Betrayed (36 page)

“Zoey? Can you hear me, Zoey?” An insistent male voice intruded on my dream.

I frowned and tried to ignore him. I didn't want to wake up, but my spirit stirred. I
needed
to wake up. I
needed
to remember. She needed me to remember.

But who was she?

“Zoey . . .” This time the voice was inside my dream and I could see my name painted against the blue of the spring sky. The voice was a woman's . . . familiar . . . magical . . . wondrous. “Zoey . . .”

I looked around the clearing and found the Goddess sitting on the other side of the stream, gracefully perched on a smooth Oklahoma sandstone rock with her bare feet playing in the water.

“Nyx!” I cried. “Am I dead?” My words shimmered around me.

The Goddess smiled. “Will you ask that of me each time I visit you, Zoey Redbird?”

“No, I'm, uh, sorry.” My words were tinged pink, probably blushing like my cheeks.

“Don't be sorry, my daughter. You have done very well. I am pleased with you. Now, it is time you awakened. And also I wish to remind you that the elements can restore as well as destroy.”

I started to thank her, even though I didn't have a clue what she was talking about, but the shaking of my shoulder and a sudden blast of cold air interrupted me. I opened my eyes.

Snow swirled all around me. Detective Marx was bending over me, shaking my shoulder. Through the weird fog in my mind I found one word. “Heath?” I croaked.

Marx jerked his chin to his right and I tilted my head to see Heath's still body being loaded into an ambulance.

“Is he . . .” I couldn't finish.

“He's fine, just banged up. He's lost a lot of blood and they've already given him something for the pain.”

“Banged up?” I was struggling to make sense of everything. “What happened to Heath?”

“Multiple lacerations, just like those other two kids. Good thing you found him and called me before he bled to death.” He squeezed my shoulder. A paramedic tried to move Marx from my side, but he said, “I'll handle her. She just needs to get back to the House of Night and she'll be fine.”

I saw the paramedic give me a look that clearly said
freak,
but Detective Marx's strong hands were helping me sit up and his tall body blocked my view of the muttering EMT.

“Can you walk to my car?” Marx asked.

I nodded. My body was feeling better, but my mind was still all mushy. Marx's “car” was really a huge, all-weather truck with giant wheels and a roll bar. He helped me up into the front seat, which was warm and comfortable, but before he closed the door I suddenly remembered something else, even though the effort made my head feel like it was going to split open. “Persephone! Is she okay?”

Marx looked confused for just a second, then he smiled. “The mare?”

I nodded.

“She's just fine. An officer is walking her to the police stables downtown until the roads are clear enough to get a trailer back to the House of Night.” His grin widened. “Guess you're braver than the Tulsa police force. None of them volunteered to ride her back.”

I rested my head against the seat as he threw the truck into four-wheel drive and navigated slowly through the drifts of snow away from the depot. There must have been ten cop cars, along with a fire truck and two ambulances parked with lights flashing red and blue and white against the empty, snow-curtained night.

“What happened here tonight, Zoey?”

I thought back, and had to squint my eyes against the sudden pain in my head. “I don't remember,” I managed to say through the pounding in my temples. I could feel his sharp gaze on me. I met the detective's eyes and remembered him telling me about his twin sister, the vamp who still loved him. He'd said I could trust him, and I believed him. “Something's wrong,” I admitted. “My memory is messed up.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Start with the last thing you can easily remember.”

“I was grooming Persephone and all of a sudden I knew where Heath was, and that he was going to die if I didn't go get him.”

“You two have Imprinted?” My surprise must have been easy to read, because he smiled and continued. “My sister and I talk, and I've been curious about vamp stuff, especially right after she first Changed.” He shrugged as if it was no big deal for a human to know all sorts of vampyre info. “We're twins, so we're used to sharing everything. A change of species just didn't make that much difference to us.” He glanced sideways at me again. “You have Imprinted, haven't you?”

