Sadly, it was the Twins who answered me and not gay, and therefore more sensitive and polite, Damien.
“Not shit, right, Twin?” said Shaunee.
“That’s right, Twin, not shit. ‘Cause we can’t be trusted to know shit,” Erin said. “Twin, did you know we’re totally untrustworthy?”
“Not until recently I didn’t, Twin. You?” Shaunee said.
“Didn’t know till recently either,” Erin finished.
Okay, the Twins aren’t really twins. Shaunee Cole is a caramel-colored Jamaican-American who grew up on the East Coast. Erin Bates is a gorgeous blonde who was born in Tulsa. The two met after being Marked and moving to the House of Night on the same day. They clicked instantly—it’s like genetics and geography never existed. They literally finish each other’s sentences. And at that moment they were glaring at me with twin looks of angry suspicion.
God, they made me tired.
They also made me mad. Yes, I’d kept secrets from them. Yes, I’d lied to them. But I’d had to. Well, mostly I’d had to. And their twin holier-than-thou crap was getting on my last nerve.
“Thank you for that lovely commentary. And now I’ll try asking someone who doesn’t have to answer in a stereo version of hateful
Gossip Girl
Blair.” I turned my attention away from them and looked directly at Damien, even though I could hear the Twins sucking air and getting ready to say something I was hoping they would one day regret. “So, I guess what I really wanted to ask when I said ‘what’s up’ is if you’ve noticed any scary, ghostlike, flappy weirdness outside lately. Have you?”
Damien’s a tall, really cute guy with excellent bone structure whose brown eyes were usually warm and expressive but were, at this moment, wary and more than a little cold. “A flappy ghost thing?” he said. “Sorry, I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
My heart squeezed at the strangerlike tone of his voice, but I told myself that at least he’d answered my question. “On the way here from the stables, something kinda attacked me. I couldn’t really see anything, but it was cold and it put a big welt on my hand.” I lifted my hand to show him—and there was no welt there anymore.
Great.
Shaunee and Erin snorted together. Damien just looked really, really sad. I was opening my mouth to explain that there had been a welt there just a few minutes ago, when Jack rushed up.
“Oh, hi! I’m so sorry I’m late but when I put on my shirt I found a ginormic stain right on the front of it. Can you believe that?” Jack said as he hurried up with his tray of food and sat at his place beside Damien.
“A stain? It’s not on that lovely blue long-sleeved Armani I got you for Christmas, is it?” Damien said, scooting over to make room for his boyfriend.
“Ohmigod, no! I’d never spill anything on that one. I just love it and—” His words came to a staggering halt when his eyes flitted from Damien to me. He gulped. “Oh, uh. Hi, Zoey.”
“Hi, Jack,” I said, smiling at him. Jack and Damien are together. Hello. They’re gay. My friends and I, along with anyone who’s not narrow-minded and utterly judgmental, are cool with that.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” Jack babbled. “I thought you were still . . . uh . . . well . . .” He trailed off, looking uncomfortable and blushing a pretty pink.
“You thought I was still hiding in my room?” I supplied for him.
He nodded.
“No.” I said firmly, “I’m done doing that.”
“Well, la-te-da,” Erin began, but before Shaunee could do her usual chime-in act, a blatantly sexy laugh coming from the door behind us made everyone turn and gawk.
Aphrodite twitched into the room, laughing while she batted her eyes at Darius, one of the youngest and hottest of the Sons of Erebus Warriors who protected the House of Night, and did an excellent hair flip. The girl always had been good at multitasking, but I was totally shocked at how nonchalant and utterly cool and collected she looked. Only two days ago she’d been almost dead and then utterly freaked because the sapphire-colored outline of a crescent moon—which appeared on all fledglings’ foreheads, Marking them as having begun the Change that would either end in becoming a vampyre or in becoming dead—had disappeared from her face.
Which meant she had somehow turned back into a human.
Okay, I’d thought she’d turned back into a human, but even from where I was sitting I could see that Aphrodite’s Mark had returned. Her cold blue eyes swept the cafeteria as she gave the watching kids a stuck-up sneer before turning her attention back to Darius and letting her hand linger on the big warrior’s chest.
