Hunted (26 page)

“Yeah,” I said, cleaning the blood off his face. “But I think I've broken whatever hold he was having over me.” I refused to admit, even to myself, that though the hypnotic effect was gone, I still had had a powerful reaction to his kiss. “Hey, did Kalona look different to you?”

“Different? How so?”

“Younger, like he's not even as old as you.” I guessed that Darius was somewhere in his early to mid-twenties—or at least that's how old he appeared to me.

Darius gave me a long, considering look. “No, Kalona appeared the same as when first I'd seen him—ageless, but not in a way that could ever be mistaken for a teenager. Perhaps he has the ability to alter his appearance to please you.”

I wanted to deny it, and then I remembered what he'd called me just before he kissed me. It had been the same name he'd called me during my nightmare.
My response to him is almost automatic, as if my soul recognizes him
, my mind whispered traitorously. A terrible fear shivered through my body, causing the little hairs on my arms and the back of my neck to stand straight up. “He calls me A-ya,” I said.

“The name sounds familiar. What does it mean?”

“It's the name of the maiden the Ghigua women created to trap Kalona.”

Darius sighed deeply. “Well, at least we now know why he's so intent upon protecting you. He thinks you are the maiden he loved.”

“I think it was more obsession than love,” I said quickly, not wanting to even consider the idea that Kalona could possibly have loved
A-ya. “Plus, we have to remember that A-ya did trap him, causing him to be imprisoned in the earth for more than a thousand years.”

Darius nodded. “So his desire for you could very easily change to violence.”

My stomach clenched. “Actually, the reason he wants me might be just to get back at A-ya. I mean, I don't know what he's actually planning to do with me. Neferet was all for killing me, but he stopped her because he said he can use my power.”

“But you would never turn from Nyx to him,” Darius said.

“And once he realizes that, I can't see him keeping me around.”

“He'll view you as a powerful enemy, one who might find a way to entrap him again,” Darius said.

“Okay, so explain to me what to do to get you fixed up, and then let's find the others and get the hell out of here.”

Darius walked me through a very gross cleaning of the long slash wound, during which I actually had to pour alcohol into his cut flesh to, as he put it,
flush out any infection that might have been caused by the Raven Mocker's blood
. I'd totally forgotten that the same knife had been imbedded in Rephaim's chest and it definitely had nasty mutant man-bird blood all over it. So I cleaned the cut and then Darius helped me find this weird but cool stuff called Dermabond, better known as liquid stitches, which I squirted in a line down the length of his cut, mushed the sides of the wound together, and,
ta-da!
except for a big not-yet-healed cut, Darius said he was good as new. I was slightly more skeptical, but (as he reminded me) I really wasn't a credible nurse to begin with.

Then he and I searched though the cabinets because I was not going anywhere with a sheet wrapped around me. Okay, you would not believe the gross, paper-thin, backless hospital “gowns” (oh, please, they are
so
not real gowns) we found in one drawer. Why is it hospitals make you wear ugly, too revealing stuff when you already feel awful? It just makes no sense. Anyway, we finally found a pair of green hospital scrubs that were way too big for me, but whatever. They were seriously better than being wrapped up in a sheet. I completed my look with
some booties. I asked Darius if he'd seen my purse, and he said he thought it was still in the Hummer. It was probably shallow of me, but I spent quite a few minutes stressing that if my purse was lost I'd have to get a new driver's license and cell phone, and wondered briefly if I'd remember the exact right shade of the cool Ulta lip gloss I was going to have to replace.

Sometime after I put on the scrubs (while Darius's back was turned) and started worrying about my purse being missing, I realized I was sitting on the bed staring off into space and almost falling asleep.

“How are you feeling?” Darius asked. “You look . . . ” His words trailed off as I'm sure he tried and vetoed words like “crappy” and “hideous.”

“I look tired?” I volunteered helpfully.

He nodded. “You do.”

“Well, that's a not-so-amazing coincidence because I am tired. Really tired.”

