Untamed

dead," I blurted.
    "What?"
    "How?"
    I looked up at Aphrodite. "Two days ago. It was like Professor Nolan. Loren was beheaded and crucified and nailed to the front gate of the school with a note that quoted some terrible Bible verse about him being detestable staked through his heart." I spoke very fast, wanting to get the taste of the terrible words out of my mouth.
    "Oh no!" Aphrodite turned a yucky shade of white and sat down heavily on Stevie Rae's old bed.
    "Zoey, that's so awful," Stevie Rae said. I could hear the tears in her voice as she put her arm around me. "Y'all were like Romeo and Juliet."
    "No!" Then because the word had come out more sharply than I'd intended, I turned to Stevie Rae and smiled. "No," I repeated in a saner voice. "He never loved me. Loren used me."
    "For sex? Ah, Z, that's crappy," Stevie Rae said.
    "Sadly, no, even though I did utterly mess up and have sex with him. Loren was using me for Neferet. She told him to come on to me. She was his real lover." I grimaced, remembering the heart-ripping scene I'd witnessed between Loren and Neferet. They'd been laughing about me. I'd given Loren my heart and my body and, through our Imprint, a piece of my soul. And he'd laughed at me.
    "Hang on. Go back. You said Neferet had Loren come on to you?" Aphrodite said. "Why would she do that if they were lovers?"
    "Neferet wanted to get me alone." My heart froze as the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together.
    "Huh? That doesn't make sense. Why would Loren acting like he was your boyfriend get you alone?" Stevie Rae asked.
    "Simple," Aphrodite said. "Zoey had to sneak around to see Loren, being as he was a professor and all. My guess is she didn't tell any of the nerd herd she was playing bad little schoolgirl with Professor Blake. My guess is also that Neferet had something major to do with our boy Erik finding out Zoey was doing the dirty with someone who was definitely not him."
    "Uh, I'm right here. You don't have to talk about me like I left the room."
    Aphrodite snorted. "If my guesses are right, I'd say your good sense left the room."
    "Your guesses are right," I admitted reluctantly. "Neferet made sure Erik walked in on me being with Loren."
    "Damn! No wonder he acted so pissed," Aphrodite said.
    "What? When?" Stevie Rae said.
    I sighed. "Erik caught me with Loren. He freaked. Then I found out that Loren was really with Neferet and he didn't care about me at all, even though we'd Imprinted."
    "Imprinted! Shit!" Aphrodite said.
    "So then I freaked." I ignored Aphrodite. It was already awful enough. I definitely didn't want to dwell on the details. "I was bawling when Aphrodite, the Twins, Damien, Jack, and—"
    "Oh, shit, and Erik. That's when we found you crying under the tree," Aphrodite interrupted.
    I sighed again, realizing I couldn't ignore her. "Yeah. And Erik announced the news about Loren and me to everyone."
    "In what I would call a very mean way," Aphrodite said.
    "Dang," Stevie Rae said. "It must have been really hateful for Aphrodite to say it was mean."
    "It was. Hateful enough for her friends to feel like her sleeping around with Loren had been a slap in the face to them. So follow Erik's 'Zoey's a slut' bomb with the 'Zoey's been keeping Stevie Rae's undeadness a secret, too' bomb, and you have a gaggle of totally pissed nerds who won't want to trust Zoey again."
    "Which means then Zoey is alone, just exactly as Neferet planned," I finished for her, finding it disturbing that it was so easy to fall into talking about myself in the third person.
    "That's the second death I saw for you," Aphrodite said. "You're completely alone. There's no last glimpse of a cute boy and no nerd herd. Your isolation is the overriding image I got from the second vision."
    "What kills me?"
    "Well, that's when it gets confusing again. I get an image of Neferet as a threat to you, but the vision gets jumbled up all weird when you're actually attacked. I know this is going to sound bizarre, but at the last moment I saw something black floating around you."
    "Like a ghost or something?" I swallowed hard.
    "No. Not really. If Neferet's hair was black, I'd say it was her hair blowing around you in a big wind, like she's standing behind you. You're alone and you're really, really scared. You try to call for help, but no one answers you and you're so terrified you freeze and don't fight back. She, or whatever it is, reaches around and somehow, using something dark and hooked, slashes your throat. It is so