In the Forests of the Night

continue to call myself Risika, even though I was transformed into what I am against my will.

My mind wanders back the road to my past, looking for a time when Rachel was still alive and Risika was not yet born.

CHAPTER 2 1701

THERE WAS ASH on my pale skin from helping to put out the fire. As my sister, Lynette, had been preparing the evening meal, flames had leapt from the hearth like arms reaching out to grab her. My twin brother, Alexander, had been standing across the room from the hearth. He was convinced this accident was his fault.

'Am I damned?' he asked, staring past me at the now cold hearth.

How did he want me to answer? I was only seventeen, a girl still, and certainly not a cleric. I knew nothing of damnation and salvation that my twin brother did not know as well. Yet Alexander was looking at me, his golden eyes heavy with worry and shame, as if I should know everything.

'You should ask these things of a preacher, not me,' I answered.

'Tell a preacher what I see? Tell him that I can look into people's minds, and that I can…

He trailed off, but we both knew what the rest of the sentence was. For months Alexander had been trying to hide his powers, which were just as undesired as the fire had been. Shaking with fear, he had told me everything. He could sometimes hear the thoughts of those around him, though he tried to block them out. If he concentrated on an object, he would make it move. And, he had added, if he stared into a fire, he could make it rise or fall. Despite his efforts to control these powers, they were sometimes stronger than he was.

Lynette had been cooking supper. Now she was at the doctor's with our papa, being treated for burns.

'It is witchcraft,' Alexander whispered, as if afraid to say the words any more loudly. 'How can I tell a clergyman that?'

Once again I could not answer him. Alexander believed far more than I in the peril of the soul. Though we both said our prayers and went to church without fail, where I was skeptical, he was faithful. In truth, I was more afraid of the cold, commanding preachers than of the fires of Hell they threatened us with. If I had the powers my brother was discovering, I would fear the church even more.

'Maybe that is what happened to our mother,' Alexander said quietly. 'Maybe I hurt her.'

'Alexander!' I gasped, horrified that my brother could think such a thing. 'How can you blame yourself for Mother's death? We were babies!'

' If I could lose control and hurt Lynette when I am seventeen, how much easier would it have been for me to lose control as a child?'

I did not remember my mother, though Papa sometimes spoke about her; she had died only a few days after Alexander and I were born. Her hair had been even fairer than my brother's and mine, but our eyes were exactly the same color as hers had been. An exotic honey gold, our eyes were dangerous in their uniqueness. Had my family not been so well accepted in the community, our eyes might have singled us out for accusations of witchcraft.

'You are not even certain Lynette's injuries are your fault,' I told Alexander. Lynette was my papa's third child, born to his second wife; her mother had died only a year before of smallpox. 'She was leaning too close to the fire, or maybe there was oil on the wood somehow. Even if you did cause it, it was not your fault.'

'Witchcraft, Rachel,' Alexander said softly. 'How large a crime is that? I hurt someone, and I will not even go to the church to confess.'

'It was not your fault! ' Why did he insist on blaming himself for something he could not have prevented?

I saw my brother as a saint—he could hardly stand to watch Papa slaughter chickens for supper. I knew, even more surely than he did, that he could never intentionally hurt someone. 'You never asked for these powers, Alexander,' I told him quietly. 'You never signed the Devil's book. You are trying to be forgiven for doing nothing wrong.'

Papa returned home with Lynette late that evening. Her arms had been bandaged, but the doctor had said there would be no permanent damage. Alexander's guilt was still so strong—he made sure she rested, not using her hands, even though he had to do most of her work. As he and I cooked supper, he would occasionally catch my gaze, the question in his eyes pleading: Am I damned?

CHAPTER 3 NOW

WHY AM I THINKING these things?

I find myself staring at the rose on my bed, so like one I was given nearly three hundred years ago. The aura around it is like a fingerprint: I can feel the strength and recognize the one who left it. I know him very well.

I have lived in this world for three hundred years, and yet I have broken one of its most basic rules. When I stopped last night to hunt after visiting Tora, I strayed into the territory of another.

My prey was clearly lost. Though not native to New York City, she had thought she knew where she was going.

The city at night is like a jungle. In the red glow of the unsleeping city the streets and alleys change and twist like shadows, just like all the human—and not so human — predators that inhabit it.

As the sun set, my prey had found herself alone in a dark area of town. The streetlights were broken, and there were more shadows than light. She was afraid. Lost. Alone. Weak. Easy prey.

She turned onto another street, searching for something familiar. This street was darker than the one before, but not in a way a human would recognize. It was one of the many streets in America that belong to my kind. These streets look almost normal, less dangerous, though perhaps a bit more deserted. Illusions can be so comforting. My prey was walking into a Venus flytrap. If I did not, someone was going to kill her as soon as she entered one of the bars or set foot in a cafe, which had probably never served anything she would wish to drink.

She seemed to relax slightly when she saw the Cafe Sangra. None of the windows was broken, no one was collapsed against the building, and the place was open. She started toward the cafe, and I followed silently.

I sensed another human presence to my left and reached out with my mind to determine whether it was a threat. Walls went up in an instant. But they were weak, and I could tear through them if I tried. The human in question would feel it, though that did not matter to me.

'This isn't your land,' he told me. Though I could sense a bit of a vampiric aura around him, he was definitely human. He was blood bonded to a vampire and probably even working for one, but not one of my kind. He was not a threat, so I did not even bother looking into his mind.

'This isn't your land,' he told me again. I knew he could read my aura, but I was strong enough to dampen it, so to him I must have felt young. Even so, he was very foolish or he was working for someone very strong— possibly both. Since there are no more than five or six vampires on Earth who are stronger than I, I had little to fear.

'Get out,' he ordered me.

'No,' I replied, continuing toward the Cafe Sangra.

I heard him draw a gun, but he had no chance to aim before I was there. I twisted the gun sharply to the side, and he dropped it so that his wrist would not break. My prey's eyes went wide as she saw this, and she ran away blindly, darting around the corner. Stupid human.

I stopped veiling my aura, and my attacker's eyes went wide as he felt its full strength.

'Is that all you were armed with?' I scoffed. 'You work for my kind—you must have more than one gun.'

He went to draw a knife, but I grabbed it first and threw it into the street hard enough to slam an inch of steel into the ground.