“It was ever so sweet of you to walk me to the dining hall. You’re right. It shouldn’t have taken two days to cut my vacation short. With all the craziness going on around here, it’s best to stay on campus where we can be protected. And since you say you’ll be stationed at the door of our dorm, that is definitely the most safe
and
attractive place to be.” She practically purred at him. Jeesh, she was stank. Had I not been so surprised to see her, I would have made appropriate gagging noises. Loud, obvious ones.
“And I must return to my posting there. Good night, my lady,” Darius said. He gave her a very sharp bow, which made him look like one of those romantic, handsome knights, minus the horse and the shining armor, from back in the day. “It is a pleasure to serve you.” He smiled at Aphrodite one more time before turning neatly on his heel and leaving the cafeteria.
“And I’ll just bet it would be a pleasure to service
you
,” Aphrodite said in her nastiest voice as soon as he was out of earshot. Then she turned around to face the gawking, silent room. She lifted one perfectly waxed brow and gave everyone her patented Aphrodite sneer. “What? You look like you’ve never seen gorgeous before. Hell, I was only gone a couple of days. Your short-term memory should be better than that. Remember me? I’m the gorgeous bitch you all love to hate.” When no one said anything, she rolled her eyes. “Oh, whatever.” She twitched to the salad bar and began to fill her plate as the noise dam finally broke and all the kids made rude sounds and turned back to their food dismissively.
To the uninformed, I’m sure Aphrodite looked like her usual haughty self. But I could see how nervous and tense she actually was. Hell, I understood exactly how she felt—I’d just walked through the gauntlet myself. Actually, I was currently stuck in the middle of it along with her.
“I thought she’d become human again,” Damien said under his breath to all of us. “But her Mark’s back.”
“Nyx’s ways are mysterious,” I said, trying to sound wise and High Priestess in Training–ish.
“I’m thinking Nyx’s ways are another M-word, Twin,” Erin said. “Can you guess it?”
“Majorly messed up?” Shaunee said.
“Exactly,” Erin said.
“That’s three words,” Damien said.
“Oh, don’t be such a schoolteacher,” Shaunee told him. “Plus, the point is Aphrodite is a hag, and we were kinda hoping Nyx dumped her when that Mark of hers disappeared.”
“More than kinda hoping, Twin,” Erin said.
Everyone stared at Aphrodite. I tried to force salad down my throat. See, here’s the deal: Aphrodite used to be the most popular, powerful, bitchy fledgling at the House of Night. Since she’d crossed the High Priestess, Neferet, and been totally ostracized, she had been reduced to simply the most bitchy fledgling at the House of Night.
Of course, weirdly (and typically enough for me), she and I had kinda, sorta, accidentally become friends—or at the very least, allies. Not that we wanted the masses to know that. Nevertheless, I’d been worried about her when she disappeared, even though Stevie Rae had chased after her. I mean, I hadn’t heard from either of them in two days.
Naturally, my other friends—namely Damien, Jack, and the Twins—hated her guts. So to say that they were shocked and not very pleased when Aphrodite walked directly to our booth and sat down beside me was an understatement almost as big as that knight in the
Indiana Jones
movie saying “He chose poorly” when the bad guy picked the wrong goblet to drink out of and his body disintegrated.
“Staring isn’t polite, even when it’s at someone as stunningly beautiful as
moi
,” Aphrodite said before taking a bite of her salad.
“What in the hell are you doing, Aphrodite?” Erin asked.
Aphrodite swallowed and then blinked with fake innocence at Erin. “Eating, moron,” she said sweetly.
“This is a no-ho zone,” Shaunee said, finally recovering her ability to speak.
“Yeah, it’s posted back here,” Erin said, pointing at a pretend sign on the back of their bench.
“I hate to repeat a sentiment I’ve said before, but in this case I’ll make an exception. So I again say: Die Dorkamese Twins.”
“That’s it,” Erin said, barely able to keep her voice down. “Twin and I are gonna smack that damn Mark right off your face.”
“Yeah, maybe it’ll stay off this time,” Shaunee said.
