Hunted

My sloth impersonation might have worked had Neferet turned into a pod professor. Sadly, she hadn’t. Neferet was glowing with power and what would appear to those less well informed as happiness. I recognized it as gloating. Neferet was a bloated spider, radiating her victory over everyone’s head she had bitten off, delighted to be contemplating more carnage.

As a side note: Darius would be really pleased at my retention of the vocab words he’d been using around me.

Besides the fact that she seemed spiderlike to me, I noticed Neferet, again, wasn’t wearing the insignia of Nyx, a goddess embroidered in silver with her hands raised and cupping a crescent moon. Instead, she was wearing a gold chain from which hung wings carved from a pure black stone. I wondered, not for the first time, why no one seemed to notice she was totally twisted. I also wondered why no one noticed the way she radiated a dark energy that filled the space around her like the air right before a lightning strike.

“Today’s lesson is going to focus on an aspect of abilities that only a vampyre, or sometimes an advanced fledgling, can use. So you won’t need your Fledgling Handbooks at the moment, unless you’d like to make additional notes in the physiology section. Please open your texts to page 426, which is the chapter on concealment.” Neferet held the small class’s attention easily. She strode back and forth across the front of her room, looking regal and typically gorgeous in a long black dress trimmed in golden thread that looked like liquid metal. Her auburn hair was pulled back, and lovely curling tendrils of it escaped to frame her beautiful face. Her voice was refined and easy to listen to.

She absolutely scared the bejeezus out of me.

“So, I’ll want you to read this chapter on your own. Your assignment will be to document in a journal all of your dreams for the next five days. Often secret desires as well as abilities surface in our dreams. Before you go to sleep, I want you to focus on your reading and think about what concealment means to you. What dark secrets do you keep hidden from the world? Where would you go if no one could find you? What would you do if no one could see you?” She paused, looking at each student as she spoke. Some smiled at her shyly. Others looked away almost guiltily. All in all, the class showed more animation than any of the others I’d been in.

“Brittney, darling, would you read aloud the section on page 432 on cloaking?”

Brittney, a petite brunette, nodded, turned the pages, and began reading:

CLOAKING

Most fledglings are familiar with the inherent ability they have to cloak their presence to outsiders, i.e., humans. It is practiced by the fledgling tradition of sneaking off campus to perform rituals under the very eyes of the human community. But this is only a small taste of the ability a mature vampyre can command. Even those without affinities can call night to them and conceal their movements from the inadequate senses of the typical human.

Here Neferet interrupted. “Part of what you will learn from this chapter is that any vampyre can move stealthily among humans, a skill which comes in handy because humans tend to be overly judgmental of our activities.”

I was frowning down at the text, thinking that I couldn’t be the only fledgling to notice Neferet’s prejudice against humans, when her voice whiplashed at me from next to my desk.

“Zoey. So nice of you to join a class that is more fitting for your abilities.”

I looked slowly up into her frigid green eyes and tried to sound like any other fledgling. “Thank you. I’ve always liked Vamp Soc class.”

She smiled, and suddenly reminded me of the creature in Alien, that totally freaky old movie with Sigourney Weaver and the really scary alien that ate people. “Excellent. Why don’t you read aloud the last paragraph on that page?”

Glad that I had an excuse to duck my face, I looked down at my book, found the paragraph, and read:

Fledglings should note that cloaking can be very taxing to their strength. It takes great powers of concentration to call and hold night for any protracted period of time. It is also important to understand that cloaking has its limitations. Some are as follows:

It is a draining practice and can cause excessive weariness.

Cloaking can only work with organic things, which is why it is easier to remain cloaked if one is skyclad (or naked).

To attempt cloaking items like cars or motorcycles or even bicycles is an exercise in futility.

As with all of our abilities, cloaking exacts a price. For some that price will be mild fatigue and a headache. For others it can be much worse.

I came to the end of the page and glanced up at her.

“That will be quite enough, Zoey. So, tell me, what did you just learn?” Her eyes bored into mine.

Well, actually, I’d just learned that my friends and I wouldn’t be escaping from the House of Night using the Hummer unless we somehow got permission to leave campus. I didn’t say that, though. Instead, I tried to look studious and said, “That cars and houses and such can’t be cloaked from humans.”

“Or vampyres,” she added in a firm voice that the uninformed (or the body-snatched) might think was concerned and teacherly. “Don’t ever forget other vampyres will see through the cloaking of inorganic materials, too.”

“I’ll remember,” I said solemnly. And I would.

CHAPTER 26

I had fencing class before lunch and couldn’t have been happier. Okay, well, that’s an overstatement. I could have been happier if my friends and I were about a bazillion miles away from the House of Night, Neferet, and Kalona. Since that didn’t seem very possible, especially after Vamp Soc and Neferet’s freaky anti-cloaking lecture, I settled for being happy that Dragon agreed I looked too tired to do more than sit and watch class.

Actually I wasn’t feeling bad at all, and when I fished my mirror out of my purse to put on the lip gloss I was relieved I hadn’t lost, I didn’t think I looked that bad, either. So Dragon’s allowing me to sit out of class, coupled with the fact that his cat had been one of those that had shown up in my room like a furry clue, had me keeping a close eye on our fencing professor.

At first glance Dragon appears to be another of my grandma’s conundrums. First of all, he’s short. Second, he’s cute. Really cute. As in the guy you’d pick to be a stay-at-home dad who baked cookies and could even hem his daughter’s skirt in an emergency. In a world where male vampyres were warriors and protectors, a short, cute guy wouldn’t normally get much attention. But his whole persona changed when he picked up his sword, or, as he’d correct me, his foil. Then he turned lethal. His features hardened. He didn’t grow taller, that would just be silly (as well as impossible), but he didn't need to be taller. He was literally so fast that his foil seemed to glide and glow with a power all its own.

I watched Dragon drill the class in fencing exercises. The fledglings didn’t seem so podlike in fencing class. But that was probably because it dealt with physical activity, not mental stuff. I paid closer attention and noticed that, even though the class was completing the physical motions, there was no easy banter or harmless teasing going on. Everyone was on task, which was weird as hell. I mean, let’s face it. Keeping a gym filled with teenagers who had sharp things in their hands totally on task is nearly impossible.

I was frowning at a group of guys who would normally have been getting at least a couple of reprimands from Dragon, along with reminders to pay attention and not act like idiots (at the House of Night professors can call kids idiots when they act like idiots because the idiot children can’t run home to their mommies and cry about it; hence there is a lot less idiot behavior at the House of Night than at most public schools), when Dragon stepped between me and my line of vision. I blinked and refocused on him.

Slowly and distinctly he winked at me before turning back to the class.

About then his huge Maine Coon padded up to sit beside me and lick one of his monstrous paws.

“Hey there, Shadowfax.” I scratched his head and felt more hopeful than I had since the Raven Mocker had almost killed me.

Even though school had turned into a nightmare and danger was all around us, lunch felt like an oasis of