Hunted hon-5

by P. C. Cast

  Well, it hadn’t taken me very long to figure out that there was just no way for me to stay incognito. Since then I’d been learning to deal with my specialness and the responsibilities (and embarrassments) that go with it. But it didn’t matter how hard I’d talked to myself about the Vamp Soc being just another class, I was still majorly nervous going into it.

  Of course, knowing Neferet would be the teacher didn’t help at all.

  I came in, found a desk near the back of the class, and proceeded to hunker down in my seat, trying to impersonate one of those sloth-like kids who slept their lives away, waking up only to move from class to class, leaving a slug trail of yawns and bright pink spots on their foreheads.

  My sloth impersonation might have worked had Neferet turned into a pod professor. Sadly, she hadn’t. Neferet was glowing with power and what would appear to those less well informed as happiness. I recognized it as gloating. Neferet was a bloated spider, radiating her victory over everyone’s head she had bitten off, delighted to be contemplating more carnage.

  As a side note: Darius would be really pleased at my retention of the vocab words he’d been using around me.

  Besides the fact that she seemed spiderlike to me, I noticed Neferet, again, wasn’t wearing the insignia of Nyx, a goddess embroidered in silver with her hands raised and cupping a crescent moon. Instead, she was wearing a gold chain from which hung wings carved from a pure black stone. I wondered, not for the first time, why no one seemed to notice she was totally twisted. I also wondered why no one noticed the way she radiated a dark energy that filled the space around her like the air right before a lightning strike.

  “Today’s lesson is going to focus on an aspect of abilities that only a vampyre, or sometimes an advanced fledgling, can use. So you won’t need your Fledgling Handbooks at the moment, unless you’d like to make additional notes in the physiology section. Please open your texts to page 426, which is the chapter on concealment.” Neferet held the small class’s attention easily. She strode back and forth across the front of her room, looking regal and typically gorgeous in a long black dress trimmed in golden thread that looked like liquid metal. Her auburn hair was pulled back, and lovely curling tendrils of it escaped to frame her beautiful face. Her voice was refined and easy to listen to.

  She absolutely scared the bejeezus out of me.

  “So, I’ll want you to read this chapter on your own. Your assignment will be to document in a journal all of your dreams for the next five days. Often secret desires as well as abilities surface in our dreams. Before you go to sleep, I want you to focus on your reading and think about what concealment means to you. What dark secrets do you keep hidden from the world? Where would you go if no one could find you? What would you do if no one could see you?” She paused, looking at each student as she spoke. Some smiled at her shyly. Others looked away almost guiltily. All in all, the class showed more animation than any of the others I’d been in.

  “Brittney, darling, would you read aloud the section on page 432 on cloaking?”

  Brittney, a petite brunette, nodded, turned the pages, and began reading:

  CLOAKING

  Most fledglings are familiar with the inherent ability they have to cloak their presence to outsiders, i.e., humans. It is practiced by the fledgling tradition of sneaking off campus to perform rituals under the very eyes of the human community. But this is only a small taste of the ability a mature vampyre can command. Even those without affinities can call night to them and conceal their movements from the inadequate senses of the typical human.

  Here Neferet interrupted. “Part of what you will learn from this chapter is that any vampyre can move stealthily among humans, a skill which comes in handy because humans tend to be overly judgmental of our activities.”

  I was frowning down at the text, thinking that I couldn’t be the only fledgling to notice Neferet’s prejudice against humans, when her voice whiplashed at me from next to my desk.

  “Zoey. So nice of you to join a class that is more fitting for your abilities.”

  I looked slowly up into her frigid green eyes and tried to sound like any other fledgling. “Thank you. I’ve always liked Vamp Soc class.”

  She smiled, and suddenly reminded me of the creature in Alien, that totally freaky old movie with Sigourney Weaver and the really scary alien that ate people. “Excellent. Why don’t you read aloud the last paragraph on that page?”

