Often, during waking, there is a moment of complete, content detachment. As your eyes flutter open in the morning light, you savor the lingering warmth of the blankets surrounding you and the allencompassing warmth of gentle sunlight. However, that’s not what comes to mind when one awakes to find they’ve been beaten, manhandled and wake up chained a few feet off the floor with your wrists and ankles shackled. Actually, there’s quite a bit of pain involved when you awaken to such circumstances.

And rage. Don’t forget the awesome, all encompassing anger. I am certainly not forgetting it.

Calm yourself, girl, resounds a voice within my head and I know this is going to end badly. What I don’t know is whom it will end badly for.

“Mmah,” I have to work my jaw a little (and it hurts like hell) before I try again, “My…name…is Solaine.”

“That name means nothing, and you are nothing to us except Jarvis’s murderer,” the voice is an old man’s, and I’m hoping that my vision will focus on my surroundings sometime soon. “Stealer of his essence, ruiner of his nest,” the voice continues and the more he speaks, the more uneasy I become. The rustling sound his voice makes as it bounces around the room is like nothing I’ve ever heard before; like I imagine musty old tomes would sound, whispering to each other late at night in the back of an enormous library.

“Don’t forget ‘Sharama’,” I snipe, interrupting his tirade momentarily and he hisses. There’s an overhead light, the walls are all grey, and from the cold seeping under my skin I have to assume that I’m—once again—deep with the walls of Greystone Ridge. “Jarvis knew what I was only after he tried to Turn me. So, technically, you might be able to say that he hastened his own demise,”

“Silence!” the vampire shouts, storming out of the shadows and slapping me dramatically. The explosion of pain seems to wake up every part of my body; a stinging in my hands and feet hurts like hell but I welcome the pain as it’s the harbinger to full consciousness (and that oh-so-helpful rage that helps me make things explode).

“I didn’t steal his essence!” I incinerated it, but I manage to keep the second half of my statement within my mind. My vision finally focuses and the vampire standing across from me and I realize that he must be an actual ANCIENT because he actually LOOKS old, which doesn’t happen for a very, very long time.

His hair’s white but not thin and his face—while not creased with deep wrinkles or webbed by them either—still shows the strain of years more easily measured in centuries rather than decades. His clothes are old-fashioned too; as if the last time he went to a haberdasher was when people actually used that word in everyday speech. It’s a nice suit—expensive no doubt—but it looks wrong and that makes me feel deeply worried.

Where’s my anger? I wonder, tamping down the verge of panic, I need that anger…

“You lie,” the Ancient vampire’s hissing retort pulls me out of my spiraling panic and as he steps closer I realize he’s going to touch me.

Fuck, I hate it when they touch me, I mutter to myself, trying not to squirm as I feel a finger trace down my face, neck, collarbone and Oh shit they’ve taken my clothes!!! Why doesn’t it reassure me that he’s sticking to my centerline?

“I don’t lie,” I growl from between gritting teeth as he pauses at my bellybutton, “and I don’t appreciate this treatment. Where am I? Why am I in this room…and where the FUCK are my clothes?!?” Suddenly a faint glimmer of red shines in the back of my vision and a tendril of heat flickers from my core to my extremities.

“I didn’t restrain you in this way,” he replies, finger still toying with my bellybutton, “but you ARE dangerous and that’s why you’re in this room. As for your clothes, well,” he smiles that awful, superior smile get when they see a woman humiliated and adds, “we felt you might be more—cooperative—if you were disrobed as well as disarmed.”

“Buddy,” I whisper, my voice smoldering with anger, “it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than this to disarm me.” I coil my energy around my restraints and feel them melt like butter from around my wrists and ankles.

“I see,” the Ancient replies calmly as I am slipping toward the floor, but I never make it to the ground. He catches me up and suddenly it feels like his hand on my stomach has gone through my skin and is reaching into the center of me to swallow up the molten core of my power.