“Yeah, Heath and I have Imprinted. That's how I knew where he was.” I left out the stuff about Aphrodite. No way did I feel up to explaining the whole her-visions-are-real-but-Neferet-has-been . . .

“Ah!” This time I gasped aloud at the agony inside my head.

“Deep, calming breaths,” Marx said, shooting me worried looks whenever he could take his eyes from the treacherous road. “I said whatever was
easy
for you to remember.”

“No, it's okay. I'm okay. I want to do this.”

He still looked worried, but continued with his questioning. “All right, you knew Heath was in trouble, and you knew where he was. So, why didn't you just call me and tell me to go to the depot?”

I tried to remember and pain shot through my head, but along with the pain came anger. Something had happened to my mind.
Someone
had messed with my mind. And that really pissed me off. I rubbed my temples and gritted my teeth against the pain.

“Maybe we should stop for a while.”

“No! Just let me think,” I gasped. I could remember the stables and Aphrodite. I could remember that Heath needed me, and the wild, snowy ride on Persephone to the depot basement. But when I tried to remember past the basement the agony that speared through my head became too much for me.

“Zoey!” Detective Marx's concern penetrated through my pain.

“Something has messed with my mind.” I wiped tears I hadn't realized I'd shed from my face.

“Pieces of your memory are gone.”

It didn't sound like a question, but I nodded anyway.

He was silent for a while. It seemed he was concentrating on the deserted, snow-covered road, but I thought I knew better, and his next words told me I was right.

“My sister”—he smiled and glanced at me—“her name is Anne, warned me once that if I ever pissed off a High Priestess I would be in serious trouble because they had ways of erasing things, and what she meant by things was people and memories.” He glanced from the road to me again, and this time his smile was gone. “So, I guess the question is: what have you done to piss off a High Priestess?”

“I don't know. I . . .” My voice trailed off as I thought about what he'd said. I didn't try to remember what had happened that night. Instead, I let my memory drift lazily backward . . . to Aphrodite and the fact that Nyx was still blessing her with visions, even though Neferet had spread the word that her visions were false . . . to the small, almost imperceptible sense of wrongness that had grown like a fungus around Neferet, until it culminated Sunday night in her undermining the decisions I'd made for the Dark Daughters . . . to the nasty scene I'd witnessed between Neferet and . . . and . . . I braced myself against the heat that was starting to throb through my head and, along with a flash of piercing pain, remembered the creature Elliott had become feeding from the High Priestess's blood.

“Stop the truck!” I yelled.

“We're almost at the school, Zoey.”

“Now! I'm going to be sick.”

We slid to the side of the empty road. I opened the door and dropped to the snowy street, staggered to the ditch, and puked up my guts into a snowbank. Detective Marx was beside me, pulling back my hair and sounding very dadlike as he told me to breathe and everything would be okay. I gulped air and finally stopped heaving. He handed me a handkerchief, one of those old-fashioned linen ones that was folded neatly into a clean square.

“Thanks.” I tried to hand it back to him after wiping my face and blowing my nose, but he smiled and said, “Keep it.”

I stood there, just gulping air and letting the throbbing in my head go away as I stared across a field of untouched snow to some distant oaks that grew along a massive stone and brick wall. And with a start of surprise, I realized where we were.

“It's the east wall of the school,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought I'd take you the back way—give you more time to collect yourself, and maybe restore some of that memory.”

Restore
. . . What was it about that word? Tentatively, I thought hard, trying to remember while I braced myself against the pain I was sure would come. But it didn't, and into my memory came the vision of a beautiful meadow, and the wise words of my Goddess . . .
the elements can restore as well as destroy
.

And then I understood what I had to do.

“Detective Marx, I need a minute here, okay?”

“Alone?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I'll be in the truck, watching you. If you need me, call.”

I smiled my thanks, but before he'd turned to go back to the truck I was walking toward the oaks. I didn't need to be under them—to actually be in the school grounds, but being near them helped me center myself. When I was close enough to see how their branches entwined like old friends, I stopped and closed my eyes.