  Glad that I had an excuse to duck my face, I looked down at my book, found the paragraph, and read:

  Fledglings should note that cloaking can be very taxing to their strength. It takes great powers of concentration to call and hold night for any protracted period of time. It is also important to understand that cloaking has its limitations. Some are as follows:

  It is a draining practice and can cause excessive weariness.

  Cloaking can only work with organic things, which is why it is easier to remain cloaked if one is skyclad (or naked).

  To attempt cloaking items like cars or motorcycles or even bicycles is an exercise in futility.

  As with all of our abilities, cloaking exacts a price. For some that price will be mild fatigue and a headache. For others it can be much worse.

  I came to the end of the page and glanced up at her.

  “That will be quite enough, Zoey. So, tell me, what did you just learn?” Her eyes bored into mine.

  Well, actually, I’d just learned that my friends and I wouldn’t be escaping from the House of Night using the Hummer unless we somehow got permission to leave campus. I didn’t say that, though. Instead, I tried to look studious and said, “That cars and houses and such can’t be cloaked from humans.”

  “Or vampyres,” she added in a firm voice that the uninformed (or the body-snatched) might think was concerned and teacherly. “Don’t ever forget other vampyres will see through the cloaking of inorganic materials, too.”

  “I’ll remember,” I said solemnly. And I would.

  CHAPTER 26

  I had fencing class before lunch and couldn’t have been happier. Okay, well, that’s an overstatement. I could have been happier if my friends and I were about a bazillion miles away from the House of Night, Neferet, and Kalona. Since that didn’t seem very possible, especially after Vamp Soc and Neferet’s freaky anti-cloaking lecture, I settled for being happy that Dragon agreed I looked too tired to do more than sit and watch class.

  Actually I wasn’t feeling bad at all, and when I fished my mirror out of my purse to put on the lip gloss I was relieved I hadn’t lost, I didn’t think I looked that bad, either. So Dragon’s allowing me to sit out of class, coupled with the fact that his cat had been one of those that had shown up in my room like a furry clue, had me keeping a close eye on our fencing professor.

  At first glance Dragon appears to be another of my grandma’s conundrums. First of all, he’s short. Second, he’s cute. Really cute. As in the guy you’d pick to be a stay-at-home dad who baked cookies and could even hem his daughter’s skirt in an emergency. In a world where male vampyres were warriors and protectors, a short, cute guy wouldn’t normally get much attention. But his whole persona changed when he picked up his sword, or, as he’d correct me, his foil. Then he turned lethal. His features hardened. He didn’t grow taller, that would just be silly (as well as impossible), but he didn't need to be taller. He was literally so fast that his foil seemed to glide and glow with a power all its own.

  I watched Dragon drill the class in fencing exercises. The fledglings didn’t seem so podlike in fencing class. But that was probably because it dealt with physical activity, not mental stuff. I paid closer attention and noticed that, even though the class was completing the physical motions, there was no easy banter or harmless teasing going on. Everyone was on task, which was weird as hell. I mean, let’s face it. Keeping a gym filled with teenagers who had sharp things in their hands totally on task is nearly impossible.

  I was frowning at a group of guys who would normally have been g
etting at least a couple of reprimands from Dragon, along with reminders to pay attention and not act like idiots (at the House of Night professors can call kids idiots when they act like idiots because the idiot children can’t run home to their mommies and cry about it; hence there is a lot less idiot behavior at the House of Night than at most public schools), when Dragon stepped between me and my line of vision. I blinked and refocused on him.

  Slowly and distinctly he winked at me before turning back to the class.

  About then his huge Maine Coon padded up to sit beside me and lick one of his monstrous paws.

  “Hey there, Shadowfax.” I scratched his head and felt more hopeful than I had since the Raven Mocker had almost killed me.

  Even though school had turned into a nightmare and danger was all around us, lunch felt like an oasis of familiarity. I loaded up on my personal favorite, spaghetti and brown pop, and joined Damien and the Twins at our booth.

  “Well, what did you guys find out?” I whispered between big bites of pasta with marinara and cheese.

  “You look way better,” Damien said, his voice definitely not a whisper.

