My cat sneezed, mee-uf-owed grumpily at me, jumped from my bed, and padded to her food bowl. She looked back at me, purring like crazy.
Okay, yeah, I know. Im hungry, too. I fed my cat and thought about Stark while I got dressed for what I was sure would be a very weird school day. Today were getting out of here, I told my reflection firmly after Id used the flatiron to semi-tame my hair.
I hurried downstairs and arrived in the kitchen just in time to grab my favorite cereal, Count Chocula, and join the Twins, who had their heads together and were whispering and looking annoyed.
Hey, guys, I said, sitting next to them and pouring myself a huge bowl of chocolatey deliciousness. Whats up?
Keeping her voice pitched low for my ears only, Erin said, Youll see whats up once you sit here for just a few minutes.
Yeah, observe the pod people, Shaunee whispered.
Okayyyyy, I said slowly, adding milk to my cereal and watching the kids around us with what I hoped was utter nonchalance.
At first I really didnt notice much of anything. Girls were busy grabbing protein bars or cereal or some other favorite breakfast food. And then I realized that it wasnt what I was seeing that was weirdit was what I wasnt. There was none of the typical joking around going on where someone makes fun of someone elses hair, and then someone else tells her to tell her mom to be quiet. No one was talking about boys. At all. No one was complaining about not having their homework done. Actually, no one was saying much of anything. They were just chewing and breathing and smiling. A lot.
I gave the Twins a WTF look.
Pod people, Erin mouthed to me while Shaunee nodded her head.
Almost as annoying as that asshole Stark, Erin whispered.
I tried not to sound massively guilty when I said, Stark? What about him?
The buttball walked through here while you were still upstairs. All like he owned the place and didnt care who knew hed been raping and pillaging some poor helpless pod girl, Shaunee said, still keeping her voice down.
Yeah, you should have seen Becca. She panted after him like a terrier, Erin said.
And what did he do? I asked, holding my breath.
It was pathetic. He barely looked at her, Shaunee said.
Talk about being used and then wadded up and thrown away like a snot rag, Erin said.
I was trying to figure out what I could say that would give me more info about what Stark had or hadnt done without letting the Twins know I cared as much as I was caring, and I thought I should maybe try to say a little something that would kinda somehow stand up for Stark, when Erins eyes got all wide and buggy as she stared behind me.
Well, speak of the damn devil, Shaunee said in her best mean-girl voice.
Literally, Erin added.
Wrong table, Shaunee said. Your minions are all over there and there. She waved her hand around the room at the other girls who had stopped eating and were staring behind me, too. Not over here.
I swiveled around in my chair to look up at Stark. Our eyes met. Im sure mine were wide and startled. His were deep and warm, and I could almost hear the question he was asking with them.
Ignoring everyone else in the room, I said, Hi, Stark. I was careful not to make my voice too friendly or icy. I just said hi to him like I would any other kid.
You look better than the last time I saw you, he said.
I could feel my cheeks getting warm. The last time hed seen me wed been in bed together. While I was still staring into his eyes and trying to figure out what the hell I could say to him in front of everyone, Erin spoke up.
Big surprise that she looks better than when you were chomping on Becca last night.
Yeah, watching that would be enough to make anyone look a little peaked.
Stark broke his gaze from mine. I saw his eyes flash a dangerous scarlet as he rounded on the Twins. Im talking to Zoey, not either of you. So butt the fuck out.
There was something about his voice that was deeply frightening. He didnt yell. His expression hardly changed. Instead, he radiated a terrible sense of coiled snake, pissed and deadly and on the brink of striking. I looked more closely at him and saw a ripple in the air around him, like heat waves lifting from a tin roof in summer. I dont know if the Twins saw it, too, but they definitely sensed something. Both of them paled, but I hardly spared a glance for them. It was Stark I was keyed on because I knew I was glimpsing the monster hed talked about. Seeing the almost instantaneous change that came over him, I was reminded of Stevie Raebefore shed found her humanity again.
Was that why I cared about Stark so much? Because Id seen Stevie Rae struggle with the same dark impulses and win over them, and I wanted to believe he could win, too?
Well, dealing with Stevie Rae had taught me one thing for sure, and that was that a fledgling in this position could be a very dangerous creature.
