Loved (House of Night Other World #1)(10)

… No one will ever harm me without suffering equal or more in return …

… No one will ever know my secrets for they will be entombed in the land, safely hidden, silent as death. I regret none of my actions and if that curses me, then my final prayer is to let that curse be entombed with this journal, to be imprisoned eternally in sacred ground.

So ends Emily Wheiler’s sad story and so begins the magickal life of Neferet … Queen of the Night!

After Aphrodite read Neferet’s final words, the silence at our table was thick. I felt shell-shocked and unaccountably sad for Emily. Not for Neferet. Like Stark had pointed out—Neferet had a choice. She chose Darkness, violence, and selfish hatred. But Emily Wheiler hadn’t had any choice. And I couldn’t help but pity her.

“Damn. That was bad,” Kramisha said.

“Well, at least now we understand why she hates men so much. Especially human men,” Stark said.

“And why she was such a control freak,” Aphrodite said.

“I understand her anger now,” I said. They gawked at me, and I held up my hand, stopping Stark before he could add his two cents. “I didn’t say I agreed with it. And I also don’t think I would have made the same choices she did, or at least I hope I wouldn’t have. But I understand her, and I have a feeling that was Kalona’s point.”

“In case she somehow gets out of the grotto, you mean,” Aphrodite said.

“Yes.” I turned to Kramisha. “Okay, your turn.” She tore a page from her lavender notebook and handed it to me. Kramisha’s handwriting was pretty—something that I hadn’t taken time to realize a year ago when she’d started writing prophetic poetry, which we’d used to save the world. More than once. But in the year since, our Poet Laureate had been teaching at the Tulsa House of Night, and I’d sat in on several of her classes. She had a raw, honest, irreverent teaching style that totally worked with students. She also had one of the most unusual adult vampyre tattoos I’d ever seen. From a distance, Kramisha’s elaborate sapphire tattoo stretched on either side of the crescent moon resting in the center of her forehead—the same crescent that Marked us all, whether in sapphire or scarlet—looking like an indecipherable script of indistinguishable letters. But when you got closer and really studied it, you could make out words hidden within the script. Words like create, imagine, inspire. And I swear the words change because I can never seem to find the same one again in the exact same place. It was weird and cool, a lot like Kramisha.

“Are you gonna take it, or am I readin’ it to ya?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” I mentally shook myself. I took the purple paper, holding it almost as carefully as I’d held the ancient journal, cleared my throat, and read aloud:

Snowflakes—each unique

yet while falling from

one existence to another

they might touch

come together

and in this Joining

find themselves again.

But only if each

agree

to sacrifice

who they were to be formed

anew.

Sometimes it

just

needs

to

snow.

“So? Anything? Anything at all?” Aphrodite asked.

I sighed. “Doesn’t mean anything to me—or at least nothing that hits me right away.” I glanced at Stark. “You?”

“I got nothing.” His eyes found Kramisha. “What about you?”

“No clue.”

Aphrodite snorted. “No clue at all? Are you or are you not a prophetess?”

Kramisha narrowed her eyes at Aphrodite. “I got to gets to class, so I don’t have time to take you out back and smack that smug champagne smile off your thin lips. So, I’ll just say this—do you understand your visions? All your visions?” She made a disturbing hissing noise when Aphrodite tried to speak. “No. They’s rhetorical. Don’t speak ’cause you is suddenly reminding me why we used to call you a hag from hell.” Kramisha stood and bowed formally to me. “Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again, High Priestess. Text if you be needing me.” Braids swaying in time with her slinky walk, Kramisha exited the room.

“Damn, she’s touchy. She should drink more.” Aphrodite glanced at her fingernails. “And I need a manicure. So, let’s hurry up this next part.”

“Next part?” I asked stupidly.

Aphrodite raised one perfectly plucked blond brow at me. “Seriously? Like you’re not heading to Woodward Park to check on Neferet’s grotto jail?”

“Oh, that next part. Yeah, I am.”

“We are,” Stark corrected.

“What he said.”

“Okay, hang on just a sec.” Aphrodite’s fingers tapped over her phone. Then she sighed, smiled, and delicately fluttered her fingers at the waitress. “Another champagne,” she said. Then, grimly, she picked up the untouched glass of orange juice, and—like it was a shot—gulped it down. Shuddering, she dabbed her mouth.

“Aphrodite, what in the hell are you doing? Like you said, we’re going to Woodward Park,” I said.

“Yeah, and like Stark said, you’re not going alone. I texted Darius. I just have time to suck down another glass of my morning grapes before he shows up. And please make note that I drank that orange stuff.” She shuddered delicately. “It was completely naked and not mixed with the salvation of alcohol.”