Tempted

far one over there, away from the tree.” Kurtis pointed up and to his left. “But I got him.”

“Did he taste as bad as he smelled?” Nicole’s shock and revulsion were as obvious as her curiosity.

Kurtis shrugged his beefy shoulders. “Hey, I’ll eat anything. Or anyone.”

They all dissolved into laughter. All except Stevie Rae.

“You have a Raven Mocker on the roof?”

“Yeah. Don’t know why the hell he was down here in the first place. Especially all beat up and broken.” Nicole lifted a brow at her. “Thought you said it was okay to go back to the House of Night ’cause Neferet and Kalona were gone. Looks like they left some shit behind, huh? Maybe they’re not really gone.”

“They’re gone,” Stevie Rae had said, already moving toward the door to the basement. “So none of you want to come back to school with me?”

Three heads shook silently back and forth as red-tinged eyes followed her every move.

“How about the others? Where are they?”

Nicole shrugged. “Wherever they want to be. Next time I see any of them I’ll tell ’em you said they should go back to school.”

Kurtis cracked up. “Hey, that’s great. Let’s all just go back to school! Like that’s something we really want to do?”

“Look, I gotta go. It’s almost sunrise. But I’m not done talkin’ about this with you. And you should know that I may want to bring the other red fledglings back here to live, even though we’ll officially be part of the House of Night. And if that happens y’all can either be with us and act right, or you need to leave.”

“How about this: How about you keep your pussy fledglings at school, and we’ll stay here because this is where we live now,” Kurtis said.

Stevie Rae stopped moving toward the exit. Almost as if it was second nature to her, she imagined she was a tree with roots growing down, down, down into the amazing, incredible ground. Earth, please come to me. In the basement, already underground and surrounded by her element, it was a simple thing to pull power up through her body. As she spoke, the ground rumbled and shook with the force of her irritation. “I’m only gonna say this one more time. If I bring the other red fledglings back here, this will be our home. If you act right, you can stay. If you don’t, you will leave.” She stomped her foot and the entire depot shook, sending plaster cascading from the low basement ceiling. Then Stevie Rae drew a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down, and imagining all the energy she’d called flowing out of her body and back into the earth. When she spoke again her voice sounded normal and the earth didn’t shake. “So, y’all decide. I’ll be back tomorrow night. See ya.”

Without giving them another glance, Stevie Rae hurried out of the basement, through the maze of rubble and metal grates spread haphazardly around the abandoned depot grounds to the stone stairs that led from the parking lot at railroad track level up to the street level of what used to be a thriving railway station. She had to be careful as she rushed up the stairs. It had stopped sleeting, and the sun had actually come out the day before, but night had brought falling temperatures and almost everything that had thawed had refrozen.

She reached the circle drive and the big covered entryway that used to keep Oklahoma weather from train passengers. She looked up and up and up.

The building was just creepy-looking. That’s all there was to it. Z liked to describe it as something out of Gotham City. Stevie Rae thought it was more like Blade Runner meets Amityville Horror. Not that she didn’t heart the tunnels under the building, but there was something about the stone exterior with its weird mixture of art deco and machine design that creeped her out.

Of course, some of her freaky feeling could have been because the sky was already starting to shift from black to gray with the coming dawn. In retrospect, that should have stopped her. She should have turned around, gone back down the stairs, climbed into the car she’d borrowed from the school, and driven to the House of Night.

Instead, she’d stepped squarely into her fate and, as Z would have said, then the poopie hit the fan.

She knew there were circular stairs inside the main part of the depot that led up to each tower room—she’d done lots of exploring during the weeks she’d lived there. But no dang way was she going back inside that building and taking a chance that some random red fledgling wouldn’t be tucked into bed and would see her—and question her—and find out the truth.

Plan B led her to a tree that at one time had obviously been decorative, but had long since overgrown its concrete circle so that its roots had broken through the ground below in the parking lot, exposing lots of frozen earth and allowing it to grow taller than it should have. Without its leaves, Stevie Rae didn’t have a clue what kind of tree it was, other than the kind that was tall enough that its branches brushed the roof of the depot, near the first of the two towers that faced out from the roof on the front side of the building, and that was tall enough for her.

Moving quickly, Stevie Rae went over to the tree and jumped to grab the branch closest to her head. She scrambled up the slick, bare bough, shimmying along it until she got to the main part of the tree. From there she made her way up and up, silently thanking Nyx for her red vampyre enhanced strength ’cause if she’d been a normal fledgling, or maybe even vamp, she’d never have been able to make the treacherous climb.

When she was as high up as she could go, Stevie Rae gathered herself and then jumped onto the roof of the building. She didn’t waste time looking in the first of the towers. Pig boy had said Rephaim was in the one farthest from the tree. She jogged across the roof to the other end of the building and then climbed the short distance up so she could look down into the circular space.

He was there. Crumpled in the corner of the tower, Rephaim lay unmoving and bleeding.

Without hesitation, Stevie Rae threw her legs over the stone ridge and then dropped the four feet or so into the room.

He’d been curled up in a ball, his good arm cradling his bad one in its dirty sling. Down the outside of his arm she could see that someone had slashed his skin, which is obviously where Kurtis had fed from him, though he hadn’t bothered to close the cut, and the odd, off smell of his inhuman blood filled the little chamber. The bandage that had immobilized his wing had come loose and it was a torn pile of bloody towels half draping his body. His eyes were closed.

“Rephaim, hey, can you hear me?”

At the sound of her voice his eyes instantly opened. “No!” he said, struggling to sit up. “Get out of here. They’re going to trap—”

Then there had been a terrible pain in the back of her head, and she remembered falling into blackness.

“Stevie Rae, you have to wake up. You have to move.”

She finally felt the hand that was shaking her shoulder and recognized Rephaim’s voice. Carefully she opened her eyes, and the world didn’t pitch and roll, though she could feel her heartbeat throbbing in her head.

“Rephaim,” she rasped. “What happened?”

“They used me to trap you,” he said.

“You wanted to trap me?” Her nausea was a little better, but Stevie Rae’s mind felt like it was working in slow motion.

“No. What I wanted was to be left alone to heal and make my way back to my father. They gave me no choice.” He stood up, moving stiffly, bent at the waist because of the metal grate that made a low, false ceiling. “Move. You have little time. The sun is already rising.”

Stevie Rae looked up at the sky and saw the soft pastels of pre-dawn that she used to think were so pretty. Now the lightening sky filled her with absolute terror. “Oh, Goddess! Help me get up.”

Rephaim grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet, where she stood unsteadily beside him, bent like he was. Drawing a deep breath, she raised her hands, gripped the cold metal of the grate, and pushed. It rattled a little, but didn’t really move.

“How is it stuck up there?” she asked.

“Chained. They hooked chains through the edges of the metal and then padlocked them to anything on the roof that couldn’t be pulled up.”

Stevie Rae pushed against the grate again. Again it rattled, but held firm. She was trapped up on a roof and the sun was rising! Gathering all her strength, she pushed and pulled, gripping the metal and trying to slide it to one side so that maybe she could crawl through. With each second the sky got brighter. Stevie Rae’s skin shivered like a horse trying to twitch off a fly.