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  “Proving how moronic males can be. Precious gems belong draped around a beautiful woman’s—meaning mine—body. Not wasted in pointy and shieldy things.”

  “Except for the part about them belonging just on your body, I’m in total agreement with you.”

  “And I agree with you that we need to keep our mouths shut about them.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my gut told me to do, but it felt awkward keeping it from Thanatos.”

  “If Thanatos didn’t mention the weapons to you, that means Dragon was the one keeping them from her, not you—not us. I say box them up and hide them in one of Lenobia’s tack rooms. I’m pretty sure if I tried to use my mom’s gold card today, it would tell me I’m shit out of luck, so I say yes to having a financial backup plan.”

  Zoey’s gaze met hers in the mirror. “Last night was bad. I’m really sorry about your dad, and I’m sorry about the stuff your mom said to you, too.”

  Aphrodite bit back the sarcastic reply that came so easily to her, drew a deep breath, and was honest with her friend. “I knew my mom never really cared about me, but knowing it and having her put it out there for everyone else to know are two different things—two different feelings. It hurts. A lot.”

  “Yeah,” Z said softly, her eyes getting watery. “I know what you mean.”

  Aphrodite turned the little stool around so she could face Zoey. “You know what one of the first things I was happy about when I got Marked?”

  “Having awesome hair?” Z smiled through her tears.

  “No, stupid, I already had awesome hair,” she quipped, and then her voice changed and she stared down at her lap. “One of the first things that made me happy was that I learned vampyres can’t have babies, so I knew there was no way I’d slip up and accidentally get pregnant and then be a shitty mom and make some poor kid as fucking miserable as my mom made me.”

  “Hey, that’s not going to happen.”

  Aphrodite wiped her eyes and looked up at Z. “Yeah, not as long as I keep having super hot sex with a vampyre it won’t.”

  “Well, that’s as true as it is gross, but it’s not what I was talking about. That’s not going to happen to you because you aren’t like your mom,” Zoey said carefully. “You’re good and loyal, and you wouldn’t hurt someone you love.”

  “Thanks,” Aphrodite managed to say, wiping her eyes again.

  “And don’t call me stupid,” Z said.

  “I didn’t call you a retard. I was being nice and politically correct.” Aphrodite turned back around and started fixing her smeared mascara.

  “And yet you still found a reason to say the r word.” Zoey sighed. “So, you really are okay after losing your dad?”

  “Are you really okay after losing your mom?”

  Z looked surprised at the question. “I guess I will be. I mean, like you, my mom hadn’t done much mothering in a long time. I was used to her not being around already.”

  “Then I guess I will be okay, too.”

  “If you need someone to talk to, you know you can talk to me, right?”

  “Right. Same for you with me. I know you and the bumpkin are close, but she has the perfect mamma and daddy,” Aphrodite put on Stevie Rae’s accent.

  “There’s nothing wrong with having good parents. It’s actually normal.”

  Aphrodite snorted. “We’ll have to agree to disagree about that, but that’s not my point. I’m just saying if you need someone else to talk to who has at least one dead parent, I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks, I think.” Z grabbed a Kleenex and blew her nose loudly. “Why don’t you get all snotty and ugly when you cry?”

  “Because I am not as disgusting as you are,” she said.

  “Can I take back that nice stuff I said about you?”

  “You can try. You’ll be unsuccessful, but you can still try.” Aphrodite pulled a pair of skinny jeans from a hanger and flipped the switch that started her electronic shoe cabinet to begin turning so that a neat row of boots appeared. She grabbed the red-soled Louboutins. Looking over her shoulder at Z’s gawk she said, “What? You can’t tell me these boots aren’t perfection.”

  “I can’t even look at your boots because your closet is freaking me the heck out.”

  “Which is just one reason you are a fashion disaster.”

  “How did you even think of having that done to your closet?”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake, my mom was a nightmare, not fashion impaired.” Aphrodite rubbed her forehead. “Jesus Christ, that was a slant rhyme, and I did it on purpose. Let’s go. I need a drink and a look at the boy stuff that’s holding our jewels hostage.”

