at all.

“Ather has been looking for you,” someone said to me, and I jumped down to the ground. My prey lay beneath the tree. I had taken him to this place with my mind before I fed, to avoid interruptions.

I walked toward the voice. It was Aubrey.

“Tell Ather I do not want to see her,” I said to him.

Aubrey was dressed differently than when I had last seen him, and could no longer be mistaken for a normal human. He had a green viper painted on his left hand, and was wearing a fine gold chain around his neck with a gold cross suspended from it. The cross was strung on the chain upside down.

He held his knife in his left hand. The silver was clean, sharp, and so very deadly, just like his pearl white viper fangs, which were, for the moment, hidden.

“Tell Ather yourself — I’m not your messenger boy” he hissed at me.

“No, you just take Ather’s orders, like a good little lapdog.”

“No one orders me, child.”

“Except Ather,” I countered. “She snaps and you jump. Or search, or kill.”

“Not always … I just didn’t like your brother,” Aubrey answered, laughing. Aubrey smiles only when he is in the mood to destroy. I wanted to knock every tooth out of that smile and leave him dying in the dirt.

“You laugh?” I ask. “You murdered my brother, and you laugh about it?”

He laughed again in response. “Who was that carrion on the ground behind you, Risika?” he taunted. “Did you even bother to ask? Who loved him? To whom was he a brother? You stepped over his body without a care.
Over the body
— no respect, Risika. You would leave his body here without a prayer for the scavengers to eat. Who is the monster now, Risika?”

His words stung, and I instantly tried to defend my actions. “He —”

“He deserved it?” Aubrey finished for me. “Are you a god now, Risika, deciding who is to live and who is to die? The world has teeth and claws, Risika; you are either the predator or the prey No one deserves to die any more than they deserve to live. The weak die, the strong survive. There is nothing else. Your brother was one of the weak. It is his own fault if he is dead.”

I hit him. I had been a young lady, not taught to fight, but in that minute I was simple fury. I hit him hard enough to snap his head to the side and send him stumbling. He righted himself, the last of the humor gone from his face.

“Careful, Risika.” His voice was icy a voice to send
shivers through the bravest heart, but I was too angry to notice.

“Do not speak of my brother that way.” My voice shook with rage, and my hands clenched and unclenched. “Ever.”

“Or what?” he asked quietly. His voice had gone darker, colder, and he was standing as still as stone. I could feel his rage cover me like a blanket. I knew in that instant that if anyone had ever threatened Aubrey, they were no longer alive to tell of it.

There was a first time for everything.

“I will put that blade through your heart, and you will never speak again,” I answered.

He threw the knife down so that it landed an inch from my feet, its blade embedded in the ground.

“Try it.”

I knelt slowly and cautiously to get the knife, not moving my eyes from Aubrey, who was watching with an icy stillness. I did not know what he would do, but I knew he would not simply let me kill him. Yet he stood there, silent, still, and faintly mocking in his expression, and did nothing.

“Well, Risika?” he prompted. “You said you would — now do it. You hold the knife. I stand defenseless. Kill me.”

If I had killed him then … If I had been able to murder him then …

“You can’t,” he finally said, when I did not move. “You can’t kill me while I am defenseless because you still think like a human. Well, know this, Risika — that isn’t how the world works.”

He grabbed my wrist with one hand and my throat with the other. The knife was useless.

“Ather talks about you as if you are so strong. You’re just as weak as your brother is.”

I had never learned any fighting skills. I had never practiced violence. But in nature survival is the name of the game, and the body touches its long-dead roots. You adapt, because if you cannot, you’re as good as dead. I adapted.

I wrenched my wrist from Aubrey’s grip while using my free hand to push away the hand that held me. The knife fell, forgotten. My wrist was broken, but there was little pain — the vampire’s tolerance for pain is high, and the injury was healing quickly.

I felt a spinning, burning sensation and failed to see Aubrey’s next attack. He pounced, knocking me back over the tree roots and onto the ground. I kicked his kneecap with all my strength, breaking it. He hissed in pain and anger, falling to the ground. I started to push myself up, but pain lanced through my arms and back.

A fight between two vampires may look physical, but when they are as strong as my line is, most damage is done with the mind. A strong vampire can strike out with its mind and kill a human without even touching it. It is harder to kill another vampire, but the fighters can still distract and disable each other. I was young and did not know how to fight that way I was on the ground and couldn’t push myself up because of the pain.

Aubrey was there in a moment. He placed one hand
on my throat, pinning me to the ground on my back. Even wounded he was far stronger than I.

He had retrieved the knife and held it against my throat.

“Remember this, Risika — I have no love for you. I think you are weak, and I don’t care about your morals. If you challenge me again, you will lose.”

