Hunted

of the bottom-feeding Mockers whose ability to speak wasn’t nearly as refined as Rephaim’s. “You ssssmell like ssssummer.” It opened its dark beak and I saw the forked tongue that flicked out hungrily, like it was tasting my scent.
    Okay. Enough was enough. Neferet had scared the bejeezus out of me. And now this . . . this . . . bird boy was going to try to bully me, too? Oh. Hell. No.
    “Alright, I am sick and tired of you freaks and the way you and your daddy and nasty Neferet think you can take over everything.”
    “Father ssssays, find Zzzzzoey, and I find Zzzzzoey. Father ssssays, watch Zzzzzoey. I watch Zzzzzoey.”
    “No. No. No! If I wanted a pain-in-the-butt dad to follow me around and check up on me, I’d call the Step-loser. So to you, your daddy, the rest of your bird-boy brothers, and even to Neferet, I say: Get. Off. My. Back!” I lifted my hands and flung fire at him. He screeched and took off, flapping wildly and flying erratically out of the tree and away from me as fast as he could go, leaving behind the scent of singed feathers and silence.
    “You know, it’s not smart to antagonize them,” a voice said. “They’re normally annoying. Once you ruffle their feathers they’re really hard to get along with.”
    I turned back to the stable building to see Stark standing in the open door.

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    CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

    “See, that’s one of the differences between you and me. You want to get along with them. I don’t. So I don’t care if I piss them off.” I told Stark. I channeled what was left of my fear and turned it into anger. “And you know what? Right now I really don’t want to hear anything more about it.” Still sounding pissed, I added, “Did you see that?”
    “That? You mean the Raven Mocker?”
    “I mean the disgusting spiders.”
    He looked surprised. “There were spiders in the tree? For real?”
    I blew out a long, frustrated breath. “Lately I’m not sure I can tell you what’s for real and what’s made up around here.”
    “I did see you being pretty pissed off and tossing fire around like a beach ball.”
    I saw his eyes travel down to my hands and realized that not only were they shaking, but they were still glowing with the aura of flame. I drew a deep, calming breath and willed the shaking to stop. Then, in a much calmer voice, I said, “Thank you, fire. You may depart now. Oh, wait. First, could you get rid of some of that ice for me?” I pointed my flame-shining hands at the section of sidewalk between where I stood and the stable, and like a lovely miniature flamethrower, fire jubilantly spouted from my fingertips, and gaily licked against the thick coating of ice, causing it to turn to cold, wet mush. But at least the mush wasn’t slippery. “Thank you, fire!” I called as the flames died from my fingers and sped away to the south.
    I trudged through the water and ice muck and tromped past Stark, who was staring at me. “What?” I said. “I was tired of almost falling and breaking my butt.”
    “You’re really something, you know.” He grinned his cocky, cute Bad Boy smile, and before I could blink, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. It wasn’t a groping, intrusive kiss filled with possessiveness like I’d been experiencing with Erik. Stark’s kiss was more of a sweet question mark, which I answered with a definite exclamation point.
    Sure, I should have been pissed. I should have pushed him away and told him off instead of kissing him back (enthusiastically). I’d like to be able to say that my semi-ho-ish reaction to him was because I’d had so much stress and fear in my life lately that I needed to escape, and his arms were the easiest escape available, which would imply I wasn’t actually totally responsible for the fact that I was sucking face with Stark right there in the doorway to the stables.
    The truth is less flattering, and yet is still the truth. I didn’t kiss him because of stress, or fear, or escape, or because of anything except the fact that I wanted to kiss him. I like him. Really, really like him. I didn’t know what I was going to do about him. I didn’t know where he would fit in my life—or even how he would fit in my life, especially if I was ashamed to admit my feelings for him in public. I could only imagine the freak-out it would cause among my friends. Not to mention the zillion pissed-off pod girls who would . . .
    And thinking about the zillion pod girls Stark had been biting and