  “I feel better,” I said, giving him a WTF look.

  “I’m thinking we really need to go over the new vocab for the lit test next week,” Damien said loudly, opening his ever-ready notebook and taking out a number two pencil.

  The Twins groaned. I frowned at him. Had he gone pod on us?

  “Yeah, just because stuff is changing around here, it doesn’t mean you can let your grades slide,” he said.

  “Damien, you are a pain in the ass,” Shaunee said.

  “Worse. You are a damn pain in the ass with your stupid vocab shit, and I—”

  Damien slid the notebook around so that we could read what he’d written below the list of vocab words.

  R.M. @ all the windows. Their hearing is excellent.

  The Twins and I shared a quick glance, then I sighed and said, “Fine, Damien. Whatever. We’ll study the stupid vocab with you. But I agree with the Twins that you’re a pain.”

  “All right. Let’s start with ‘loquacious.’” He pointed his pencil at the word.

  Shaunee shrugged. “Isn’t that something out of Star Trek?”

  “Sounds right to me,” Erin said.

  Damien gave them a look of disgust I knew he didn’t have to act to put on. “No, simpletons, this is what it means.” He wrote: Dragon is on our side. “So, Erin, why don’t you try the next word, ‘voluptuous’?”

  “Oooh, I know what that one means,” Shaunee said, grabbing Damien’s pencil before he could pass it to Erin. Beside ‘voluptuous’ she quickly wrote: me! Then, farther down on the page, she scrawled: Anastasia is 2.

  “You know I consider using texting shorthand gauche,” Damien said.

  “Don’t care,” Shaunee said.

  “Even if we knew what ‘gauche’ meant,” Erin said.

  “I’ll take the next word,” I said. Ignoring the next vocab word, I wrote: We gotta get out of here tonight, but can’t use the Hummer. Can’t cloak it. I paused, chewing my lip, and then added, Got to be careful. N knows we’re going to try to leave. “I guess I don’t know what that next one means after all. Can you help me out, Damien?”

  “No problem.” Damien wrote: We need to get out of here fast. Before they can stop us.

  “Okay, hang on. I’ll try the next word. Just let me think about it for a sec.” We all ate silently while I thought, but not about the vocab word “ubiquitous” (seriously, I could have thought about that forever and not figured out what it meant).

  We needed to get off campus, under my cloaking, as soon as possible. But Neferet was expecting us to try to bolt; she’d made that clear. This meant she’d be listening in to our lunchroom conversations, not just via the Raven Mockers but inside Damien’s and the Twins’ minds the second she was physically close enough to them to make her psychic eavesdropping work. Again, I thought how relieved I was that no one but Stevie Rae and I knew I’d really be running to the Benedictine Abbey instead of the depot tunnels. Thanks to my note-passing skills and—

  “That’s it!”

  The Twins and Damien stared at me. I grinned at them. “I remembered what ‘ubiquitous’ means!” I lied. “And I have an idea about studying. I’m going to write definitions for some of the words on pieces of paper. I’ll give one to each of you, which you’re going to be expected to study and learn. When you learn the word, pass it back to me, and I’ll give you another one. It’ll be kinda like flashcards.”

  “Have you lost your damn mind?” Shaunee said.

  “No,” Damien said perkily. “It’s a good idea. It’ll be fun.”

  I was ripping strips of notebook paper and writing furiously on them: Get to the stables. After folding each one carefully, I said, “Just think about the definitions we’ve gone over. Don’t read the word I gave you until the bell rings for the end of sixth hour. I mean it.” I handed each of them their “word.”

  “Okay, okay, we get it,” Erin said, stuffing her note into the pocket of her designer jeans.

  “Yeah, whatever. You two are turning into teachers. And that’s not a compliment,” Shaunee said, taking her piece of paper.

  “Just remember, don’t peek until the bell,” I said.

  “We won’t,” Damien said. “And when we do, maybe we should call our individual elements to us, just to help us focus?”

  “Yes!” I said, smiling gratefully at Damien.