I scream; the scream loosens from my throat like a separate entity trying to escape before this body dies and the scream pleases him. I know his thoughts—intimately connected to him as I am—as he sucks the power from me. Caught by only one hand, he doesn’t have the control over the rest of me that he’d like and I howl as I claw skin from every part of him I can reach. Unfortunately, it does nothing more than upset him and I feel myself becoming colder by the minute. I kick and scratch and bite all his two thousand parts, almost managing to wriggle out of his grasp before the blackness forms within me, dragging me back into its depths.

SYNNOVE, 6 years old…

It was an accident, I didn’t know what I was doing. Our cat had given birth to kittens but one came out not moving. My child-self held it, crying, and wished for that tiny life to mewl. My father told me to leave it—let the cat take it and bury it—but that lovely calico kitten broke my heart. So I pet it, poured my love into it, and after a few moments she grew warm and wiggly. I take her to her mother and Cat almost takes my hand off; hurrying to nuzzle the kitten to her belly and inspecting it with more fervor than the other four.

You have to understand my father was not a religious man, nor a superstitious one, but he knew that what I’d done was not normal. Nor would it be acceptable, if the townsfolk learned of it.

“Synnove,” he whispers as he throws me up onto his shoulder and stalks out into the woods, stopping only when we reach a wide, empty meadow. “Darling daughter, blood of my life, do you know what you have done?” he sets me down upon a stump in the clearing and I am scared to look up until he tilts my chin and I see the gentleness in his eyes.

“No Papa,” I answer meekly, still terrified that I’ve done something unforgivable. “The kitten wasn’t moving, and the Cat pushed her away,” I pause for a moment before muttering, “someone had to love it…” My voice fades as my father’s eyes soften in that way I so often see when he looks only at Mother.

“Sweet child, that kitten was dead. What you did was unnatural,” I start to deny it but he silences me gently, “but it was not wrong. Was not bad, nor evil. You must understand that,”

“I don’t understand, Papa,” but I stare at the ground.

“I have never seen anyone do what you have done. It is not even spoken of. The priest would brand you a witch, my joy, if anyone ever finds out what you can do,” he forces me to look up at him once more, into his clear, blue grey eyes. “They will kill you. They will kill your mother and your brothers. Only after they have killed me…but there is something you can do to protect us.”

“What can I do, Papa?” my desperate plea makes him swoop me off my perch and crush him to his massive chest, “Tell me and I’ll do it,” I whisper.

“I cannot ask you to be anything less than what you are, my favorite child. But now I must send you away,”

“NO PAPA!” I cry and he hushes me,

“Yes daughter,” he stares at me from inches as he adds, “I must send you away so that you can learn how to use what power you have. So you can become—fully—what you already ARE.”

“No!” I cry fitfully, begging though I don’t know the impossibility of what I’m saying, “I won’t do it anymore, I PROMISE! I’ll never,” I choke on my sobs as he holds me, rubbing his huge, paw-like hand across my back as I wind

down into hic-sobbing.

“You cannot be other than what you are,” I shake my head furiously, ringlets tossing back and forth as I nuzzle into darling. You are meant from more than the life I can give you, but I know others who can lead you to your destiny.” Father carries me home then, tucking me into bed and when I wake in the morning, it all seems like a bad dream. As the weeks pass I hope he’s forgotten his promise to send me away and every day that comes and

goes makes it seem more likely.

Then, in the middle of an unassuming midsummer’s night, he scoops me from my place in front of the fire and takes me into the woods. Half-asleep, I barely remember him handing me to a lean, tall, duskyskinned man that resembles him in his height, his hands and his eyes. Before he leaves, my father tells me,

“This is your Uncle, daughter-mine, and this is your blood. Learn the ways of the Travelers and when their travel leads you to the Mountain people learn their ways as well. Return to us only when it is safe,” he kisses my forehead and whispers, “we are always loving you.”

“I love you too, Papa,” I mumble and rolling into the nest of blankets, I fall asleep to the rocking motion of the wagon as we make our way into the night.