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  “Erik Night is the hottest damn thing at this entire school,” Shaunee said.

  “Forget that—he’s the hottest damn thing on this planet,” Erin said.

  “He’s not hotter than Kenny Chesney,” Stevie Rae said quickly.

  “Okay, just please with your country obsession!” Shaunee frowned at Stevie Rae before turning her attention back to me. “Do not let this opportunity pass you by.”

  “Yeah,” Erin echoed. “Do not.”

  “Pass me by? What am I supposed to do? He didn’t even say anything to me.”

  “Uh, Zoey honey, did you smile back at the boy?” Damien asked.

  I blinked. Had I smiled back at him? Ah, crap. I bet I hadn’t. I bet I just sat there and stared like a moron and maybe even drooled. Okay, well, I might not have drooled, but still. “I dunno,” I said instead of the sad truth, which didn’t fool Damien at all.

  He snorted. “Next time smile at him.”

  “And maybe say hi,” Stevie Rae said.

  “I thought Erik was a just pretty face,” Shaunee said.

  “And body,” Erin added.

  “Until he dumped Aphrodite,” Shaunee continued. “When he did that I realized the boy might have something going on upstairs.”

  “We can already tell he has it going on downstairs!” Erin said, waggling her eyebrows.

  “Uh-huh!” Shaunee said, licking her lips like she was contemplating eating a big piece of chocolate.

  “You two are gross,” Damien said.

  “We only meant that he has the cutest butt in town, Miss Priss,” Shaunee said.

  “As if you haven’t noticed,” Erin said.

  “If you started talking to Erik it would really piss off Aphrodite.” Stevie Rae said.

  Everyone turned and stared at Stevie Rae as if she’d just parted the Red Sea or something.

  “It’s true,” Damien said.

  “Very true,” Shaunee said while Erin nodded.

  “So the rumor is he used to go out with Aphrodite,” I said.

  “Yep,” Erin said.

  “The rumor is grotesque but true,” Shaunee said. “Which makes it even better that now he likes you!”

  “Guys, he was probably just staring at my weird Mark,” I blurted.

  “Maybe not. You’re really cute, Zoey,” Stevie Rae said with a sweet smile.

  “Or maybe your Mark made him look, and then he thought you were cute so he kept looking,” Damien said.

  “Either way, his looking will definitely piss Aphrodite off,” Shaunee said.

  “Which is a good thing,” Erin said.

  Stevie Rae waved away their comments. “Just forget about Aphrodite and your Mark and all that other stuff. Next time he smiles at you, say hi. That’s all.”

  “Easy,” Shaunee said.

  “Peasy,” Erin said.

  “Okay,” I mumbled and went back to my salad, wishing desperately that the whole Erik Night issue was as easy-peasy as they thought it was.

  One thing about lunch at the House of Night was the same as lunch at SIHS or any other school I’d ever eaten at—it was over too soon. And then Spanish class was a blur. Profesora Garmy was like a little Hispanic whirlwind. I liked her right away (her tattoos looked oddly like feathers, so she reminded me of a little Spanish bird), but she ran the class speaking entirely in Spanish. Entirely. I should probably mention here that I haven’t had Spanish since eighth grade, and I freely admit to not paying much attention to it then. So I was pretty lost, but I wrote down the homework and promised myself that I’d study the vocab words. I hate being lost.

  Intro to Equestrian Studies was held in the Field House. It was a long, low brick building over by the south wall, attached to a huge indoor riding arena. The whole place had that sawdusty, horsey smell that mixed with leather to form something that was pleasant, even though you know that part of the “pleasant” scent was poopie—horse poopie.

  I stood nervously with a small group of kids just inside the corral where a tall, stern-faced upperclassman had directed us to wait. There were only about ten of us, and we were all third formers. Oh, (great) that annoying redheaded Elliott kid was slouching against the wall kicking at the sawdust floor. He raised enough dust to make the girl standing closest to him sneeze. She threw him a dirty look and moved a few steps away. God, did he irritate everyone? And why couldn’t he use some product (or perhaps a comb) on that nappy hair?

