"Fine, whatever." Our eyes met in the mirror, and I was almost sure I saw fear in Aphrodite's gaze. Then she went back to work fixing her face.

Feeling utterly confused, I tried to pick up where the conversation had gotten way weird. "So, what's the deal with you saying Aphrodite isn't normal? And I don't mean her abnormally bad attitude," I hastily added.

"Easy-peasy," Stevie Rae said. "Aphrodite still has visions, and visions aren't normal for humans." She gave Aphrodite a so there look. "Go ahead. Tell Zoey."

Aphrodite turned from the mirror and sat on the little stool I kept close by. She ignored Stevie Rae and said, "Yeah, I still have my visions. Whoop-tee-fucking-do. The only thing I didn't like about being a fledgling is the only thing I get to keep now that I'm a stupid human again."

I looked more closely at Aphrodite, seeing through the I'm all that fa?ade she liked to throw up. She was pale, and there were dark circles beneath the cover-up she had slathered under here yes. Yes, she definitely looked like a girl who had just gone through a bunch of crap, and some of it could be one of her draining, life-changing visions. No wonder she was being such a bitch; I was a moron not to have noticed it before then.

"What did you see in the vision?" I asked her.

Aphrodite met my gaze with a steady one of her own and for a moment let down the steel wall of arrogance she liked to keep around her like a shield. A terrible, haunted shadow crossed her beautiful face, and her hand shook as she raised it to brush a strand of blond hair behind her ear. "I saw vampyres slaughtering humans and humans killing vampyres right back. I saw a world filled with violence and hatred and darkness. And in the darkness I saw creatures that were so horrible, I couldn't tell what they were. I--I couldn't even keep looking at them. I saw the end of everything." Aphrodite's voice was as haunted as her face.

"Tell her the rest of it," Stevie Rae prompted her when Aphrodite paused, and I was surprised by the sudden gentleness in her voice. "Tell her why all of that was happening."

When Aphrodite spoke, I felt her words as if they had been shards of glass she'd smashed into my heart.

"I saw all of it happening because you were dead, Zoey. Your death made it happen."

Chapter Five

"Ah, hell," I said, and then my knees gave way and I had to sit down on my bed. My ears had an odd buzzing sound in them, and it was hard for me to breathe.

"You know it doesn't mean it'll come true for sure," Stevie Rae said, patting me on the shoulder. "I mean, Aphrodite saw your grandmamma, Heath, and even me dying. Well, I mean me dying a second time. And none of those things happened. So we can stop it." She looked up at Aphrodite. "Right?"

Aphrodite fidgeted uneasily.

"Ah, hell," I said for a second time. Then I forced myself to talk around the big lump of fear that had lodged in the middle of my throat. "There's something different about the vision you had of me, isn't there?"

"It could be because I'm human," she said slowly. "It's the only vision I've had since turning back into a human, so, yeah, it doesn't seem too wrong that it would feel different than the ones I had when I was a fledgling."

"But?" I prompted.

She shrugged and finally met my eyes. "But it did feel different."

"Like how?"

"Well, it felt more confusing--more emotional--more jumbled up. And I literally didn't understand some of what I saw. I mean, I didn't recognize the horrible things that were seething around in the darkness."

"Seething?" I shivered. "That doesn't sound good."

"It wasn't. I was seeing shadows inside shadows inside darkness. It was like ghosts were turning back into living things, but the things they were turning back into were too terrible for me to look at."

"You mean like not human or vampyre?"

"Yeah, that's what I mean."

Automatically I rubbed my hand, and a skittering of fear slithered through my body. "Ah, hell."

"What?" Stevie Rae said.

"Tonight there was something that, well, kinda attacked me when I was walking from the stables to the cafeteria. It was some kind of cold shadow thing that came from the darkness."

"That can't be good," Stevie Rae said.

"You were alone?" Aphrodite asked, her voice sounding flintlike.

"Yes," I said.

"Okay, that's the problem," Aphrodite said.

"Why? What else did you see in your vision?" "Well, you died a couple different ways, which is not something I've ever seen before."