Keeping my voice completely calm, I said, What was it you wanted to say to me, Stark?
I saw the struggle on his face as the kid I knew fought with the monster who clearly wanted to leap across the table and eat the Twins. Finally he shifted his gaze back to me. His eyes still glowed slightly red when he said, I didnt really have anything to say. I just found this. Its yours, isnt it? He lifted his hand and, clenched in it, was my purse.
I looked from it to him, and then back at the purse again. I remembered what hed said about being scared of purses like Im scared of spiders. When I looked into his eyes again, I was smiling.
Thanks, it is mine. I took it from him, and as our hands brushed I said, A guy once told me that girls purses reminded him of spiders.
The red left his eyes like hed thrown a switch. The terrible aura that had surrounded him was gone. One of his fingers wrapped around mine and held for just an instant. Then he let loose the purse and my hand.
Spiders? Are you sure you heard him right?
Im sure. Thanks again for finding this.
He shrugged, turned, and slouched out of the room.
As soon as he was gone, all the fledglings except the Twins and me started whispering excitedly about how hot Stark is. I ate my cereal in silence.
Okay, hes beyond creepy, Shaunee said.
Was that what Stevie Rae was like before she Changed? Erin asked.
I nodded. Yeah, basically. I lowered my voice and added, Did you guys notice anything in the air around him? Like a weird rippling or an extra-dark shadow?
No, I was too busy thinking he was going to eat me to look around him, Erin said.
Ditto, said Shaunee. So is that why he doesnt freak you out, because hes like Stevie Rae before she Changed?
I lifted one of my shoulders and used the excuse of a mouth full of Count Chocula to not say much.
Hey, seriously, I know what Kramishas poem said and all, Erin said. But you gotta watch yourself around him. Hes totally bad news.
Plus, the poem might not have been about him, Shaunee said.
Guys, do we really have to talk about this right now? I said after swallowing.
Nope, he has zero importance to us, Shaunee said quickly.
Ditto, Erin said; then she added, You gonna check to be sure he didnt steal your stuff?
Yeah, whatever. I unsnapped my purse and looked into it, pawing around a little and taking an out-loud inventory. Cell phonelip glosscool sunglassesmoney holder thing with, yep, all my money and my drivers license in itand I broke off abruptly when I found the little note that had an arrow broken in half drawn on it. Below the arrow were the words: Thanks for last night.
What? Did you find something he ripped off? Erin asked, trying to peer across the table and into my purse.
I snapped it shut. No, just nasty used Kleenex. I wish he had ripped that off.
Well, I still say hes an asshole, Erin grumbled.
I nodded and made little agreeing sounds as I finished my cereal and tried not to think about Starks warm hand stroking my hair.
My classes, as my Spanish teacher, Professor Garmy, would had said, had she not turned into a good little pod professor, were no bueno para me. And the worst part was, if you took away the disgusting Raven Mockers, who seemed to be everywhere, I could have almost convinced myself that everything was normal. But almost can be a really big word.
It didnt help that my schedule had been changed around at semester, so that I was in classes with all different kids, none of them being Damien and the Twins. Aphrodite was nowhere to be seen, making me worry on and off about whether she and Darius were being eaten by Raven Mockers. Of course, knowing Aphrodite, they were still in her room playing doctor.
It was with that gross mental picture that I slid into a desk for my first class, which was now Literature 205. Oh, when Shekinah had moved all my classes around so that I could be in an advanced level of Vampyre Sociology, shed failed to mention that the rearrangement had caused me to be bumped up to the next level of my lit and Spanish classes. So my stomach churned as I waited for Professor Penthasilea, better known as Prof P, to assign a piece of literature with a correspondingly awful essay that was so far over my head that it could roost.
I shouldnt have worried. Prof P was there. She looked like her gorgeous, artsy self. But she acted like an utterly different vampyre. Prof P, by far the coolest lit teacher Id ever hoped to encounter, began the hour by passing out grammar worksheets. Yep. I stared down at the half dozen pages, Xeroxed front and back, she wanted us to complete. The worksheets ran the range from comma splices and run-ons to diagramming complex sentences (seriously).