  “Okay, but if you’re not nicer this time, I’m gonna tell Kramisha you like to rhyme, ’cause it makes you feel divine, and it keeps you from livin’ a life of crime.” Zoey grinned at her. “Heehees!”

  “I have no words.” Shaking her head, Aphrodite followed Zoey, who was giggling like a third grader, down the hall. “And she wonders why I drink…”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Neferet

  Mortals would describe what Neferet did as dreaming. They would say they had been having nightmares so vivid that, upon waking, the dreams had stayed with them and even seemed real.

  Cocooned in the den of the fox, clothed only in blood and Darkness, Neferet expanded her consciousness, sifting through levels of the seen and unseen worlds, in a quest for survival.

  No, the immortal did not dream.

  In truth the Tsi Sgili was re-experiencing her life, one event after another—reliving the moments that had culminated in the birth of an immortal, and by thus reliving she hoped to rediscover that which the vision in the mirror had shattered: her purpose and her true self.

  Neferet began with the night reflected in the mirror, the moment her innocence had been lost. She once again became sixteen-year-old Emily Wheiler—daughter of a mother who had died just six months earlier—and she relived the night her father had attacked and raped her.

  She could smell him: brandy, sour breath, sweat, cigars, and lust. She felt the disgust of knowing what he intended, and the terror of realizing she could not escape him. Then she experienced once again the pain of her beaten and torn body.

  Still Emily Wheiler, she fled, bleeding and desperate, to be rejected by her fiancé, but at the same moment saved by the Tracker who Marked her as fledgling and forever altered her destiny.

  Safely within the Chicago House of Night, her body healed under the watchful eye of her first mentor. But her mind could not recover. Emily needed vengeance to fully heal. Her mentor’s voice was as clear as it had been that night in 1893.

  “…An insatiable need for retribution and vengeance becomes a poison that will taint your life and destroy your soul…”

  Her mentor had explained to Emily that she faced the choice between forgetting what her father had done to her and moving on with her new life as a fledgling—or wallowing in self-pity and carrying the scars of what that monster had caused, unable to forget and forgive.

  The fledgling who used to be Emily Wheiler did not take either choice.

  The Tsi Sgili’s body twitched spasmodically. Her breathing quickened, though she did not awaken. She remained deeply unconscious and utterly in another time—another place—and relived the birth of Neferet, Queen of the Night.

  She returned to Wheiler House, the home of her father, as avenger, strangling him to death and claiming her new name, and her new life—without forgiveness, doubt, or self-pity.

  Neferet’s hands twitched as the specter of her past fingered the strand of pearls, smooth and deadly, and relived the exhilaration she had felt when she had ended Barrett Wheiler’s pathetic life.

  Neferet relived something else as well—she was again filled with the flush of that first kill. She hadn’t tasted his blood. The thought had not entered her mind then, but she had felt the power of ending his breath, of stopping his heartbeat, of knowing she had caused his spirit to flee that broken, mortal shell.

>   The chill that had paled Neferet’s flawless skin warmed, though ever so slightly.

  She relived her escape from Chicago by train, accompanying a small group of vampyres who were scouting new House of Night sites in the west. At the train’s first stop, Emily Wheiler buried her journal. In the dirt of the land that would become Oklahoma, she entombed the only record of what had happened to her. She remembered cutting into that earth with a spade, and opening a wound that was the red of dried bull’s blood and carried with it the scent of the end of all things. With the burial of that sad, pitiable account of innocence lost and rape revenged, Neferet’s new life blazed.

  It was not an easy life.

  But always within that comet of rebirth was a dark center of comfort that never forsook Neferet. Night was her world, and the shadows in the deepest corners of her world held solace and acceptance and comfort.

  The Chicago School Council had decided it was unsafe for fledgling Neferet to return there, and she had been transferred to St. Louis’s Tower Grove House of Night. There her gifts scorched through her.

  Neferet curled tightly into herself, reliving the next moment that had defined who she would become.

