“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.

“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.”