by P. C. Cast
“How do you reach the tunnels?” Neferet cut him off.
“I’m sorry, I’d need to get administrative permission for any—”
“That won’t be necessary.” This time she added a seductive smile to her words. “I’m simply compiling historical information about the school building. The tunnels are still accessible, aren’t they?”
The man looked equally as confused by her question as he was dazzled by her smile. “Oh, yes. They’re easy to get to. Just follow this here main hall ’til you pass the library.” He gestured to their right. “There’re stairs in the corner of the intersecting hallway. Take them down a flight. The access is through an old music room about midway through the next hall on the right. I got the master key right here. I don’t suppose it’d hurt anything if I gave you a quick look. It’s not like classes are going on right now or—”
“Incapacitate him, but do not kill him,” Neferet had ordered. “Oh, and give me that key.”
Aurox hit him hard enough to make him unconscious. He didn’t believe the old man was dead, but he wasn’t certain. There was no time to check. He handed Neferet the jangling keys and she began hurrying in the direction the man had unwisely indicated. She paused when she came to the large room on their left, glancing in the windows of the closed doors. Aurox looked with her. It was an elegent room. Large, decorative lights hung over tables and bookshelves.
Strange that Aurox perceived a waiting quality from within.
“Library,” she said. “All this Art Deco architecture is utterly wasted on human teenagers.” Neferet dismissed the building’s beauty and majesty. She nodded at the intersecting hallway ahead of them. “This is the correct way.”
Almost reluctantly, Aurox followed her.
“This a school, just as the House of Night is a school?” Aurox had to give voice to some of the questions that were circling around his mind.
Neferet didn’t even glance at him. “It is a human school—a public school. Not like the House of Night.” She shuddered delicately. “I can practically see the hormones and testosterone. Why do you ask?”
“I am simply curious,” he said.
She did look at him then, briefly. “Do not be.”
“Yes, Priestess,” he said softly.
They wove their way farther within the quiet building, and the hall became less and less touched by sunlight. The shadows around Neferet stirred as she stopped in front of a door with musical notes painted on it. “This is it,” she said, as she unlocked the door, and stepped into a dingy area that smelled of dust and neglect. To their left was a room filled with metal stands and chairs. Before them was a cluttered area that led into more darkness. Neferet hesitated and made a low sound of frustration. “I grow weary of searching.”
Neferet lifted her right hand, pressed the sharp nail of her left middle finger against her palm, slicing open a wound that wept red.
“To the red ones I command you lead me;
my blood your payment will be.”
With a sense of fascination Aurox watched Darkness release from within the shadows beneath and around Neferet as well as the corners of the room. Questing tendrils slithered to her. Twining around her body they crawled up her skin to the blood that pooled in her palm. Darkness fed there, causing Neferet to shiver and moan as if in pain, though the Priestess did not close her hand. Did not pull away.
It made Aurox feel. Part of him felt excited as he anticipated a battle to come and welcomed the rage and power that battle would evoke. But another part of him felt revulsion. Darkness pulsed around Neferet, malevolent and sticky and dangerous. Aurox was pondering the different feelings when Neferet shook off the tendrils and licked her wound closed.
“You have fed.
I will be led.”
The singsong rhyme of Neferet’s spell brushed power against Aurox and he shivered as Darkness writhed and then skittered off leaving a thin ribbon-like trail that was blacker than a new moon night as its signpost.
“Come,” Neferet said.
Aurox did as he was commanded.
They followed the ribbon into the seemingly abandoned hallway, which began to slope down and down, tunnel-like. Eventually they came to a space that widened and dead-ended. There Neferet paused.
Aurox scented them before he saw them. Their odor was vile, rotten, filthy. Death, he thought. They smell of death.
“Unacceptable,” Neferet said angrily under her breath. “Utterly unacceptable.” She strode into the underground room, went to the wall, and flipped a switch. A single bare bulb cast a sickly yellow light.