  The cat had been a small, shorthaired black and gray tabby. She would have been too small, too ordinary, too unattractive, for Neferet to have noticed at all, had it not been for her keen intelligence, and the additional toe she had on both of her front paws. It had been winter in St. Louis, frigid and snowy, and young Neferet had thought the little tabby had appeared to be wearing mittens.

  The school’s ill-tempered cook had named the cat Chloe, after a human thief who had been caught trying to burgle the school, because she had been unable to keep the feline from breaking into her kitchen, no matter how often she locked windows, and kept a keen eye on the scullery maids with their lackadaisical habit of forgetting to close doors. That day Chloe had pried open a window, scaled a ceiling beam, leaped on the cooling table, and gorged herself on a fresh kidney pie. The vampyre had been throwing the beast from the pantry when Neferet had happened by.

  “How ever did she find a way to wear mittens?” young Neferet had exclaimed, as she rescued little Chloe from the snow bank she’d landed in, brushing wet white flakes from dusky fur and smiling as the cat batted at the ties on her ermine-lined cape.

  The cook had laughed at Neferet mockingly. “I know you are young, but that is no reason to sound like such a simpleton. Chloe is polydactyl—six toed. Surely you’ve seen our High Priestess and her mate’s cats. All polydactyl. This ugly little runt must be related to them, though I don’t see the resemblance, except in those paws.” The old vampyre had turned away, still cackling, shaking her head, and muttering, “Mittens on a cat. The child is pretty, but empty-headed…”

  Neferet remembered how her face had burned with embarrassment and anger, until Chloe had looked up into her eyes.

  Then Neferet’s world had changed. She relived the thrill of it—of knowing what was within the cat’s mind. She didn’t hear actual words—cats don’t think in words. She heard emotions, and the emotions told stories. Chloe beamed mischief. Her belly was full and warm and she was sleepy. But most important, the cat looked into her eyes with love and loyalty and joy, and chose Neferet as her own for life.

  Pandeia, longtime High Priestess in St. Louis, had not called her a simpleton. Nor had she mocked Neferet when the young fledgling had gone to her, holding a sleeping Chloe, and describing with breathless wonder the dream images she could pull from the little feline’s mind.

  “And, High Priestess, I can touch your cat’s mind, too!” Neferet had gushed, pointing to the vampyre’s plump calico lazing on the windowsill. “She is happy, very happy, because she is pregnant!”

  The High Priestess’s smile had almost outshined the cook’s mocking. “Dear Neferet, Nyx has granted you a wonderful affinity, a special attachment to cats, the animal most closely associated with our Goddess. Nyx must value you highly to award you such a gift.”

  The glorious day faded and Neferet’s experience changed. Months passed as quickly as the Tsi Sgili’s rapid heartbeat.

  She was still a fledgling, but older. Her council was valued—first because of her connection to the felines that roamed freely at the House of Night as companions of the fledglings and vampyres. Then because though her affinity had begun with cats, soon it had become apparent that Neferet was able to touch people’s minds almost as easily as she did cats’.

  Images lifted from the past, one after another, dizzying in their speed:

  “Neferet, it would be helpful if you came to town with me. I need to know if the town is growing restless again at the thought of our full moon rituals,” her High Priestess had asked.

  She had gone with Pandeia, opening herself to the onslaught of fear and hatred and envy that the local humans directed at the High Priestess, though they either simpered and tipped their hats to her, or averted their eyes and pretended not to see her.

  Neferet began to loathe going to town.

  “Neferet, the human Consort of our new professor seems sad; it would be helpful if you could tell me if he wishes to leave, but is fearful to ask,” Pandeia had asked at another time.

  Neferet had slipped within the man’s mind. The human hadn’t been sad. He had been unfaithful to his vampyre, and had been sneaking away during the daylight hours while she slept to gamble and whore on riverboats.

  The professor had sent him away and quickly forgotten him, moving on to another, more loyal Consort within a fortnight.

  But Neferet had found it hard to forget what she had touched within the man’s mind. Lust and envy—greed and desire. It had sickened her.

  Seeing how much their High Priestess valued her counsel, others came to her, always seeking the answers hidden beneath the masks of others.