“Stop it,” I said. When the Twins turned slant-eyed looks of pissed-off-ness on me, I felt my stomach clench. Did they really hate me as much as they looked like they did? It made my heart hurt to think about it, but I lifted my chin and stared right back at them. If I completed the Change to vampyre, I would someday be their High Priestess, and that meant they had damn well better listen to me. “We’ve already been through this. Aphrodite is part of the Dark Daughters now. She’s also part of our circle, being as she has an affinity for the element earth.” I hesitated, wondering if she still had that affinity, or had she lost it when she’d gone from fledgling to human and then, apparently, back to fledgling again, but that was just too confusing, so I hurried on. “You guys know you agreed to accept her in each position,
without
name-calling and hateful remarks.”
The Twins didn’t say anything, but Damien’s voice, sounding uncharacteristically flat and emotionless, came from the other side of me. “We agreed to that, but we didn’t agree to be friends with her.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to be your friend,” Aphrodite said.
“Ditto, bitch!” the Twins said together.
“Whatever,” Aphrodite said, moving like she was going to pick up her tray and leave.
I’d opened my mouth to tell Aphrodite to sit down and the Twins to shut up when a bizarre noise echoed down the hall and through the open doors to the cafeteria.
“What the—?” I began, but didn’t get the whole question out before at least a dozen cats streaked into the cafeteria, hissing and spitting like crazy.
Okay, at the House of Night, cats are everywhere. Literally. They follow us around, sleep with, and in my cat Nala’s case, often complain at, the fledgling of their choice. In Vamp Soc class, one of the first cool things we learned was that cats had long been familiars of vampyres. This meant that we were all majorly used to having cats everywhere. But I had never seen them act so absolutely insane.
The Twin’s huge gray tomcat, Beelzebub, jumped right up between them. He was puffed up to twice his already ginormously large size, and he stared back through the open door to the dining hall with amber eyes slit in anger.
“Beelzebub, baby, what’s wrong?” Erin tried to soothe him.
Nala leaped up on my lap. She put her little white-tipped paws on my shoulder and gave a scary, psycho-cat growl as she, too, stared at the door and the chaotic noise still coming from the hall.
“Hey,” Jack said. “I know what that sound is.”
And it hit me at the same time. “It’s a dog barking,” I said.
Then something that resembled a large yellow bear more closely than a dog burst into the cafeteria. The bear-dog was followed by a kid who was being followed by several uncharacteristically frazzled-looking professors, including our fencing master, Dragon Lankford, our equestrian instructor, Lenobia, as well as several of the Sons of Erebus Warriors.
“Got ya!” the kid yelled once he caught up with the dog and came to a skidding halt not far from us while he swooped down, snagged the barking beast’s collar (which I noted was pink leather with silver metallic spikes all around it), and neatly clipped a leash to it. The instant his leash was reattached, the bear stopped barking, plopped its round butt down on the floor, and stared, panting, up at the kid. “Yeah, great.
Now
you want to act right,” I heard him mutter to the obviously grinning canine.
Even though the barking had stopped, the cats in the cafeteria had definitely not stopped freaking. There was so much hissing around us, it sounded like air escaping from a punctured inner tube.
“You see, James, this was what I was trying to explain to you earlier,” Dragon Lankford said as he stared, frowning, down at the dog. “The animal just won’t work at this House of Night.”
“It’s Stark, not James,” the kid said. “And like
I
was trying to explain to
you
earlier—the dog has to stay with me. It’s just the way it is. If you want me—you get her, too.”
I decided that the new dog kid had an unusual way about him. It wasn’t like he was being openly rude or disrespectful to Dragon, but he also wasn’t speaking to him with the respect, and sometimes outright fear, with which the vast majority of newly Marked fledglings spoke to vampyres. I checked out the front of his vintage Pink Floyd T-shirt. No class insignia there, so I didn’t have a clue what year he was and how long he’d been Marked.
“Stark,” Lenobia was saying, obviously trying to reason with the kid, “it’s just not possible to integrate a dog into this campus. You can see how much he’s upsetting the cats.”
“They’ll get used to him. They did at the Chicago House of Night. She’s usually pretty good about not chasing them around, but that gray cat really did ask for it with that whole hissing and scratching thing.”
“Uh-oh,” Damien whispered.
I didn’t need to look—I could sense the Twins puffing up like blowfish.
“My goodness, what is all this noise about?” Neferet swept into the room, looking beautiful and powerful and completely in control.
I watched the new kid’s eyes widen as he took in her gorgeousness. It was soooo annoying that everybody automatically fell stupid at their first glimpse of our High Priestess and my nemesis, Neferet.