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“Hey, that’s not going to happen. ”
Aphrodite wiped her eyes and looked up at Z. “Yeah, not as long as I keep having super hot sex with a vampyre it won’t. ”
“Well, that’s as true as it is gross, but it’s not what I was talking about. That’s not going to happen to you because you aren’t like your mom,” Zoey said carefully. “You’re good and loyal, and you wouldn’t hurt someone you love. ”
“Thanks,” Aphrodite managed to say, wiping her eyes again.
“And don’t call me stupid,” Z said.
“I didn’t call you a retard. I was being nice and politically correct. ” Aphrodite turned back around and started fixing her smeared mascara.
“And yet you still found a reason to say the r word. ” Zoey sighed. “So, you really are okay after losing your dad?”
“Are you really okay after losing your mom?”
Z looked surprised at the question. “I guess I will be. I mean, like you, my mom hadn’t done much mothering in a long time. I was used to her not being around already. ”
“Then I guess I will be okay, too. ”
“If you need someone to talk to, you know you can talk to me, right?”
“Right. Same for you with me. I know you and the bumpkin are close, but she has the perfect mamma and daddy,” Aphrodite put on Stevie Rae’s accent.
“There’s nothing wrong with having good parents. It’s actually normal. ”
Aphrodite snorted. “We’ll have to agree to disagree about that, but that’s not my point. I’m just saying if you need someone else to talk to who has at least one dead parent, I’m here for you. ”
“Thanks, I think. ” Z grabbed a Kleenex and blew her nose loudly. “Why don’t you get all snotty and ugly when you cry?”
“Because I am not as disgusting as you are,” she said.
“Can I take back that nice stuff I said about you?”
“You can try. You’ll be unsuccessful, but you can still try. ” Aphrodite pulled a pair of skinny jeans from a hanger and flipped the switch that started her electronic shoe cabinet to begin turning so that a neat row of boots appeared. She grabbed the red-soled Louboutins. Looking over her shoulder at Z’s gawk she said, “What? You can’t tell me these boots aren’t perfection. ”
“I can’t even look at your boots because your closet is freaking me the heck out. ”
“Which is just one reason you are a fashion disaster. ”
“How did you even think of having that done to your closet?”
“Oh, for shit’s sake, my mom was a nightmare, not fashion impaired. ” Aphrodite rubbed her forehead. “Jesus Christ, that was a slant rhyme, and I did it on purpose. Let’s go. I need a drink and a look at the boy stuff that’s holding our jewels hostage. ”
“Okay, but if you’re not nicer this time, I’m gonna tell Kramisha you like to rhyme, ’cause it makes you feel divine, and it keeps you from livin’ a life of crime. ” Zoey grinned at her. “Heehees!”
“I have no words. ” Shaking her head, Aphrodite followed Zoey, who was giggling like a third grader, down the hall. “And she wonders why I drink…”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Neferet
Mortals would describe what Neferet did as dreaming. They would say they had been having nightmares so vivid that, upon waking, the dreams had stayed with them and even seemed real.
Cocooned in the den of the fox, clothed only in blood and Darkness, Neferet expanded her consciousness, sifting through levels of the seen and unseen worlds, in a quest for survival.
No, the immortal did not dream.
In truth the Tsi Sgili was re-experiencing her life, one event after another—reliving the moments that had culminated in the birth of an immortal, and by thus reliving she hoped to rediscover that which the vision in the mirror had shattered: her purpose and her true self.
Neferet began with the night reflected in the mirror, the moment her innocence had been lost. She once again became sixteen-year-old Emily Wheiler—daughter of a mother who had died just six months earlier—and she relived the night her father had attacked and raped her.
She could smell him: brandy, sour breath, sweat, cigars, and lust. She felt the disgust of knowing what he intended, and the terror of realizing she could not escape him. Then she experienced once again the pain of her beaten and torn body.
Still Emily Wheiler, she fled, bleeding and desperate, to be rejected by her fiancé, but at the same moment saved by the Tracker who Marked her as fledgling and forever altered her destiny.