“Perhaps we should wait and—”

“No!” I interrupted. “I meant it when I said I wanted to go. Plus, there's no way I can get any real sleep as long as we're here. I just don't feel safe.”

“Agreed,” Darius said. “You aren't safe. None of us are safe.”

Unspoken was the understanding that we would still not be safe even if we managed to get away from the House of Night, but it was better for morale if neither of us mentioned that.

“Alright, let's get the others,” I said.

I checked the clock on the wall before we left the room and realized that it was a little after 4:00
A.M.
It was a shock to see how much time had passed, especially since I must have been out for several hours, even though I didn't feel rested at all. If things were normal at the House of Night, fledglings should be finished with classes. “Hey,” I told Darius, “it's about dinnertime. They might be in the cafeteria.”

He nodded, moved the propped-up chair, and opened the door slowly.

“Hallway's empty,” he murmured.

While he'd been peeking down the hall, I'd been checking him out. So, instead of following him out of the room, I grabbed his sleeve and held him back. He gave me a questioning look.

“Uh, Darius, I'm thinking that we really need to change clothes before we make a grand entrance in the middle of the cafeteria, or even my dorm. I mean, you're more than a little bloody, and I'm wearing what looks like a big green trash bag. We're not exactly inconspicuous.”

Darius glanced down at himself, taking in the dried blood that was splattered all down his shirt and jacket. The blood plus the newly closed laceration on his face plus my hospital scrubs definitely equaled conspicuous, a conclusion Darius obviously came to easily.

“Let's take the stairs up to the next floor. That's where the Sons of Erebus are housed. I'll change, then get you quickly to your dorm so you can be rid of those.” He gestured at my outfit. “If we get lucky we'll find Aphrodite and the Twins in the dorm and will just have to scout out Damien and then slip from the school grounds.”

“Sounds good. I never thought you'd hear me say that I was looking forward to getting back to those tunnels, but right now that feels like the best place to be,” I said.

Darius grunted what I assumed was guy language for agreeing with me, and I followed him into the hall, which really was deserted. It was just a short way to the stairwell. Okay, going up a flight of steps just about did me in, and I ended up leaning heavily on Darius's arm. I could tell by the worried glint in his eyes that he was seriously considering picking me up and would have (despite my protests) if we hadn't gotten to the next floor about then.

“So,” I said between gasps, “is it always this quiet up here?”

“No,” Darius said grimly. “It's not.” We passed a common area that had a fridge, a big, flat-screen TV, some comfy couches, and a bunch of guy stuff like free weights, a dartboard, and a pool table. It, too, was deserted. His face set into unreadable lines, Darius led me to one of the many doors that opened off the hall.

His room was just about as I'd imagined a Son of Erebus's room would be—clean and simple, with hardly any knickknacks. He did have some trophies that were for winning knife-throwing competitions, and a whole collection of Christopher Moore's hardback books, but no framed pictures of friends or family, and the only art on the walls was of Oklahoma landscapes, which probably came with the room. Oh, he also had a mini-fridge like Aphrodite's, which kinda annoyed me. Did everyone have a fridge except me? Jeesh. There was a big, heavily draped picture window that I wandered over to, pulling back a corner of the curtains and looking out so Darius could change his clothes without causing a jealous Aphrodite to disembowel either of us.

It should have been a busy time. Classes were out and kids should have been going from the academic part of the school to the dorms, rec room, cafeteria, and just in general hanging out and being teenagers. Instead, I only saw a couple of people doing their best slip and slide down the sidewalk as they hurried from one building to another.

Even though my intuition was telling me there was way more to it than that, I wanted to blame the dead quiet of the school on the weather. The dark sky was still spitting icy rain, and despite the isolating effects of the storm, I was enthralled with how magical the shining coating of frozen water made everything look. Trees bowed under the crystalline weight that entombed their branches. The soft yellow of the gaslights flickered over slick walls and sidewalks. The coolest thing was the ice-encapsulated grass. It stuck up in brittle spikes all over, glistening when light hit it just right, making the ground look like it had grown a field of diamonds.

