“How are you feeling?” Darius asked. “You look…” His words trailed off as I’m sure he tried and vetoed words like “crappy” and “hideous.”
“I look tired?” I volunteered helpfully.
He nodded. “You do.”
“Well, that’s a not-so-amazing coincidence because I am tired. Really tired.”
“Perhaps we should wait and—”
“No!” I interrupted. “I meant it when I said I wanted to go. Plus, there’s no way I can get any real sleep as long as we’re here. I just don’t feel safe.”
“Agreed,” Darius said. “You aren’t safe. None of us are safe.”
Unspoken was the understanding that we would still not be safe even if we managed to get away from the House of Night, but it was better for morale if neither of us mentioned that.
“Alright, let’s get the others,” I said.
I checked the clock on the wall before we left the room and realized that it was a little after 4:00 A.M. It was a shock to see how much time had passed, especially since I must have been out for several hours, even though I didn’t feel rested at all. If things were normal at the House of Night, fledglings should be finished with classes. “Hey,” I told Darius, “it’s about dinnertime. They might be in the cafeteria.”
He nodded, moved the propped-up chair, and opened the door slowly.
“Hallway’s empty,” he murmured.
While he’d been peeking down the hall, I’d been checking him out. So, instead of following him out of the room, I grabbed his sleeve and held him back. He gave me a questioning look.
“Uh, Darius, I’m thinking that we really need to change clothes before we make a grand entrance in the middle of the cafeteria, or even my dorm. I mean, you’re more than a little bloody, and I’m wearing what looks like a big green trash bag. We’re not exactly inconspicuous.”
Darius glanced down at himself, taking in the dried blood that was splattered all down his shirt and jacket. The blood plus the newly closed laceration on his face plus my hospital scrubs definitely equaled conspicuous, a conclusion Darius obviously came to easily.
“Let’s take the stairs up to the next floor. That’s where the Sons of Erebus are housed. I’ll change, then get you quickly to your dorm so you can be rid of those.” He gestured at my outfit. “If we get lucky we’ll find Aphrodite and the Twins in the dorm and will just have to scout out Damien and then slip from the school grounds.”
“Sounds good. I never thought you’d hear me say that I was looking forward to getting back to those tunnels, but right now that feels like the best place to be,” I said.
Darius grunted what I assumed was guy language for agreeing with me, and I followed him into the hall, which really was deserted. It was just a short way to the stairwell. Okay, going up a flight of steps just about did me in, and I ended up leaning heavily on Darius’s arm. I could tell by the worried glint in his eyes that he was seriously considering picking me up and would have (despite my protests) if we hadn’t gotten to the next floor about then.
“So,” I said between gasps, “is it always this quiet up here?”
“No,” Darius said grimly. “It’s not.” We passed a common area that had a fridge, a big, flat-screen TV, some comfy couches, and a bunch of guy stuff like free weights, a dartboard, and a pool table. It, too, was deserted. His face set into unreadable lines, Darius led me to one of the many doors that opened off the hall.
His room was just about as I’d imagined a Son of Erebus’s room would be—clean and simple, with hardly any knickknacks. He did have some trophies that were for winning knife-throwing competitions, and a whole collection of Christopher Moore’s hardback books, but no framed pictures of friends or family, and the only art on the walls was of Oklahoma landscapes, which probably came with the room. Oh, he also had a mini-fridge like Aphrodite’s, which kinda annoyed me. Did everyone have a fridge except me? Jeesh. There was a big, heavily draped picture window that I wandered over to, pulling back a corner of the curtains and looking out so Darius could change his clothes without causing a jealous Aphrodite to disembowel either of us.
It should have been a busy time. Classes were out and kids should have been going from the academic part of the school to the dorms, rec room, cafeteria, and just in general hanging out and being teenagers. Instead, I only saw a couple of people doing their best slip and slide down the sidewalk as they hurried from one building to another.
Even though my intuition was telling me there was way more to it than that, I wanted to blame the dead quiet of the school on the weather. The dark sky was still spitting icy rain, and despite the isolating effects of the storm, I was enthralled with how magical the shining coating of frozen water made everything look. Trees bowed under the crystalline weight that entombed their branches. The soft yellow of the gaslights flickered over slick walls and sidewalks. The coolest thing was the ice-encapsulated grass. It stuck up in brittle spikes all over, glistening when light hit it just right, making the ground look like it had grown a field of diamonds.
“Wow,” I said, more to myself than Darius, “I know the ice storm is a pain in the butt, but it really is pretty. It makes everything look like a whole different world.”
Darius was pulling a sweatshirt on over a clean T-shirt as he joined me at the window. His frown said that he saw the pain-in-the-butt part of the storm more than the ice magic of it.
“I don’t see one sentry,” he said, and I realized that his frown hadn’t been directed just at the ice but at the boundaries of the walls, which we could see from his window, too. “We should be able to see at least two or three of my brother warriors from here, but there is no one.” Then I felt him stiffen.
“What is it?”
“I spoke too soon, and you were correct. This is a whole different world. There are sentries posted. They are just not my brothers.” He pointed at a spot on the wall to our right where it curved behind Nyx’s Temple, which was situated right across from the building we were in. There, between the shadow of an ancient oak and the rear of the temple, the darkness shifted to reveal the bent shape of a Raven Mocker crouched on the wall. “And there,” Darius motioned down the wall a little way to another spot. I’d overlooked it as nothing more than a natural fold of darkness on this stormy night, but as I stared, it, too, moved slightly, revealing another terrible man-bird creature.
“They’re all over,” I said. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“Can you disguise us with the elements, as you did before?”
“I don’t know. I’m so tired, and I feel weird. My cut is better, but it’s like I keep getting drained and never really refilled.” Then my stomach sank further as I realized something else. “After I used fire and wind to knock Kalona off you, I didn’t have to release the elements. They just weren’t there anymore. That’s never happened before. They’ve always hung around until I bid them depart.”
“You’re exhausting yourself. The ability to conjure and control the elements is your gift, but it doesn’t come without a price. You’re young and healthy, so under normal circumstances you probably hardly notice the drain it causes in you.”
“I have a couple of times before, but it’s never been like this.”
“You’ve never been close to death before. Add to that the fact that you haven’t had time to rest and recuperate, and that’s a dangerous combination.”
“In other words, we may not be able to count on me to sneak us out of here,” I said.
“How about we call you Plan C, and we try to come up with Plans A and B.”
“I’d rather be Plan Z,” I grumbled.
“Well, this will help, even if it’s just a temporary fix.” He went to the mini-fridge and pulled out what looked like two water bottles, only the bottles were filled with a thick red liquid I recognized very well. He handed me one. “Drink up.”
I took it and frowned at him. “You have blood in water bottles in your fridge?”
He raised his brows at me, then cringed a little as the cut that stretched down the entire side of his face pulled. Finally he said, “I am a vampyre, Zoey. You will be one soon. To us having bottled human blood is the same as having bottled water. Only there is a lot more kick to blood.” He lifted his bottle to me and then drained it.
I shut off my mind and did the same. As always, the blood hit my system like an explosion, giving me a kick of energy and making me feel suddenly very much alive and invincible. My woozy head cleared, and the ache that had been radiating from my wound diminished, letting me draw a big, deep, pain-free breath.
“Better?” Darius said.
“Totally,” I said. “Let’s go get me some real clothes and find the others while this buzz lasts.”
