Betrayed

she turned to face us. I glanced at the clock over the computer. It was 7:06 A.M. on Saturday morning. What was going on?
    "Zoey, this is Detective Marx"—she pointed at the taller of the two men—"and Detective Martin from the homicide division of the Tulsa Police Department. They wanted to ask you a few questions about the human boy who was killed.”
    "Okay," I said, wondering what kind of questions they could possibly want to ask me. Hell, I didn't know anything. I hadn't even known him that well.
    "Miss Montgomery," Detective Marx began, but he was cut neatly off by Neferet.
    "Redbird," she said.
    "Ma'am?”
    "Zoey legally changed her last name to Redbird when she became an emancipated minor upon entrance to our school last month. All of our students are legally emancipated. We find it helpful with the unique nature of our school.”
    The cop gave a short nod. I couldn't tell whether he was annoyed or not, but I guessed by the way he kept looking at Neferet the answer was not.
    "Miss Redbird," he continued, "we have received information that you are acquainted with Chris Ford and Brad Higeons. Is this true?”
    "Yeah, I mean yes," I hastily corrected. Clearly this wasn't a good time to sound like a silly teenager. "I know … well, knew both of them.”
    "What do you mean by knew?" Detective Martin, the shorter cop, said sharply.
    "Well, I mean that I don't hang out with human teenagers anymore, but even before I was Marked I didn't see Chris or Brad much." I wondered what he was so uptight about, and then I realized that because Chris was dead and Brad was missing that my talking about them in the past tense probably sounded really bad.
    "When was the last time you saw the two boys?" Marx asked.
    I chewed my lip, trying to remember. "Not for months—since the beginning of football season, and then I just went to maybe two or three parties and they were there, too.”
    "So you weren't with either boy?”
    I frowned. "No. I was kinda dating the Broken Arrow quarterback. That's the only reason I knew any of those Union guys.” I smiled, trying to lighten things up. "People think Union players hate BA players. It's not really true. Most of them grew up together. A bunch of them are still friends.”
    "Miss Redbird, you've been at the House of Night for how long?" the short cop asked as if I hadn't tried to be pleasant.
    "Zoey has been with us for almost exactly one month," Neferet answered for me.
    "And in that month did either Chris or Brad visit you here?”
    Totally surprised, I said, "No!”
    "Are you saying no human teenagers have visited you here at all?" Martin fired the question quickly.
    Caught off guard I sputtered like a moron and I'm sure looked completely guilty. Thankfully, Neferet saved me.
    "Two friends of Zoey's did see her during her first week here, although I do not believe you'd call it an official visit," she said with a smooth, adult smile aimed at the detectives that clearly said kids will be kids. Then she nodded encouragement at me. "Go ahead and tell them about your two friends who thought it'd be fun to scale our walls.”
    Neferet's green eyes locked on mine. I'd told her all about Heath and Kayla climbing the wall with the ridiculous idea of busting me out. Or at least that had been Heath's idea. Kayla, my ex-best friend, had just wanted me to see that she'd staked a claim on Heath. I'd told Neferet all of that, and more. How I'd kinda accidentally tasted Heath's blood—until Kayla had caught me and totally lost her mind. Staring into Neferet's eyes I knew as sure as if she'd said the words aloud that I was to keep the little blood-tasting incident to myself, which was more than okay with me.
    "There really wasn't much to it, and it was a whole month ago. Kayla and Heath thought they'd sneak in and bust me out." I paused to shake my head like I thought they were totally crazy, and the tall cop jumped in with, "Kayla and Heath who?”
    "Kayla Robinson and Heath Luck," I said. (Yeah, Heath's last name really is Luck, but the only thing he was particularly lucky about is not getting picked up DUI.) "Anyway, Heath is kinda slow sometimes, and Kayla, well, Kayla's really good at shoes and hair, but not so good at common sense. So they hadn't really thought out the whole `Hey, she's turning into a vampyre and if she leaves the House of Night she'll die' issue. So I explained to them that not only did I not want to leave, I couldn't leave. And that was about it.”
    "Nothing unusual