Hunted

impulses and win over them, and I wanted to believe he could win, too?

Well, dealing with Stevie Rae had taught me one thing for sure, and that was that a fledgling in this position could be a very dangerous creature.

Keeping my voice completely calm, I said, “What was it you wanted to say to me, Stark?”

I saw the struggle on his face as the kid I knew fought with the monster who clearly wanted to leap across the table and eat the Twins. Finally he shifted his gaze back to me. His eyes still glowed slightly red when he said, “I didn’t really have anything to say. I just found this. It’s yours, isn’t it?” He lifted his hand and, clenched in it, was my purse.

I looked from it to him, and then back at the purse again. I remembered what he’d said about being scared of purses like I’m scared of spiders. When I looked into his eyes again, I was smiling.

“Thanks, it is mine.” I took it from him, and as our hands brushed I said, “A guy once told me that girls’ purses reminded him of spiders.”

The red left his eyes like he’d thrown a switch. The terrible aura that had surrounded him was gone. One of his fingers wrapped around mine and held for just an instant. Then he let loose the purse and my hand.

“Spiders? Are you sure you heard him right?”

“I’m sure. Thanks again for finding this.”

He shrugged, turned, and slouched out of the room.

As soon as he was gone, all the fledglings except the Twins and me started whispering excitedly about how hot Stark is. I ate my cereal in silence.

“Okay, he’s beyond creepy,” Shaunee said.

“Was that what Stevie Rae was like before she Changed?” Erin asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, basically.” I lowered my voice and added, “Did you guys notice anything in the air around him? Like a weird rippling or an extra-dark shadow?”

“No, I was too busy thinking he was going to eat me to look around him,” Erin said.

“Ditto,” said Shaunee. “So is that why he doesn’t freak you out, because he’s like Stevie Rae before she Changed?”

I lifted one of my shoulders and used the excuse of a mouth full of Count Chocula to not say much.

“Hey, seriously, I know what Kramisha’s poem said and all,” Erin said. “But you gotta watch yourself around him. He’s totally bad news.”

“Plus, the poem might not have been about him,” Shaunee said.

“Guys, do we really have to talk about this right now?” I said after swallowing.

“Nope, he has zero importance to us,” Shaunee said quickly.

“Ditto,” Erin said; then she added, “You gonna check to be sure he didn’t steal your stuff?”

“Yeah, whatever.” I unsnapped my purse and looked into it, pawing around a little and taking an out-loud inventory. “Cell phone…lip gloss…cool sunglasses…money holder thing with, yep, all my money and my driver’s license in it…and—” I broke off abruptly when I found the little note that had an arrow broken in half drawn on it. Below the arrow were the words: Thanks for last night.

“What? Did you find something he ripped off?” Erin asked, trying to peer across the table and into my purse.

I snapped it shut. “No, just nasty used Kleenex. I wish he had ripped that off.”

“Well, I still say he’s an asshole,” Erin grumbled.

I nodded and made little agreeing sounds as I finished my cereal and tried not to think about Stark’s warm hand stroking my hair.

My classes, as my Spanish teacher, Professor Garmy, would had said, had she not turned into a good little pod professor, were no bueno para me. And the worst part was, if you took away the disgusting Raven Mockers, who seemed to be everywhere, I could have almost convinced myself that everything was normal. But almost can be a really big word.

It didn’t help that my schedule had been changed around at semester, so that I was in classes with all different kids, none of them being Damien and the Twins. Aphrodite was nowhere to be seen, making me worry on and off about whether she and Darius were being eaten by Raven Mockers. Of course, knowing Aphrodite, they were still in her room playing doctor.

It was with that gross mental picture that I slid into a desk for my first class, which was now Literature 205. Oh, when Shekinah had moved all my classes around so that I could be in an advanced level of Vampyre Sociology, she’d failed to mention that the rearrangement had caused me to be bumped up to the next level of my lit and Spanish classes. So my stomach churned as I waited for Professor Penthasilea, better known as Prof P, to assign a piece of literature with a correspondingly awful essay that was so far over my head that it could roost.

I shouldn’t have worried. Prof P was there. She looked like her gorgeous, artsy self. But she acted like an utterly different vampyre. Prof P, by far the coolest lit teacher I’d ever hoped to encounter, began the hour by passing out grammar worksheets. Yep. I stared down at the half dozen pages, Xeroxed front and back, she wanted us to complete. The worksheets ran the range from comma splices and run-ons to diagramming complex sentences (seriously).

Okay, some kids—well, I guess the majority of kids if they had an on-level public school education—would not have been shocked at all by the assignment. But this was Prof P at the House of Night! One thing I could say for Hell High (as human kids called it) was that the classes were not boring. And even among the totally not boring professors, Penthasilea stood out. She’d captivated me in the first sixty seconds of the first day I’d sat in her class by saying that we were going to read Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, a book about the sinking of the Titanic. That was cool enough, but add to that the fact that Prof P had actually been living in Chicago when the ship sank, and she remembered tons of amazing details about not just the people on the ship but what life had been like in the early 1900s, and you have an excellent class.

I looked up from my totally boring worksheets to where she was sitting at her desk, bloblike, staring stone- faced at her computer screen. Her c ke an n the shipharisma in class today would definitely fall on the South Intermediate High School crap teacher scale at about the level of Mrs. Fosster, who consistently got the prize for the Worst English Teacher Ever, and had been called Queen of Worksheets or Umpa Lumpa, depending on whether she was wearing her M&M blue muumuu or not.

Professor Penthasilea had definitely been changed into a pod person.

Spanish class was next. Not only was Spanish II insanely too hard for me (hell, Spanish I had been too hard for me!), but Prof Garmy had turned into a nonteacher. Where before the class had been immersion, which means basically all the talking was in Spanish and not English, now she flitted around the room nervously, helping kids write the description of the picture she’d put up on the Smart Board of a bunch of cats, er, gatos getting all tangled in string, um, hilo—or whatever. (I seriously don’t have many Spanish skills.) Her vamp tattoos looked like feathers, and she’d reminded me of a little Spanish bird before. Now she looked and acted like a neurotic sparrow, flitting from kid to kid and getting ready to have a nervous breakdown.

Pod professor number two.

But I would have chosen to stay in Prof Garmy’s confusing Spanish class all day if it could have kept me from going to my third-hour class, Advanced Vampyre Sociology, taught by—you guessed it—Neferet.

Since day one at the House of Night, I’d resisted being put in an advanced level of Vampyre Sociology. At first it was because I’d wanted to fit in. I hadn’t wanted to be known as the weird third former (or freshman) kid who’d been stuck in a sixth former (or senior) class because she was so “special.” I mean, barf.

Well, it hadn’t taken me very long to figure out that there was just no way for me to stay incognito. Since then I’d been learning to deal with my specialness and the responsibilities (and embarrassments) that go with it. But it didn’t matter how hard I’d talked to myself about the Vamp Soc being just another class, I was still majorly nervous going into it.

Of course, knowing Neferet would be the teacher didn’t help at all.

I came in, found a desk near the back of the class, and proceeded to hunker down in my seat, trying to impersonate one of those sloth-like kids who slept their lives away, waking up only to move from class to class, leaving a slug trail of yawns and bright pink spots on their foreheads.