by P. C. Cast
“Take her hand. Talk to her. Keep her conscious,” Darius said. And then he turned away and started throwing stuff out of the first aid kit.
“Zoey, can you hear me?” I could feel that Stevie Rae had hold of my hand, but just barely.
It took what felt like a superhuman effort, but I whispered, “Yeah.”
Stevie Rae clutched my hand harder. “You’re gonna be okay. ’Kay? Nothin’ can happen to you, ’cause I don’t know what I’d do—” Her voice caught on a sob, and then she said, “You can’t die ’cause you’ve always believed the best of me, so I’ve tried to be what you believe I am. Without you, well, I’m afraid the good in me will die, too, and I’ll give in to the darkness. Plus, there are so many things I still need to tell you. Important things.”
I wanted to tell her not to be silly, that she wasn’t making sense and I wasn’t going anywhere, but through the pain and the numbness I was starting to get a strange feeling. The only way I could describe it was as a sense of not-rightness. Whatever had happened, whatever was going on with me, that was the source of the not-rightness. And this new feeling, more than the blood—more than the fear in my friends’ faces—was telling me that something was so wrong with me that I might, indeed, be going somewhere.
It was then that the pain began to recede, and I decided that if this was what it felt like to die, then it was better than living and hurting like hell.
Heath burst into the room, came straight to me, and took my other hand. He barely looked at Stevie Rae. Instead, he smoothed the hair out of my face.
“How are ya, babe? Still holding on?”
I tried to smile at him, but he seemed so far away that I couldn’t make the change in expression reach him.
The Twins ran into the room with Kramisha close behind them.
“Oh no!” Erin stopped several feet from where I was and pressed her hand against her mouth.
“Zoey?” I thought Shaunee looked confused. Then she blinked several times, her gaze traveled down my body, and she burst into tears.
“That don’t look good,” Kramisha said. “Not good at all.” She paused and then her eyes went from me to Heath, whose attention was so focused on me I swear he didn’t look like he’d notice if a giant white elephant in a tutu danced into the room. “Ain’t that the human kid who was down here before?”
I don’t know why, but except for my own body, which didn’t seem to belong to me anymore, I had become majorly aware of everything that was going on around me. The Twins were holding hands and bawling so hard snot was running from their noses. Darius was still digging through the first aid kit. Stevie Rae was patting my hand and trying (unsuccessfully) not to cry. Heath was whispering silly butchered lines from Titanic to me. In other words, everyone was focused on me—except Kramisha. She was staring hungrily at Heath. Little warning bells started ringing in my mind and I tried to struggle to regain awareness of my body. I needed to warn Heath to be on his guard. I needed to tell him he should leave this place before something bad happened to him.
“Heath,” I managed to whisper.
“I’m here, babe. I’m not going anywhere.”
I did a mental eye roll. Heath and his heroics were cute and all, but I was afraid they were going to get him eaten by Stevie Rae’s red fledglings.
“Hey, ain’t you the human kid who was down here before? The one Zoey came after?” Kramisha had moved closer to Heath. Her eyes had taken on a red tint that was a gigantic warning sign. Was I the only one who could see danger in the intense way she was staring at him?
“Darius!” I finally gasped.
Thankfully, the warrior looked up from rummaging through the first aid kit. I flicked my eyes from his to where Kramisha was practically drooling on Heath and saw understanding cross Darius’s face.
“Kramisha. Leave the room. Now,” Darius snapped.
She hesitated, then dragged her red gaze from Heath to look directly at me. Go! I mouthed the word. Her eyes didn’t change, but Kramisha nodded once and walked quickly from the room.
It was then that Aphrodite slapped the doorway blanket aside and made her grand entrance. Looking seriously like poopie, she scowled at the room.