Safely within the Chicago House of Night, her body healed under the watchful eye of her first mentor. But her mind could not recover. Emily needed vengeance to fully heal. Her mentor’s voice was as clear as it had been that night in 1893.
“…An insatiable need for retribution and vengeance becomes a poison that will taint your life and destroy your soul…”
Her mentor had explained to Emily that she faced the choice between forgetting what her father had done to her and moving on with her new life as a fledgling—or wallowing in self-pity and carrying the scars of what that monster had caused, unable to forget and forgive.
The fledgling who used to be Emily Wheiler did not take either choice.
The Tsi Sgili’s body twitched spasmodically. Her breathing quickened, though she did not awaken. She remained deeply unconscious and utterly in another time—another place—and relived the birth of Neferet, Queen of the Night.
She returned to Wheiler House, the home of her father, as avenger, strangling him to death and claiming her new name, and her new life—without forgiveness, doubt, or self-pity.
Neferet’s hands twitched as the specter of her past fingered the strand of pearls, smooth and deadly, and relived the exhilaration she had felt when she had ended Barrett Wheiler’s pathetic life.
Neferet relived something else as well—she was again filled with the flush of that first kill. She hadn’t tasted his blood. The thought had not entered her mind then, but she had felt the power of ending his breath, of stopping his heartbeat, of knowing she had caused his spirit to flee that broken, mortal shell.
The chill that had paled Neferet’s flawless skin warmed, though ever so slightly.
She relived her escape from Chicago by train, accompanying a small group of vampyres who were scouting new House of Night sites in the west. At the train’s first stop, Emily Wheiler buried her journal. In the dirt of the land that would become Oklahoma, she entombed the only record of what had happened to her. She remembered cutting into that earth with a spade, and opening a wound that was the red of dried bull’s blood and carried with it the scent of the end of all things. With the burial of that sad, pitiable account of innocence lost and rape revenged, Neferet’s new life blazed.
It was not an easy life.
But always within that comet of rebirth was a dark center of comfort that never forsook Neferet. Night was her world, and the shadows in the deepest corners of her world held solace and acceptance and comfort.
The Chicago School Council had decided it was unsafe for fledgling Neferet to return there, and she had been transferred to St. Louis’s Tower Grove House of Night. There her gifts scorched through her.
Neferet curled tightly into herself, reliving the next moment that had defined who she would become.
The cat had been a small, shorthaired black and gray tabby. She would have been too small, too ordinary, too unattractive, for Neferet to have noticed at all, had it not been for her keen intelligence, and the additional toe she had on both of her front paws. It had been winter in St. Louis, frigid and snowy, and young Neferet had thought the little tabby had appeared to be wearing mittens.
The school’s ill-tempered cook had named the cat Chloe, after a human thief who had been caught trying to burgle the school, because she had been unable to keep the feline from breaking into her kitchen, no matter how often she l
ocked windows, and kept a keen eye on the scullery maids with their lackadaisical habit of forgetting to close doors. That day Chloe had pried open a window, scaled a ceiling beam, leaped on the cooling table, and gorged herself on a fresh kidney pie. The vampyre had been throwing the beast from the pantry when Neferet had happened by.
“How ever did she find a way to wear mittens?” young Neferet had exclaimed, as she rescued little Chloe from the snow bank she’d landed in, brushing wet white flakes from dusky fur and smiling as the cat batted at the ties on her ermine-lined cape.
The cook had laughed at Neferet mockingly. “I know you are young, but that is no reason to sound like such a simpleton. Chloe is polydactyl—six toed. Surely you’ve seen our High Priestess and her mate’s cats. All polydactyl. This ugly little runt must be related to them, though I don’t see the resemblance, except in those paws. ” The old vampyre had turned away, still cackling, shaking her head, and muttering, “Mittens on a cat. The child is pretty, but empty-headed…”
Neferet remembered how her face had burned with embarrassment and anger, until Chloe had looked up into her eyes.