Okay, some kidswell, I guess the majority of kids if they had an on-level public school educationwould not have been shocked at all by the assignment. But this was Prof P at the House of Night! One thing I could say for Hell High (as human kids called it) was that the classes were not boring. And even among the totally not boring professors, Penthasilea stood out. Shed captivated me in the first sixty seconds of the first day Id sat in her class by saying that we were going to read Walter Lords A Night to Remember, a book about the sinking of the Titanic. That was cool enough, but add to that the fact that Prof P had actually been living in Chicago when the ship sank, and she remembered tons of amazing details about not just the people on the ship but what life had been like in the early 1900s, and you have an excellent class.
I looked up from my totally boring worksheets to where she was sitting at her desk, bloblike, staring stone-faced at her computer screen. Her c ke an n the shipharisma in class today would definitely fall on the South Intermediate High School crap teacher scale at about the level of Mrs. Fosster, who consistently got the prize for the Worst English Teacher Ever, and had been called Queen of Worksheets or Umpa Lumpa, depending on whether she was wearing her M&M blue muumuu or not.
Professor Penthasilea had definitely been changed into a pod person.
Spanish class was next. Not only was Spanish II insanely too hard for me (hell, Spanish I had been too hard for me!), but Prof Garmy had turned into a nonteacher. Where before the class had been immersion, which means basically all the talking was in Spanish and not English, now she flitted around the room nervously, helping kids write the description of the picture shed put up on the Smart Board of a bunch of cats, er, gatos getting all tangled in string, um, hiloor whatever. (I seriously dont have many Spanish skills.) Her vamp tattoos looked like feathers, and shed reminded me of a little Spanish bird before. Now she looked and acted like a neurotic sparrow, flitting from kid to kid and getting ready to have a nervous breakdown.
Pod professor number two.
But I would have chosen to stay in Prof Garmys confusing Spanish class all day if it could have kept me from going to my third-hour class, Advanced Vampyre Sociology, taught byyou guessed itNeferet.
Since day one at the House of Night, Id resisted being put in an advanced level of Vampyre Sociology. At first it was because Id wanted to fit in. I hadnt wanted to be known as the weird third former (or freshman) kid whod been stuck in a sixth former (or senior) class because she was so special. I mean, barf.
Well, it hadnt taken me very long to figure out that there was just no way for me to stay incognito. Since then Id been learning to deal with my specialness and the responsibilities (and embarrassments) that go with it. But it didnt matter how hard Id talked to myself about the Vamp Soc being just another class, I was still majorly nervous going into it.
Of course, knowing Neferet would be the teacher didnt help at all.
I came in, found a desk near the back of the class, and proceeded to hunker down in my seat, trying to impersonate one of those sloth-like kids who slept their lives away, waking up only to move from class to class, leaving a slug trail of yawns and bright pink spots on their foreheads.
My sloth impersonation might have worked had Neferet turned into a pod professor. Sadly, she hadnt. Neferet was glowing with power and what would appear to those less well informed as happiness. I recognized it as gloating. Neferet was a bloated spider, radiating her victory over everyones head she had bitten off, delighted to be contemplating more carnage.
As a side note: Darius would be really pleased at my retention of the vocab words hed been using around me.
Besides the fact that she seemed spiderlike to me, I noticed Neferet, again, wasnt wearing the insignia of Nyx, a goddess embroidered in silver with her hands raised and cupping a crescent moon. Instead, she was wearing a gold chain from which hung wings carved from a pure black stone. I wondered, not for the first time, why no one seemed to notice she was totally twisted. I also wondered why no one noticed the way she radiated a dark energy that filled the space around her like the air right before a lightning strike.
Todays lesson is going to focus on an aspect of abilities that only a vampyre, or sometimes an advanced fledgling, can use. So you wont need your Fledgling Handbooks at the moment, unless youd like to make additional notes in the physiology section. Please open your texts to page 426, which is the chapter on concealment. Neferet held the small classs attention easily. She strode back and forth across the front of her room, looking regal and typically gorgeous in a long black dress trimmed in golden thread that looked like liquid metal. Her auburn hair was pulled back, and lovely curling tendrils of it escaped to frame her beautiful face. Her voice was refined and easy to listen to.