CHAPTER 23
The school’s infirmary wasn’t very big. Actually, it was only three little hospital-like rooms on one of the floors of the professors’ building. So it was no surprise that there were hurt kids spilling out of the rooms. Not that it wasn’t shocking to see an additional three pallets, each filled with a hurt fledgling, scattered in the hallway. The wounded kids blinked in surprise as my group and I paused in the entrance.
“Zoey?” I looked up from trying not to stare at the hurt kids—and not to smell the blood that seemed to hang in the air around us—to see two vampyres hurrying toward me. I recognized them as Neferet’s assistants, kinda like the equivalent of nurses, and had to think hard to remember that the tall blonde called herself Sapphire, and the short, Asian one was Margareta. “Were you injured, too?” Sapphire asked, looking me over quickly.
“No, I’m fine. We’re all fine,” I assured her. “Actually, we’re here to help.”
“Without a healer we’ve done all that can be done for them,” said Margareta bluntly. “None of the fledglings are in immediate danger of dying, though one never knows how an injury will affect the Change, so it is always possible that several of them might—”
“Okay, yeah, we get it.” I cut her off before she could say “die” all loud and obvious in front of the group of kids who might very well die. Jeesh, talk about bad bedside manner.
“We aren’t here because of our medical skills,” Damien explained. “We’re here because our circle is powerful, and within it we might be able to soothe those who have been injured.”
“None of the other uninjured fledglings are here,” said Sapphire, as if that was a reason for us to not be here, too.
“None of the other fledglings have affinities for the elements,” I said.
“Really, we have done all that can be done,” Margareta repeated coolly. “Without a High Priestess—”
This time Stark cut her off. “We have a High Priestess, so it’s time for you to step aside and let her, and her circle, help these kids.”
“Yeah, back off,” Aphrodite said, literally getting in the vamp’s face.
The two vampyres backed off, though I could feel their icy, disapproving stares.
“What the hell is their problem?” Aphrodite asked in a low voice as we walked into the hallway.
“I don’t have a clue,” I said. “I don’t really even know them.”
“I do,” Damien said softly. “I volunteered in the infirmary my third-former year. They’ve always been dour. I thought it was because they had to deal with fledglings dying.”
“ ‘Dour’?” Shaunee said.
“Translate him, will ya, Stevie Rae?” Erin said.
“Dour means ‘stern and kinda gloomy.’ You know, y’all really should read more.”
“I was just gonna say that,” Stark said.
Damien sighed.
Unbelievably, I had to stifle a smile. The circumstances were bad, but my friends being their normal selves made everything seem just a teensy bit better.
“Nerd herd, focus. You’re here to help the fledglings. Dour One and Dour Two aren’t important,” said Aphrodite.
“Dr. Seuss reference. I like it,” Stark said, giving me a check-meout-I’ve-
Aphrodite frowned at him. “I said ‘focus,’ not ‘flirt.’”
“Stevie Rae?” A guy called from a pallet halfway down the hall, interrupting all of us.
“Drew?” Stevie Rae said, and then she hurried to his side. “Drew, are you okay? What happened? Is your arm broke?”
The kid’s arm was in a sling. One of his eyes was all bruised and puffy, and his lip was split, but he managed to smile at Stevie Rae. “I’m really glad you’re not dead anymore.”
She grinned. “Hey, me, too. And I can tell you I don’t so much recommend the dying and un-dying stuff, so you gotta rest and get well.” Then she sobered as her eyes went back to his wounds, and she added quickly, “But you’re gonna be okay. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“It’s no biggie. I didn’t break my arm. It just got dislocated when I was wrestling with a Raven Mocker.”
“He tried to save Anastasia.” My gaze followed the girl’s voice into a hospital room beside where Drew was lying. The door was open and I could see a fledgling half reclined in bed with one arm propped on one of those aluminum side tray things that fit on hospital beds. Her entire forearm was wrapped in thick gauze. There was also a nasty cut that ran down the side of her neck and disappeared into her hospital gown. “He almost did it, too. Drew almost saved her.”
“Almost isn’t good enough,” Drew said tightly.
“Almost is better than what lots of kids did,” said the girl. “At least you tried.”
“What the hell happened, Denio?” Aphrodite asked, moving past me and into the girl’s room. I suddenly realized who the girl was. She and her two buddies, Enyo and Pemphredo (named after the three sisters of the Gorgon and Scylla), had been part of Aphrodite’s bitchy inner circle before I came to the House of Night and, as Aphrodite herself has said, her life imploded. I braced myself for Denio to make some haggish comment to Aphrodite, since none of her “friends” had actually stayed her friends once she’d fallen from Neferet’s good graces and I’d replaced her as Leader of the Dark Daughters. Thankfully, the girl’s response wasn’t hateful at all, though she sounded frustrated and more than a little pissed.
“Nothing happened. Well, that is, unless you stood up to the damn bird things. Then they attacked you. We”—she gestured with her good arm out at the infirmary—“stood up to them. So did Dragon and Anastasia.”
“They attacked Professor Anastasia while Dragon was fighting a bunch of them down the lane. He wasn’t close enough to help her. He didn’t even see it happening,” Drew said. “I grabbed one of them and pulled it off her, but another one came up behind me.”
“I grabbed that one,” Denio said. She pointed across the hall. “Ian tried to help when the thing turned on me. The Raven Mocker snapped his leg like a twig.”
“Ian Bowser?” I asked, sticking my head through the open doorway of the room Denio had pointed to.
“Yeah, it’s me,” said the scrawny, but kinda cute kid who had one leg propped up and wrapped all the way to his thigh in a cast. He looked way too white against the bleached sheets.
“That looks like it hurts,” I said. I knew him from drama class. He’d had a massive crush on our teacher, Professor Nolan—before she was murdered a month or so ago.
“I’ve felt better,” he said, trying to smile.
“Yeah, we’ve all felt better,” said a girl on a pallet farther down the hallway.
“Hanna Honeyyeager! I didn’t see you over there,” Damien said, moving around me to go to the girl’s side. I could understand why he hadn’t noticed her before she said something. She was covered by a big white comforter, which she disappeared against because she was seriously the whitest kid I think I’ve ever seen. You know, one of those blondes who had skin so fair it never tanned and she always looked pink-cheeked and either embarrassed or surprised. I only knew her through Damien. I’d heard him talking to her about flowers—apparently the girl was a genius with anything that bloomed. I remembered that about her, and the fact that everyone always called her by her first and last names, kinda like Shannoncompton, only they didn’t run the two together.
“What happened to you, sweetie?” Damien crouched down beside her and took her hand. Her little blond head was wrapped in a gauze bandage that had a bloody spot near the forehead.
“When Professor Anastasia was attacked, I screamed at the Raven Mockers. A lot,” she said.
“She has a seriously shrill voice,” said a kid from the last hospital room, who I couldn’t even see.
“Well, apparently Raven Mockers don’t like shrill voices,” said Hanna Honeyyeager. “One of them knocked me out.”
“Hang on.” Erin marched down the hall toward the room of the kid I couldn’t see. “Is that you, T.J.?”
“Erin!”
“Oh. My. Goddess!” Erin squealed and rushed into his room.