  “Speaking of.” Shaunee grabbed the sheet of paper we’d been writing on. “I’m going to take this to the ladies’ room and do my own studying with my element.” She looked long and hard at me, and I nodded, understanding that she was going to call fire to her and destroy the evidence of our “subterfuge,” which was a big word I actually knew the definition of.

  “I’ll go with you, Twin. You might need my, er, help.” Erin hurried after her.

  “At least we don’t have to worry about Shaunee lighting the school on fire from the bathroom,” Damien whispered.

  “Holy shit, I’m starved!” Aphrodite breezed in and plopped down next to me. Her plate was loaded with spaghetti. She looked gorgeous, as usual, but a little frazzled. Her hair, which she normally wore long and flowing all around her shoulders, was pulled back in what might have once been a chic, puffed-top ponytail, but now looked actually messy.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered, throwing a look at the window and giving Aphrodite what I hoped was a be-quiet-they-can-hear-us look.

  Aphrodite followed my line of vision, nodded slightly, and then whispered back, “I’m fine. Darius is fast!”

  From that I understood that the warrior had probably been taking her on one of his superfast runs. I briefly regretted that he couldn’t carry us all out of here, one at a time, but filed an amended version of the thought; maybe he could carry one or even two fledglings in an emergency.

  “They’re all over out there,” Aphrodite said so softly I almost didn’t hear her.

  “Around the perimeter?” Damien whispered.

  Aphrodite nodded, shoveling spaghetti into her face. “They lurk around campus, too,” she said between bites, careful to keep her voice low, “but their focus is obviously on keeping anyone from coming or going without their permission.”

  “Well, we’re definitely going without their permission,” I said. I looked at Damien. “You have to go so I can talk to Aphrodite. Do you understand?”

  He started to look hurt for a second, and then I saw understanding in his eyes as he remembered I could talk freely to Aphrodite without worrying that Neferet could break into her mind and dig out what I’d said.

  “I understand,” he said. “So I guess I’ll see you…” His voice trailed off into a question.

  “Just go over the vocab note I gave you, okay?”

  He smiled. “Okay.”

  “Vocab note?” Aphrodite said after he was gone.

  “It’s just a way I’m getting them to meet me in the stables ri
ght after school without them knowing beforehand. Maybe if it’s a surprise to them, it’ll take a while for Neferet to know what we’re up to.”

  “And by that time we’ll be out of here?”

  “I hope so,” I whispered. I leaned closer to Aphrodite, not caring if the Raven Mockers were suspicious about the two of us putting our heads together. At least they couldn’t get into our heads. “Get to the stables with Darius as soon as school’s out. Dragon and Anastasia are with us. So I’m hoping that means the cat clues were right, and Lenobia is on our side, too.”

  “Which means she may help us get out of here from the weak part in the wall by the stables?”

  “Yeah. Okay, do not tell anyone else this next part, not even Darius. Do you swear?”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Cross my heart and hope to—”

  “Just saying you won’t tell is good enough for me,” I said, not wanting to hear anything about hoping to die come out of her mouth.

  “I won’t tell. So, what is it?”

  “We’re not going back to the depot tunnels when we leave here. We’re going to the Benedictine Abbey.”

  Her gaze on me was sharp and way more intelligent than most people gave her credit for being. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  “I trust Sister Mary Angela, and I have a bad feeling about the tunnels.”

  “Ah, shit. I hate it when you say that.”

  “Hell, I don’t like it either! But I sensed a darkness down there that I’ve been seeing too much of.”

  “Neferet,” Aphrodite whispered.

  “I’m afraid so.” I spoke slowly, thinking aloud. “And I’m thinking that the influence of the nuns might repel her. Plus, Sister Mary Angela told me that there was a place of power there at the abbey, something that made my control over the elements not so surprising to her. I think she called it Mary’s Grotto.” As I spoke I felt that sureness within that told me Nyx was pleased with the choices I was making. “Maybe we can somehow use the power there, like we’ve used the power over by the east wall before. At the very least it might help me keep us cloaked.”