Sînge

CHAPTER 1

A Fascinating Discovery

The Forbidden Forest was dark, and as obviously stated, forbidding. A few heavy clouds had just covered the moon, and the silence was unbroken, save for the rustling of wind in the leaves of the giant trees. An owl hooted far in the distance, and a colony of bats took off into alarmed flight at the sound, chattering and flapping loudly. Several leaves on the forest floor stirred in the restless breeze.

Aurelia smiled and looked around, stretching her arms to work out the stiffness. This was her favorite time of night, when the last traces of the sun had melted away, and the creatures of the forest had just begun to stir. The sunset was beautiful, she had to admit, but she was a bit wary of coming out of the tree in which she slept so early. Jeni had said that she once came out in the instant after the sun had set, and nothing had happened. It wasn't that Aurelia didn't believe Jeni. It was just that she knew her friend tended to stretch things a little in her enthusiasm and desire to entertain.

Lately, though, Aurelia and Jeni had spent less time together than she would have preferred. She remembered when they used to go searching together every night, spending hours talking and laughing. Now, Jeni was spending more and more of her time with Marin, and even when they all went searching together, it wasn't quite the same. Aurelia had been trying very hard not to feel jealous of Marin, but it was proving more difficult than she had thought. He and Jeni kept talking about things they had done together and laughing at private jokes. Aurelia laughed and smiled along with them, but she still felt very much a third wheel. She often wondered if Jeni even liked spending time with her anymore, or if she liked being with Marin better. Maybe Marin was more fun to be around than she was. She still knew in some distant part of herself, not often considered, that she was being silly. It was quite acceptable for Jeni to be close friends with two people, but she still couldn't help dwelling on this depressing subject.

Don't you start all that again! she told herself sternly. Think happy thoughts. Flowers and fuzzy rabbits! There you go, now don't you feel better? She snorted. It sounded like something useless that her mother would have said to cheer her up, and it had exactly the same effect.

Feeling like she needed a distraction, Aurelia looked around and saw the weeping willow tree in which she slept to her left. She ran towards it, grabbed a branch, and catapulted herself onto the gnarled bough of an ancient oak growing nearby. Balancing lightly on the balls of her feet, she leapt to the next branch and climbed swiftly to the topmost reaches of the tree.

Ahh, that's better, she thought, breathing in the sweet, cool air, panting slightly, and gazing at the carpet of treetops around her. She loved the exhilaration of leaping and running. She felt as if she were charged and overflowing with life.

"Aurelia!" someone whispered. Glancing down through the dark foliage, she saw Jeni squinting around into the darkness. "Where are you?" she said, a little louder.

There was a clear spot through the branches straight to the forest floor. Taking a deep breath, Aurelia jumped forty feet straight down. Her stomach leaped up into her throat and the wind whooshed loudly in her ears making her dizzy, but she landed softly on the damp leaves. Trying to stand up gracefully as if she did that kind of thing all the time, she somehow tangled up her feet and went sprawling.

Jeni giggled as she pulled Aurelia to her feet.

"You are so clumsy!" she laughed. "I don't get how you can leap around in the trees as well as any of us, but still not manage to stand up without tripping over your feet!"

"I don't know why," said Aurelia seriously, "but my left foot keeps kicking the right one away, and there's nothing I can do to stop it!"

Both girls giggled even harder.

"Maybe you were just born that way," said a low voice.

"Hey Marin!" said Jeni brightly, turning in the direction of the voice. "Now we can all go searching together!"

"Hi, Marin," echoed Aurelia, with slightly less enthusiasm. "I've just got to go tell my mum I'm going now, so wait for me a bit?" she added.

"Sure, tell my dad too, won't you?" asked Jeni. Aurelia glanced at Marin. "Do you-"

"No, it's alright," Marin said, shrugging.

When Aurelia returned from the Arbore cerc (Tree circle) where her colony slept, the three of them headed off into the woods, pushing branches aside as they walked. Jeni got slapped accidentally in the face with a bunch of berries by Aurelia, and after that she moved to a less dangerous position.

"I can't believe you two still tell your parents that you're going searching. Shouldn't they see the pattern by now?" said Marin. "I mean, we do go almost every night."

"Well," began Aurelia, not wanting to seem old-fashioned by saying that her mom (and Aurelia herself, for that matter) liked to follow tradition, but Jeni cut her off.

"Of course we have to tell them, even though they already know, it's just a stupid custom!" she said, with the barest hint of 'duh' in her voice.

"Yeah," Aurelia put in, now that she had Jeni's support, "I don't see how your dad lets you get away with not telling him..." she trailed off after glancing at Jeni's rapidly shaking head.

Marin's jaw seemed to clench slightly.

"I've already told you, he doesn't care. Come on, let's go look for some Waterberries." He said abruptly, and turned, striding towards a distant stream.