  As Neferet relived the experiences, she felt the resentment that had begun within her then. They were all so needy! Even the High Priestess.

  “Neferet, tell me if that Son of Erebus Warrior thinks I’m truly beautiful…”

  “Neferet, I want to know if my roommate is telling me the truth about…”

  “Neferet, tell me…”

  “Neferet, I want…”

  “Neferet, why does…?”

  The Tsi Sgili shivered, though still she did not awake as experience after experience, memory after memory, assaulted her so rapidly that they bled into one another, becoming a collage of need and greed, desire and betrayal, lies and lust.

  Darkness saved her. As when she had been Emily, she was drawn to the night-blooming gardens of Tower Grove. The most shadowy places in her House of Night were familiar friends to her. There she could disappear, calling the night to her, so that others looked right over and past her, and never seeing…

  Chloe understood. She was intelligent and precocious, and no matter what insipid thought Neferet had overheard, she found a way to make her smile. She whispered to the cat the feelings she was learning never to say aloud—never to show to other fledglings—never, ever to reveal to any vampyre.

  “I hate it when Pandeia asks me to listen in to a human’s mind, especially a male human,” young Neferet had told her purring feline. “They are all vile. Their thoughts are obsessed with our bodies—with possessing us—even though their fear is so strong it almost has a scent: sour breath, sweat, and insatiable desire.”

  Chloe had touched noses with her and rubbed her face against her cheek, filling her with unconditional love and acceptance.

  “When I am High Priestess I will only use my powers when I want to. I do not agree with Pandeia and the rest of them. Just because I’m gifted, that doesn’t mean I must be at their beck and call. I was given the power, not them. It should be mine to do with as I wish.”

  Instead of snuggling against her, as usual, the little cat’s ears pricked and she stood, perching on Neferet’s lap and peering out into the night-cloaked gardens of the House of Night.

  In her den, the Tsi Sgili moaned aloud, not wantin
g to relive what happened next, but not able to escape from the visions of her past.

  The Tower Grove House of Night had lush grounds that stretched for more than two hundred secluded acres around the main campus. The grounds were, of course, meticulously tended, but it was the early twentieth century, and St. Louis was still known as the gateway to the wild west. The gardens were home to more than water features and night-blooming flowers.

  Chloe scented the air.

  Neferet breathed deeply with the little cat. When she arched her back, growling ferociously, Neferet had bared her teeth, too, sharing her rage that an intruder had entered her House of Night.

  It wasn’t until Chloe had leaped from her lap that Neferet had come to herself and knew fear. She raced after her cat.

  The bobcat had been hunting rabbits and had chased one to ground not far from the dark corner in which Neferet and Chloe had been sitting. Frustrated at losing his prey, the big male had sprayed around the clearing, marking it as his own.

  Chloe burst into the male’s territory. Shrieking a warning, the bobcat faced the little tabby. Yowling and spitting, Chloe flew at the male, all claws and teeth.

  “No!” Neferet screamed along with Chloe as the bobcat struck once, twice, swatting the little cat as if she were an annoying insect, and slicing her belly, neatly disemboweling her.

  The huge beast, easily three times the size of Chloe, was closing on where the tabby lay gutted, twitching and bleeding, when Neferet reached the clearing.

  Rage filled the fledgling, and she charged the animal, screaming in wordless hatred, hands raised in claws, and teeth bared.

  The bobcat’s ears flattened against his skull. His yellow eyes met Neferet’s blazing emerald gaze. What he saw there gave him pause. As quickly as his instinct to kill had been ignited, his instinct for self-preservation took over, and the feline backed away, fading into the foliage.

  Neferet rushed to her cat. Chloe was still alive. Her little heart raced and she was panting in panic and pain. “No! Goddess, no!” Neferet ripped her dress and tried to push the intestines back into the cat’s belly, and staunch the terrible flood of blood. “Help her, Nyx! Please, if I am as important to you as everyone says I am, please, I beg of you, help her!” Filled with her cat’s pain and her own despair, Neferet cried into the night. “Help her, Goddess! Please help!”