“Damn it, this Imprint is a pain in the ass! Stevie Rae, could you not get a handle on yourself and keep your emotional bullshit under control and show just a smidge of respect for those of us who can still have hangovers that would kill the average—” She finally managed to focus her blurry vision enough to actually see me. Her face, already pale and hollow-eyed, blanched so that it looked a sickly shade of fish-belly white. “Oh, Goddess! Zoey!” She started shaking her head back and forth, back and forth as she rushed over to me. “No, Zoey. No. I didn’t see this.” She was talking earnestly to me. “I never saw this. You beat the first death vision I had. The next one wasn’t supposed to be you being cut again. The next was supposed to be you drowning. No! This isn’t right!”
I tried to say something, but she’d already rounded on Heath.
“You! What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I—I came to see if she was okay,” Heath stammered, obviously freaked by her intensity.
Aphrodite shook her head again. “No. You aren’t supposed to be here. This isn’t right.” She paused and her eyes narrowed at Heath. “You caused this, didn’t you?”
I watched Heath’s eyes fill with tears. “Yeah, I think I did,” he said.
CHAPTER 13
Damien, Jack, and Erik ran into the room, followed closely by Duchess. Jack took one look at me, screamed like a girl, and fainted. Damien caught him in time to keep him from falling and bashing his head on the floor. He laid him down on Stevie Rae’s bed while the poor confused Lab whined and stared with big, worried brown eyes from Jack to Damien and me, and then back to Jack again. Damien joined everyone else, including Erik, who was crowding around me. Darius waded into the group, parting kids like he was a vampyre Moses and they were the fledgling Red Sea.
“They need to cast a circle and focus the healing powers of the elements on Zoey,” Darius told Aphrodite.
She nodded, touched my forehead gently, and then started snapping commands at my friends.
“Nerd herd! Take your places. Let’s get this circle cast.”
Shaunee and Erin stared blankly at her. Damien, his voice thick with tears, said, “I—I don’t know which direction is east.”
Stevie Rae squeezed my hand again before letting it go. “I do. I always know where north is, so I can show you where east is, too,” she told Damien.
“Make the circle around the table,” Darius said. “And give me the sheet from that bed.”
Damien grabbed the top sheet from Stevie Rae’s bed, murmuring to an awake and crying Jack that it was going to be okay. He handed the sheet to Darius.
“Stay with me, Priestess,” he told me. He glanced at Heath and Erik. “Keep talking to her, both of you.”
Erik took the hand Stevie Rae had let loose. “I’m here, Z.” He threaded his fingers with mine. “You have to make it through this. We need you.” He paused and his beautiful blue eyes met mine. “I need you, and I’m sorry about all that stuff before.”
Then Heath raised my other hand to his lips, kissing it softly. “Hey, Zo, did I tell you I haven’t had one drink for more than two months?”
It was seriously weird to have both of my guys there. I was glad they weren’t banging their chests at each other, but I understood that might not be a particularly good thing because it meant that I was hurt even worse than I’d realized.
“That’s good, huh? I’ve totally stopped drinking,” Heath said.
I tried to smile at him. It was good. The reason I’d broken up with Heath right before I was Marked was his drinking. It had totally gotten out of control, and—
Darius pulled Erik’s wadded-up shirt from my chest and quickly ripped the top of my dress in half so that I felt the cool air of the tunnel against my blood-drenched skin.
“Sweet Goddess, no!” Erik blurt
ed.
“Ah, shit!” Heath was shaking his head back and forth. “This is bad. Really bad. No one can live with—”
“No human can live with this kind of wound, but she’s not a human and I’m not going to let her die.” Darius interrupted Heath as he (thankfully) covered my naked boobs with the sheet.
I made the mistake of glancing down. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t have the energy to scream. There was a long laceration that went all the way from the top of my left shoulder, across my chest a couple of inches above my breasts, and didn’t end until it sliced through the skin on my right shoulder. The cut was deep and jagged. The edges of my skin flapped sickeningly apart, showing way more muscle and fat and layers of skin than I was ever meant to see. Blood seeped from all along the terrible wound, but not as much blood as I would expect. Was that because I was running out of it? Hell! It was probably because I was running out! My breath started to come in hysterical little pants.
