Hunted (37 page)

Someone had put a sand and salt mixture on the sidewalk, but it had little effect on a storm that just kept coming. Wave after wave of freezing rain fell, making the world look like a giant cake with crystal icing. It was still beautiful, but in an eerie, dreamlike way. As I slipped and slid and struggled the few yards I had to cross from the drama classroom to the stables, I realized there was no way the six of us were going to be able to walk out of here, not to mention the mile or so we'd have to go to get to the Benedictine Abbey on the corner of Lewis and Twenty-first.

I wanted to sit down in the middle of the cold, wet, slippery mess and burst into tears. How was I going to get us out of here? I needed the Hummer, but I couldn't cloak it. That left only escape on foot, which wasn't fast enough under normal circumstances. During an ice storm that coated the streets and sidewalks of midtown Tulsa with ice and darkness, it was not just slow but impossible.

I was almost at the entrance to the stables when I heard the mocking
cro-oak
from the branches of the huge old oak that stood sentry outside the building. My first reaction was to slip and slide quickly to the door and get inside. I actually started to hurry, and then my anger caught up with me. I stopped, drew a deep breath to center myself, and ignored the bird thing's terrible human eyes staring at me and causing the little hairs on the back of my neck to lift.

“Fire, I need you,” I whispered, sending my thoughts south, to the
direction ruled by that element's flames. Almost instantly I felt heat brush against my skin and there was a waiting, listening quality to the air around me. I turned and looked up into the ice-crusted branches of the proud old oak.

Instead of a Raven Mocker, a terrible, spectral image of Neferet clung to the center of the tree where the massive first branches began to spread. She radiated darkness and evil. There was no breeze, but her long hair was lifting around her, as if the strands had a life of their own. Her eyes glowed a nasty scarlet, more rust than red. Her body was semi-transparent; her skin shimmered with an unearthly light.

I focused on the one thing that allowed my terror to thaw enough for me to speak—if her body looked transparent, then she really wasn't there.

“Don't you have more important things to do than spy on me?” I was glad my voice didn't shake. I even raised my chin and glared at her.

“
You and I have unfinished business
.” Her mouth didn't move, but I heard her voice echo eerily around us.

I mimicked one of Aphrodite's haughty sneers. “Okay, so maybe
you
don't have anything better to do than spy on me.
I
, on the other hand, am way too busy to be bothered by
you
.”

“
Once again you need a lesson in respecting your elders
.” As I watched, she began to smile, and her wide, beautiful mouth stretched and stretched and stretched until, with a horrible gagging sound, spiders exploded from that gaping maw and her image broke apart into hundreds and hundreds of seething, multilegged creatures.

I sucked air for a huge scream, and had already started scurrying backwards, when I heard a rustling of wings and a Raven Mocker landed in the crotch of the tree. I blinked, expecting him to be overrun with spiders, but they shimmered and then seemed to soak into the night and disappear. There was only the tree, the Raven Mocker, and my lingering fear.

“Zzzzzoey,” the creature hissed my name. Obviously this was one
of the bottom-feeding Mockers whose ability to speak wasn't nearly as refined as Rephaim's. “You ssssmell like ssssummer.” It opened its dark beak and I saw the forked tongue that flicked out hungrily, like it was tasting my scent.

Okay. Enough was enough. Neferet had scared the bejeezus out of me. And now this . . . this . . .
bird boy
was going to try to bully me, too? Oh. Hell. No.

“Alright, I am sick and tired of you freaks and the way you and your daddy and nasty Neferet think you can take over everything.”

“Father ssssays, find Zzzzzoey, and I find Zzzzzoey. Father ssssays, watch Zzzzzoey. I watch Zzzzzoey.”