Aurox thought it looked like a nest.
Mattresses were piled against one another. Bodies were curled around each other under blankets. Some were naked. Some were clothed. It was difficult to see where one ended and another began. One head lifted. The vampyre’s tattoos were red and they looked remarkably like the tendrils of Darkness that had led them to him. His gaze was hard. His voice angry.
“Kurtis, take care of whoever is bothering us.”
A large mound moved sluggishly and a thick broad forehead appeared from the other end of the nest. This one had a red crescent outlined on his forehead—a fledgling.
“It’s barely even day. Just zap ’em with electricity or somethin’ and—”
“And what?” Neferet’s voice was ice. “Kurtis, you were stupid and bumbling before you died. Now you’re stupid and bumbling and you stink.” Neferet glanced at Aurox. “Throw him against the wall.”
Aurox moved to do her bidding, but slowly, giving the fledgling time to feel fear. Aurox fed from that fear, and as his body shifted, changed, grew into something else, something more powerful, the fledgling’s fear shifted, changed, grew into delicious terror. With a roar Aurox lifted the boy from his nest and hurled him into the wall. There was a sick cracking sound and the boy lay still.
“Whoa! Whoa! Wait a second. Neferet! I didn’t know it was you.” The red vampyre stood, shirtless, hands out, facing the Priestess. Aurox felt his fear. It felt good.
He took a step toward the vampyre. His hooves rang against the cold cement floor.
“Halt for now, Aurox,” Neferet commanded. She turned her back to him and concentrated on the vampyre and his nest. “Did you really believe you could hide from me, Dallas?”
“I wasn’t hiding from you! I didn’t know what to do—where to find you.”
“Don’t lie to me.” Neferet’s voice had gone soft and in that softness Aurox heard a black, endless danger. “Don’t ever lie to me.”
“Okay, okay. Sorry,” the vampyre said hastily. “I guess I just didn’t think.”
The nest of fledglings had been stirring, awakening as their vampyre and Neferet had been speaking, and now Aurox could see faces, wide-eyed with fear, staring from Neferet to him.
He longed to crush those staring faces under his hooves.
A rattling cough came from the nest.
Neferet sneered. “How many of you are there?”
“After the depot when Zoey and her assholes fought us, ten are left besides me.” He glanced at Kurtis. “And him.”
“He isn’t dead. Yet,” Neferet said. “So there are eleven fledglings and one vampyre. How many of your fledglings have begun coughing?”
Dallas shrugged. “Two, maybe three.”
“There are too many of them. They need to be around vampyres or they will die. Again,” she added with a cruel smile.
From the fledgling nest more fear washed over Aurox. He ground his teeth together, fighting the urge to feed from it.
“Will you come around us then? Like you used to?”
“No. I’ve had a change in plans. It’s time you joined me. All of you joined me.”
“You mean at the House of Night? That’s impossible. We’re not what we used to be and we don’t want to—”
“What you want is of no consequence to me unless you obey me. And if you do not obey me you will die.”
The vampyre seemed to stand straighter. His
anger burned brighter, as did the single electric bulb. “I won’t die. I’ve already Changed. Some of them might,” he gestured to the fledglings that crouched all around his feet, “but I say that’s survival of the fittest.”
“You’re not as smart as I remembered, Dallas. Let me speak plainly and simply then so even you can understand: if you and your fledglings do not obey me you will be the first to die. My creature will kill you. Now. Or whenever I command him to. Make your choice.”
The bulb’s light dimmed. “I choose to obey you,” Dallas said.
“Wise choice. I want you cleaned up and back at the House of Night in time for classes tonight.”
“But how—”
“Use the school’s showers to wash the stench off yourselves. Steal clothing. Clean clothing. Or buy it. At seven thirty, just before classes begin, a House of Night bus will be waiting down the street at the east entrance to the University of Tulsa. You’ll board it. You’ll resume classes. You’ll sleep at the House of Night.” Neferet paused, waving a hand dismissively. “I’ll have windows covered or open a basement or something. But you will live at the House of Night.”
