The Den of Shadows Quartet Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER 13

  NOW

  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?

  “I don’t want your games!” I shout. If the one who left this reminder is still near, let him confront me.

  No one answers.

  CHAPTER 14

  NOW

  MY PAST AND MY PRESENT have combined to taunt me. Shaking with grief and anger, I return to Ambrosia. I glance around the room, checking for Aubrey. I do not see him.

  I come to this place seeking a diversion. The ghost of Rachel cannot follow me here.

  I see my image reflected in a crystal glass someone has left on a counter. My reflectio
n is a misty apparition, but I can see Tora’s markings in my hair and I laugh. This is something Aubrey will never take from me.

  In this moment I feel like exactly what I am: a wild child of the darkness. A dangerous shadow in a mood to make trouble.

  I look around the room again. Smiling, I toss my tiger-striped hair back from my face and perch on the counter. The girl behind it, a younger fledgling, opens her mouth as if to tell me to get down but then thinks better of it.

  “What do you see, Tiger?” someone asks me, and I turn toward him. “You look around this room as if you saw it differently from all of us. What do you see?”

  I recognize him, and I know he recognizes me. He is Ather’s blood brother, Jager. People say he treats all life as a game that must be played — a cruel and deadly game in which whoever is winning makes the rules.

  Jager appears eighteen, with dark skin and deep brown hair. His eyes are emerald green, and they reflect the dim light like a cat’s. I know it is the same illusion as my hair. All vampires have black eyes, and Jager had dark eyes even when he was alive — he was born nearly five thousand years ago, in Egypt, and watched the great pyramids rise.

  “I see someone who does not show his true eyes,” I observe. “What do you see?”

  “I see that my warnings to Ather and Aubrey were justified,” he answers.

  “Was it you who warned Ather I would be strong?”

  “It was I who warned her that you would be stronger than she.”

  He sits on the counter beside me, and the girl behind it gives up, moving to a table on the other side of the room.

  “Ather is weak,” I comment. “It is one of her flaws. She changes those who will be stronger than her, because it makes others think she has more power than she does.”

  “She isn’t the only one you are stronger than, Risika,” he answers. “Aubrey isn’t often challenged, because people know he is powerful, and they are afraid of him. He has you afraid of him, although he is not much stronger than you are, if at all.”

  “Oh, really?” I ask, not believing him. “Then we must be speaking of different Aubreys, because I lost the last time I fought the Aubrey I know.”

  “You could hide that scar with a thought. You have the power to do that,” Jager says, changing the subject.

  “I could,” I answer. “But I don’t.”

  “You wear it like a warning — a sign that you will avenge it.”

  “I will avenge more than this scar, Jager.”

  “When?” he presses. “Will you wait for him to start the music? Or will you start it yourself?”

  “I prefer to kill in silence.”

  Jager gazes at me and smiles. “Happy hunting, Risika.” A moment later he is gone.

  I lie back on the counter, thinking on his words, and then I too am gone. We are phantoms of the night, coming and going from the darkened city like shadows in candlelight.

  I return to my home in a light, detached mood, not bothering with the complexities of revenge. I look out the front window, watching the few who are also returning to bed as the sun rises.

  One of Concord’s other shadows enters his house — a witch, but only by heritage, as he is not trained. He is not a threat to me.

  I also see Jessica, Concord’s young writer, looking out her own window. Jessica writes about vampires, and her books are true, though no one understands how she knows what she does. I wonder if I should tell her my story — perhaps she could write it for me. Perhaps it is my story she now writes.

  I go upstairs and fall into bed and a vampiric sleep.

  My dreams are my memories of the past. I dream of my years of innocence, while I was still fighting what I was.

  CHAPTER 15

  1704

  I DID NOT RETURN to my home for three years, and when I finally did, no one saw me.

  It was nearly midnight when I stopped in Concord, which was intentional. I did not wish to run into any humans.

  I did not want to be recognized, of course, but more than that I was not sure I could control myself. The last time I had fed had been two nights previous, on a thief who had the ill luck to attack me as I wandered the darkened streets. The thirst beat at me viciously.

  Though I consoled myself by saying I only killed those who deserved it, Aubrey’s words always echoed in my mind: Are you a god now, Risika, deciding who is to live and who is to die? Thieves and murderers sustained me, but only just. I fed only as often as I needed to in order to survive, and the hunger was always near.

  I stood outside the house I had once lived in, perched on the edge of the well, watching the house like a ghost, able to see and hear but unable to do anything else.

