Dayhunter

by Jocelynn Drake

  We glided down the main canal and pulled up near one of the few bridges that spanned the waterway. Danaus rose and tied the boat to an empty pole while I killed the engine. The only sound disrupting the silence was the break of the waves brushing against the side of the boat as we settled at the landing. In all of Venice, the island of San Michele would have been the only place more peaceful, but despite some of the popular myths about vampires, I didn’t get any particular kicks wandering around a crumbling, mold-infested graveyard at night. The living were generally more interesting than the dead.

  “Where are we?” he asked as we left the boat and wandered down the disintegrating fondamenta along the canal, toward the only cluster of buildings rising up in the darkness.

  “The birthplace of Venice,” I said. My voice hovered at a whisper, as if anything loud would break the spell. Lights began to appear as we reached the edge of the campo that was now more dirt and gravel than the original stonework. Grass crowded close to the road and weeds pushed their way between the cracks in the remaining paving. The main square was overgrown, with only a few bits of broken column and statues left to adorn the area like tombstone markers for the city that once was.

  “The island is nearly deserted, but they say that this is where the Venetians first settled in either the fourth or fifth century,” I said, running my hand over one of the stone columns. All its original marks were worn away, leaving what appeared to be a pale white, bonelike pillar rising up without the rest of the skeleton. “I’ve always liked it here. I love the island’s sense of history and its peace.”

  “It’s nice,” he whispered. Danaus wandered over and stood before an odd chunk of white stone that resembled a chair. The locals referred to it as the throne of Attila the Hun, but no one actually believed he had ever sat on that hunk of rock. A light breeze stirred the leaves in some nearby trees, sending up their soft song into the night. Not far from the square, lights from the only restaurant on the island glowed in golden patches, but even they were beginning to dim under the lateness of the hour. The few inhabitants of the island were slipping off to bed, leaving Danaus and me alone.

  “This city is almost as old as you, Danaus. Its memory is nearly as long as yours,” I teased.

  A faint smile lifted his features as he looked around the empty plaza. “A lot of Europe is,” he reminded me. His voice was gentle, losing its usual gruff, angry edge. It was as if he had forgotten for a brief moment that I was a nightwalker; the enemy.

  “True.” I nodded, clinging to my smile though it was starting to fade. “I think it’s one of the drawbacks to living in the New World; too new.”

  “No sense of history or identity,” he murmured.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ve got something else to show you.”

  I led him across the square and past the external colonnade to the front door of the church of Santa Fosca. The small structure was a mix of classical Byzantine and Greek. It took me only a moment to pick the lock and push open the dark wood doors. Pale slivers of moonlight shone through the open windows, revealing the high arching ceiling and wooden beams that crossed overhead. The forlorn coos of pigeons echoed off the walls as the birds settled in their roosts for the night. The interior was made of white bricks and a handful of white marble columns. There were no statues at the altar of the Blessed Mother, and only a single crucifix hung on the back wall. Tall white candles dotted the altar and filled the wall sconces that lined the walls. The center aisle was wide, but the intricate mosaic floor was cracked and broken, with a layer of dust veiling its former beauty. Only the old wooden pews still gleamed in the faint light, as if someone took the time to carefully wax each one at least once a week.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” I said, spinning to look at my companion. “It’s visited by only tourists now and hasn’t been used as a church for a couple centuries. It’s a shame. The architecture is as lovely as any of the churches in San Croce or even San Marco.”

  “How?” he asked breathlessly.

  “How what?”

  “How is it that you can be here? Has God abandoned this place?” I watched Danaus. His whole body was tensed, looking as if he expected one of us to be struck by lightning at any second. A faint sheen of perspiration glistened on his forehead in the moonlight.

  “The magic is gone from this place,” I replied. “It’s not God, Danaus, but the faith of the people who go to a church that keeps me out. Faith is just another form of magic. If a human believes God will protect him, then he has cast a spell. And when people stop going to a church, the magic eventually fades.”

  Walking over to the pews to my right, I extended my hand, slowly moving it through the air. I could feel a light residue of energy. Someone had sat there during the day and whispered a prayer, a near-silent plea for hope or help, or maybe thanks or protection. There were other pockets in the air around me, thin and faint like a ghost, fading with the passage of time.

  “I—I don’t understand,” he said, his voice faltering. I could taste his fear and horror in the air, but there was nothing enticing about it. From him, it was unnerving and even a little sickening, like a slow-working poison. It was as if the world was crumbling away beneath his feet and I was the cause.

  “For some people, a cross doesn’t work against nightwalkers.” I lowered my hand back to my side and turned to face my companion. “These people believe that something about the shape of the metal keeps my kind at bay. They have faith in the cross, but not in the idea of a protective God, and that’s never as strong. Your heart and soul aren’t involved in that kind of faith, just your mind.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, his face hardening. If he had been armed, I think he would have drawn his sword to protect himself against my words. But instead he stood in the darkness of the church glaring at me.

  “I’m not asking you to,” I said with an indifferent shrug. “I’m just telling you what I’ve learned from experience. But you have to consider, I am standing in what has been a Christian church at one time.”