“How will we satisfy our hunger?”
“Carefully. And what you cannot satisfy carefully you will control, at least until the world has turned and changed to embrace your needs.”
“I don’t get it! Why do you even want us there?”
“Rephaim, the Raven Mocker you failed to kill more than once, has been gifted with a human form during the night and has mated with Stevie Rae. He is allowed to attend the House of Night, along with Aphrodite, and the other red fledglings—Stevie Rae’s red fledglings.”
“I’m supposed to go to school with him? And her? Together?”
The bulb glowed brightly again.
“You hate them, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That is the reason I want you there—want you all there.”
“Because we hate them?”
“No, because of what your hatred, controlled by me, will cause,” she said.
“And what’s that?” he asked.
Neferet smiled. “Chaos.”
* * *
They left shortly after Neferet finished instructing the vampyre called Dallas in the ways he could and could not cause chaos. Apparently, his purpose was much like Aurox’s purpose—Neferet commanded and controlled his violence and held his allegiance. He was not to kill—yet. And always, always, there was the underlying thread of seeding dissent and discontent and hatred.
Aurox understood. Aurox obeyed.
When Neferet commanded that he control the beast within him, he obeyed and followed her from the rotting nest up through the cool, clean corridors of the school.
At the front door the old guard lay where Aurox had left him.
“Is he alive?” Neferet asked.
Aurox touched him. “Yes.”
Neferet sighed. “I suppose that is for the best, even though it’s slightly inconvenient. You’ll need to go back downstairs and tell Dallas I want the old man’s memory wiped clean. Tell him to implant the suggestion that he was wounded when the school was robbed.” She tapped her chin, considering, and looked down the hallway at the glass cases that held memorabilia and the library beyond with its neat rows of books and gleaming, ornate light fixtures. “No, I have a more amusing idea. Tell Dallas to make the human believe he was wounded when the school was vandalized. Then on the way out, I want you to smash the cases and destroy the library. Do it quickly. I’ll be waiting outside. And I do not like to be kept waiting.”
“Yes, Priestess,” he said.
“As I said, this architecture is wasted on human teenagers…” She laughed as she left the building
Hastily he retraced his path back to the underground lair. As soon as Dallas caught sight of him, the vampyre stood and faced him, putting himself between Aurox and the fledgling pack. The red vampyre’s grimy arm lifted to rest on a metal box that was bolted to the cement wall. Aurox felt the power that thrummed there, coiling, waiting to do his bidding.
“What do you want?” Dallas asked.
“Neferet sent me with a new command for you.”
Dallas took his hand from the metal box. “What does she want me to do?”
“There is a guard who is unconscious near the entry to the school. Priestess does not want him to remember our presence. Instead he is to believe vandals attacked him.”
“Yeah, fine. Whatever,” Dallas said, then before Aurox could turn away he asked, “Hey, what the hell are you?”
The question surprised Aurox. His answer came automatically. “I am Neferet’s to command.”
“Yeah, but what are you?” asked a dark-haired fledgling girl who was peering at him from behind Dallas. “I saw you. You were changing into something with horns and hooves. Are you some kind of demon?”
“No. Not a demon. I am Neferet’s to command.” Aurox turned away then, leaving them behind, but he could not leave their words behind. They followed him down the hallway. He’s a freak, they whispered. Something not right.