  The sound of hooves drew my attention from Elliott and I looked up in time to see a magnificent black mare pounding into the corral at full gallop. She slid to a stop a couple feet in front of us. While we all gawked like fools, the mare’s rider dismounted gracefully. She had thick hair that reached to her waist and was so blond it was almost white, and eyes that were a weird shade of slate gray. Her body was tiny, and the way she stood reminded me of those girls who obsessively take dance classes so that even when they’re not in ballet they stand like they have something stuck way up their butts. Her tattoo was an intricate series of knots entwined around her face—within the sapphire design I was sure I could see plunging horses.

  “Good evening. I am Lenobia, and this,” she pointed at the mare and gave our group a contemptuous look before finishing the sentence, “is a horse.” Her voice rang against the walls. The black mare blew through her nose as if to punctuate her words. “And you are my new group of third formers. Each of you has been chosen for my class because we believe you might possibly have an aptitude for riding. The truth is that less than half of you will last the semester, and less than half of those who last will actually develop into decent equestrians. Are there any questions?” She didn’t pause long enough for anyone to ask anything. “Good. Then follow me and you shall begin.” She turned and marched back into the stable. We followed.

  I wanted to ask who the “we” were who thought I might have an aptitude for riding, but I was scared to say anything and just scrambled after her like everyone else. She came to a halt in front of a row of empty stalls. Outside of them were pitchforks and wheelbarrows. Lenobia turned to face us.

  “Horses are not big dogs. Nor are they a little girl’s romanticized dream image of a perfect best friend who will always understand you.”

  Two girls standing beside me fidgeted guiltily and Lenobia skewered them with her gray eyes.

  “Horses are work. Horses take dedication, intelligence, and time. We’ll begin with the work part. In the tack room down this hall you’ll find mucking boots. Choose a pair quickly, while we all get gloves. Then each of you take your own stall and get busy.”

  “Professor Lenobia?” said a chubby girl with a cute face, who raised her hand nervously.

  “Lenobia will do. The name I chose in honor of the ancient vampyre queen needs no other title.”

  I didn’t have a clue who Lenobia was, and made a mental note to look it up.

  “Go on. You have a question, Amanda?”

  “Yeah, uh, yes.”

  Lenobia raised one brow at the girl.

  Amanda swallowed noisily. “Get busy doing what, Profes—, I mean, Lenobia, ma’am?”

  “Cleaning out stalls, of course. The manure goes in the wheelbarrows. When your barrow is full you can dump it in the compost area on the wall side of the stables. There is fresh sawdust in the storage room beside the tack room. You have fifty minutes. I’ll be back in forty-five to inspect your stalls.”

  We all blinked at her.

  “You may commence. Now.”

  We commenced.

  Okay. Really. I know it’s going to sound weird, but I didn’t mind cleaning out my stall. I mean, horse poopie just isn’t that gross. Especially because it was obvious that these stalls were cleaned out like every other instant of the day. I grabbed the mucking boots (which were big rubber galoshes—totally ugly, but they did cover my jeans all the way up to my knees) and a pair of gloves and got to work. There was music playing through excellent loudspeakers—something that I was pretty sure was Enya’s latest CD (my mom used to list
en to Enya before she married John, but then he decided that it might be witch music so she quit, which is why I’ll always like Enya). So I listened to the haunting Gaelic lyrics and pitch-forked up poopie. It didn’t seem that hardly any time had passed when I was dumping the wheelbarrow and then filling it with clean sawdust. I was just smoothing it around the stall when I got that prickly feeling that someone was watching me.

  “Good job, Zoey.”

  I jumped and whirled around to see Lenobia standing just outside my stall. In one hand she was holding a big, soft curry brush. In the other she was holding the lead rope of a doe-eyed roan mare.

  “You’ve done this before,” Lenobia said.

  “My grandma used to have a really sweet gray gelding I named Bunny,” I said before I realized how stupid I sounded. Cheeks hot, I hurried on, “Well, I was ten, and his color reminded me of Bugs Bunny, so I started calling him that and it stuck.”

  Lenobia’s lips tilted up in the barest hint of a smile. “It was Bunny’s stall you cleaned?”

