Untamed

croaking cry. It was so loud, it could have been in her warm, tidy living room with her. "Grandma! Are you okay?"
    "They're spirit creatures, u-we-tsi-a-ge-ya . They can cause me real harm only if I am near death, and I can assure you—I am nowhere near death," she said firmly.
    I remembered the freezing fear they'd brought with them and the stinging welt that had risen on my hand, and wasn't convinced she was one hundred percent right about that. "Just hurry, Grandma. I'll feel a lot better when you're here," I said.
    "Me, too," Aphrodite said.
    "I'll be there within two hours. I love you, Zoeybird."
    "I love you, too," Grandma.
    I was just getting ready to click the phone closed when Grandma added, "And I love you, too, Aphrodite. This might very well be twice that you are responsible for saving my life."
    "Bye. See you soon," Aphrodite said.
    I did click the phone closed then and was surprised to see that Aphrodite's eyes, which were now almost entirely clear blue again, had filled with tears and she was pink-cheeked. She felt me watching her and shrugged one shoulder and wiped at her eyes, looking totally uncomfortable. "What? So I kinda like your Grandma. Is that a crime?"
    "You know, I'm beginning to think that somewhere inside you there's a nice Aphrodite hiding."
    "Well, don't get all warm and tingly. As soon as I find her, I'm going to drown her in the bathtub."
    I just laughed at her.
    "Don't you think you should get going? You have a lot to do."
    "Huh?" I said.
    She sighed. "You have to round up the nerd herd, brief them on the poem and whatnot, and figure out where your grandma's staying, which means you'll probably have to okay something with Shekinah, since I'll bet you don't want to have a cozy one-on-one with Neferet, and there's still the nanny cam you have to have Jack set up in the morgue. Good luck with all of that."
    "Crap, you're right. While I'm doing all of that, what are you gonna be doing?"
    "I am going to be resting so I can be refreshed and ready to put the scarily awesome powers of my brain to work on the poem puzzle."
    "So you're gonna take a nap?"
    "Basically. Hey, cheer up. We managed to skip out on a whole day of school," she said.
    " You managed to skip out on a whole day of school. I managed to make the one class my ex-boyfriend is teaching just in time to do a really uncomfortable and more than slightly embarrassing improvisation scene with him in front of the entire class."
    "Ooooh! I want to hear all about that!"
    "Don't hold your breath," I said over my shoulder as I went out the door.
    Damien and the Twins weren't hard to find. They were downstairs in the main room of the dorm, snarfing down bags of pretzels and baked chips. (Ugh! It was such a pain in the butt that the vamps made us eat healthy stuff.) It was obvious when everyone shut up at first sight of me and then all began to babble at once that they were also gossiping about me.
    "Oh, honey. We just heard about Erik and Drama class," Damien said, giving me a little sympathetic pat on my arm.
    "Yeah, but we haven't heard enough about it," Shaunee said.
    "We definitely need details from the horse's mouth," Erin said.
    "And you're the horse," Shaunee finished.
    I sighed. "We did an improv scene. He kissed me. The class went nuts. Everyone left when the bell rang. I stayed. He ignored me. The end."
    "Oh, nuh-uh. You're not getting away with just those little details," Erin said.
    "Yeah, we got better dirt from Becca. You know, Twin, I do believe that girl has a crush on our Erik," Shaunee said.
    "Do tell, Twin? Should we claw her eyes out for Z?" Erin said. "I haven't done a nice eye-clawing in ages."
    "You two are so banal," Damien said. "Erik and Zoey are broken up, remember?"
    "Yeah, well, your vocab is a ba-pain in our ba-asses," Erin said.
    "Ba-exactly," Shaunee said.
    "Holy crap! Would you guys stop bickering? We've got some major life stuff going on that makes my pathetic love life stuff seem even more ridiculous than it already is. Now I'm gonna get myself a brown pop and try like hell to find some real chips in the kitchen. While I do that, get your butts upstairs and meet me in Aphrodite's room. We have stuff we have to figure out."
    "Stuff?" Damien said. "What kind of stuff?"
    "The same old stuff of the scary, life-shattering, world-ending variety we're so familiar with," I said.
    Damien and the Twins blinked at me for a couple of seconds; then all three muttered, "Okay, cool. We're in."
    "Oh, and Damien," I