"We can have a truce," I said, looking at Rephaim and forcing him to meet my gaze. "But that's not peace. It's also not trusting him and telling him our business. You gotta get that straight in your head, Rephaim, or you need to leave with him right now."

"I stay with Stevie Rae," he said.

"Then remember whose side you're on," I said.

"You may rest assured that I will not let him forget that," Kalona said.

"Yeah, and you should know that Rephaim has a whole bunch of people who care about him, and we won't let him be used by you." Kalona ignored me and spoke to his son instead. "If you need me, look to the west and follow our blood." He started to spread his wings.

"Remember that you are my son, because I can assure you those around you will never forget it." He leaped into the sky and with a few powerful strokes of his wings Kalona disappeared into the night.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zoey

So, I ended up cutting first hour. I mean, seriously. No way was I up to sitting there and letting Neferet take passive-aggressive shots at me after the whole Kalona/Rephaim thing. Instead I sent Rephaim to class (and told him to tell the professor he'd been in the bathroom) and then found a shadowy seat not far from the stables. I needed time to sit and think. By myself.

Kalona said he wanted a truce with us, which I figured was pretty much bull poopie. The truth probably was that he wanted to use Rephaim to infiltrate our ranks and mess us up-and that sounded like I thought the nerd herd and I were turning into a redneck Okie paramilitary group. I sighed. Why couldn't those groups be more attractive? Which made me think about the inbred panther people on True Blood and how stupid Jason was. Jeesh, I needed to rewatch season three. I was totally behind on season four ...

"hello, Zoey. Focus," I told myself.

So, Kalona is pretending like he wants a truce. Rephaim believes him because that kid has a bad case of I-want-my-dad-to-love-me. Stevie Rae is gonna be pissed when she finds out he's been talking to Rephaim, which I totally understood. She wanted to protect Rephaim's feelings, and Kalona + a new and improved Rephaim = train wreck.

And then there was the whole bad red fledglings returning to school and pretending not to be raving lunatics and kill ers. Ugh, just ugh. Thinking about the fights in the halls that was going to cause gave me a headache.

Throw into the mix the fact that Stark still wasn't sleeping well, Neferet's new Consort was a bull (Eew, that couldn't mean what it sounded like it meant, could it?), and the Aurox kid/whatever who made me feel uber weird-scared and anxious and just downright freaked-and the whole school seemed to be a bomb waiting to explode.

I stared up at the moon. "Plus," I said quietly, as if speaking directly to the shining crescent, "in six days I have to go perform a cleansing ritual on my grandma's land because my mom was killed there."

I blinked hard. I was not going to cry. Again. I was just going to sit out here in the moonlight until it was time for me to go to drama class second hour.

As if I didn't have enough drama in my life already.

"Well," I told the moon. "At least my soul isn't shattered anymore and I'm not a sleepless Otherworld almost-ghost." Right on the heels of that cheery thought I spoke aloud the very next thing that came into my mind: "I miss Heath so much." The words were still in the air around me when the small place in the middle of my chest began to warm. With a terrible sense of rubbernecking at an accident my gaze was pulled from the serene moon to the wall that framed the House of Night. Aurox was jogging along the school side of the wall. Even from this distance I could see that he was alert and searching for possible trouble, his gaze scanning around and up. He even looked like he was sniffing the air. He was coming toward me, though not directly so. My bench was several yards closer to the school from the wall and hidden in the shadows under the big trees, and he hadn't seen me. But he wasn't sticking to the shadows. He jogged in the open and even though the moon was not full, the night was clear and the fat crescent gave off enough silver-blue light that, as he approached, I could see his face.

Aurox was definitely what any girl would call hot. Well, any girl who didn't know he was some kind of killer creature in a boy skin suit. Then I remembered how a bunch of the fledglings had made over him after he'd killed the Raven Mocker. Guess they didn't care whether his skin was a suit or for real. It felt like something was crawling up my spine and I gave a little shudder. I cared. I cared a lot about what was beneath the skin.

His eyes were super strange. I'd noticed them before. Ironically enough, in this light they reminded me of the moon, or at least of those rocks called moonstones-only his eyes glistened, almost glowed.