  “Yeah. I liked to ride him, and Grandma said that no one should ride a horse unless they clean up after one.” I shrugged. “So I cleaned up after him.”

  “Your grandmother is a wise woman.”

  I nodded.

  “And did you mind cleaning up after Bunny?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Good. Meet Persephone,” Lenobia nodded her head at the mare beside her. “You’ve just cleaned her stall.”

  The mare came into the stall and walked straight up to me, sticking her muzzle in my face and blowing gently, which tickled and made me giggle. I rubbed her nose and automatically kissed the warm velvet of her muzzle.

  “Hi there, Persephone, you pretty girl.”

  Lenobia nodded in approval as the mare and I got to know each other.

  “There are only about five minutes left before the bell rings for school to end, so it is not necessary that you stay as part of today’s class, but if you’d like, I believe you have earned the privilege of brushing Persephone.”

  Surprised, I looked up from patting the horse’s neck. “No problem, I’ll stay,” I heard myself saying.

  “Excellent. You can return the brush to the tack room when you’ve finished. I’ll see you tomorrow, Zoey.” Lenobia handed me the brush, patted the mare, and left us alone in the stall.

  Persephone stuck her head in the metal rack that held fresh hay, and got to work chewing, while I got to work brushing. I’d forgotten how relaxing it was to groom a horse. Bunny had died of a sudden and very scary heart attack two years ago, and Grandma had been too upset to get another horse. She’d said that “the rabbit” (which is what she used to call him) couldn’t be replaced. So it had been two years since I’d been around a horse, but it came back to me instantly—all of it. The smells, the warm, soothing sound of a horse eating, and the gentle shoosh the curry brush made as it slid over the mare’s slick coat.

  At the edge of my attention I vaguely heard Lenobia’s voice, sharp and angry, as she totally chewed out a student I guessed was the annoying redheaded kid. I peeked over Persephone’s shoulder and took a quick look down the stall line. Sure enough, the redheaded kid was slouched in front of his stall. Lenobia stood beside him, hands on her hips. Even from the side view I could see she was mad as hell. Was it that kid’s mission to piss off every teacher here? And his mentor was Dragon? Okay, the guy looked nice, until he picked up a sword—uh, I mean foil—then he shifted from nice guy to deadly-dangerous-vampyre-warrior-guy.

  “That redheaded slug kid must have a death wish,” I told Persephone as I returned to her grooming. The mare twitched an ear back at me and blew through her nose. “Yep, I knew you’d agree. Wanta hear my theory about how my generation could single-handedly wipe out slugs and loser kids from America?” She seemed receptive, so I launched into my Don’t Procreate with Losers speech. . . .

  “Zoey! There you are!”

  “Ohmygod! Stevie Rae! You scared the poo out of me!” I patted and reassured Persephone, who had shied when I’d squealed.

  “What in the world are ya doin’?”

  I waggled the curry brush in her direction. “What does it look like I’m doing, Stevie Rae, getting a pedicure?”

  “Stop messing around. The Full Moon Ritual is gonna start in like two minutes?”

  “Ah, hell!” I gave Persephone one more pat and hurried out of the stall to the tack room.

  “You forgot all about it, didn’t you?” Stevie Rae said, holding my hand to help me balance while I kicked my feet out of the rubber boots and put my cute little ballet slippers back on.

  “No,” I lied.

  Then I realized that I’d also forgotten all about the Dark Daughters’ ritual afterward.

  “Ah, hell!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  About halfway to Nyx’s Temple I realized that Stevie Rae was being unusually quiet. I glanced sideways at her. Was she also looking pale? I got a creepy walk-over-your-grave feeling.

  “Stevie Rae, is something wrong?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s sad and kinda scary.”

  “What is? The Full Moon Ritual?” My stomach started to hurt.

  “No, you’ll like that—or at least you’ll like this one.” I knew she meant, versus the Dark Daughters’ ritual I had to go to afterward, but I didn’t want to talk about that. Stevie Rae’s next words made the whole issue of the Dark Daughters seem like a small, secondary problem. “A girl died last hour.”

  “What? How?”

