Untamed (House of Night #4)(9)

"That's quite considerate of you, my lady," said the older warrior, who was still holding the door for me. "I would be happy to give you a list of names."

I smiled and thanked him. All the way to the girls' dorm, he chatted courteously about the warriors who would be assigned to guard us while I nodded and made the appropriate noises and tried to sneak glances up into the quiet night sky. Nothing flapped or chilled the air, but I couldn't get rid of the frightening feeling that someone or something was watching me.

Chapter Four

I had barely touched my door handle when it was pulled open and Aphrodite grabbed my wrist. "Would you get your butt in here? Shit, you are slow as a fat kid on crutches, Zoey." She pulled me into the room and slammed the door firmly behind us.

"I'm not slow, and you have a whole hell of a lot of explaining to do," I said. "How did you get in here? Where is Stevie Rae? When did your Mark come back? What --?" My tirade of questions was cut off by a loud, insistent tapping that was coming from my window.

"First of all, you're a moron. It's the House of Night not Tulsa Public Schools. No one locks their doors, so I walked right in your room. Second, Stevie Rae is over there." Aphrodite breezed past me as she hurried to the window. I just stood there staring at her while she pulled back the thick drapes and started unlatching the heavy leaded-glass windowpane. She gave me an irritated look over her shoulder. "Hello! A little help would be nice."

Utterly confused, I joined her at the window. It took both of us to wrench it open. I gazed out from the top floor of the old raw stone building that looked more like a castle than like a dorm. The late December night was still cold and dreary, and it was now making a halfhearted attempt at rain. I could just see the east wall through the darkness and the shrouding trees. I shivered, but fledglings rarely feel cold, and it wasn't the weather giving me the chills. It was a glimpse of the east wall--a place of power and mayhem. Beside me, Aphrodite sighed and leaned forward so she could peek out the window and down the wall. "Stop messing around and get in here. You're going to get caught, and more importantly, the humidity is going to frizz my hair."

When Stevie Rae's head bobbed up into view, I almost peed on myself.

"Hi, Z!" she said cheerfully. "Check out my new ultracool climbing abilities."

"Ohmygod. Get. In. Here." Aphrodite reached through the open window, grabbed one of Stevie Rae's hands, and yanked. Like she was a balloon, Stevie Rae popped into the room. Aphrodite quickly closed the window and pulled shut the drapes.

I closed my flapping open mouth, but continued to stare as Stevie Rae stood up, brushing off her Roper jeans and retucking her long-sleeved shirt into them.

"Stevie Rae," I finally managed. "Did you just crawl up the side of the dorm?"

"Yep!" She grinned at me, nodding her head so that her short blond curls bounced around like a crazed cheerleader's. "Cool, huh? It's like I'm a part of the stones that the building's made of, and I get all weightless, and, well, here I am." She held out her hands.

"Like Dracula," I said, and knew I'd spoken my thought out loud only when Stevie Rae frowned and said, "What's like Dracula?" I sat down heavily on the end of my bed. "In the book, Dracula, the old one by Bram Stoker," I explained, "Jonathan Harker says he sees Dracula crawling down the side of his castle."

"Oh, yeah, I can do that. When you said 'like Dracula,' I thought you meant I looked like Dracula--all kinda creepy and pale with bad hair and those long, nasty fingernails. That's not what you meant, was it?"

"No, you look great, actually." I was definitely telling her the truth. Stevie Rae did look great, especially compared to how she'd been looking (and acting and smelling) the past month. She looked like Stevie Rae again, before my best friend's body had rejected the Change and she'd died almost exactly one month ago, and then, somehow, come back from the dead. But she'd been different--broken. Her humanity had been almost completely lost, and she wasn't the only kid it had happened to. There was a pack of nasty undead dead kids lurking around the old Prohibition tunnels beneath Tulsa's downtown abandoned depot. Stevie Rae had almost become one of them--mean, hateful, and dangerous. Her Goddess-given affinity with the element earth was all that had helped her retain any bit of herself, but it hadn't been enough. She'd been slipping away. So, with the help of Aphrodite (who had also been given an affinity for the element earth), I'd cast a circle and asked Nyx to heal Stevie Rae.

And the Goddess had, but during that healing process, it seemed like Aphrodite had had to die to save Stevie Rae's humanity. Thankfully, that hadn't been true. Instead of dying, Aphrodite's Mark had disappeared as Stevie Rae's Mark had miraculously been colored in and expanded, showing that she had completed her Change into vampyre. Except to add to the general confusion, Stevie Rae's tattoo hadn't appeared in the traditional color of sapphire, as all adult vampyre Marks are colored. Stevie Rae's Mark was bright scarlet--the color of new blood.

"Uh, hello. Earth to Zoey. Anybody home in there?" Aphrodite's smart-alecky voice cut through my mental babble. "Better check your BFF. She's kinda losing it."

I blinked. Even though I'd been gawking at Stevie Rae, I hadn't been seeing her. She was standing in the middle of the room--what used to be our room up until a month ago, when her death had completely and utterly changed everything forever--staring around her with big tear-filled eyes.