I spat in his face. He drew the knife across my left shoulder, from the center of my throat, in the gap between the two collarbones, to the center of my upper left arm. I gasped. It burned like fire and hurt more than anything I had ever felt.

Most human blades will not scar our kind, but Aubrey’s blade was not a human blade. Magic, for lack of a better word, was embedded deep in the silver. I learned later that Aubrey had taken his blade from a vampire hunter during his third year as a vampire. Its original owner had been raised as a vampire hunter, but even so he had lost to Aubrey.

Aubrey disappeared as I lay on the ground, riding out the pain. If the blade had been human silver, the wound would have healed in moments; instead it took some time for my body even to get control of the pain.

Once it had subsided from blinding to simply unbearable, I sat up slowly, gingerly tracing the wound. The bleeding had already stopped, but the wound did not close fully until after I had fed again. And it left a scar. My skin was already so pale that the scar showed only as a faint pearl-colored mark, but I knew where it was, and I could see it easily.

Somehow, though I knew not how, and someday, though I knew not when, I would avenge that scar and all that it stood for: Alexander’s death, the death of my faith in humankind, and the death of Rachel, innocent Rachel, a human filled with illusion.

My kind can live forever. I would have a long time, and many opportunities, to keep that vow.

I
WAS FOOLISH
to attack him then, and am equally foolish to bait him now, but I have no other choice. I refuse to roll over and let Aubrey be king without ever challenging him.

I can sense his aura in the room but cannot see him, and he has not spoken.

Where are you, Aubrey?
I ask him with my mind.
Why do you hide from me?

I hear his laughing, taunting voice in my head; it is a voice I have come to hate with all my mind, all my strength, and all my soul. He says only four words, not even a sentence.

One line of a poem.

Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright …

I scream the wordless cry of the eagle, the hunting cry of the diving hawk, the angered cry of a caged beast, and I hear Aubrey laugh in my mind. I know where he was as I hunted on his land.

Even as he laughs I change my shape to a golden
hawk that flies from that room in her animal rage and lands inside the tiger’s cage at the zoo. The sign,
“Panthera tigris tigris,”
has fallen, and its wooden post is snapped in two like a twig. The metal bars of the tiger’s cage are bent. The guard is lying on the ground, pale and motionless.

I do not care about the guard or the sign, only about Tora, the one creature I have loved since Alexander’s death. Tora, who is lying on her side, her paws bound, with a knife in her heart. She was born free, and deserved to live so. Instead she lived in a cage and was killed, bound and helpless. This more than anything makes me feel as if the knife was planted in my own heart instead of hers.

I shift back into my usual form and pull the knife from her, screaming another wordless cry of rage and grief. Tearing the ropes from her paws, I weep at each golden hair that has fallen from her and at each black hair that has forever lost its shine. I weep — weep as I did not when I lost my brother and my life. I weep until my thoughts run dark and my tears run dry.

Love is the strongest emotion any creature can feel except for hate, but hate can’t hurt you. Love, and trust, and friendship, and all the other emotions humans value so much, are the only emotions that can bring pain. Only love can break a heart into so many pieces.

The greatest pain I have ever felt rode on the back of love. I loved Alexander, and every injury he received seemed reflected onto me. His death tore my heart out and bled it dry, and now Aubrey has used my love for Tora to push the blade in deeper.

This is why, I have learned, the strongest of the vampires keep all these emotions at arm’s length: because they are weaknesses, and if you have weaknesses you can be taken down with all the other prey.

Close to dawn I lift my head, my long golden hair blending with Tora’s tiger fur. I do not think, but add the black stripes to my own tiger-gold hair.

“Look, my beautiful,” I whisper. “I have stolen your stripes. I will wear them so that your beauty will not be forgotten. My tiger, my Tora, my beautiful — I will not allow this crime to go unpunished.” My eyes are dry but sparkle with anger and determination. “I will be sure he is truly dead before he takes another life I love.”

I am focused inward, on Tora, and hear no one approach me. However, I feel a brush of air against my hair, the aura of some visitor. My head snaps up, but I see no one. Whoever was there is gone, leaving nothing save a slip of paper next to my hand.

I pick up the paper, my eyes caught on the name that is scrawled across the top in black ink:
Rachel
. I cannot read the words below, which have run together where water has fallen onto the ink.
Not water
, I think, realizing how strongly the aura is mixed in with them —
tears
.

I stare at the name for a moment, then crush the note in my hand, a fine tremor of rage going through me at this creature who dares to taunt me so. I do not recognize the aura on the paper; I do not know who sent it.

“Rachel is dead,” I say aloud. “I am not Rachel — she died three hundred years ago.”

The tearstains on the paper — whose are they? What human learned of Rachel and was so pained by her
story that he sent me this? Or is this note a sick joke of Aubrey’s, another way to scar my heart?