Revealed

But her mind could not recover. Emily needed vengeance to fully heal. Her mentor’s voice was as clear as it had been that night in 1893.
    “…An insatiable need for retribution and vengeance becomes a poison that will taint your life and destroy your soul…”
    Her mentor had explained to Emily that she faced the choice between forgetting what her father had done to her and moving on with her new life as a fledgling—or wallowing in self-pity and carrying the scars of what that monster had caused, unable to forget and forgive.
    The fledgling who used to be Emily Wheiler did not take either choice.
    The Tsi Sgili’s body twitched spasmodically. Her breathing quickened, though she did not awaken. She remained deeply unconscious and utterly in another time—another place—and relived the birth of Neferet, Queen of the Night.
    She returned to Wheiler House, the home of her father, as avenger, strangling him to death and claiming her new name, and her new life—without forgiveness, doubt, or self-pity.
    Neferet’s hands twitched as the specter of her past fingered the strand of pearls, smooth and deadly, and relived the exhilaration she had felt when she had ended Barrett Wheiler’s pathetic life.
    Neferet relived something else as well—she was again filled with the flush of that first kill. She hadn’t tasted his blood. The thought had not entered her mind then, but she had felt the power of ending his breath, of stopping his heartbeat, of knowing she had caused his spirit to flee that broken, mortal shell.
    The chill that had paled Neferet’s flawless skin warmed, though ever so slightly.
    She relived her escape from Chicago by train, accompanying a small group of vampyres who were scouting new House of Night sites in the west. At the train’s first stop, Emily Wheiler buried her journal. In the dirt of the land that would become Oklahoma, she entombed the only record of what had happened to her. She remembered cutting into that earth with a spade, and opening a wound that was the red of dried bull’s blood and carried with it the scent of the end of all things. With the burial of that sad, pitiable account of innocence lost and rape revenged, Neferet’s new life blazed.
    It was not an easy life.
    But always within that comet of rebirth was a dark center of comfort that never forsook Neferet. Night was her world, and the shadows in the deepest corners of her world held solace and acceptance and comfort.
    The Chicago School Council had decided it was unsafe for fledgling Neferet to return there, and she had been transferred to St. Louis’s Tower Grove House of Night. There her gifts scorched through her.
    Neferet curled tightly into herself, reliving the next moment that had defined who she would become.
    The cat had been a small, shorthaired black and gray tabby. She would have been too small, too ordinary, too unattractive, for Neferet to have noticed at all, had it not been for her keen intelligence, and the additional toe she had on both of her front paws. It had been winter in St. Louis, frigid and snowy, and young Neferet had thought the little tabby had appeared to be wearing mittens.
    The school’s ill-tempered cook had named the cat Chloe, after a human thief who had been caught trying to burgle the school, because she had been unable to keep the feline from breaking into her kitchen, no matter how often she locked windows, and kept a keen eye on the scullery maids with their lackadaisical habit of forgetting to close doors. That day Chloe had pried open a window, scaled a ceiling beam, leaped on the cooling table, and gorged herself on a fresh kidney pie. The vampyre had been throwing the beast from the pantry when Neferet had happened by.
    “How ever did she find a way to wear mittens?” young Neferet had exclaimed, as she rescued little Chloe from the snow bank she’d landed in, brushing wet white flakes from dusky fur and smiling as the cat batted at the ties on her ermine-lined cape.
    The cook had laughed at Neferet mockingly. “I know you are young, but that is no reason to sound like such a simpleton. Chloe is polydactyl—six toed. Surely you’ve seen our High Priestess and her mate’s cats. All polydactyl. This ugly little runt must be related to them, though I don’t see the resemblance, except in those paws.” The old vampyre had turned away, still cackling, shaking her head, and muttering, “Mittens on a cat. The child is pretty, but empty-headed…”
    Neferet