The Den of Shadows Quartet - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [16]
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.
CHAPTER 12
1701
AFTER 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.