"Aurelia, you know he's touchy about that," whispered Jeni as they followed him at a short distance. Aurelia didn't answer, and Jeni looped her arm through her friend's. "He doesn't mean it, don't worry."

"Yeah," said Aurelia, sighing, "but I just forget, you know...Thanks for stopping me, anyway."

When they had caught up to Marin at the stream a while later, they spread out to search for a Glick plant. Or, rather, Aurelia spread out, and Jeni and Marin went off together in another direction. Deciding not to follow them to show Jeni she didn't care, Aurelia looked around for the fat, waxy leaves alone, pushing aside bushes and tripping once on the hem of her light robe as she went. She was careful to stay away from the water, a stream of flowing darkness with only occasional glints of moonlight on the ripples.

"I've got some!" she called to the other two, spotting a plant hidden behind a boulder. When they arrived, Marin carefully poked a stick through the outer skin of a Glick leaf to get it's sticky sap on the end of the stick, taking care not to get any of it on himself. Glick sap took days to wash off. Kneeling by the edge of the stream (Jeni grabbed the back of Aurelia's robe after she almost fell in), they lowered the end of the stick through the ripples and managed to get some Waterberries fixed on to the end. Aurelia tried not to imagine her mother's face if she could see her this close to deadly running water.

Even if I fell in, she reasoned to herself, Jeni and Marin would pull me out before I could pass out, and dissolve or wash away. She wasn't sure what would actually happen, but the she had been warned with too many gruesome stories about what could happen to vampires in running water to try experimenting.

Marin carried the stick (with the end covered in berries so it resembled a lumpy lollipop or an extremely warty fingertip) to the boulder that had been hiding the Glick plant. He knocked lightly on the middle of it with his knuckles till enough stone chips crumbled away to make a shallow bowl in the center, blowing away the resulting dust.

Aurelia supposed that to humans, vampires would seem very strong. She had read in a book that she found once on the forest floor (it might have fallen off a passing wizard's broomstick) that wizards had to use several complicated spells to lift the stones to build Hogwarts castle. She thought that they were rather weak, if they were not able to lift even a few boulders by themselves. Either that, or they were extremely lazy.

Jeni and Aurelia used sharp sticks to puncture the berries so that the silvery liquid inside them ran into the bowl. Aurelia even managed to pop three of them cleanly, but she poked the fourth a little too energetically, and it exploded, covering them all in speckles of silver juice.

Marin sighed. "At least it smells nice."

Waterberry juice smelled like rotten cabbage.

When the last berry was popped, Jeni asked, "Can I look first?" and, not waiting for an answer, she leaned over the rock and stared eagerly into the pool of silver juice. A month or two ago, while exploring around the stream that they had been warned away from by their parents, they had discovered that Waterberry juice showed their reflections. The three of them had been extremely excited by this discovery, never having been able to see them before, as nothing else could show a vampire's reflection. It was ironic that the only substance that could grew in the only element in nature they could not abide, besides the sun. Before discovering it, the closest they had been able to get was to have someone draw one of them (and the pictures were none of them very accurate). The other solution was to walk around with someone else, and have them tell you, "You have so-and-so's nose, but with smaller nostrils and a little longer point, and so-and-so's eyebrows, but not quite that thick," and so on. It was quite difficult to form an accurate picture, unless one possessed a photographic memory that could be cut and pasted together. Also, with only seven members in their colony, the choice of models was rather limited.

Jeni, after wiping her juice-speckled face with her robe, was gazing fondly at her reflection, making faces, wrinkling her nose, and fixing her already perfect hair. After about ten minutes of this, she finally moved aside to let Aurelia have a look.

Aurelia examined her reflection critically. Not too bad, she thought. Her long black hair was tied neatly into a knot in the back, except for a few wisps straying across her pale skin. She had finely boned features, dark lips, and when the moonlight showed, dusky violet eyes. She smiled to examine her teeth, also not bad. Her pointy fangs were nice and white and the rest of her teeth were even. As she moved aside to let Marin have a look, she thought about a description she had read of vampires in the same book. It had said they were skeletally thin. That's going a bit far, she thought, looking at Marin fixing his hair carefully and Jeni tapping her bare white foot impatiently on the dirt. She couldn't really see them as "Skeletons, with skin stretched gruesomely over the bones, " like the book had said. They were just slim and fine boned - that was all. How could they be expected to gain weight when they never ate solid food? Anyway, it was better than being obese; a health epidemic the book predicted would later sweep the United States.

Jeni had pushed Marin aside and was looking at her reflection again. Aurelia glanced at Marin, grinning, and he rolled his eyes. She really didn't have a problem with Jeni and Marin being better friends, once she really considered the matter, it was just that she didn't want to be left alone. She missed the days when all three of them were equally close.