  “How they all die. She didn’t make the Change, and her body just . . .” Stevie Rae paused, shuddering. “It happened near the end of Tae Kwan Do class. She’d been coughing, like she was short of breath at the beginning of our warmup exercises. I didn’t think anything of it. Or maybe I did, but I put it out of my mind.”

  Stevie Rae gave me a small, sad smile and she looked ashamed of herself.

  “Is there any way to save a kid? After, you know, they start—” I broke off and made a vague, uncomfortable gesture.

  “No. There’s no way you can be saved if your body starts to reject the Change.”

  “Then don’t feel bad about not wanting to think about the girl who was coughing. There’s nothing you could have done anyway.”

  “I know. I just . . . it was awful. And Elizabeth was so nice.”

  I felt a sharp jolt somewhere in the middle of my body. “Elizabeth No Last Name? She’s the girl who died?”

  Stevie Rae nodded, blinking hard and obviously trying not to cry.

  “That’s horrible,” I said, my voice so weak it was almost a whisper. I remembered how considerate she’d been about my Mark, and how she’d noticed Erik looking at me. “But I just saw her in Drama class. She was fine.”

  “That’s how it happens. One second the kid sitting next to you looks perfectly normal. The next . . .” Stevie Rae shivered again.

  “And everything’s going to go on like normal? Even though someone at the school just died?” I remembered that last year, when a group of sophomores from SIHS had been in a car accident one weekend and two of them had been killed, extra counselors had been called in to school on Monday and all the athletic events had been cancelled for that week.

  “Everything goes on like normal. We’re supposed to get used to the idea that it might happen to anyone. You’ll see. Everyone will act like nothing happened, especially upperclassmen. It’s just third formers and good friends of Elizabeth, like her roommate, who will show any reaction at all. The third formers—that’s us—are supposed to act right and get over it. Elizabeth’s roommate and best friends will probably keep to themselves for a couple days, but then they’ll be expected to get it together.” She lowered her voice, “Truthfully, I don’t think the vamps think of any of us as real until we actually Change.”

  I thought about this. Neferet didn’t seem to treat me like I was temporary—she’d even said that it was an excellent sign that my Mark was colored in already, not that I was as confident as sh
e seemed to be about my future. But I absolutely was not going to say anything that might sound as if Neferet was giving me special treatment. I didn’t want to be “the weird one.” I just wanted to be Stevie Rae’s friend and fit in with my new group.

  “That’s really awful,” was all I said.

  “Yeah, but at least if it happens, it happens fast.”

  Part of me wanted to know the details, and part of me was too scared even to ask the question.

  Thankfully, Shaunee interrupted before I could make myself ask what I was really too freaked out to want to know.

  “Just please with the taking so long,” Shaunee called from the front steps of the temple. “Erin and Damien are already inside saving a place in the circle for us, but you know that once the ritual starts they won’t let anyone else in. Hurry up!”

  We rushed up the steps, and with Shaunee leading us, hurried into the temple. Sweet, smoky incense engulfed me as I entered the dark arched foyer of Nyx’s Temple. Automatically, I hesitated. Stevie Rae and Shaunee turned to me.

  “It’s okay. There’s nothing to be nervous or scared about.” Stevie Rae met my eyes and added, “At least nothing in there.”

  “The Full Moon Ritual is great. You’ll like it. Oh, when the vamp traces the pentagram on your forehead and says ‘blessed be’ all you have to do is say ‘blessed be’ back to her,” Shaunee explained. “Then follow us over to our place in the circle.” She smiled reassuringly at me and hurried ahead into the dimly lit interior room.

  “Wait.” I grabbed Stevie Rae’s sleeve. “I don’t want to sound stupid, but isn’t a pentagram a sign of evil or something like that?”

  “That’s what I thought, too, until I got here. But all that evil stuff is bull that the People of Faith want you to believe so that . . . Heck,” she said with a shrug, “I’m not even sure why they’re so set on people—well, humans that is—believing that it’s an evil sign. The truth is that for like a zillion years the pentagram has stood for wisdom, protection, perfection. Good stuff like that. It’s just a five-pointed star. Four of the points stand for the elements. The fifth, the one that points up, stands for the spirit. That’s all it is. No boogieman there.”