Chosen (House of Night #3)(10)

"That man is such a damn turd monkey."

"Grandma!" I said.

"Oh, Zoeybird, did I call your mother's husband a damn turd monkey out loud?"

"Yes, Grandma, you did."

She looked at me, her dark eyes sparkling. "Good."

Chapter Four

Grandma tried to save the rest of my birthday celebration. We walked across Utica Square to the Stonehorse Restaurant, where we decided to have some decent birthday cake. Which meant Grandma had two glasses of red wine and I had a brown pop and a huge, gooey slice of devil's food cake. (Yes, we enjoyed the irony.) Grandma didn't try to make it all better by fabricating some crap about my mom not meaning it... she'd come around ... just give her time ... blah...blah ... blah. Grandma's way more practical and tons cooler than that.

"Your mom's a weak woman who can only find her identity through a man," she said as she sipped her red wine. "Unfortunately, she chose a really bad man."

"She'll never change, will she?"

Grandma touched my cheek gently. "She might, but I honestly doubt it, Zoeybird."

"I like it that you don't lie to me, Grandma," I said.

"Lies don't fix things. They don't even make things easier, at least not in the long run. Best to tell the truth and then clean up an honest mess."

I sighed.

"Honey, do you have a mess you need to clean up?" Grandma asked.

"Yeah, but unfortunately it's not an honest one." I gave Grandma a sheepish smile and told her about my disastrous birthday party.

"You know, you're going to have to straighten out this boyfriend issue. Heath and Erik are only going to put up with each other for about this long." She held up her fingers, measuring out roughly an inch's worth of "this long."

"I will, but Heath was in the hospital for almost a week after that whole serial killer thing that I saved him from, and then his parents jetted him off to the Cayman Islands for their Christmas vacation. I haven't even seen him in a month. So I really haven't had the chance to do much about the Heath and Erik issue." I focused on scraping the bottom of my plate instead of looking at Grandma. The "whole serial killer thing" was utter b.s. I'd saved Heath, but it hadn't been from something as simple as a crazy human. I'd saved him from a group of creatures that my best friend, the undead Stevie Rae, had been (and probably still was) leader of. But I couldn't tell Grandma that. I couldn't tell anyone that, because behind it all was the High Priestess of the House of Night, my mentor, Neferet, and she was way too psychic for my own good. She can't seem to read my mind, at least not very well, but I tell someone-she reads his or her mind-we're all in a lot of trouble. Talk about stress.

"Maybe you should go home and make it right," Grandma said. Then, when she saw my startled look she added, "I mean, make the birthmas present issue right, not the Heath and Erik issue."

"Oh, good. Yeah, I should do that." I paused, thinking about what she had just said. "You know, it really has turned into my home."

"I know." She smiled. "And I'm glad for you. You're finding your place, Zoeybird, and I'm proud of you."

Grandma had walked me back to where I'd parked my vintage VW Bug, and hugged me good-bye. I'd thanked her for the great presents again, and neither of us had mentioned my mother. There are just some things it doesn't do any good to talk about. I'd told Grandma I was going back to the House of Night to make things right with my friends, and I'd meant to. But instead I found myself driving downtown. Again. For the past month every night I could make a lame excuse or sneak out by myself, I'd been haunting the streets of downtown Tulsa. Haunting... I snorted to myself. That was an excellent word to use for me searching for my best friend, Stevie Rae, who had died a month ago, and then become undead. Yes, it was as weird as it sounded.

Fledglings died. We all knew that. I'd witnessed the death of two of the three who had died since I'd been at the House of Night. Okay, so everyone knew we could die. What everyone didn't know was that the last three fledglings who had died had resurrected, or come alive again, or ... hell! I suppose the easiest way to describe it is that they had become the stereotype for vampyres: the walking undead who were bloodsucking monsters with no humanity left within them at all. And they smelled bad, too.

I knew because I'd been unlucky enough to see what I had at first thought were the ghosts of the first two dead fledglings. Then human teenagers started being killed, and it had looked like someone was trying to set up a vampyre as the killer. That sucked, especially since I'd known the first two boys who had been killed, and the police's attention turned on me for a little while. What sucked even worse was when Heath had been the third human taken.

Well, I couldn't let him be killed. Plus, we'd kinda sorta accidentally Imprinted. With Aphrodite's help I'd figured out how to follow the Imprint to Heath. The police thought that then I'd rescued a pretty messed-up Heath from a human serial killer.

What had I really discovered?

My undead best friend and her disgusting minions. I'd gotten Heath out of there (the "there" had been the old downtown Prohibition tunnels under the abandoned Tulsa depot) and confronted Stevie Rae. Or what was left of her.

See, one problem was that I didn't believe all of her humanity had been destroyed, like it appeared to have been with the other undead and very nasty ex-fledglings who had been trying to chomp on Heath. The second problem was Neferet. Stevie Rae had told me that Neferet was behind their undeadness. I knew it was true because Neferet had put a really awful spell on Heath and me right before the police had showed up. It was supposed to make us forget everything that had happened in the tunnels. I think it worked on Heath. It had only worked on me temporarily. I'd used the power of the five elements to break through mine. So, long story short. Since then I'd been worried about what the hell I was going to do about: one, Stevie Rae; two, Neferet; three, Heath. It might seem that it helped that none of my three worries had been around during the past month, but it didn't.