“Zoey, look at me,” Erik said. When I kept staring down at the wound Darius was pressing thick pads of gauze against, Erik took my chin gently in his hand and turned my face up, forcing me to look at him. “You’re going to be fine. You have to be fine.”
“Yeah, Zo. Just don’t look at it,” Heath said. “You know, like you told me whenever I messed myself up playing football. You used to say, ‘Just don’t look at it and it won’t hurt so bad.’”
Erik let loose of my chin and I managed to nod. Had I been able to talk I would have told both of them Hell no, I’m not looking at it again! I’d already scared the crap out of myself. No need to revisit it.
“Get that circle cast,” Darius said.
“We’re ready,” Damien said.
I looked around (definitely avoiding glancing down at myself again) to see that Damien, Stevie Rae, and the Twins had taken their positions in a circle around us.
“Then get it cast!” Darius snapped.
There was a pause into which Erin finally spoke. “But Zoey always casts the circles. We never have.”
“I’ll do it.” Aphrodite stepped within the circle and marched over to Damien. Damien gave her a look that even I could see was filled with doubt. “You don’t have to be a fledgling or a vampyre to cast a circle. All you have to be is attached to Nyx. And I’m attached to Nyx,” she said firmly. “But I need you guys to be behind me on this. Are you?”
Damien paused long enough to look at me. With an effort that seemed to sap the last of my strength, I nodded at him. He smiled at me and nodded back.
“I’m behind you,” Damien told Aphrodite.
Aphrodite looked from him to the Twins. “We’re with you, too.” Erin spoke for both of them.
Finally she turned to Stevie Rae, who wiped her eyes, sent me a big, confident smile, and then she said to Aphrodite, “You’ve saved my life twice. I’m trusting that you can do the same for Zoey.”
I saw Aphrodite’s face flush, her chin lift, and her shoulders straighten and knew that for the first time in a very long time she felt like an accepted part of a group.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Aphrodite said. “It’s the first element, the one we all embrace from our first breaths to our last. I call wind to the circle!” Sure enough, I saw a sudden breeze begin to lift Aphrodite’s and Damien’s hair, and with a look of obvious relief, she moved clockwise around the circle to Shaunee.
And then I stopped paying attention—or rather my attention started to narrow, getting all gray and tunnel-vision-like around the edges.
“Zoey, are you still with us?” Darius asked as he pressed more gauze against my chest.
I couldn’t answer him. My head felt really light, but the rest of my body was unbelievably heavy, like some moron had parked a Mack truck on top of me.
“Z?” Erik was saying. “Z, look at me!”
“Zoey? Babe?” Heath looked like he was going to cry again.
Okay, I really wanted to say something to make them feel better, but it just wasn’t possible. I couldn’t make my body work anymore. It was like I’d become a distant spectator in the game that was going on around me. I could watch, but I couldn’t play.
“All the elements but spirit have been evoked,” Aphrodite said. She was standing beside Darius. “That’s the element Zoey always personifies, and I feel weird calling it in her place.”
“Call it,” Darius said. He glanced up from me and looked around the circle at my friends. “Concentrate the power of your element on Zoey. Think about filling her with strength and warmth and life.”
Vaguely I heard Aphrodite evoking spirit, although I didn’t feel the quickening its presence usually gave me. I briefly felt a distant warmth and thought for a second that I also smelled rain and cut grass, but that was gone quickly while the gray framing my vision became thicker and thicker.
“Are you the human Zoey was Imprinted with?” I heard Darius talking to Heath. I listened, but couldn’t manage to care too much about what they were saying.
“Yes,” Heath said.
“Good. Your blood would be even better than Aphrodite’s for her.”
“That’s the first good news I’ve heard in ages,” Aphrodite mumbled, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Are you willing to allow Zoey to drink from you?”
“Of course!” Heath said. “Just tell me what I need to do.”
“Sit up here. Hold her head in your lap. Then give me your arm,” Darius told Heath.
Heath got up on the end of the table, and with Erik and Darius’s help my head was soon resting against his warm thigh, like he was a living pillow. Heath held his arm out and Darius grasped it firmly. My mind was too fuzzy to make sense of what they were doing until Darius reached behind him and took the all-purpose knife/scissors/bottle opener from the first aid kit, flipped the knife partway open, and pressed the blade against the soft skin on the inside of Heath’s muscular forearm.
