Revealed

as long as I keep having super hot sex with a vampyre it won’t.”
    “Well, that’s as true as it is gross, but it’s not what I was talking about. That’s not going to happen to you because
you aren’t like your mom,
” Zoey said carefully. “You’re good and loyal, and you wouldn’t hurt someone you love.”
    “Thanks,” Aphrodite managed to say, wiping her eyes again.
    “And don’t call me stupid,” Z said.
    “I didn’t call you a retard. I was being nice
and
politically correct.” Aphrodite turned back around and started fixing her smeared mascara.
    “And yet you still found a reason to say the r word.” Zoey sighed. “So, you really are okay after losing your dad?”
    “Are you really okay after losing your mom?”
    Z looked surprised at the question. “I guess I will be. I mean, like you, my mom hadn’t done much mothering in a long time. I was used to her not being around already.”
    “Then I guess I will be okay, too.”
    “If you need someone to talk to, you know you can talk to me, right?”
    “Right. Same for you with me. I know you and the bumpkin are close, but she has the perfect mamma and daddy,” Aphrodite put on Stevie Rae’s accent.
    “There’s nothing wrong with having good parents. It’s actually normal.”
    Aphrodite snorted. “We’ll have to agree to disagree about that, but that’s not my point. I’m just saying if you need someone else to talk to who has at least one dead parent, I’m here for you.”
    “Thanks, I think.” Z grabbed a Kleenex and blew her nose loudly. “Why don’t you get all snotty and ugly when you cry?”
    “Because I am not as disgusting as you are,” she said.
    “Can I take back that nice stuff I said about you?”
    “You can try. You’ll be unsuccessful, but you can still try.” Aphrodite pulled a pair of skinny jeans from a hanger and flipped the switch that started her electronic shoe cabinet to begin turning so that a neat row of boots appeared. She grabbed the red-soled Louboutins. Looking over her shoulder at Z’s gawk she said, “What? You can’t tell me these boots aren’t perfection.”
    “I can’t even look at your boots because your closet is freaking me the heck out.”
    “Which is just one reason you are a fashion disaster.”
    “How did you even think of having that done to your closet?”
    “Oh, for shit’s sake, my mom was a night
mare,
not fashion im
paired.
” Aphrodite rubbed her forehead. “Jesus Christ, that was a slant rhyme, and I did it on purpose. Let’s go. I need a drink and a look at the boy stuff that’s holding our jewels hostage.”
    “Okay, but if you’re not nicer this time, I’m gonna tell Kramisha you like to rhyme, ’cause it makes you feel divine, and it keeps you from livin’ a life of crime.” Zoey grinned at her. “Heehees!”
    “I have no words.” Shaking her head, Aphrodite followed Zoey, who was giggling like a third grader, down the hall. “And she wonders why I drink…”

CHAPTER EIGHT
Neferet
    Mortals would describe what Neferet did as dreaming. They would say they had been having nightmares so vivid that, upon waking, the dreams had stayed with them and even seemed real.
    Cocooned in the den of the fox, clothed only in blood and Darkness, Neferet expanded her consciousness, sifting through levels of the seen and unseen worlds, in a quest for survival.
    No, the immortal did not dream.
    In truth the Tsi Sgili was re-experiencing her life, one event after another—reliving the moments that had culminated in the birth of an immortal, and by thus reliving she hoped to rediscover that which the vision in the mirror had shattered: her purpose and her true self.
    Neferet began with the night reflected in the mirror, the moment her innocence had been lost. She once again became sixteen-year-old Emily Wheiler—daughter of a mother who had died just six months earlier—and she relived the night her father had attacked and raped her.
    She could smell him: brandy, sour breath, sweat, cigars, and lust. She felt the disgust of knowing what he intended, and the terror of realizing she could not escape him. Then she experienced once again the pain of her beaten and torn body.
    Still Emily Wheiler, she fled, bleeding and desperate, to be rejected by her fiancé, but at the same moment saved by the Tracker who Marked her as fledgling and forever altered her destiny.
    Safely within the Chicago House of Night, her body healed under the watchful eye of her first mentor.