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.
Danaus narrowed his beautiful blues, closely examining my face for my reaction to the news. “Half. Like you said, part of me is still human.”
But it wasn’t that simple. The bori weren’t demons, and I had never heard of anyone being half bori. There was no cross-breeding with humans. The closest mix between a human and a bori was a nightwalker, and I knew without a doubt that Danaus was not one of us.
It sounded as if the bori that made the deal was more of a parasite attached to Danaus’s soul, lending him power as the bori bided his time. And while the naturi clung to twelve wells of power from the earth, Danaus had potentially become a walking doorway for the entire bori race. They just had to figure out how to unlock him.
And yet, Danaus had never used the term bori. He didn’t know, didn’t understand, their long history. He was just clinging to the ancient definition of what a demon was and making his decisions based on that. He had no idea what he was.
“So you’re trying to save your human half by ridding the world of evil, namely vampires,” I said, trying to quell my rising panic before he sensed it. What could I tell him? That it wasn’t a demon that owned a part of his soul, but something nastier and more complicated? I didn’t have any answers for him. And what information I could give him would only make it worse. I needed time and more information before I opened my mouth.