Hunted

around and through me and, hopefully, Darius, too. “Spirit, I ask you to cloak us . . . hide us . . . let us blend with the night. Water, fill the air around us, bathe us and conceal us. Fire, I need you just a little—just enough to heat the ice so that it changes to mist forms. But not only around us,” I added quickly. “Go all over the school grounds. Make everything soupy and misty and magical.” I smiled as I felt the elements quivering in anticipation of the task I’d given them.
    “Okay, let’s do this.” I nodded at Darius. He opened the door and, buoyd by wind and spirit and fire, we moved out into the ice storm.
    I’d been right about one thing: the weather was nasty. I’d definitely liked it more looking out from inside the warm, dry building. It had been bad before, but as the elements responded to my command the storm increased in intensity. I glanced around us, trying to discover if the Raven Mockers had noticed us, but the elements were working together well, and Darius and I walked in what felt like the middle of a blinding snow globe turned to ice. The ice and wind were so bad that I would have fallen right on my butt if Darius hadn’t had the reflexes of a cat and somehow managed to keep both of us on our feet.
    Which reminded me, as he and I walked quickly but carefully down the frozen sidewalk, shrouded in a sudden mist that had blown up all around us, heads bent against the icy onslaught, I did not see one single cat. Okay, yeah, the weather was awful, especially after I’d messed with it, and cats don’t like anything wet, but I didn’t remember once in the months I’d lived at the House of Night walking anywhere on campus and not seeing at least a couple cats chasing after each other.
    “There aren’t any cats around,” I said.
    Darius nodded. “I already noticed.”
    “What does it mean?”
    “Trouble,” he said.
    But I didn’t have time to think about what the absence of cats might mean (and to worry about where my Nala might be). I was already feeling the drain of energy. I had to focus all of my strength and concentration to keep a running whispered litany going to wind, fire, and water. “We are the night, let the spirit of night cover us . . . shroud us with mist . . . blow, wind, and keep evil eyes from seeing us . . . ”
    We were almost to the dorm when I heard the girl’s voice. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the high, nervous tone definitely meant that something was wrong. The tension in Darius’s arm, and the way he was peering around, trying to see through the elemental soup surrounding us, told me that he’d heard it, too.
    As we got closer to the dorm, the voice got clearer and louder, and the words began to make sense.
    “No, really! I—I just wanta get back to my room,” the frightened girl’s voice said.
    “You can get back. After I’m done with you.”
    I froze, pulling Darius to a stop with me as I recognized the guy’s voice even before the girl answered him.
    “How about later, Stark? Then maybe we can—” Her words were abruptly cut off. I heard a little scream that ended in a gasp, and then there was an awful wet sound, and the moans began.

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    CHAPTER TWENTY

    Darius started forward, pulling me with him. We got to the little stoop that was the entrance to the girls’ dorm. There were wide stairs, framed with staggered, waist-high stone walls, excellent for sitting on and flirting with your boyfriend after he’d walked you to the door and before he kissed you good night.
    What Stark was doing was a twisted mockery of the good-night kissing that usually went on there. He was holding a girl in what could have been an embrace, had it not been obvious that, just seconds before his teeth had locked on her neck, she’d been trying to get away from him. I watched, horrified, as Stark, oblivious to our presence, continued his attack on her. It didn’t matter that the girl was now moaning with sexual pleasure. I mean, we all know that’s what happens when a vamp bites someone: The sex receptors in both the “victim” (and in this case she was definitely his victim!) and the vamp were stimulated. She was physically feeling pleasure, but her wide, terrified eyes, and the rigidity of her body made it obvious she would fight him if she could. Stark was drinking in huge gulps from her throat. His moans were feral and the hand that wasn’t holding her tight against his body was fumbling at the girl’s skirt, lifting it