Hunted

wall, and then bank teller–like windows cut in the real wall, complete with tarnished brass bars on the front. I decided quickly it must have been the depot ticket office. From there we entered a huge room. The floor was marble and it still looked slick and butterlike in the dimness. The walls were weird, though. All kinda rough and bare from the floor up to about a foot or so above my head, and then the decorations started. They were blurred by dust and time and inattention, and there were cobwebs hanging all over (eesh, first bats and now spiders!), but the vibrant old Art Deco colors were still visible, telling stories of Native American mosaic patterns, feather headdresses, horses, leather, and fringe.

I gazed around at the corroded beauty, and thought this could make a great school. It was big and it had the same kind of grace as many of Tulsa’s downtown buildings had, thanks to the oil boom and 1920s Art Deco styling. Lost in thought of what might someday be, I walked across the empty lobby, peeking around, noticing hallways that stretched off from this one big room, leading to others, wondering if there were enough of them for several classrooms. We took one of those hallways and it dead-ended at wide double glass doors. Jack bobbed his head at them. “That’s the gym.” We all gazed through the time-dirtied glass. In the nonlight I could just make out blobs of shapes that looked like great sleeping beasts from a dead world. “And over there’s the door to the boys’ locker room.” Jack pointed to a closed door to the right of the gym. “And there’s the girls’.”

“Okay, well, I’m going to hit the showers,” I said lamely. “Erik, would you and Jack let Damien know about Kramisha’s poems? Tell him if he has to talk to me about it I’ll be in Stevie Rae’s room, hopefully sound asleep for at least a few hours. If it can wait, we’ll all meet and try to figure out what it could mean after we’ve rested.” I shifted the towels and bathrobes I’d been clutching so I could wipe sleepily at my face.

“You need to rest, Z. Not even you can go through all of this and keep functioning without sleep,” Erik said.

“Yeah, if Damien wasn’t staying awake with me, I’d be scared of falling asleep on watch duty,” Jack said, and yawned for punctuation.

“The Twins will take over for you soon.” I smiled at Jack. “Just hold on till then.” My smile widened to include Erik. “I’ll see you soon. Both of you.”

I started to turn away and Erik’s touch on my arm stopped me. “Hey, we’re together again. Aren’t we?”

I met Erik’s eyes and saw his vulnerability through the pretend confidence of his smile. He wouldn’t understand if I said I needed to talk to him about, well, sex before I agreed to get back together with him. That would hurt his ego as well as his heart and then I’d be back where I was before, with me kicking myself for being the cause of us being apart.

So I simply said, “Yeah, we’re together again.”

The sweet vulnerability was reflected in the kiss he bent to place on my lips. It wasn’t a groping, demanding, we’re-gonna-have-sex-now kiss. It was a warm, gentle, I’m-so-glad-we’re-back-together kiss, and it utterly melted me.

“Get some sleep. I’ll see you soon,” he whispered. He kissed my forehead quickly, then he and Jack disappeared through the boys’ locker room door.

I stood there for a while, just looking at the closed door and thinking. Had I been wrong about the change in Erik? Had I misunderstood what was behind his passion in the tunnel? After all, he wasn’t a fledgling anymore. He was a fully Changed, adult vampyre. That made him a man, even though he was still nineteen, just like he’d been less than a week ago, before he’d Changed.

Maybe the increase in the sexual tension between us was natural, and not just because he thought I was a skank now that I’d given up my virginity. Erik was a man, I repeated the thought to myself. I already knew from the disaster with Loren Blake that being with a man was different than being with a boy or a fledgling. Erik was a fully Changed vampyre, like Loren had been. The thought sent nervous skitters through my body. “Like Loren” wasn’t a particularly good analogy. But Erik definitely was not Loren! Erik had never used me or lied to me. Erik was Changed, but he was still the Erik I knew and might even love. I really shouldn’t be stressing myself out with worrying about this. The sex thing would work itself out. I mean, compared to an ancient immortal coming after us, Neferet having the school in her evil clutches, me freaking about whether there is or isn’t something bizarre going on with the red fledglings, Grandma being in a coma, and the nasty Raven Mockers wreaking havoc in Tulsa, whether or not Erik would try to pressure me into having sex with him should be a stress break, or at least a stress vacation. Shouldn’t it?

“Z! There you are. Would you come on?” Erin stuck her head out of the girls’ locker room door. There was a huge cloud of steam wafting around behind her and I could see that she was wearing only her bra and panties (matching, of course, from Victoria’s Secret).

With an effort I put Erik out of my mind. “Sorry…sorry, I’m coming,” I said and hurried into the locker room.

CHAPTER 9

Okay, taking a group shower with girls who had affinities for water and fire was an experience that went from awkward to interesting to pretty darn funny.

At first it was awkward because, well, even though we’re all girls, we’re not exactly used to communal showers. These weren’t horribly barbaric. There were about half a dozen shower heads (which were all bright and shiny and new looking—I’m sure thanks to either Kramisha or Dallas or both, with help from Aphrodite’s popular gold card). Each of them had a separate shower stall one right after another. No, there weren’t any doors or shower curtains or anything. Actually, there was a rail at the top of each one, so my guess was that there used to be shower curtains back in the day, but they were long gone. Oh, the stalls for the toilets did have doors, even if they didn’t want to stay latched. So it was awkward to be naked with my friends at first. But we are all girls, hetero girls at that, so we really weren’t interested in each other’s boobies and such, no matter how hard that is for guys to comprehend, so the awkward part didn’t last long. Plus, the entire locker room was filled with dense steam, which gave the illusion of privacy.

Then, after I picked my shower stall, chose from the lovely assortment of bath and hair products, and started to soap up, it hit me that it was really steamy. As in unnaturally so. And that the “unnaturally so” was happening because all of the shower heads, even in the unoccupied stalls, were shooting jets of hot water from them, causing warm mist to rise and swirl, almost as thick as smoke.

Hmm…

“Hey!” I stuck my head over my stall trying to see the Twins in their showers. “Are you guys doing something to the water?”

“Huh?” Shaunee said, wiping shampoo bubbles out of her eyes. “What?”

“This,” I flailed my arms causing the thick mist to billow around me dreamily. “All of this doesn’t seem like it’s happening without some help from certain someones who know how to manipulate fire and water.”

“Us? Miss Fire and Miss Water?” Erin said. I could barely see the top of her bright blond head through the steam. “Whatever could she mean, Twin?”

“I do believe our Z is implying we’d use our goddess-given affinities for something as selfish as making thick, warm, sweet-smelling mist to help relax all of us after we’ve just had a day that was ever so horrible,” Shaunee said with mock Southern Belle innocence.

“Would we do that, Twin?” Erin asked.

“We absolutely would, Twin,” Shaunee said.

“For shame, Twin. For shame,” Erin said with mock severity. And then they dissolved into twin giggles.

I rolled my eyes at them, but realized Shaunee had been right. The mist was sweet-smelling. It reminded me of spring rain, filled with the fresh scents of flowers and grass, and it was warm—no, the water was hot, like a lazy summer day at the beach. The truth was even though the room was occasionally semi-illuminated by flashes of lightning from the storm that was raging outside, and even though booming thunder was uncomfortably loud, the atmosphere the Twins had created was utterly soothing.