Redeemed (House of Night #12)(41)

Thanatos hesitated. She glanced at Lenobia, who smiled. She glanced at Kalona, who frowned. And then she surprised me by glancing over her shoulder at me. I met her eyes and did what my gut told me to do—I smiled and nodded.

Thanatos turned to Suzanne, grasped her forearm in the traditional vampyre greeting, and raised her voice so that it was filled with the power of Nyx: “As High Priestess of Tulsa’s House of Night, I welcome you and grant sanctuary to all who seek it!”

Beside me, I heard Stark sigh and whisper, “Ah, hell…”

Zoey

“No, Bobby! How many times does Mommy have to tell you? You cannot touch the tall man’s wings!” A frazzled-looking woman plucked a toddler from where he was teetering on the field house’s sandy floor, arms stretched out, reaching for the tip of Kalona’s wing.

I bit my cheek to keep from giggling as the winged immortal grunted in annoyance and sidestepped to avoid sticky reaching fingers. The toddler tried to lurch out of his mom’s tired arms. Kalona dodged around her the other way. As usual, whenever Kalona appeared, all the humans focused their attention on him, which seemed to be wearing on him. He looked tired. Weirdly, his wounds hadn’t totally healed yet but were painful-looking pink lines and puckered gouges. I was thinking that he must not have spent enough time on the roof of the ONEOK building when Aphrodite’s “Psst!” took my attention.

“Z, bumpkin—over here with me, now!” Aphrodite called to us. Stevie Rae and I let go of the case of water we’d been carrying into the field house and followed Aphrodite to the shadowy far wall and a little alcove that held a statue of Nyx.

“Man, I’m beat,” Stevie Rae said.

“Seriously,” I agreed.

“We’re overdue for a break,” Aphrodite said, tossing cans of brown pop to Stevie Rae and me. Then she totally surprised me by cracking open her own can.

“Pop? You? I thought you hated it.”

“I do, and this isn’t pop. It’s Sophia champagne,” she said, sipping happily through a little pink straw that she’d unwrapped from the side of the slender pink can.

“Champagne in a can—who knew?” Stevie Rae said.

“Anyone civilized.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“My point exactly,” Aphrodite said. Then she cut her eyes to Kalona, who was standing in the middle of the field house, obviously looking for someone and just as obviously trying to ignore the people who were staring at him.

“Kalona and humans, especially little humans, equals apocalyptic train wreck,” Aphrodite said.

“In total agreement with you,” I said. “Does he look tired to you guys?”

Aphrodite snorted. “We all look tired.”

“I think he looks like he always does, except beat up, which makes it kinda mean that I was rootin’ for that baby to grab a feather,” Stevie Rae said.

“Kalona’s an immortal. He’s fine, and a baby yanking on his feathers would be beyond awesome,” Aphrodite said. “I wonder what I could bribe a toddler with to do that—or, better yet, his mom to allow him do that. Do you think she likes mimosas?”

“That mom sure looks like she needs a mimosa, without the orange juice. She’d probably like one of your pink cans,” Stevie Rae said.

“I don’t say this often because it isn’t often true, but I think you’re right, Stevie Rae,” Aphrodite said. “I’ll need more than one of these little cans, though. Looks like a job for the Widow Clicquot.”

“Widow Clicquot? Is she from Temple Israel?”

“Oh, you poor, ignorant peasant,” Aphrodite said, shaking her head sadly at Stevie Rae.

Kalona had made it past the toddler, and he was moving again. Ugh, it seemed he was heading in our direction. “Tell me he isn’t coming our way.”

“Wish I could,” Aphrodite said.

“He’s like a ginormic homing pigeon,” Stevie Rae said.

“Should we meet him halfway?” I asked, yawning. I glanced at the school clock. It read 5:30 A.M. There was a little over an hour left before sunrise, and for once I totally understood red fledgling exhaustion.

“Save Kalona from the humans? Not no, but hell no,” Aphrodite said.

“Ditto on that,” Stevie Rae said.

I shrugged and yawned again. “Okay by me. I’m too tired to move anyway.”

Thanatos had decided that the best place to put all the humans—and there really was a bunch of them—was in the biggest building on campus, our field house. I thought it was a good idea. The place was huge, and with them all together in here they’d be easy to keep track of. Of course the majority of the field house floor was sand because it was used for Warrior training, and the sand sucked. Sand, sleeping bags, and tired, scared, grumpy, gawking humans don’t mix well together, so we’d all (meaning almost everyone on campus except for Thanatos, Grandma, Detective Marx, and the religious leaders) spent the past several hours struggling to spread tarps and transform the Warrior training grounds into a what was finally starting to look like a temporary tornado shelter. Not that that was much better, but at least it was less sandy and was more or less neatly sectioned off in family sleeping areas.

“Check it out.” Aphrodite bumped me with her shoulder. “The guy Rabbi Steven Bernstein has Kalona cornered. I’ll bet he’s asking him all sorts of crazy Torah questions.”