Hunted (House of Night #5)(4)

"Got it!" he said. He was holding a really old combo CD-cassette-radio that was humongous. It was one of those things they used to call boom boxes way back in the day. Like the 1980s. Without looking at Stevie Rae, he set it on the table that was close to her and Darius and started fiddling with the ginormic, glaringly silver knobs, muttering that he hoped it could pick up something down here.

"Where's Venus?&rdqu C Ke if they o; Stevie Rae asked Erik. It obviously hurt for her to talk, and her voice had gone all shaky.

Erik had glanced back toward the round, blanket-draped entrance to the room that served as a door, which was empty. "She was right behind me. I thought she'd come in here and--" Then he did look at Stevie Rae, and his words fell away. "Ah, man, that must really hurt," he said softly. "You look bad, Stevie Rae."

She tried, and failed, to smile at him. "Well, I've felt better. I'm glad Venus helped you out with the boom box. Sometimes we can actually get some of the radio stations down here."

"Yeah, that's what Venus said," Erik said vaguely. He was staring at the arrow sticking out of Stevie Rae's bare back.

Even through my worry about Stevie Rae I'd started to wonder about the absent Venus and tried like hell to remember what she looked like. Last time I'd gotten a really good look at the red fledglings, they hadn't been "red" yet, which means the outline of a crescent moon in the middle of their foreheads had still been sapphire-colored like all fledglings' tattoos are when they're first Marked. But these fledglings died. Then un-died. And they had all been bloodsucking, crazed monsters until Stevie Rae went through a type of Change. Somehow Aphrodite's humanity (who knew she had any?) mixed with the power of the five elements--all of which I can control--and voil?! Stevie Rae got her humanity back, along with some gorgeous adult vampyre tattoos that look like vines and flowers framing her face. But instead of the tattoo being dark blue, it had turned red. As in the color of fresh blood. When that happened to Stevie Rae, all the undead-dead kids' fledgling tattoos had turned red, too. And they got their humanity back. In theory. I really hadn't been around them or Stevie Rae enough since her Change to know for sure that everything was one hundred percent with all of them. Oh, and Aphrodite lost her Mark--totally. So she's supposedly human again, even though she still has visions.

All of this explains why the last time I'd spent any time with Venus she was more than kinda disgusting looking since she was very nastily undead. But now she'd been fixed--or at least sort of--and I knew that she'd hung with Aphrodite before she died (and un-died), which means she had to have been totally gorgeous because Aphrodite didn't believe in ugly friends.

Okay, before I sound like an ?ber-jealous freak let me explain: Erik Night is to-die-for hot in a Superman?Clark Kent kind of way and, to carry through with the superhero analogy, he's also talented and honestly a good guy. Er, vampyre. Recently Changed vampyre at that. He is also my boyfriend. Er, ex-boyfriend. Recently ex-boyfriend at that. Sadly, that means I'm going to be ridiculously jealous of anyone, even one of the kinda freaky red fledglings, who might be catching too much of his interest (too much = any).

Darius's businesslike voice had, thankfully, interrupted my inner babbling.

"The radio can wait. Right now, Stevie Rae must be attended to. She will need a clean shirt and blood as soon as I get through with this." Darius spoke as he put the first aid kit on Stevie Rae's bedside table, opened it, and busily pulled out gauze and alcohol and some scary stuff.

That had definitely shut everybody up.

You know I love y'all like white bread, don't you?" Stevie Rae said, giving us a brave smile. My friends and I had nodded woodenly. "Okay, so you won't take it the wrong way if I say that all of y'all but Zoey need to go find somethin' to keep yourselves busy while Darius yanks this arrow outta my chest."

"All of them except me? No no no no no. Why do you want me to stay?"

I saw humor in Stevie Rae's pain-filled eyes. "'Cause you're our High Priestess, Z. You gotta stay and help Darius. Plus, you've already seen me die once; how much worse could this be than that?" Then she paused and her eyes widened as she stared at the palms of my still dorkishly raised hands and blurted, "Holy crap, Z, look at your hands!"

I turned my hands over so I could see what the hell she was staring at, and felt my own eyes widen. Tattoos spread across my palms, the same beautiful intricate pattern of latticework swirls that decorated my face and neck and stretched down either side of my spine and around my waist. How could I have forgotten? I'd felt the familiar burning flash across my palms as we all escaped into the safety of the tunnels. I'd realized then what that burning meant. My goddess, Nyx, the personification of Night, had Marked me again as exclusively hers. Had set me apart, again, from all the other fledglings and vampyres in the world. No other fledgling had a filled-in, expanded Mark. That only happened after a kid went through the Change, and then the outline of the crescent moon on the forehead was filled in and expanded to a unique, one-of-a-kind tattoo that framed the face, proclaiming to the world that he or she was a vampyre.

So my face proclaimed that I was a vampyre, but my body said I was still a fledgling. And the rest of my tattoos? Well, that was something that had never happened before--not to a fledgling and not to a vamp, and even now I wasn't one hundred percent sure what it meant.