“Wind, I call you to me and this time I ask that you blow clean any dark taint that has touched my mind.” I felt a gust of cold, like I was being battered by my own personal hurricane, but it wasn't pressing against my body. It was filling my mind. I kept my eyes tightly closed and blocked out the throbbing ache that had returned to my temples. “Fire, I call you to me and ask that you burn from my mind any darkness that has touched it.” Heat filled my head, only it wasn't like the hot spear that I'd felt earlier. Instead it was a nice warmth, like a heating pad on a pulled muscle. “Water, I call you to me and ask that you wash from my mind the darkness that has touched it.” Coolness flooded through the warmth, soothing what had been overheated and bringing incredible relief. “Earth, I call you to me and ask that your nurturing strength take from my mind the darkness that has touched it.” From the bottoms of my feet, where I was connected firmly to the earth, it was as if a faucet had opened and I imagined putrid darkness running down and out of my body to be consumed by the strength and goodness of the earth. “And, spirit, I ask that you heal what darkness has destroyed in my mind, and restore my memory!” Something snapped within me and a white-hot familiar sensation shot down my back, dropping me heavily to my knees.

“Zoey! Zoey! My God, are you okay?”

Once again Detective Marx's strong hands were shaking my shoulders and he was helping me to my feet. This time my eyes opened easily and I smiled into his kind face.

“I'm more than okay. I remember everything.”

“You're sure this is how it has to be?” Detective Marx asked for what seemed like the zillionth time.

“Yep.” I nodded wearily. “It has to be like this.” I was so damn tired I thought I could fall asleep right there in the cop's ginormic monster truck. But I knew I couldn't. The night wasn't over yet. My job wasn't over yet.

The detective sighed, and I smiled at him.

“You're just gonna have to trust me,” I said, sounding a lot like he had earlier that day.

“I don't like it,” he said.

“I know, and I'm sorry. But I've told you everything I can.”

“That some homeless kook is responsible for Heath and the other two boys?” He shook his head. “Feels wrong to me.”

“Are you sure you're not a little bit psychic?” I smiled tiredly at him.

“If I was, I'd be able to figure out
what
feels wrong.” He shook his head again. “Explain this—what happened to your memory?”

I'd already thought about my answer for this one. “It was the trauma of tonight. It made me block what happened. And then my affinity for the five elements helped me to overcome the block and remember.”

“That's why you had all that pain?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess so. It's gone now anyway.”

“Look, Zoey, I'm pretty sure that there's more going on here than what you're telling me. I want you to know that you really can trust me,” he said.

“I know that.” I believed him, but I also knew that there were some secrets I couldn't share. Not with this really nice detective. Not with anyone.

“You don't have to deal with whatever it is on your own. I can help you. You're just a kid—just a teenager.” He sounded totally exasperated.

I met his eyes steadily. “No, I'm a fledgling who is leader of the Dark Daughters and a High Priestess in training. Believe me, that's a lot more than
just a teenager
. I've given you my oath, and you know from your sister that my oath binds me. I promise I've told you everything I can, and if any more kids disappear, I believe I can find them for you.” What I didn't say was that I wasn't one hundred percent sure how I was going to do that, but the promise felt right, and so I knew Nyx would help me keep it. Not that that would be easy. But I couldn't betray Stevie Rae's presence, which meant no one could know about the creatures, or at least not until Stevie Rae was safe.

Marx sighed again, and I could see that he was muttering to himself as he stomped around to help me down from his truck. But just before he opened the door to the main school building Marx (annoyingly) ruffled my hair and said, “All right, we'll do this your way. Of course, it's not like I have a choice.”

He was right. He didn't have any choice.

I walked into the building before him and was instantly engulfed in the warmth of its familiar scents of incense and oil, and the soothing gaslights that flickered like eager, welcoming friends.