CHAPTER 2

Another Fascinating Discovery, even More Fascinating then the First

"Imagine how weird it would be to have colorful hair, like wizards have," commented Jeni, tugging at a piece of her own wavy black hair.

"Not to mention having those heavy, solid bones," added Aurelia, and they all laughed.

"It must be strange," said Marin, "but think how miserable it must feel not to have hollow bones, and to be so weak."

"But they can do all sorts of magic and spells, and all we can do is put creatures to sleep and turn into bats," said Aurelia thoughtfully. "I'd love to be able to do other magic, or even just see how they do it."

"I'm alright like this," said Marin. "Did you know they have to go to school to learn that stuff all day, and still are almost helpless without their wands? They can't even disguise themselves as shadows without those things, and we can do that from birth!"

"But they can see the sun," said Jeni, no longer staring at her reflection, but into the starry sky. "And they can be free to go wherever they want, and not stuck in a forest forever so they won't be killed by some stupid Auror, and-"

"Jeni, don't say things like that!" said Aurelia, feeling slightly frightened. "What point is there to going out of the forest? You remember what happened to Jan."

"We rarely get caught!" said Marin forcefully. "And the point is not that there's something wrong with the forest. The point is freedom."

"But aren't you happy with what we have?" Aurelia asked. She'd never understood the constant desire the others seemed to have to leave the forest, and relative safety.

The other two sighed. Marin even rolled his eyes. They had been through this many times before.

"Never mind, 'Relia, we wouldn't leave," said Jeni quietly. "I would like to get out of here, but I don't think we'd be any happier. Humans think we're monsters."

The three of them sat in silence for a while. How can wizards be so unfair to us? Thought Aurelia. I understand why Muggles are afraid of us, it's probably just the magic and non-magic thing, but wizards should understand. She would have dearly loved to go to a school like Hogwarts, even though she couldn't do any magic, just to learn and be able to read all those books she had heard about. She had been taught all about the world of magic by her mother and colony, as was vampire tradition, but there was so much more that she could not experience. A few vampires chose to venture into the wizarding world, but they were always treated with fear, anger and contempt. Her colony's leader, Ema, had decided that they were better off away from that kind of prejudice, so they did not have contact with wizards, despite living in a forest so close to a school. Aurelia felt that it was better this way. It was very important to her to be liked, and she didn't think she could stand having a whole race of people hate her for something she couldn't help.

"Come on, guys, we'd better start searching," said Marin, breaking them out of their reverie. "I'll see you later back at the Cerc."

Aurelia watched first Jeni, then Marin, turn into small black bats and fly off. She closed her eyes and concentrated hard on the hearing the night sounds. She imagined that her arms were not arms, but wings. She imagined that she had fur. With the barest sound of a leaf rustling in the wind, there was no longer a girl standing where she had been, but a small bat already disappearing into the darkness.

Squeak.

Aurelia loved flying. She was free of the confines of the ground, and could go up, or down, and loop and dive with complete liberty. No matter how long she did this, she would never get tired of it. Her ears could pick out every tiny sound, and she could sense where things were without having to see them, though her eyes were good as well. Although she loved being with her friends, she also treasured the time when she was alone, without the possibility of feeling left out.

She thought about what Marin had said, about how wizards hated them for no reason other than the fact that they drank the blood of other creatures. Was drinking something's blood better than taking its life? The vampires used their magic to make sure the creature would not remember what had happened, and was unconscious so that it felt no pain. To them, causing suffering to another creature was dishonorable. What was so wrong with it? Personally, she thought that the way humans ate was a bit gross. Her mother had told her that they killed animals and ripped off their skin for clothing, cut them up into little pieces, and burnt them over a fire. Then they mashed the pieces in their teeth, covering them with digesting saliva, and swallowed them. Aurelia shuddered.

All her life, she had been raised to believe humans were completely alien, sometimes detested, sometimes feared, but always intriguing. She had never met another vampire that associated with humans. There were many other colonies, she knew, but she had never been to them, and had never really talked to anyone from another colony. Occasionally a traveler stopped by, but he or she would only speak to the adults, because the children would be out searching.

Pricking her ears, she heard something rustling around on the ground. Aurelia veered right, swooped under a branch, and came to rest just above a Jarvey, a large, rude ferret-like creature. They spoke English, but were not intelligent enough to actually know what they were saying. She changed back to her normal form, and crouched on the branch, watching. It was standing on the ground, snuffling at the bushes and muttering to itself. She could hear only some of what it was saying, as its mouth was full of half a dead rat.

"Mornin' Mr. Feces-face *crunch crunch* bright as a rock, that one *slurp* is that a toupee or a dead badger? Never washed his armpits..."

Aurelia began to sing softly, a variation of a sweet tune that all vampires sang to lull their prey to sleep. Aurelia's version was medium range, and slightly melancholy.

