Hunted (House of Night #5)(49)

"Heath," I began, but just then Aphrodite, followed by a bunch of cats, including my Nala and her hateful white Persian, appropriately named Maleficent, came into the room.

"Awkward. Again," Aphrodite added, looking knowingly from Heath to Erik and me.

I sighed and realized my head was starting to hurt almost as much as the cut across my chest. Then the Twins and Kramisha piled into the room, too.

"Ah, oh," Shaunee said.

"What's ex-boyfriend doing here?" Erin said.

"The roads are too bad. Heath can't get home," I said.

"So that means he be staying here?" Kramisha asked, giving Heath a long look.

"He'll have to. He's safer here than at the House of Night," I said, keeping an eye on Kramisha and adding silently to myself that I wasn't convinced he'd be safe here either. "He and I have Imprinted again," I added for good mea sure.

Kramisha curled her lip. "I know that. I can smell you in his blood. He ain't good for nothin' now 'cept for being your boy toy."

"He's not--" I started, but Heath's sharp voice cut me off.

"No, the girl's right. That's all I am to you," Heath said bluntly.

"Heath. That's not how I think of you," I said.

"Yeah, well, I don't want to say shit more about it. I'm your blood donor, and that's it." He turned away from me and I saw him grab a bottle of wine someone had left by the bed and take a big swig of it.

Damien, a puffy-eyed Jack, and Duchess (causing all of the cats except Nala to hiss like insane creatures) crowded back into the room then.

"Hey, Heath," Jack said. "I thought you were on your way home."00[#p

"I can't get home. Looks like I'm stuck here with you in the left-behind pile."

Jack frowned, close to bursting into tears again. "Damien's not leaving me behind. Not really. I just--I just can't go with him right now this second."

"That's right. We'll be back together as soon as we can," Damien said, putting his arm around Jack. "Okay, I hate to interrupt all this g*y-boy romance stuff, but I wrote me some more poems when I woke up and thought you better see them," Kramisha said.

That broke though my confusion about what to do about Heath and Erik. "You're right. I do need to see them," I said. "Damien, did Jack get a chance to explain to you about Kramisha's poetry?"

"Yes. I even got a copy of the poems before Kramisha went to sleep and read them while Jack and I were on watch," Damien said.

"What the hell are you guys talking about?" Aphrodite said.

"When you were all drunk and disorderly, Z discovered poetry written on the walls of Aphrodite's room," Erin said.

"Written by Kramisha, but all of it seemed to be about Kalona, which is totally creepy," Shaunee said.

"It's like she's channeling abstract images about him," Damien said. "I think the poems in her room were meant to catch our attention, which means we need to check out everything Kramisha writes."

"Oh, great. That's all we need. More gloom and doom poetry," Aphrodite said.

"Well speaking of, here's two new ones." Kramisha tried to hand me the couple of sheets of paper the poems were written on, but moving my arms up so I could hold them made me suck air with pain.

"Here." Erik smoothly took the papers from her. Then he brought them to me and held them up so that Damien, the Twins, Aphrodite, Jack, and I could read them at the same time. The first one was baffling:

What once bound him

Will make him flee

Place of power--joining of five

Night

Spirit

Blood

Humanity

Earth

Joined not to conquer,

Instead to overcome

[KrbroughNight leads to Spirit

Blood binds Humanity

And Earth completes.

"That makes my head hurt. I mean, more than it already does. I cannot tell you how much I hate poetry," Aphrodite said.

"Do you have a clue about this?" I asked Damien. "I think it's giving us directions on how we can make Kalona flee, or run away," he said.

"We know what `flee' means, Mr. Vocab," Erin said.

"It's kinda depressing that it says flee instead of kill," Jack said.

"Kalona can't be killed," I said, speaking the words automatically. "He's immortal. He can be trapped. He can be chased away, although it boggles my mind to think about what might make him run. But he can't be killed."

"Those five thingies together, in a place of power, make him run," Jack said.

"Wherever that is, and what ever they are," I said.

"They're people who represent each of those things. Or at least that would be my first guess. See how they're capitalized? That usually means they are proper nouns, or names," Damien said.

"They're names," Kramisha said.

"Do you know anything else about it? Can you tell who they are?" Damien asked.

Kramisha shook her head, looking frustrated. "No. It's just when you said that they be people, I knew you was right."

"How about the next one?" Damien said. "Maybe it'll help us make sense of this one."