Betrayed

squint my eyes against the sudden pain in my head. "I don't remember," I managed to say through the pounding in my temples. I could feel his sharp gaze on me. I met the detective's eyes and remembered him telling me about his twin sister, the vamp who still loved him. He'd said I could trust him, and I believed him. "Something's wrong," I admitted. "My memory is messed up.”
    "Okay," he said slowly. "Start with the last thing you can easily remember.”
    "I was grooming Persephone and all of a sudden I knew where Heath was, and that he was going to die if I didn't go get him.”
    "You two have Imprinted?" My surprise must have been easy to read, because he smiled and continued. "My sister and I talk, and I've been curious about vamp stuff, especially right after she first Changed." He shrugged as if it was no big deal for a human to know all sorts of vampyre info. "We're twins, so we're used to sharing everything. A change of species just didn't make that much difference to us." He glanced sideways at me again. "You have Imprinted, haven't you?”
    "Yeah, Heath and I have Imprinted. That's how I knew where he was." I left out the stuff about Aphrodite. No way did I feel up to explaining the whole her-visions-are-real-but-Neferet-has-been...
    "Ah!" This time I gasped aloud at the agony inside my head.
    "Deep, calming breaths," Marx said, shooting me worried looks whenever he could take his eyes from the treacherous road. "I said whatever was easy for you to remember.”
    "No, it's okay. I'm okay. I want to do this.”
    He still looked worried, but continued with his questioning. "All right, you knew Heath was in trouble, and you knew where he was. So, why didn't you just call me and tell me to go to the depot?”
    I tried to remember and pain shot through my head, but along with the pain came anger. Something had happened to my mind. Someone had messed with my mind. And that really pissed me off. I rubbed my temples and gritted my teeth against the pain.
    "Maybe we should stop for a while.”
    "No! Just let me think," I gasped. I could remember the stables and Aphrodite. I could remember that Heath needed me, and the wild, snowy ride on Persephone to the depot basement. But when I tried to remember past the basement the agony that speared through my head became too much for me.
    "Zoey!" Detective Marx's concern penetrated through my pain.
    "Something has messed with my mind." I wiped tears I hadn't realized I'd shed from my face.
    "Pieces of your memory are gone.”
    It didn't sound like a question, but I nodded anyway.
    He was silent for a while. It seemed he was concentrating on the deserted, snow-covered road, but I thought I knew better, and his next words told me I was right.
    "My sister"—he smiled and glanced at me—"her name is Anne, warned me once that if I ever pissed off a High Priestess I would be in serious trouble because they had ways of erasing things, and what she meant by things was people and memories." He glanced from the road to me again, and this time his smile was gone. "So, I guess the question is: what have you done to piss off a High Priestess?”
    "I don't know. I ..." My voice trailed off as I thought about what he'd said. I didn't try to remember what had happened that night. Instead, I let my memory drift lazily backward ... to Aphrodite and the fact that Nyx was still blessing her with visions, even though Neferet had spread the word that her visions were false ... to the small, almost imperceptible sense of wrongness that had grown like a fungus around Neferet, until it culminated Sunday night in her undermining the decisions I'd made for the Dark Daughters … to the nasty scene I'd witnessed between Neferet and … and ... I braced myself against the heat that was starting to throb through my head and, along with a flash of piercing pain, remembered the creature Elliott had become feeding from the High Priestess's blood.
    "Stop the truck!" I yelled.
    "We're almost at the school, Zoey.”
    "Now! I'm going to be sick.”
    We slid to the side of the empty road. I opened the door and dropped to the snowy street, staggered to the ditch, and puked up my guts into a snowbank. Detective Marx was beside me, pulling back my hair and sounding very dadlike as he told me to breathe and everything would be okay. I gulped air and finally stopped heaving. He handed me a handkerchief, one of those old-fashioned linen ones that was folded neatly into a clean square.
    "Thanks." I tried to hand it