Almost as soon as she began the first notes, the jarvey's eyes began to close and it's muttering trailed off ('don't know where she bought that skirt...'). It rolled onto its side, breathing evenly and drooling around the dead rat. Aurelia dropped gently to the ground, and approached its prone form. She sniffed daintily, and then wrinkled her nose. The beast smelled like a bloated rotting fish. This was the part she disliked most about searching. Holding her nose with one hand and crouching down, she bent over the neck of the jarvey. She opened her mouth and pressed its neck lightly with her fangs, just enough to penetrate the skin. She then stepped back and touched the tiny holes softly with a white finger. As she pulled it away, a thin thread of blood came with it, shiny and black in the darkness. She turned her hand over, palm up, and the thread curved in a graceful arc, releasing one end from the jarvey, and pooling in her cupped hand. Using her left hand, she touched the cut again, and it closed and the skin became as it was before. Vampires took such a small amount of blood that the creature never knew what had happened.

She walked a few steps away, then whistled softly, and the jarvey began to wake ('where ya goin' ugly? Mother was a hippo...'). She began the long run back to the Arbore cerc, keeping her steps even and her right hand level so she wouldn't spill the blood, as was now second nature to her.

Suddenly, she saw something through the trees that couldn't possibly be there. She slowed gradually, trying not to spill, and walked a few steps in the direction from which she had come. A shiver of fear seized her as her mind registered what it was. A boy! A human boy! She could only hope that it was a wizard, and not a barbaric Muggle come to chop down the forest. How could there be a boy here? It was at least three hours before dawn. What should she do? Ema, the colony leader, had told them that teachers from Hogwarts occasionally came into the forest, but they always stayed on the path close to the edge. It was best to wait until they had walked on, and to ignore them. Yet here was a boy, too young to be a teacher, almost a kilometer inside the forest and off the path!

Aurelia took a deep breath, and used her magic to make her body appear like it was part of a shadow. Better safe than sorry, she thought, reassuring herself that the boy could not see her and hurt her now. She turned, ready run back to the Cerc, but then she stopped, unsure. She could see the boy shivering. His teeth were making clacking sounds. Perhaps he was lost! Aurelia had once been lost, when she had flown too far away on her third day of searching. She remembered how scared she had felt, and how even her beloved forest had seemed threatening. Of course, her mother had found her before sunrise, and she now knew the forest so well that she could never get lost. But there was no one to rescue this boy.

Feeling a pang of pity, she took a step closer to him. He was lying on his side, curled up in between the roots of a tree. What if he was dangerous? What if he woke up? Aurelia didn't want to help a future vampire hunter out of the forest. He would eventually find his way out using magic, but he looked so forlorn! She bit her lip, trying to decide. She could never choose something and stay with it; it always took her ages to weigh the consequences of each choice.

OK, she said to herself. If I take him to the edge of the forest...she couldn't think of anything bad happening. She'd be invisible if she stayed as a shadow, and he wouldn't wake up until the morning. On the other hand, if she left him alone, he could be bitten by that Jarvey, or stepped on by a sky gazing centaur, or clubbed by a troll, or all sorts of horrible things! Aurelia couldn't believe she had even considered leaving him. She quickly sang her sleeping song for good measure, and ran up to his sleeping form.

Pinching his robes with her left hand, she raised him to a standing position for examination. This might be her only chance to see a wizard boy under completely safe conditions. The boy was tall, almost as tall as Marin, and he had a long nose and medium colored hair. She couldn't tell the exact color without moonlight. Curious, she leaned him against the tree trunk, noticing that he was wearing Hogwarts robes with a shiny 'P' badge on the front. She pulled open one of his eyelids, revealing a jittering eyeball, which gave her a bit of a shock.

Then, as the clouds drifted away and the moonlight flooded them, she gasped. His eyes were bright blue, and his hair was red! How intriguing, thought Aurelia. She hesitated, wondering if he had lice, then brushed his (red!) hair with her fingers, almost laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all. OK, she thought, now I can tell Jeni and Marin I've seen a human up close.

With that, she swung the boy over her shoulder, grabbed his dangling arm to make sure he didn't fall off, and ran for the edge of the forest. She hadn't realized how warm humans were! It was a strange sensation.

When she reached the edge of the forest near Hogwarts, Aurelia deposited the boy on the ground within clear view of the castle. She arranged his arms and legs so that he lay spread-eagled on the ground. Hmm, she thought. That didn't look right. Maybe a sleeping position should conserve heat. She folded and tucked him into a ball - a difficult feat, as his limbs kept springing out at odd angles - and, as an afterthought, covered him in dead leaves. Better. Satisfied that he was safe and warm, she allowed herself one last look before sprinting as fast as she could back to the Cerc. She did not realize that the boy had momentarily seen a black, girl-shaped shadow running away into the forest.