"Venus, you need a lot more than a gold card to fix the mess you've turned into." Sarcasm shot out of the shadows of the tunnel in front of them. "Look at you - you're all tame and boring. And I used to think you had seriously cool potential."

Venus, along with Stevie Rae and the rest of her fledglings, came to a halt. "I'm tame and boring?"

Venus's laugh was as sarcastic as Nicole's voice. "So your idea of seriously cool must be ripping out people's throats. Please. That can't even be attractive."

"Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it," Nicole said, tucking aside the blanket that had been resting across the entryway to the kitchen.

She was framed in the doorway by lanternlight from within. She looked thinner - harder than Stevie Rae remembered her looking. Starr and Kurtis stood a little way behind her, and behind them at least a dozen red-eyed fledglings gathered, glaring at them maliciously.

Stevie Rae took one step forward. Nicole's mean, red-tinged eyes darted from Venus to her.

"Oh, did you come back to play some more?" Nicole said.

"I'm not playin' with you, Nicole. And you're done 'playing' " - she air quoted the word - "with people

around here."

"You can't tell us what to do!" the words exploded from Nicole. Behind her, Starr and Kurtis bared their teeth and made noises that were more snarls than laughter. The fledglings in the kitchen stirred restlessly.

It was then that Stevie Rae saw it. It hung near the ceiling over the rogue fledglings like a wavering sea of blackness that seemed to pool and write like a ghost made of nothing but darkness.

Darkness . . .

Stevie Rae swallowed down the bile of fear and forced her eyes to focus on Nicole. She knew what she had to do. She needed to end this now, before Darkness got a better hold than it already had on them.

Instead of responding to Nicole, Stevie Rae drew a deep, cleansing breath and said, "Earth, come to me!" When she felt the ground beneath her feet and the curved sides of the tunnel around her begin to warm, she turned her attention to Nicole.

"As usual, you have it wrong, Nicole. I'm not gonna tell you what to do." Stevie Rae spoke in a calm, reasonable voice. She knew from Nicole's widened eyes that she was probably taking on that green glow that had surrounded her at the House of Night, and she began lifting her hands, drawing more of the rich, vibrant energy of her element to her. "I'm gonna give you a choice, and then y'all are gonna take the consequences for what you choose. Just like all of us have to."

"How about you choose to take your pu**y asses back to the House of Night with the rest of the spineless f**ks who call themselves vampyres," Nicole said.

"You know I ain't no pu**y," Dallas said, stepping closer to Stevie Rae.

"Neither am I," rumbled Johnny B from behind Dallas.

"Nicole, I never did like you much. I always thought you had you a bad case of head-up-your-ass-itis.

Now I'm sure of it," Kramisha said, moving up to stand closer to Stevie Rae's other side. "And I do not like the way you talkin' to our High Priestess."

"Kramisha, I do not give one single shit for what you like or don't like. And she ain't my High Priestess!" Nicole shouted, spraying white spittle from her lips.

"Seriously gross," Venus said. "You might want to rethink this whole evil-fledgling thing. It's making you ugly, in more ways than one."

"Power is never ugly, and I have power," Nicole said.

Stevie Rae didn't have to look up to tell that the Darkness seeping from the ceiling of the kitchen was getting thicker.

"Okay, that's enough. Y'all clearly can't be nice, so this needs to be done. Here's your choice - and each of you need to make it for yourself." Stevie Rae looked behind Nicole as she spoke, meeting each set of glowing scarlet eyes, hoping beyond hope that she might get through to at least one of them. "You can embrace Light. If you do, that means you choose goodness and the way of the Goddess, and you can stay here with us. We'll be starting back to school at the House of Night Monday, but we'll be livin'

here in our tunnels, where we're surrounded by earth and we feel comfortable and all. Or you can keep choosing Darkness." Stevie Rae saw Nicole's little jerk of surprise when she gave a name to it. "Yeah, I know all about Darkness. And I can tell you that messin' with it, in any way, is a major mistake. But if that's your choice, then you're gonna have to leave here, alone, and not return."