Revealed (House of Night #11)(87)

“Hey, what’s it to you?” the guy with the garbage bag said. “You’re a vampyre. It’s not like we scare you.”

I knew they thought I was a full vampyre. I knew that made them afraid of me.

I was glad.

“So, you’re used to scaring human girls into giving you some cash?” What total jerks!

The second guy shrugged. “If a girl don’t want to be scared, she shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“Oh, it’s the girl’s fault?” I’d meant the question hypothetically, but the garbage bag guy didn’t get that.

“Yeah, it’s the girl’s fault!”

“But we won’t scare nobody if they just give us some cash.”

“We don’t take no credit cards, though.” Garbage bag guy laughed and smacked his friend on the arm.

“You’re jerks. You’re both jerks. How about you get jobs instead of messing with little girls?”

“Messing with little girls pays better,” said the garbage bag guy.

“I was sitting here, minding my own business. You two need to remember that. You brought this on yourselves.” I stood. My whole body felt hot. I was really pissed. “Guess what? You should’ve picked another little girl to mess with today.”

“Hey, we wasn’t messing with you. We was just passin’ by,” said the second guy. He grabbed his friend’s arm and started pulling him away.

“Relax, girlie. No harm, no foul,” said the garbage bag guy, sending me a sarcastic grin and flashing his black, broken teeth.

So they thought they were going to slither off and find a real girl, a normal girl, to scare?

I felt like my heart was going to blaze out of my chest.

“No! Not today you’re not!” I threw my anger at them. It was a glowing blue ball of light. It slammed into the two guys, lifting them off their feet and hurling them against the stone wall of the ridge.

I was breathing hard and feeling good about what I’d done. They’d think twice before they messed with any other girl! Assholes!

Thunder cracked above me and a fork of lightning stabbed into the center of the park, making the hair on my forearms lift. It was then I realized I had my fist wrapped around the Seer Stone.

I blinked and shook my head. Wait, what had just happened?

I stared at the men. They were still there, lying in the shadow of the stony ridge. They weren’t yelling back at me or brushing themselves off and getting up, or even taking off because I’d scared the crap out of them.

I couldn’t see that they were moving at all.

Holy crap! I’d used Old Magick to attack the two men. It had been just like when I’d knocked Shaylin off her feet. I’d done it automatically after the burn of my anger had become unbearable. But the burn hadn’t been my anger, it had been the Seer Stone heating up, penetrating my body, feeding from my emotions and then striking out.

I let loose the stone and looked at my palm. A perfect circle had been burned into it.

Dazed, I looked up, seeing smoke coming from the heart of the park above me. The air smelled of electricity and fire and I realized lightning must have struck a tree, or maybe even one of the park buildings. Woodward Park was on fire.

Firemen would be coming soon. So would the police.

My knees were wobbly and my head hurt as I stumbled forward, getting closer to the men, staring at the two shapes that were crumpled at the base of the ridge. One of them moaned. The other’s arm twitched.

The sky opened and ropes of rain began falling, so that I couldn’t tell if the wetness was water or blood or my tears.

I didn’t think. I just ran.

I didn’t need to call mist and shadow to me. The thunderstorm cloaked me. No one noticed a lone girl, running through the rain, away from the burning park, especially since emergency vehicles and the police were swarming in the opposite direction.

I ran around the school wall, entering back through the hidden door. And I kept running until I was inside the stables, gasping and shivering. I went to the tack room and got a clean towel. Wrapping it around myself, I walked down the long line of stalls until I found Persephone. I slid the door open and entered the warm, dark stall. Persephone was sleeping the way horses do, standing with one leg cocked and her head low, eyes half-lidded. She barely moved when I went to her and wrapped my arms around her neck and sobbed into her thick, soft mane.

What was happening to me?

The guys in the park had been jerks, but they couldn’t have hurt me. Sure, they preyed on girls, scaring them into throwing cash their way, but they couldn’t have hurt me. I could’ve walked away and made an anonymous call to the police, given a description of them, and told the cops that they were loitering in the park, threatening girls. The cops would’ve run them off.

Instead I exploded on them.

I hadn’t even thought it through. I hadn’t done it on purpose. It had just happened. My anger had literally exploded through the Seer Stone at them.

What was it Aphrodite had been trying to tell me? Something about her vision and Old Magick and me losing control of my anger. I hadn’t listened to her. I’d cut her off and believed she’d betrayed me. I’d let anger control me.

“Oh, Goddess, that was wrong—so wrong of me,” I cried.

Then, through my sobs and the thunderstorm that roiled in the sky, I heard a siren. It wasn’t a fire truck. It wasn’t an ambulance. It was a police car. And it wasn’t speeding past the school toward Woodward Park. Its siren was getting closer and closer. It had to have entered our gate and pulled up to the school.