“No. No. No! If I wanted a pain-in-the-butt dad to follow me around and check up on me, I'd call the Step-loser. So to you, your daddy, the rest of your bird-boy brothers, and even to Neferet, I say: Get. Off. My. Back!” I lifted my hands and flung fire at him. He screeched and took off, flapping wildly and flying erratically out of the tree and away from me as fast as he could go, leaving behind the scent of singed feathers and silence.

“You know, it's not smart to antagonize them,” a voice said. “They're normally annoying. Once you ruffle their feathers they're really hard to get along with.”

I turned back to the stable building to see Stark standing in the open door.

 

 

 

 

“See, that's one of the differences between you and me. You want to get along with them. I don't. So I don't care if I piss them off.” I told Stark. I channeled what was left of my fear and turned it into anger. “And you know what? Right now I really don't want to hear anything more about it.” Still sounding pissed, I added, “Did you see that?”

“That? You mean the Raven Mocker?”

“I mean the disgusting spiders.”

He looked surprised. “There were spiders in the tree? For real?”

I blew out a long, frustrated breath. “Lately I'm not sure I can tell you what's for real and what's made up around here.”

“I did see you being pretty pissed off and tossing fire around like a beach ball.”

I saw his eyes travel down to my hands and realized that not only were they shaking, but they were still glowing with the aura of flame. I drew a deep, calming breath and willed the shaking to stop. Then, in a much calmer voice, I said, “Thank you, fire. You may depart now. Oh, wait. First, could you get rid of some of that ice for me?” I pointed my flame-shining hands at the section of sidewalk between where I stood and the stable, and like a lovely miniature flamethrower, fire jubilantly spouted from my fingertips, and gaily licked against the thick coating of ice, causing it to turn to cold, wet mush. But at least the mush wasn't slippery. “Thank you, fire!” I called as the flames died from my fingers and sped away to the south.

I trudged through the water and ice muck and tromped past Stark, who was staring at me. “What?” I said. “I was tired of almost falling and breaking my butt.”

“You're really something, you know.” He grinned his cocky, cute Bad Boy smile, and before I could blink, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. It wasn't a groping, intrusive kiss filled with possessiveness like I'd been experiencing with Erik. Stark's kiss was more of a sweet question mark, which I answered with a definite exclamation point.

Sure, I should have been pissed. I should have pushed him away and told him off instead of kissing him back (enthusiastically). I'd like to be able to say that my semi-ho-ish reaction to him was because I'd had so much stress and fear in my life lately that I needed to escape, and his arms were the easiest escape available, which would imply I wasn't actually totally responsible for the fact that I was sucking face with Stark right there in the doorway to the stables.

The truth is less flattering, and yet is still the truth. I didn't kiss him because of stress, or fear, or escape, or because of anything except the fact that I wanted to kiss him. I like him. Really, really like him. I didn't know what I was going to do about him. I didn't know where he would fit in my life—or even how he would fit in my life, especially if I was ashamed to admit my feelings for him in public. I could only imagine the freak-out it would cause among my friends. Not to mention the zillion pissed-off pod girls who would . . .

And thinking about the zillion pod girls Stark had been biting and whatnot finally splashed cold water on me and I managed to stop kissing him. I gave him a shove so that he stepped out of the doorway. I hurried into the field house, looking around guiltily and then breathing a sigh of relief that we were the only ones loitering and cutting class.

There was a little side room off of the main field house complex, much like the tack room in the stables. It was where the bows and arrows and targets and other field house-ish and sporting equipment and such was housed. I ducked into it with Stark close on my heels, closed the door, and took a few steps away from him. When he gave
me
that look
, that sexy smile of his, and started toward me, I held up my hand like a crossing guard.

“No. You stay over there and I'll stay over here. We need to talk and that's not going to happen if you're close to me,” I said.

“Because you can't keep your hands off me?”

“Oh, please. I'm managing to keep my hands off you just fine. I'm not one of your pod girls.”

“Pod girls?”

