Hunted

ripped the top of my dress in half so that I felt the cool air of the tunnel against my blood-drenched skin.
    “Sweet Goddess, no!” Erik blurted.
    “Ah, shit!” Heath was shaking his head back and forth. “This is bad. Really bad. No one can live with—”
    “No human can live with this kind of wound, but she’s not a human and I’m not going to let her die.” Darius interrupted Heath as he (thankfully) covered my naked boobs with the sheet.
    I made the mistake of glancing down. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t have the energy to scream. There was a long laceration that went all the way from the top of my left shoulder, across my chest a couple of inches above my breasts, and didn’t end until it sliced through the skin on my right shoulder. The cut was deep and jagged. The edges of my skin flapped sickeningly apart, showing way more muscle and fat and layers of skin than I was ever meant to see. Blood seeped from all along the terrible wound, but not as much blood as I would expect. Was that because I was running out of it? Hell! It was probably because I was running out! My breath started to come in hysterical little pants.
    “Zoey, look at me,” Erik said. When I kept staring down at the wound Darius was pressing thick pads of gauze against, Erik took my chin gently in his hand and turned my face up, forcing me to look at him. “You’re going to be fine. You have to be fine.”
    “Yeah, Zo. Just don’t look at it,” Heath said. “You know, like you told me whenever I messed myself up playing football. You used to say, ‘Just don’t look at it and it won’t hurt so bad.’ ”
    Erik let loose of my chin and I managed to nod. Had I been able to talk I would have told both of them Hell no, I’m not looking at it again! I’d already scared the crap out of myself. No need to revisit it.
    “Get that circle cast,” Darius said.
    “We’re ready,” Damien said.
    I looked around (definitely avoiding glancing down at myself again) to see that Damien, Stevie Rae, and the Twins had taken their positions in a circle around us.
    “Then get it cast!” Darius snapped.
    There was a pause into which Erin finally spoke. “But Zoey always casts the circles. We never have.”
    “I’ll do it.” Aphrodite stepped within the circle and marched over to Damien. Damien gave her a look that even I could see was filled with doubt. “You don’t have to be a fledgling or a vampyre to cast a circle. All you have to be is attached to Nyx. And I’m attached to Nyx,” she said firmly. “But I need you guys to be behind me on this. Are you?”
    Damien paused long enough to look at me. With an effort that seemed to sap the last of my strength, I nodded at him. He smiled at me and nodded back.
    “I’m behind you,” Damien told Aphrodite.
    Aphrodite looked from him to the Twins. “We’re with you, too.” Erin spoke for both of them.
    Finally she turned to Stevie Rae, who wiped her eyes, sent me a big, confident smile, and then she said to Aphrodite, “You’ve saved my life twice. I’m trusting that you can do the same for Zoey.”
    I saw Aphrodite’s face flush, her chin lift, and her shoulders straighten and knew that for the first time in a very long time she felt like an accepted part of a group.
    “Okay, let’s do this,” Aphrodite said. “It’s the first element, the one we all embrace from our first breaths to our last. I call wind to the circle!” Sure enough, I saw a sudden breeze begin to lift Aphrodite’s and Damien’s hair, and with a look of obvious relief, she moved clockwise around the circle to Shaunee.
    And then I stopped paying attention—or rather my attention started to narrow, getting all gray and tunnel-vision-like around the edges.
    “Zoey, are you still with us?” Darius asked as he pressed more gauze against my chest.
    I couldn’t answer him. My head felt really light, but the rest of my body was unbelievably heavy, like some moron had parked a Mack truck on top of me.
    “Z?” Erik was saying. “Z, look at me!”
    “Zoey? Babe?” Heath looked like he was going to cry again.
    Okay, I really wanted to say something to make them feel better, but it just wasn’t possible. I couldn’t make my body work anymore. It was like I’d become a distant spectator in the game that was going on around me. I could watch, but I couldn’t play.
    “All the elements but spirit have been evoked,” Aphrodite said. She was standing beside Darius. “That’s the element