He used a desk made of wood and steel to smash and destroy the treasures in the clean, wide hallway. He shattered the ornate fixtures that hung from the room filled with books. While he did that Aurox fed from the fear and anger that lingered in his body. When those emotions were used up he channeled the fear the red vampyre and his fledglings were evoking from the old man as the fledgling he’d wounded drank his blood and the others looked on laughing. When they finished with the guard and wiped his mind clean, Aurox used the vestiges of the disgust the fledglings felt for him to fuel the power he needed until that emotion, too, was gone. Then he unearthed the only emotions he had left. The emotions he’d not fed from, but instead had somehow kept, and claimed as his own. So it was washed in Zoey’s loneliness and sadness and guilt that he finished vandalizing the school and then, changing back to the shell of a boy, Aurox walked heavily from the destruction he had caused and made sure Neferet waited no longer.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Stark
Stark’s dream started okay. He’d been on an awesome beach with white sand around him and clear blue water before him. The sun hadn’t burned him at all. Actually, it was just like before he’d been Marked and the sun had felt great on his face and shoulders. He was shooting arrows at a big round bull’s-eye target that magickally absorbed them and then made them reappear in the sand beside him so that he could continue to shoot and shoot and shoot.
He was just thinking how really great the dream would be if Zoey showed up on the beach in a bikini.
Or maybe it would be a European beach and Zoey would show up in a topless bikini. Now that would be even better.
And then, like what happens a lot in dreams, the scene shifted and all of a sudden Zoey was there, only they weren’t on the beach. She was there, curled up in his arms, warm and soft and smelling really good.
“Hey,” she said, smiling up at him. “You’re awake and the sun hasn’t set yet.”
“Yeah.” He grinned at her. “Let me show ya how awake I am.” He kissed her and she tasted sweet. Her body fit with his perfectly. She made that little sighing moan she made when she was really feeling good.
But just as he was really getting into the dream Zoey pulled back from him. He looked questioningly at her, thinking maybe it was going to be an awesome-beyond-awesome dream and she’d do a sexy little strip for him. Then he saw the look on her face. It was wide-eyed terror.
“Stop them!” she yelled. “Stark! Guardian! Help me!”
She was reaching for him as dark, snake-like tendrils dragged her away.
Stark leaped up and the Guardian Sword appeared in his hand. He ran to her, vaulted over her fallen body, and landed smack in the middle of the tendrils of Darkness. Swinging the Guardian Sword he slashed through them over and over again, but where he cut one, two grew to take its place, and both reattached like Velcro to Zoey’s body.
“Stark! Oh, Goddess!
Help me!”
“I’m trying! Zoey, I’m doing my best!” But he was making no difference against Darkness. By now, Z was wrapped completely, cocooned like something a giant spider would snack on, and she was conscious and screaming for him to save her.
Stark fought and fought, but there was nothing he could do, and as Darkness pulled her from him, he saw Neferet, the puppet master commanding the black, sticky strings. She stood just out of his sword reach and laughed as she tightened the threads around Zoey until his love, his queen, was strangled, killed, and then absorbed by her enemy.
In the dream Stark stood there, sobbing and lost without his Zoey. In his mind he heard a voice strong and clear: This will happen unless Zoey Redbird publicly breaks from Neferet. She must stand up to the Tsi Sgili and stop these pretenses of a truce between them.
Stark, still shocked and broken from the dream loss of his queen, only heard the words and not the voice. He didn’t think of where the message came from—only the warning itself.
He took a deep breath and woke with Zoey safe, warm, and willing in his arms, and she smiled up at him saying, “Hey, you’re awake and the sun hasn’t set yet.” A terrible, portentous chill shivered through his body. It had been more than a dream—he knew it. Which meant the warning was more than just words—it was prophecy. Stark filled his arms with Zoey, pressing her hard against his body.
“Tell me you’re okay. Tell me you feel fine.”
“I will if you stop smothering me,” she choked out.
He loosened his grip with one of his arms, with the other he ran up and down her back as he looked over her shoulder, being sure there were no tendrils there—no sticky memories from his dream.
“Stark, hey stop.” She grabbed his hand and stared into his eyes. “What the heck is wrong?”
“Massively bad dream. Like of apocalyptic proportions. And then I woke up and you were saying the exact same words you said to me in the dream right before Darkness got you.”
“First, eew, Darkness getting me is disgusting. How’d it happen?”