The Den of Shadows Quartet - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [12]
At least, I hoped I was human. What had Ather done to me?
“Risika,” she told me, “if you do not feed, the blood I have given you will kill you.” She was not pleading with me; she was stating facts. “It will take days before you are truly dead, but by sunset tomorrow you will be too weak to hunt for yourself, and I refuse to spoon-feed you. Hunt or die, it is your choice.”
I hesitated, trying to remember. There was a reason that I should not hunt. Someone I knew would have resisted, someone I loved but could not remember … I could not remember. The only reason I could remember now was the one I had been taught all my life by the preachers — because killing was a sin.
But dying by my own choice was a sin as well.
Perhaps I was already damned.
“Foolish child,” Ather said. “Look at yourself in that mirror and tell me that your own church would not condemn you for what you are. Would you refuse the life I have given you to try to save the soul which your god has damned?”
“I will not sell my soul to save my life,” I said, though in my mind I was not so sure. My church was cold and strict, but I feared the nothingness of a soulless death just as much as I feared the flames of the spoken Hell. And perhaps she was right. Perhaps it was already too late.
“No,” I said again, trying to convince myself more than her. “I will not.”
“Brave words,” Ather told me. “What if I told you it did not matter?” She was whispering now, as if that would drive her words into my mind. It was working. “You signed the Devil’s book as your blood fell onto my gift to you.”
In my mind the scene played itself out again. A black rose, the thorns sharp like the fangs of a viper. A drop of blood falling on the black flower as those fanglike thorns cut the hand that held them. Black eyes, much like Ather’s black eyes but somehow infinitely colder, watching like a snake as the blood fell. Watching like a viper, like the thorns of the rose, as if he had bitten me …
My mind was filled with dark images and darker thoughts of snakes and hunting beasts and red blood falling on black petals. My heart was filled with pain and anger and hatred and the black blood that had damned me.
CHAPTER 9
NOW
I PULL MYSELF from my memories. I curse the fool I was to think I could save my damned soul with silly protests.
Aubrey’s servant has run from my home, and I sense him leaving my town. He fears for his life, with good reason. Had he stayed I would have killed him. He knows I would, and he knows I can smell his fear.
I may have been changed against my will, but I do not fight what I am anymore. There is no greater freedom than feeling the night air against your face as you run through the forest, no greater joy than the hunt. The taste of your prey’s fear, the sound of its heart beating strong and fast, the smells of the night.
I stand in this small town, so near to the dead and almost as near to the faithful in the church across the street, feeling the fear of the human running from my home. For that is what I am — a hunter. I learned long ago that I could not deny that fact.
Every instinct tells me to hunt this running, frightened creature. I am a vampire, after all. But I am not an animal, and I was once a human. That is what makes my kind dangerous: a hunter’s instincts and a human’s mind. Humanity’s cruel way of toying with the world, laced with the savage, unthinking hunt of the wild animal.
But I do have control, and I will let this human live to tell his news to Aubrey, whom he fears even more than he fears me. He is the bearer of bad news, and Aubrey does not like bad news.
I refuse to allow Aubrey to rule me, but only because it is the way of my kind. I fear Aubrey as much as this human does, perhaps more, for I know exactly what Aubrey is and what he is capable of.
I am restless. Despite the rising sun, I am in the mood