"It's French for something being skewered, usually food, cretins. `The world going insane and evil letting slip the birds of war'"--he raised his brows at the Twins as he deliberately misquoted Shakespeare, obviously expecting them to recognize it, which they just as obviously didn't--"does not excuse sloppy vocabulary." Then he turned back to Darius. "Oh, I did find these in a not-so-sanitary pile of tools." And lifted what looked like giant scissors.

"Bring the wire cutters and the first aid kit here," Darius said in an all-business voice.

"What are you going to do with the wire cutters?" Jack asked.

"I'm going to cut the quill end of the arrow off so that I can pull it the rest of the way through the priestess's body. Then she can begin to heal," Darius said simply.

Jack gasped and fell back against Damien, who put an arm around him. Duchess, the yellow Lab who had become completely attached to Jack since her original own er, a fledgling kid named James Stark, had died and then un-died and shot an arrow through Stevie Rae as part of an evil plot to let loose Kalona, a nasty fallen angel (yes, looking back on it I see that it's complex and even kinda confusing, but that seems to be typical for evil plots), whined and leaned against his leg.

Oh, Jack and Damien are a couple. Which means they're g*y teenagers. Hello. It happens. More often than you'd expect. Wait, scratch that. It happens more often than parents expect.

"Damien, maybe you and Jack could, uh, go back to that kitchen you found and see if you can whip up something for us to eat," I said, trying to think up things for them to do that didn't include staring at Stevie Rae. "I'll bet we'd all feel better if we ate something."

"I'd probably puke," Stevie Rae said. "That is, unless it's blood." She tried to shrug apologetically, but broke off the movement with a gasp and turned even whiter than her already totally pale complexion.

"Yeah, not really hungry over here, either," Shaunee said, gawking at the arrow that was poking out of Stevie Rae's back with the same kind of fascination that made people rubberneck at car wrecks.

"Ditto, Twin," Erin said. She was looking everywhere but at Stevie Rae.

I was just opening my mouth to tell them I really didn't care if they were hungry or not, I just wanted to keep them busy and away from Stevie Rae for a while when Erik Night hurried into the room.

"Got it!" he said. He was holding a really old combo CD-cassette-radio that was humongous. It was one of those things they used to call boom boxes way back in the day. Like the 1980s. Without looking at Stevie Rae, he set it on the table that was close to her and Darius and started fiddling with the ginormic, glaringly silver knobs, muttering that he hoped it could pick up something down here.

"Where's Venus?&rdqu C Ke if they o; Stevie Rae asked Erik. It obviously hurt for her to talk, and her voice had gone all shaky.

Erik had glanced back toward the round, blanket-draped entrance to the room that served as a door, which was empty. "She was right behind me. I thought she'd come in here and--" Then he did look at Stevie Rae, and his words fell away. "Ah, man, that must really hurt," he said softly. "You look bad, Stevie Rae."

She tried, and failed, to smile at him. "Well, I've felt better. I'm glad Venus helped you out with the boom box. Sometimes we can actually get some of the radio stations down here."

"Yeah, that's what Venus said," Erik said vaguely. He was staring at the arrow sticking out of Stevie Rae's bare back.

Even through my worry about Stevie Rae I'd started to wonder about the absent Venus and tried like hell to remember what she looked like. Last time I'd gotten a really good look at the red fledglings, they hadn't been "red" yet, which means the outline of a crescent moon in the middle of their foreheads had still been sapphire-colored like all fledglings' tattoos are when they're first Marked. But these fledglings died. Then un-died. And they had all been bloodsucking, crazed monsters until Stevie Rae went through a type of Change. Somehow Aphrodite's humanity (who knew she had any?) mixed with the power of the five elements--all of which I can control--and voil?! Stevie Rae got her humanity back, along with some gorgeous adult vampyre tattoos that look like vines and flowers framing her face. But instead of the tattoo being dark blue, it had turned red. As in the color of fresh blood. When that happened to Stevie Rae, all the undead-dead kids' fledgling tattoos had turned red, too. And they got their humanity back. In theory. I really hadn't been around them or Stevie Rae enough since her Change to know for sure that everything was one hundred percent with all of them. Oh, and Aphrodite lost her Mark--totally. So she's supposedly human again, even though she still has visions.