  Danaus remained quiet as I walked toward the altar. He was still uneasy, his emotions verging on frustration and anger. I stopped at the two small steps that led up to the remains of a marble altar. Behind it hung the tortured image of Jesus Christ still pinned to the wooden cross. His face and body was streaked and stained from time and water damage. His benevolent face appeared as if he had been crying tears, mourning the state of his home, or maybe just the state of man.

  “Why did you do it, Mira?” Danaus asked, his voice strangely gentle.

  “Do what?” I replied, trying to sound only mildly interested. Something twisted in my stomach; this was going to take an ugly turn.

  “Why did you abandon God?”

  “What?” My voice jumped above a whisper for the first time since we landed on Torcello, shattering the silence that had become suffocating. I spun on my right heel to gaze with confusion at my dark companion. His whole body was tensed, his hands balled into tight fists at his sides.

  “Why did you abandon God?” he repeated. “Why did you choose to become a vampire?”

  Plopping down on the two little stairs leading to the altar, I laughed. I tried to tell myself that it was an amusing point of view, but even I heard the thick layer of caustic bitterness in my voice. Danaus had been born centuries ago, long before Christianity took hold as the dominant religion in Europe, but he had obviously learned and clung to its teaching during his long years. I, on the other hand, had taken a slightly different route.

  “Abandon God?” I repeated, pushing back to my feet. “I didn’t abandon God; He abandoned me. Take a good look at me, Danaus. This isn’t vampire enchantment—I was born looking this way.” A ball of fire suddenly hovered beside my face as I walked toward him. “Red hair and violet eyes. I was born on the island of Crete in a small fishing village during the fourteenth century. Everyone had either brown or black hair and brown eyes. Do you know what they said when I was born? I was the spawn of Satan.<
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  “I spent the first sixteen years of my life on my knees, begging God to forgive me for being born. And do you know what His reply was? This!” I held both of my hands out to my sides and they instantly became engulfed in flames. “A group of men from my village tried to rape me one night as I walked back home from church. In my terror, I accidentally set two of them on fire. Before that day, I had never harmed a single human being, but that night I killed two men.”

  “It was an accident,” Danaus firmly said.

  “Was it? How could it be an accident if that’s what I was born to do?” I extinguished the flames I had created, letting the darkness flood the church again as I walked back toward the altar. My heels hitting the broken stone floor echoed through the heavy silence. The night moved close again, wrapping me in its cold arms, holding me, protecting me against Danaus’s questions and memories I desperately wanted to forget.

  “Choosing to be a nightwalker wasn’t about abandoning God,” I continued, the hard angry edge disappearing from my voice. “I lost my faith that night when those men died. Becoming a nightwalker was about power and gaining control of my life.”

  “You traded power for eternal damnation when you died.” Hard accusation filled his voice. His footsteps scraped against the gritty dirt floor as he moved a few feet closer to me.

  “Why do you cling to these archaic ideas?” I shouted, sending several of the pigeons overhead nervously into the air. Their wings beat against the wind as they darted out the open window in search of a quieter location to spend the night. “Not in all my six centuries have I run across this Satan that you are so confident I have sold my soul to. No one has ever spoken of him. Not the Coven, nor Sadira.”

  “You kill.”

  “I have yet to meet a race that didn’t kill. The naturi, humans, lycans, witches, even God’s precious angels kill. Why is my race suddenly different?”

  “You drink blood.”

  “So what! I feed on the life of others. I take their blood, and under most circumstances, leave the life behind. Most carnivores can’t claim that.”

  “It’s not right!” he shouted at me. There was an underlying tremble in his voice, as if something small and frightened within him had finally lashed out at me. His ragged breathing filled the quiet of the church, and I could easily make out the frantic beat of his heart.

  “Says who? Your religious leaders up in their ivory towers? I don’t know whether there is truly a Heaven and Hell, but I believe you earn either place based on the choices that you make.”

  “And you chose to become a vampire,” he hurled back at me.

  “I also chose to save more lives in the past few days at the risk of my own than I care to count.” I took a couple steps up the aisle toward him, barely suppressing the urge to create a fireball in defense against his callous comments. “I’m no innocent, but I’m not the embodiment of all evil that you want me to be. You want to kill me because you think I’m evil. Fine. Just make sure it’s because of the things I’ve done and not because of what I am.”

  “Is that why you’re doing this?” His whole demeanor suddenly changed. The tension that had pulled the shoulder muscles taut eased and his fists loosened so that his fingers now hung open at his sides. “Because you’re trying to earn salvation?” he asked, his tone losing its harshness.

  “Fuck Heaven!” I spat, my hands balled into fists so tight my knuckles had begun to ache. “I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. If I don’t, my people will die. If I don’t, everything beautiful in this world will die.”

  I paced down the aisle again, stopping at the two little stairs, willing myself to calm. I couldn’t fathom why this was still a sore topic with me. For more than six hundred years I had turned over ideas of God, Heaven, Hell, and the devil in my mind. I came up with theories for why my kind existed and our place in the great scheme of things. Sometimes my theories proved to be wrong and I threw them out for new ones. I didn’t have many answers, but my mind was open to possibilities.

