Hunted

Twins had taken their positions in a circle around us.

“Then get it cast!” Darius snapped.

There was a pause into which Erin finally spoke. “But Zoey always casts the circles. We never have.”

“I’ll do it.” Aphrodite stepped within the circle and marched over to Damien. Damien gave her a look that even I could see was filled with doubt. “You don’t have to be a fledgling or a vampyre to cast a circle. All you have to be is attached to Nyx. And I’m attached to Nyx,” she said firmly. “But I need you guys to be behind me on this. Are you?”

Damien paused long enough to look at me. With an effort that seemed to sap the last of my strength, I nodded at him. He smiled at me and nodded back.

“I’m behind you,” Damien told Aphrodite.

Aphrodite looked from him to the Twins. “We’re with you, too.” Erin spoke for both of them.

Finally she turned to Stevie Rae, who wiped her eyes, sent me a big, confident smile, and then she said to Aphrodite, “You’ve saved my life twice. I’m trusting that you can do the same for Zoey.”

I saw Aphrodite’s face flush, her chin lift, and her shoulders straighten and knew that for the first time in a very long time she felt like an accepted part of a group.

“Okay, let’s do this,” Aphrodite said. “It’s the first element, the one we all embrace from our first breaths to our last. I call wind to the circle!” Sure enough, I saw a sudden breeze begin to lift Aphrodite’s and Damien’s hair, and with a look of obvious relief, she moved clockwise around the circle to Shaunee.

And then I stopped paying attention—or rather my attention started to narrow, getting all gray and tunnel- vision-like around the edges.

“Zoey, are you still with us?” Darius asked as he pressed more gauze against my chest.

I couldn’t answer him. My head felt really light, but the rest of my body was unbelievably heavy, like some moron had parked a Mack truck on top of me.

“Z?” Erik was saying. “Z, look at me!”

“Zoey? Babe?” Heath looked like he was going to cry again.

Okay, I really wanted to say something to make them feel better, but it just wasn’t possible. I couldn’t make my body work anymore. It was like I’d become a distant spectator in the game that was going on around me. I could watch, but I couldn’t play.

“All the elements but spirit have been evoked,” Aphrodite said. She was standing beside Darius. “That’s the element Zoey always personifies, and I feel weird calling it in her place.”

“Call it,” Darius said. He glanced up from me and looked around the circle at my friends. “Concentrate the power of your element on Zoey. Think about filling her with strength and warmth and life.”

Vaguely I heard Aphrodite evoking spirit, although I didn’t feel the quickening its presence usually gave me. I briefly felt a distant warmth and thought for a second that I also smelled rain and cut grass, but that was gone quickly while the gray framing my vision became thicker and thicker.

“Are you the human Zoey was Imprinted with?” I heard Darius talking to Heath. I listened, but couldn’t manage to care too much about what they were saying.

“Yes,” Heath said.

“Good. Your blood would be even better than Aphrodite’s for her.”

“That’s the first good news I’ve heard in ages,” Aphrodite mumbled, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Are you willing to allow Zoey to drink from you?”

“Of course!” Heath said. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

“Sit up here. Hold her head in your lap. Then give me your arm,” Darius told Heath.

Heath got up on the end of the table, and with Erik and Darius’s help my head was soon resting against his warm thigh, like he was a living pillow. Heath held his arm out and Darius grasped it firmly. My mind was too fuzzy to make sense of what they were doing until Darius reached behind him and took the all-purpose knife/scissors/bottle opener from the first aid kit, flipped the knife partway open, and pressed the blade against the soft skin on the inside of Heath’s muscular forearm.

The scent of his blood settled over me like a delicious fog.

“Press her mouth against it,” Darius said. “Make her drink.”

“Come on, babe. Take some of this. It’ll help you get better.” Okay, my rational mind knew that Erik was standing right there beside me watching along with all of my best friends. Under normal circumstances I would never have done what I did next, no matter how delicious and amazing and enticing Heath’s blood smelled.

But I wasn’t currently experiencing anything that even mildly resembled normal circumstances. So when Heath pressed his bleeding arm against my lips, I opened my mouth, sank my teeth deep into him, and started sucking.

Heath moaned and wrapped his other arm around me, pressing his face into my hair as I drank from him. The world immediately narrowed so that there was only Heath and me as his blood exploded into my body. With that first drink, awareness slammed back into my chest, and with it pain so intense that I would have wrenched my mouth from his skin had he not tightened his grip on me and whispered into my ear, “No! You can’t stop. If I can stand it, so can you, Zo.”

See, I knew I wasn’t just causing him to feel the exquisite pleasure feeding from a human usually caused both vamp and victim. We’d instantly Imprinted again. Even in the bad shape I was in I could tell that. Heath’s whole awareness filled me along with his blood, and we were bound together through the magical fabric that was the need and attraction between human and vampyre, stitched together in a single garment of the ancient bond that was an Imprint. But I wasn’t just drinking from him. I was feeding in a frenzy that was a natural instinct for survival, and through our connection Heath was feeling my pain and fear and need, everything that I’d been numb to when my body was in near-fatal shock. His blood had changed that, though. It had revitalized me, and in doing so it had wrenched me out of the deadly shock state and thrown me directly into searing pain and the realization that I was perilously close to dying.

I whimpered, still feeding from him, but was miserable because I knew what I was making him feel.

Of course, he knew what I was feeling, too, and how sorry I was that I was hurting him.

“It’s okay, babe. It’s okay. It’s not that bad, really,” he whispered in my ear through teeth gritted against the intense mixture of pain and desire.

I don’t know how much time had passed when I realized that, even though the cut across my chest hurt like hell, my body was warm, and I could feel caressing me a soft breeze that carried the scent of spring rain and a hay-filled meadow. My spirit, too, felt invigorated, and I knew that Heath’s blood had energized me enough that now I was able to accept the healing aid of the elements that comforted my soul as they soothed my body.

At about the same time I realized Heath had stopped talking to me. I opened my eyes and glanced up. He was kinda slumped over me but was being held upright by Darius’s firm grip on his shoulders. His eyes were closed and his face was pale.

Instantly I pulled my mouth from his arm. “Heath!” Had I killed him? Panicked, I tried to sit up, but the pain shooting through my body stopped me.

“The human is fine, Priestess,” Darius soothed. “Stanch the wound on his arm so that he will not lose any more blood.”

Automatically I ran my tongue over the narrow slice on Heath’s arm and the bigger gash I’d made when I bit him while I thought Heal…don’t bleed anymore, and when I pulled away this time I saw that the knife wound, as well as the marks my teeth had left, had completely stopped bleeding.

“You can close the circle,” Darius told Aphrodite, who was watching me with undisguised curiosity.

See, I wanted to tell her, there are a lot of different kinds of Imprints. What I have with Heath is definitely not what you have with Stevie Rae. But I couldn’t summon the energy to say the words. Actually, I wasn’t looking forward to the gazillion questions I was sure she was going to have for me. And then before she turned to Stevie Rae to begin thanking and then sending away the elements, I saw Aphrodite send Darius a sexy smile filled with promise, and I remembered that the first Imprint I’d shared with Heath had been broken when I’d had sex with Loren, and I realized that it was Darius who was going to have to field her questions. By the intimate smile he gave her in return, I was guessing he was going to like that kind of questioning wayyyy more than I ever would.

Okay, gross.