Chosen

fading and I had started to shake. My god, what had I just done? 'Are you afraid of me?'

Slowly, he reached out, taking my hand and pulling me to him so he could wrap his arm around me. 'I'm not afraid of you. I'm afraid for you. If people find out all the stuff you can do, I—I don't know what might happen.' He leaned back a little, not taking his arm from around me, but looking into my eyes. 'You're changing, Zoey. And I'm not sure what you're changing into.'

My eyes filled with tears. 'I'm becoming a vampyre, Heath. That's what I'm Changing into.'

He touched my cheek, and then he used his thumb to wipe away the rest of the concealer so that my Mark was completely visible. Heath bent to kiss the crescent moon in the middle of my forehead. 'I'm okay with you being a vampyre, Zo. But I want you to remember that you're still Zoey, too. My Zoey. And my Zoey isn't mean.'

'I couldn't let them hurt you,' I whispered, really shaking now as I realized how cold and horrible I'd just been. I might have just caused the deaths of two men.

'Hey, look at me Zo.' Heath took my chin in his hand and forced me to meet his eyes. 'I'm almost six one. I'm a kick-ass starting quarterback for a 6A school. OU is offering me a full-ride football scholarship. Would you please remember that I can take care of myself?' He let loose of my chin and touched my cheek again. His voice was so serious and grown-up that he suddenly reminded me weirdly of his dad. 'When I was away with my parents, I did some reading up on your vampyre goddess, Nyx. Zo, there's a lot of stuff written about vampyres, but I didn't find anything that said your goddess is mean. I think you should keep that in mind. Nyx has given you a bunch of powers, and I don't think she'd like it if you used them in the wrong way.' His eyes glanced over my shoulder to the distant road and the awful scene that was playing out there. 'You shouldn't be mean, Zo. No matter what.'

'When did you get so old?'

He smiled. 'Two months ago.' Heath kissed my lips softly, and then stood up, pulling me to my feet. 'You gotta get out of here. I'm gonna go back the way we came. You should probably cut through the rose gardens and get back to school. If those guys aren't dead they're gonna talk, and that's not gonna be good for the House of Night.'

I nodded. 'Okay, yeah. I'll get back to the school.' Then I sighed. 'I was supposed to break up with you.'

His smile turned into a full grin. 'Not happening, Zo. It's you and me, baby!' He kissed me good and hard, and gave me a little shove in the direction of the Tulsa Rose Garden, which bordered Woodward Park. 'Call me and we'll meet next week. 'Kay?'

' 'Kay,' I mumbled.

He started to back away so that he could watch me leave. I turned and walked toward the rose garden. Automatically, like I'd been doing it for decades, I called mist and night, magic and darkness, to cover me.

'Wow! Cool, Zo!' I heard him yell from behind me. 'I love you, baby!'

'I love you, too, Heath.' I didn't turn around, but whispered into the wind and willed it to carry my voice to him.

CHAPTER 19

Yep, I was seriously messed up. Not only had I not broken up with Heath, but I had probably made our Imprint even stronger. Plus, I may have caused two men to be killed. I shivered, feeling more than a little sick. What in the hell had happened to me? I'd been drinking Heath's blood and having a horny old good time (jeesh, I was becoming such a ho-bag), and then those men had started messing with us and it was like something inside of me freaked and changed from Regular Zoey to Psycho Killer Vampyre Zoey. Was that what happened? Did vamps freak when the human they'd Imprinted was threatened?

I remembered in the tunnels how pissed I'd been when Stevie Rae's 'friends' (not that she was actually buddies with those disgusting undead dead kids) had attacked Heath. Okay, I'd even gotten violent, but I hadn't felt such a powerful urge to wipe them off the face of the earth! Just remembering the anger that had rushed through me as the two men had started toward us (Heath) to give us (Heath) a hard time was enough to make my hands start to shake again.

Clearly there was just too much vampyre stuff that I didn't know about. Hell, I'd even taken notes and memorized some of the chapter on Imprinting and bloodlust, but I was starting to see that there was lots of stuff the oh-so-educational textbook had left out. What I needed was an adult vamp. Fortunately, I knew one I was sure would be very happy to volunteer to be my teacher.

I'm sure there were lots of things he'd be ever so pleased to teach me.

I thought about those things, which was easy to do when I was filled with Heath's delicious, sexy blood. My body still tingled with heat and power and sensations I knew I didn't have a clue about, but I craved more of. A lot more of.

There was no denying that Loren and I had a thing. It was different than the thing Heath and I had, and even different than the thing Erik and I had. Crap. I had too many things going on in my life.

Basically, I floated to Aphrodite's parent's garage apartment in a kind of horny, power-filled, yet confused haze and was so distracted by, well, sex that I didn't think about the fact that I appeared to be nothing more than mist and darkness until I was actually standing in the living room of the apartment watching Stevie Rae stare with wet, red-tinged eyes at the TV screen and sniffle. I glanced at the TV and realized she was watching a Lifetime Movie of the Week. It looked like the one about the mom who knew she was dying of some horrid disease and she had to race against time (and commercial breaks) to find a new family for her zillions of overly perky children.

'Talk about depressing,' I said.

Stevie Rae's head whipped around as she crouched in a feral, defensive pose after leaping behind the couch where she hissed and snarled at me.

'Ah, crap!' I instantly shooed away darkness and whatnot, so that I was solid, visible me again. 'Sorry, Stevie Rae. I forgot I'd gone all Bram Stoker.'

She peered over the couch at me, eyes glowing and fangs bared, but she'd stopped hissing.

'Uh, relax. It's just me.' I lifted the canvas bag and shook it so the blood sloshed nastily. 'Your meals on wheels.'

She stood up and narrowed her eyes. 'You shouldn't do that.'

I raised my eyebrows at her. 'Shouldn't do what? Bring you blood or turn into mist and darkness.'

Stevie Rae snatched the canvas bag I was dangling in her direction. 'Sneak up on me. It could be dangerous.'

I sighed and sat on the couch, trying to ignore the fact that she was already gulping down the first bag of blood. 'If you ate me the way my life sucks right now, you'd be doing me a favor.'

'Yeah, I'll bet. I remember how tough it was to be alive. All filled with dating drama and ohmygoodness, what should I wear to school. Real awful, unlike the stress of being dead and then undead but still feeling mostly dead.' Stevie Rae spoke in the cold, sarcastic voice that was totally different from the way she used to sound, which suddenly annoyed the crap right outta me. Like I didn't have stress in my life just because I wasn't dead? Or undead? Or whatever.

'Professor Nola was killed last night. It looks like some of the People of Faith crucified her and chopped her head off and left her out by the trapdoor on the east wall with a lovely note about not suffering a witch to live. I think that my step-loser might be involved, but I can't say anything about it because my mom is covering for him, and if I rat him out she'll probably go to jail forever. I just sucked Heath's blood and got interrupted by some gang wannabes who I think I might have kinda sorta accidentally killed, and Loren Blake and I have been making out. So, how was your day?'

The old Stevie Rae flickered inside this one's red eyes. 'Ohmygoodness,' she said.

'Yeah.'

'You've been making out with Loren Blake?' As usual, Stevie Rae got to the heart of the juiciest gossip. 'What was it like?'

I sighed and watched her start on her second bag of blood. 'It was amazing. I know this is going to sound totally ridiculous, but I think we might really have something together.'

'Just like Romeo and Juliet,' she said between swallows.

'Uh, Stevie Rae, let's use a different analogy, shall we? R&J didn't end so well.'