"You know you don't deserve it."

"Please, Goddess!" he repeated. His body was shivering vio lently. "Very well, but remember. What a goddess gives, she can also take away." Unable to stop watching, I saw Neferet lift her arm and brush back her sleeve. Then she ran her fingernail up her forearm, leaving a slender scarlet line that immediately began to bead with blood. I felt the draw of her blood. When she held out her arm, offering it to Elliott, I pressed against the rough bark of the tree, forcing myself to stay still and hidden as he fell to his knees before her and, while he made feral grunts and moans, began to suck Nef eret's blood. I tore my eyes from him to look at Neferet. She'd thrown her head back and her lips were parted as if having the grotesque Elliott creature suck the blood from her arm was a sex ual experience. Deep within me I felt an answering desire. I wanted to slice open someone's skin and .. . No! I ducked completely behind the tree. I would not become a monster. I would not be a freak. I couldn't let this thing control me. Slowly and silently I started back the way I'd come, refusing to look at the two of them again.

Chapter Seventeen

I was still feeling shaky, confused, and more than a little sick to my stomach when I finally got to the dorm. Clusters of damp kids pooled around the main room watching TV and drinking hot chocolate. I grabbed a towel from a stack by the door and joined Stevie Rae, the Twins, and Damien sitting around our favorite TV watching Project Runway, and started drying a grumbling Nala. Stevie Rae didn't realize I was being uncharacteristically quiet. She was too busy gushing about how the snowball fight I'd avoided earlier had morphed into a major battle after dinner that had raged until someone had thrown a snowball that had hit one of the win dows of Dragon's office. Dragon was what everyone called the fencing professor, and he was not a vamp any fledgling would want to piss off. "Dragon ended the snow war." Stevie Rae giggled. "But it was real fun until then."

"Yeah, Z, you missed one hellacious wicked fight," Erin said. "We knocked the crap outta Damien and his boyfriend," Shaunee said. "He's not my boyfriend!" Damien said, but his little smile seemed to add an unspoken "yet" to the end of the sentence. "What ..."

"... ever," said the Twins. "I think he's cute," Stevie Rae said. "Me, too," Damien said, turning adorably pink. "What do you think of him, Zoey?" Stevie Rae asked. I blinked at Stevie Rae. It was like I was inside a fishbowl in the middle of a typhoon, and everyone else was on the outside clue lessly enjoying lovely weather. "Is everything okay, Zoey?" Damien said.

"Damien, can you get me some eucalyptus?" I said abruptly "Eucalyptus?" I nodded. "Yeah, some strands of it, and some sage, too. I need both for the ritual tomorrow."

"Yeah, no problem," Damien said, watching me entirely too closely. "Did you get the ritual all figured out, Z?" Stevie Rae asked. "I think so." I paused and took a long breath. Then I met Damien's questioning gaze steadily. "Damien, has there ever been a case of a fledgling who seemed to have died, but later was found alive?" To his credit, Damien didn't freak or ask me if I had gone in sane. I could feel that the Twins and Stevie Rae were staring at me like I'd just announced I was going to be on Girls Gone Wild: Vamp Edition, but I ignored them and kept focused on Damien. We all knew he spent hours studying, and he remembered every thing he read. If any of us would know the answer to my bizarre question, it would be him. "When a fledgling's body starts rejecting the Change there is no stopping it. That's clear in all the books. It's also what Neferet has told us. Zoey," I'd never heard him sound so serious. "What is wrong?"

"Please, please, please tell me you're not feeling sick!" Stevie Rae practically sobbed. "No! It's nothing like that," I said quickly. "I'm fine. I promise."

"What's going on?" Shaunee said. "You're scaring us," Erin said. "I don't mean to," I told them. "Okay, this is coming out all wrong, but I think I saw that Elliott kid."

"Huh!"

"What!" the Twins said together. "I don't understand," Damien said. "Elliott died last month." Stevie Rae's eyes suddenly widened. "Like Elizabeth!" she said. Before I could say anything, she blurted, in one long, breathless sentence, "Last month Zoey thought she saw Elizabeth's ghost out by the east wall but we didn't say anything 'cause we didn't want to scare y'all." I opened my mouth to explain about Elliott--and Neferet. And shut it again. I should have realized before I'd said one word to any of them that I absolutely could not tell them about Neferet. Vampyres were all intuitive to some degree. High Priestess Nef eret was amazingly intuitive. So much so that she often seemed to be able to read actual thoughts. No way could my four friends walk around school knowing that I'd seen her letting some kind of disgusting undead Elliott creature suck her blood without Nef eret knowing everything in their freaked-out minds. What I'd witnessed tonight I would have to keep completely to myself. "Zoey?" Stevie Rae put her hand on my arm. "You can tell us." I smiled at her and wished with all my heart that I could. "I did think I saw Elizabeth's ghost last month. And tonight I think I saw Elliott's," I finally said. Damien frowned. "If you saw ghosts why did you ask me about fledglings recovering from rejecting the Change?"