Hunted

up until then, and been walking and talking and mostly conscious, she was quickly fading into a ghostly white nothing before our eyes.
    “Ready, Zoey?” Darius asked, making me jump.
    Fear had made my teeth chatter so hard that I barely managed to stutter, “Y-yeah.”
    “Stevie Rae?” he said gently. “Are you prepared?”
    “As I’ll ever be, I guess. But I can tell you I really wish stuff like this would quit happenin’ to me.”
    “Aphrodite?” He’d looked to her next.
    Aphrodite moved so that she was kneeling on the floor in front of the bed and took both of Stevie Rae’s forearms in a strong handhold. “Try not to flail too much,” she told Stevie Rae.
    “I’ll do my best.”
    “On three,” Darius said, with the shears poised to close on the feather end of the arrow. “One . . . two . . . three!”
    Then everything happened fast. He’d clipped off the end of the arrow like he’d just cut through a tiny twig.
    “Cover it!” He barked the command at me, and I’d pressed the gauze against the inch or so of arrow that still stuck out of the front of Stevie Rae’s chest squarely between her boobies while he moved around behind her. Stevie Rae’s eyes had been squeezed closed. She was breathing in short little panting gasps again, and sweat was beading her face. “Again on three, only this time you push against the end of the arrow,” Darius said. I’d wanted to stop everything and scream No, let’s just wrap her up and take our chances getting her to a hospital, but Darius had already begun counting. “One . . . two . . . three!”
    I shoved against the hard, newly sliced end of the arrow as Darius, bracing himself with one hand against Stevie Rae’s shoulder, pulled the arrow from her body with one swift, awful-sounding, jerk.
    Stevie Rae did scream. So did I. So did Aphrodite. And then Stevie Rae slumped forward into my arms.
    “Keep the gauze pressed against the wound.” Darius quickly and efficiently cleaned the newly exposed hole in Stevie Rae’s back.
    I remembered repeating over and over, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s out now. It’s all over now . . . ”
    Looking back, I remember that Aphrodite and I had both been sobbing. Stevie Rae’s head had been pressed against my shoulder, so I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel wetness leaking down my shirt. When Darius lifted her gently and laid her back on the bed so that he could dress the entry wound I felt a jolt of pure fear stab through me.
    I’d never seen anyone look as pale as Stevie Rae—anyone who was still alive, that is. Her eyes were squeezed tight shut, but red-tinged tears made horrible tracks down her cheeks, the slight pink in stark contrast to her almost transparent colorless skin.
    “Stevie Rae? Are you okay?” I could see her chest rising and falling, but she hadn’t opened her eyes and she wasn’t making any noise.
    “I’m . . . still . . . here.” She whispered the words with long pauses between them. “But . . . kinda . . . floating . . . above . . . y’all.”
    “She’s not bleeding,” Aphrodite said in a low voice.
    “She has nothing left to bleed,” Darius said as he taped the gauze to her chest.
    “The arrow missed her heart,” I said. “Its purpose wasn’t to kill her. It was to bleed her.”
    “We are lucky, indeed, that the fledgling missed his mark,” Darius said.
    His words still went round and round inside my head because I knew what none of the rest of them did, that it was impossible for Stark to miss his mark. His gift from Nyx had been that his aim was always true, that he always hit whatever it was he aimed at, even if that sometimes had horrible consequences. Our Goddess had told me herself that once she gave a gift, she never took it back, so even though Stark had died and then come back as a twisted version of himself, he still would have hit her heart and killed Stevie Rae if that had been his intention. So did that mean there was more of Stark’s humanity left than there had seemed to be? He’d called my name; he’d recognized me. I’d shivered, reliving the chemistry that had sparked between us right before he died.
    “Priestess? Did you not hear me?” Darius and Aphrodite had been staring at me.
    “Oh, sorry. Sorry. I was distracted by . . . ” I hadn’t wanted to explain that I was thinking about the guy who had almost killed my best friend. I still didn’t want to explain that.
    “Priestess, I was saying, if Stevie Rae doesn’t get