“Wow,” I said, more to myself than Darius, “I know the ice storm is a pain in the butt, but it really is pretty. It makes everything look like a whole different world.”

Darius was pulling a sweatshirt on over a clean T-shirt as he joined me at the window. His frown said that he saw the pain-in-the-butt part of the storm more than the ice magic of it.

“I don't see one sentry,” he said, and I realized that his frown hadn't
been directed just at the ice but at the boundaries of the walls, which we could see from his window, too. “We should be able to see at least two or three of my brother warriors from here, but there is no one.” Then I felt him stiffen.

“What is it?”

“I spoke too soon, and you were correct. This is a whole different world. There are sentries posted. They are just not my brothers.” He pointed at a spot on the wall to our right where it curved behind Nyx's Temple, which was situated right across from the building we were in. There, between the shadow of an ancient oak and the rear of the temple, the darkness shifted to reveal the bent shape of a Raven Mocker crouched on the wall. “And there,” Darius motioned down the wall a little way to another spot. I'd overlooked it as nothing more than a natural fold of darkness on this stormy night, but as I stared, it, too, moved slightly, revealing another terrible man-bird creature.

“They're all over,” I said. “How are we going to get out of here?”

“Can you disguise us with the elements, as you did before?”

“I don't know. I'm so tired, and I feel weird. My cut is better, but it's like I keep getting drained and never really refilled.” Then my stomach sank further as I realized something else. “After I used fire and wind to knock Kalona off you, I didn't have to release the elements. They just weren't there anymore. That's never happened before. They've always hung around until I bid them depart.”

“You're exhausting yourself. The ability to conjure and control the elements is your gift, but it doesn't come without a price. You're young and healthy, so under normal circumstances you probably hardly notice the drain it causes in you.”

“I have a couple of times before, but it's never been like this.”

“You've never been close to death before. Add to that the fact that you haven't had time to rest and recuperate, and that's a dangerous combination.”

“In other words, we may not be able to count on me to sneak us out of here,” I said.

“How about we call you Plan C, and we try to come up with Plans A and B.”

“I'd rather be Plan Z,” I grumbled.

“Well, this will help, even if it's just a temporary fix.” He went to the mini-fridge and pulled out what looked like two water bottles, only the bottles were filled with a thick red liquid I recognized very well. He handed me one. “Drink up.”

I took it and frowned at him. “You have blood in water bottles in your fridge?”

He raised his brows at me, then cringed a little as the cut that stretched down the entire side of his face pulled. Finally he said, “I am a vampyre, Zoey. You will be one soon. To us having bottled human blood is the same as having bottled water. Only there is a lot more kick to blood.” He lifted his bottle to me and then drained it.

I shut off my mind and did the same. As always, the blood hit my system like an explosion, giving me a kick of energy and making me feel suddenly very much alive and invincible. My woozy head cleared, and the ache that had been radiating from my wound diminished, letting me draw a big, deep, pain-free breath.

“Better?” Darius said.

“Totally,” I said. “Let's go get me some real clothes and find the others while this buzz lasts.”

“That reminds me.” He turned back to the fridge, grabbed another bottle of blood, and tossed it to me. “Stick that in your pocket. Drinking blood won't replace sleep and the time your body needs to heal, but it will keep you on your feet. Or at least I hope it will.”

I shoved the bottle in one of the huge pockets of my baggy scrub pants. Darius strapped on his knife holster, grabbed a clean leather jacket, and he and I left his room, hurried down the stairs, and walked to the door of the building—all without seeing anyone else. It felt wrong, but I didn't want to pause to talk about it. I didn't want to do or say anything that might keep us there for even one more second than we had to be.

As Darius reached the front door of the building, I hesitated. “I
don't think it's smart for the Raven Mockers to see that I'm up and walking around.” I kept my voice low, even though there was no one visible around us.