“You know, from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. That's how I think of the girls you bite and mess with their minds so that they're all ‘
Oooh, that Stark, he's just so hot! Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod!
' It's seriously annoying. And, by the way, if you ever try any of that crap with me, I promise you I will call all of the five elements and we will kick your butt. Count on it.”

“I wouldn't try to do that to you, but that's not saying I wouldn't like to taste you. I totally would.” His voice had gone all sexy again, and he started to step closer to me.

“No! I'm serious about you staying over there.”

“Okay! Okay! What's got your panties in such a bunch?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “My panties are not in a bunch. All hell happens to be breaking loose around us, in case you hadn't noticed. The House of Night is under the control of something that's probably a demon. Neferet has turned into something that's probably a lot worse than a demon. My friends and I are not safe. I have no idea how to do what I need to do to begin to make this mess right, and to top it all off I'm falling for a guy who's been with a crapload of the girls on campus and used mind control on them.”

“You're falling for me?”

“Yeah, great, isn't it? I already have a vampyre boyfriend
and
a human guy I've Imprinted. As my grandma would say, my dance card is more than full.”

“I can take care of the vamp boyfriend.” Automatically Stark's hand came up to stroke the bow that was strapped to his back.

“Hell no, you won't
take care of him!
” I yelled. “Get this through
your head: That bow is not the fix-it answer to your problems. It should be your very last resort and should never, ever be used against another person, human or vampyre. You used to know that.”

His face hardened. “You know what happened to me. I'm not going to apologize for what's become my nature.”

“Your nature? Do you mean your spoiled-brat nature, or your slut nature?”

“I mean me!” He pounded his fist against his chest. “It's what I am now.”

“Okay, you need to hear me once and for all, because I'm not going to keep repeating this. Get a damn clue! We
all
have bad things inside us, and we
all
choose either to give in to those bad things or to fight them.”

“That's not the same thing as—”

“Shut up and listen to me!” My anger exploded around us. “It's not the same thing for
any
of us. For some people the only thing they have to struggle with is whether they sleep in and miss first hour or get their butts up and go to school. For other people it's harder stuff—like whether or not to go into rehab and stay clean or to just give up and keep using. For you maybe it's even harder—like whether to fight for your humanity or to give in to the darkness and be a monster. But it's still a
choice
. Your choice.”

We stood there staring at each other. I didn't know what else to say. I couldn't make the choice to do the right thing for him, and I suddenly understood that I wouldn't keep sneaking around and seeing him. If he couldn't be the kind of guy I was proud to be with in public, the act he put on for me in private didn't mean anything. And that was something he needed to know.

“What happened last night won't happen again. Not like that.” The anger drained out of me and my voice calmed down. I sounded quiet and sad in the stillness of the little room.

“How can you say that when you just told me you were falling for me?”

“Stark, what I'm telling you is that I'm not going be with you if I have to hide the fact that we're together.”

“Because of that vamp boyfriend?”

“Because of you. Erik does affect us. I care about him. The last thing I want to do is hurt him, but it would be stupid of me to stay with him and wish I was with you, or anybody else, including the human guy I've Imprinted. So you need to understand Erik couldn't stop me from being with you.”

“You really do have feelings for me, don't you?”

“I do, but I can promise you I won't be your girlfriend if I'm ashamed to be with you in front of my friends. You can't be wrong around everyone else and right around me. What you really are is how you act most of the time. I see that there's still good in you, but that good will eventually be blotted out by the darkness that's there, too, and I'm not going to hang around to see that happen.”

He looked away from me. “I knew that was how you felt before, but I didn't think it would bother me so much to hear you say it. I don't know if I can make the right choice. When I'm with you, I feel like I can. You're so strong, and you're good.”

I blew out a big sigh. “I'm not that darn good. I've messed up a lot. Sadly, I'll probably keep messing up. A lot. And you were the strong one last night, not me.”

He met my eyes again. “You are good. I can feel it. You're good down deep in your heart, where it counts.”