Hunted

“You’re wrong, my love. I feel her within you.”

His wings pressed against my body, drawing me closer to him. Even though his physical form was only semi- substantial, I could feel him. His wings were soft. Winter cold against the warmth of my dreaming self. The outline of his body was frigid mist. It burned my skin, sending electric currents through me, heating me with a desire I didn’t want to feel but was powerless to resist.

His laugh was seductive. I wanted to drown in it. I leaned forward, closing my eyes and gasping aloud as the chill of his spirit brushed against my breasts, sending shooting sensations that were painful but deliciously erotic to places in my body that made me feel out of control.

“You like the pain. It brings you pleasure.” His wings got more insistent, his body harder and colder and more passionately painful as it pressed against mine. “Surrender to me.” His voice, already beautiful, was unimaginably seductive as he became aroused. “I spent centuries in your arms. This time our joining will be controlled by me, and you will revel in the pleasure I can bring you. Throw off the shackles of your distant goddess and come to me. Be my love, truly, in body as well as soul and I will give you the world!”

The meaning of his words penetrated through the haze of pain and pleasure like sunlight burning away dew. I found my will again, and stumbled out of the embrace of his wings. Tendrils of icy black smoke snaked around my body, clinging…touching…caressing…

I shook myself like a pissed cat shaking off rain and the dark wisps slid from my body. “No! I’m not your love. I’m not A-ya. And I’ll never turn my back on Nyx!”

When I spoke Nyx’s name, the nightmare shattered.

I sat straight up in bed, shaking and gasping. Stevie Rae was sleeping soundly beside me, but Nala was wide awake. She was growling softly. Her back was arched, her body was totally puffed up, and she was staring slit-eyed at the air above me.

“Ah, hell!” I shrieked and bounded off the bed, spinning around and looking up, expecting to see Kalona hovering like a giant bat-bird over us.

Nothing. There was nothing there.

I grabbed Nala and sat on the bed. With trembling hands I petted her over and over. “It was just a bad dream…it was just a bad dream…it was just a bad dream,” I told her, but I knew it was a lie.

Kalona was real, and somehow he was able to reach me through my dreams.

CHAPTER 2

Okay, so Kalona can get into your dreams, but you’re awake now, so pull yourself together! I told myself sternly as I petted Nala and let my cat’s familiar purr soothe me. Stevie Rae stirred in her sleep and murmured something I couldn’t hear. Then, still sleeping, she smiled and sighed. I looked down at her, glad that she was having better luck with her dreams.

Gently I pulled back the blanket she’d curled up under and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw no blood seeping through the bandage that covered the terrible arrow wound that had pierced her.

She stirred again. This time Stevie Rae’s eyes fluttered and opened. She looked confused for a second, then she smiled sleepily up at me.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I’m okay,” she said groggily. “Don’t worry so much.”

“It’s a little hard not to worry when my best friend keeps dying,” I said, smiling back at her.

“I didn’t die this time. I just almost died.”

“My nerves are telling me to tell you there’s not a big difference in that ‘almost’ to them.”

“Tell your nerves to be quiet and go to sleep,” Stevie Rae said, closing her eyes and pulling the blanket back up over her. “I’m okay,” she repeated. “We’re all going to be okay.” Then her breathing deepened and I swear in less time than it took for me to blink, she was asleep.

I stifled my big sigh and scooted back on the bed, trying to get comfortable. Nala curled up between Stevie Rae and me, and gave me a disgruntled mee-uf-ow! that I knew meant she wanted me to relax and go to sleep.

Sleep? And possibly dream again? Uh, no. Not likely.

Instead I kept an eye on Stevie Rae’s breathing and petted Nala absently. It was so darn weird how normal everything seemed here in the little bubble of peace we’d made. Looking at sleeping Stevie Rae I found it almost impossible to believe that just a few hours ago she’d had an arrow sticking through her chest and we had had to escape from the House of Night as chaos tore our world apart. Unwilling to allow myself to sleep, my exhausted thoughts circled back, replaying the events of the night. And as I sifted through them, I was amazed anew that any of us had survived…

I remembered that Stevie Rae had, unbelievably, asked me to get a pencil and some paper ’cause she thought it would be a good time to make a list of stuff that we needed to get down in the tunnels so that we’d have the right supplies and whatnot if we had to stay hidden for a while.

She’d asked me that, in a totally calm voice, while she was sitting in front of me with an arrow stuck through her chest. I remember looking at her, getting really sick to my stomach, and then looking away and saying, “Stevie Rae, I’m not so sure this is a good time to be making lists.”

“Ouch! Dang, that hurts worse than gettin’ one of those goat-head thistles stuck in your foot.” Stevie Rae had sucked air and flinched, but still managed to smile over her shoulder at Darius, who had ripped open the back of her shirt to expose the arrow that was sticking out of the middle of her back. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it’s your fault that it hurts. What’d you say your name was again?”

“I am Darius, Priestess.”

“He’s a Son of Erebus warrior,” Aphrodite had added, giving him a surprisingly sweet smile. I describe it as surprisingly sweet because Aphrodite is usually selfish, spoiled, hateful, and kinda hard to tolerate in general, even though I’m starting to like her. In other words, she’s definitely not sweet, but it was becoming clearer and clearer that she really had a thing for Darius, hence the unusual sweetness.

“Please. His warrior-ness is obvious. He’s built like a mountain,” Shaunee had said, giving Darius an appreciative leer.

“A totally hot mountain,” Erin echoed and made kiss noises at Darius.

“He’s taken, Twin freaks, so go play with each other,” Aphrodite automatically snapped at them, but it had seemed to me that she didn’t have her heart in the insult. Actually, now that I was thinking about it again, she’d sounded almost nice.

Oh, by the way, Erin and Shaunee are soul twins, not biological twins, being as Erin is a blond-haired blue- eyed Oklahoma girl and Shaunee is a caramel-colored easterner of Jamaican descent. But genetics didn’t mattered with them—they might as well have been separated at birth and then rejoined by twin radar.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks for reminding us that our boyfriends aren’t here,” Shaunee said.

“’Cause they’re probably being eaten by man-bird freaks,” Erin said.

“Hey, cheer up. Zoey’s grandma didn’t say the Raven Mockers actually ate people. She said they just picked them up with their humongous beaks and threw them against a wall or whatever over and over again until every bone in their body was broken,” Aphrodite told the Twins with a lighthearted grin.

“Uh, Aphrodite, I don’t think you’re helping,” I said. Though she was right. Actually, as scary as it sounded, she and the Twins both might have been right. I hadn’t wanted to think about that too long, so I’d turned my attention back to my injured best friend. She’d looked absolutely horrible—pale, sweaty, and covered with blood. “Stevie Rae, don’t you think we should get you to a—”

“I got it! I got it!” Just then Jack had burst into the little side-tunnel area that had been made into Stevie Rae’s room, followed closely by the yellow Lab that rarely let the kid out of her sight. He was flushed and brandishing a white briefcase-looking thing that had a big red cross on it. “It was right where you said it’d be, Stevie Rae. In that kinda kitchen tunnel place.”

“And as soon as I get my breath I’ll tell you how pleasantly surprised I was when I discovered the working refrigerators and microwaves,” Damien said, following Jack into the room, breathing heavily and dramatically