  Would he recognize me, even if he saw me? The three years had changed me. My fair skin was frosty white, and my golden hair was tangled, not having seen a comb in a while. I wore men’s clothing, having lost my patience with long dresses as I explored the forests, mountains, and rivers of the country.

  Of course I could have walked up to the door and asked my father if he knew who I was, but I would not. He would only be hurt more when I had to leave again. I would not let him know what I had become.

  Lynette was asleep in her room, but my father was awake, and crying. He looked out the window, and though I knew he was looking in my direction, he did not see me. I had learned how to shield my existence from mortal eyes.

  The tears on his face sent daggers into my heart. I had a powerful vision of Aubrey and Ather lying dead, with me standing above them. Would anyone weep if they were killed? I did not think so, but I would never have the chance to know. Aubrey had proved beyond any doubt that I would not be the one to give him death.

  A woman drifted downstairs behind my father. Her dark hair was tied back, and even from this distance I could see that her eyes were chocolate brown. Her skin was not as fair as my mother’s had been. When she put a hand on my father’s shoulder, I could see that she did not have the graceful artist’s hands my father had often described my mother as having.

  “Peter, it’s late. You need to sleep.”

  My father turned to her and gave a weak smile, and for an instant I felt an irrational urge to go inside and shake this woman. I had seen my father’s thoughts, and I knew without a doubt that this stranger was his wife. Her name was Katherine. Had he married her trying to replace us? Did she even know about Alexander and me? Did she care?

  These people were no longer my family that I knew. But I could not help hating this woman for trying to take my place.

  “Jealous?” someone said over my shoulder, and I swung around toward Aubrey, knowing that my eyes were narrowed with hatred. “If she bothers you that much, kill her.”

  “I am sure you would appreciate that,” I hissed.

  He laughed. “You have too many morals.”

  “And you have none,” I snapped back, trying to keep myself from hitting him. I refused to leave while he was here, his attention on my father and this innocent woman.

  Innocent woman … strange, how my opinion changed so quickly. As soon as Aubrey suggested I kill her, I felt the need to protect her.

  “I have some morals, I suppose,” he argued, though his voice was light. He had taken no offense at the accusation. “But none that interfere with the way I survive. Look at yourself, Risika — you can hardly preach the benefits of morality.”

  Though I did not hate myself for killing to survive, I feared that I would one day become as indifferent to murder as Aubrey was.

  “If you came here to convince me to abandon my morals, you are wasting your time,” I snapped.

  “You are hardly my only motive for being here,” he answered lazily.

  My father and his wife had decided to get some air and were now sitting on the back porch, quietly discussing how the farm was doing, Lynette’s suitors, and everything else except for the reason my father had been crying.

  As if he could sense my gaze on him, my father turned toward me, but this time his eyes went wide, as if he
could see me despite my efforts.

  Standing, he took a step in my direction before his wife put a hand on his arm. “There’s no one there, Peter,” she insisted, and my father sighed.

  “I could have sworn I saw her….” He shook his head, taking a raspy breath.

  “You could have sworn you saw her a few days ago, but she was not there. You thought you saw your son the week before that, but he was not there. They never are, Peter, and they never will be. Let them go.”

  My father turned about and went inside the house. Katherine closed her eyes for a moment and whispered a prayer.

  Why did she not help him herself? Was she so blind that she could not see how much her words had hurt him?

  Aubrey laughed beside me. “You are jealous.”

  I spun toward him again, losing my temper. “Could you go somewhere else?”

  “I could,” he said. “But this is more fun.”

  “Damn you.”

  He shrugged, then looked past me to my father’s wife, who had just stood and moved toward the house.

  She hesitated, then turned slowly, sensing eyes on her back.

  “Leave her alone, Aubrey,” I commanded.

  “Why?”

  Katherine looked up as if she had heard a sound, and then walked toward us, though I could tell that she did not really see Aubrey or me.

  I clenched my fists, knowing that he was baiting me and knowing equally well that if he had set his mind on killing this woman, there was no way I could stop him.

  Katherine gasped as Aubrey stopped hiding himself from her. She froze, eyes wide.

  “Fine, Aubrey — you have made your point,” I snapped, stepping between him and his prey “Now leave.”

  “And what point would that be?” he inquired. “I do not share your reservations, Risika. I hunt when I wish, as I always have.”

  “Hunt somewhere else,” I said. His eyes narrowed.

  “Who … Wh-What do you want?” Katherine stammered, backing away from us. She was breathing quickly, and her heart was beating fast from fear.