  When I finally spoke again, I was surprised at how tired my voice sounded. As if the long centuries had been condensed into a single sound. “You’ve walked this earth for more than a millennium. How can you still cling to the idea that concepts like these are black and white?” I turned to look at him. He still stood near the head of the aisle, as if afraid to enter this place. “Good and evil are not black and white. Human doesn’t automatically equal good and vampire doesn’t equal evil. You’ve spent a lifetime slaughtering my people. Have you never paused for half a second to wonder if we really are what you want us to represent?”

  “Once.” His voice was little more than a summer breeze through a maple tree, soft and soothing.

  “When?” He didn’t answer me, but I knew when as soon as I asked the question. It had been the first night we met. He hesitated that night when we fought. I’d believed it was because of Nerian and the naturi, but there had been something else brewing in the back of his mind. “And what did you decide?”

  “I don’t have an answer. I don’t know! For some reason, you throw everything into confusion. You make me question all the answers I thought I had,” he raged, taking an angry step toward me. His powers surged out from him, hitting me in the chest with enough force to make me take a steadying step backward.

  “There’s nothing wrong with asking questions,” I said with a half smile. The anger and frustration I felt earlier had dissipated, leaving only a fine trembling in my muscles.

  “But these questions take away hope,” he said. I could feel the anger draining out of him, to be replaced by a bone-deep despair that threatened to crush us both. For just this brief moment in time he looked lost, and it was my fault. Before meeting me, he had purpose and direction, he had a light to sail by, but I had destroyed that. I didn’t like him killing, but I also didn’t believe in taking away another creature’s hope.

  “I want to call in my debt,” I announced after a heavy silence had filled the air.

  “What do you want?”

  “Tell me what you are.” He turned and started to walk out of the church without a word. “Stop, Danaus. I’ve thought about this since I first laid eyes on you. You’re at least part human, that can’t be mistaken, but you’re not a warlock or a lycan. I’ve mentally gone through the laundry list of every creature I’ve encountered and nothing seems to fit. What is it that you are so desperate to hide?”

  “Let’s go,” he said. The hunter stopped walking but was still facing the entrance.

  “Not until you tell me. What’s so horrible? Can it top the fact that I am a monster among my own kind? Or that I can be used as a weapon by my enemy to destroy both naturi and nightwalkers? This secret is destroying you and my kind. You have to tell someone.” I was grasping at straws but knew that his twisted outlook on the world had to be rooted somewhere. After more centuries that I cared to count, Danaus’s mind and identity were still mostly human, but the secret of his existence was tearing him apart and destroying far too many of my own kind in the process. It also left him vulnerable to creatures such as Ryan, who were all too happy to use Danaus’s desperation and confusion to their advantage.

  “Why you?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at me.

  “Because us freaks got to stick together,” I replied, flashing him a wicked grin.

  He made a strange noise, almost like a strangled laugh, and shook his head. “Bitch,” he muttered under his breath, but in the quiet church it was like he had shouted it.

  “I pray you’re not just figuring that out,” I said blandly, but then quickly turned serious again. “What is this burden on your shoulders?”

  Danaus turned around, resting one hand against the doorjamb as if to steady himself. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and rough, making me wonder how many times he had spoken these words aloud. “My mother was a witch. Before I was born, she made a deal with a demon to gain more power.”

  “And the price?” Those three words escaped
my lips in a rough and ragged whisper. I already knew the answer. There was always a price for more power. I knew that personally. For my amazing abilities, I traded in my ability to be awake during the day and gained a complete dependence on blood for survival.

  “Me.”

  My knees buckled and I landed on my butt on the edge of one of the marble steps leading up to the altar. Panic screamed in my brain as I struggled to comprehend the words he had uttered. A fierce shaking started in my hands and a sharp, biting chill swept through my body. There were no such thing as demons—not as humans comprehended them—but back in the beginning, when the world was young, there were two guardian races, the naturi who watched over the earth and the bori who watched over all souls.

  The bori were an immensely powerful race that had come to represent both angels and demons in human mythology. And while the naturi had the ability to force all lycanthropes to do their bidding, the bori could easily subjugate the entire nightwalker race. The naturi wanted to destroy us, but the bori wanted to rule us. It was why both races had been banished from this world. Yet, something was off. While we all knew some naturi were left on earth after the seal had been made, supposedly none of the bori remained. All the bori had been locked away for centuries. Had Danaus’s mother found a way to partially summon a bori back to earth?

  I couldn’t raise my gaze to look at him, not when I knew my horror was clearly written across my face. My world was crumbling around me at an alarming rate. Jabari could control me, Rowe wanted to use me to permanently free Aurora, and Danaus, with his link to the bori, could use me to destroy both the naturi and the nightwalkers.

  Closing my eyes, I drew in a deep breath as I pushed down the rising wave of panic filling my chest. I needed to think clearly. “You’re a demon?” I finally said, lifting my gaze to look down the long aisle at the creature that had saved me on more than one occasion.