The scent of his blood settled over me like a delicious fog.
“Press her mouth against it,” Darius said. “Make her drink.”
“Come on, babe. Take some of this. It’ll help you get better.” Okay, my rational mind knew that Erik was standing right there beside me watching along with all of my best friends. Under normal circumstances I would never have done what I did next, no matter how delicious and amazing and enticing Heath’s blood smelled.
But I wasn’t currently experiencing anything that even mildly resembled normal circumstances. So when Heath pressed his bleeding arm against my lips, I opened my mouth, sank my teeth deep into him, and started sucking.
Heath moaned and wrapped his other arm around me, pressing his face into my hair as I drank from him. The world immediately narrowed so that there was only Heath and me as his blood exploded into my body. With that first drink, awareness slammed back into my chest, and with it pain so intense that I would have wrenched my mouth from his skin had he not tightened his grip on me and whispered into my ear, “No! You can’t stop. If I can stand it, so can you, Zo.”
See, I knew I wasn’t just causing him to feel the exquisite pleasure feeding from a human usually caused both vamp and victim. We’d instantly Imprinted again. Even in the bad shape I was in I could tell that. Heath’s whole awareness filled me along with his blood, and we were bound together through the magical fabric that was the need and attraction between human and vampyre, stitched together in a single garment of the ancient bond that was an Imprint. But I wasn’t just drinking from him. I was feeding in a frenzy that was a natural instinct for survival, and through our connection Heath was feeling my pain and fear and need, everything that I’d been numb to when my body was in near-fatal shock. His blood had changed that, though. It had revitalized me, and in doing so it had wrenched me out of the deadly shock state and thrown me directly into searing pain and the realization that I was perilously close to dying.
I whimpered, still feeding from him, but was miserable because I knew what I was making him feel.
Of course, he kne
w what I was feeling, too, and how sorry I was that I was hurting him.
“It’s okay, babe. It’s okay. It’s not that bad, really,” he whispered in my ear through teeth gritted against the intense mixture of pain and desire.
I don’t know how much time had passed when I realized that, even though the cut across my chest hurt like hell, my body was warm, and I could feel caressing me a soft breeze that carried the scent of spring rain and a hay-filled meadow. My spirit, too, felt invigorated, and I knew that Heath’s blood had energized me enough that now I was able to accept the healing aid of the elements that comforted my soul as they soothed my body.
At about the same time I realized Heath had stopped talking to me. I opened my eyes and glanced up. He was kinda slumped over me but was being held upright by Darius’s firm grip on his shoulders. His eyes were closed and his face was pale.
Instantly I pulled my mouth from his arm. “Heath!” Had I killed him? Panicked, I tried to sit up, but the pain shooting through my body stopped me.
“The human is fine, Priestess,” Darius soothed. “Stanch the wound on his arm so that he will not lose any more blood.”
Automatically I ran my tongue over the narrow slice on Heath’s arm and the bigger gash I’d made when I bit him while I thought Heal…don’t bleed anymore, and when I pulled away this time I saw that the knife wound, as well as the marks my teeth had left, had completely stopped bleeding.
“You can close the circle,” Darius told Aphrodite, who was watching me with undisguised curiosity.
See, I wanted to tell her, there are a lot of different kinds of Imprints. What I have with Heath is definitely not what you have with Stevie Rae. But I couldn’t summon the energy to say the words. Actually, I wasn’t looking forward to the gazillion questions I was sure she was going to have for me. And then before she turned to Stevie Rae to begin thanking and then sending away the elements, I saw Aphrodite send Darius a sexy smile filled with promise, and I remembered that the first Imprint I’d shared with Heath had been broken when I’d had sex with Loren, and I realized that it was Darius who was going to have to field her questions. By the intimate smile he gave her in return, I was guessing he was going to like that kind of questioning wayyyy more than I ever would.