Tempted

that is, unless you stood up to the damn bird things. Then they attacked you. We”—she gestured with her goodarm out at the infirmary—“stood up to them. So did Dragon and Anastasia.”
    “They attacked Professor Anastasia while Dragon was fighting a bunch of them down the lane. He wasn’t close enough to help her. He didn’t even see it happening,” Drew said. “I grabbed one of them and pulled it off her, but another one came up behind me.”
    “I grabbed that one,” Denio said. She pointed across the hall. “Ian tried to help when the thing turned on me. The Raven Mocker snapped his leg like a twig.”
    “Ian Bowser?” I asked, sticking my head through the open doorway of the room Denio had pointed to.
    “Yeah, it’s me,” said the scrawny, but kinda cute kid who had one leg propped up and wrapped all the way to his thigh in a cast. He looked way too white against the bleached sheets.
    “That looks like it hurts,” I said. I knew him from drama class. He’d had a massive crush on our teacher, Professor Nolan—before she was murdered a month or so ago.
    “I’ve felt better,” he said, trying to smile.
    “Yeah, we’ve all felt better,” said a girl on a pallet farther down the hallway.
    “Hanna Honeyyeager! I didn’t see you over there,” Damien said, moving around me to go to the girl’s side. I could understand why he hadn’t noticed her before she said something. She was covered by a big white comforter, which she disappeared against because she was seriously the whitest kid I think I’ve ever seen. You know, one of those blondes who had skin so fair it never tanned and she always looked pink-cheeked and either embarrassed or surprised. I only knew her through Damien. I’d heard him talking to her about flowers—apparently the girl was a genius with anything that bloomed. I remembered that about her, and the fact that everyone always called her by her first and last names, kinda like Shannoncompton, only they didn’t run the two together.
    “What happened to you, sweetie?” Damien crouched down beside her and took her hand. Her little blond head was wrapped in a gauze bandage that had a bloody spot near the forehead.
    “When Professor Anastasia was attacked, I screamed at the Raven Mockers. A lot,” she said.
    “She has a seriously shrill voice,” said a kid from the last hospital room, who I couldn’t even see.
    “Well, apparently Raven Mockers don’t like shrill voices,” said Hanna Honeyyeager. “One of them knocked me out.”
    “Hang on.” Erin marched down the hall toward the room of the kid I couldn’t see. “Is that you, T.J.?”
    “Erin!”
    “Oh. My. Goddess!” Erin squealed and rushed into his room.
    Right behind her, Shaunee yelled, “Cole? What about Cole?”
    “He didn’t stand up to them,” T.J. answered in a strained voice, which made Shaunee stop at the open door to his room like she’d been smacked in the face.
    “Didn’t stand up? But . . .” Shaunee’s voice faded, like she was utterly confused.
    “Oh, shit, boy! Look at your hands!” Erin’s exclamation drifted from T.J.’s room.
    “Hands?” I repeated.
    “T.J.’s a boxer. He even placed in the last Summer Games, against vampyres,” Drew explained. “He tried to knock out Rephaim. It didn’t quite work out like he expected, and the bird guy tore up his hands.”
    “
Oh, Goddess, no.”
I heard Stevie Rae say softly, her words filled with horror.
    I was watching Shaunee as she stood outside T.J.’s room, looking like she didn’t know what to do with herself, which gave me a really bad feeling. Cole and T.J. had been best friends, and they’d been dating the Twins. T.J. was seeing Erin; Cole was seeing Shaunee. The two couples had done a lot of hanging out together. All I could think was, “How could one stand up to the Raven Mockers and not the other?”
    “Exactly what I’d like explained to me.” I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until Darius commented.
    The last kid in the hall answered him. “It just happened. The stables caught on fire, then Neferet and Kalona freaked. The RavenMockers went crazy. If you stayed out of their way they didn’t mess with you, which is what we were doing until one of them grabbed Professor Anastasia. Then some of us tried to help her, but most of the fledglings just ran for the dorms.”
    I looked at the kid. She had really pretty red hair and eyes that were bright, gorgeous blue. Both of her biceps were wrapped in gauze,