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victim of House of Night violence.
    That had really pissed me off, but what could I have said to the guy?
We didn’t so much vandalize and threaten her as we rescued my grandma from her evil clutches and then we tossed her off the roof of her penthouse.
Yeah, like that would have gone over great.
    Hearing them talking about “poor Neferet” had been more than I could take. Hell, my circle and I had just kept “poor Neferet” from materializing in the middle of our open house and eating the locals! “Poor Neferet” might even have been responsible for Erin’s body rejecting the Change. It seemed too much of a coincidence to me that Erin had died right after the gross, semi-formed ex-High Priestess had passed through the fledgling’s body.
    So, instead of screaming at the locals, I’d taken advantage of the chaos caused by a fledgling dying publicly, and slipped away by myself to sit on a bench at the far side of the stables; take a long, deep breath; and think. I exhaled that breath and continued to think. “Stark, I’m not out here hiding.” I reasoned through what I was feeling aloud. “I just needed a second to myself to deal with the poo storm that’s going to be caused by all of that—” I waved a hand in the direction of the main campus, and finished. “—all of that mess.”
    He sat beside me on the bench and took my hand in his. “Yeah, I get it. Dealing with death is tough on me, too,” Stark said quietly.
    “Yeah,” I said, and a little sob escaped with the word. Goddess, I was such a hypocrite! “You know what? I’m as bad as those gossiping humans. You were right. I am
hiding
out here feeling pissed and sorry for myself instead of being freaked that one of our circle just died.”
    “Z, I don’t expect you to be perfect. No one does.” Stark squeezed my hand. “You know it won’t always be like this.”
    My stomach clenched. “I think that’s the problem. I
don’t
know that it won’t always be like this.”
    “This is the second time we’ve beaten Neferet—and she didn’t look so good tonight. Seriously—spiders? That’s all she’s got? She can’t keep fighting us forever.”
    “She’s immortal, Stark. She can’t be killed, so she
can
keep fighting us forever,” I said gloomily. “And she’d changed from spiders to yucky, gooey, black crap that was starting to reform her body. Ugh. She’s back.”
    “Well, at least everyone knows she’s turned bad,” he countered with.
    “Nope,
everyone
doesn’t know she’s turned bad. Vampyres know it—and the High Council had decided to not do squat to her. Humans, local humans—hell, our own mayor and his council—think that she’s practically Glenda the Good Witch of the North. What pissed me off tonight was that I overheard some of the guys in suits and the PTA moms talking about her and wondering if we had something to do with her penthouse being vandalized last week because ‘poor Neferet,’” I air quoted, “hasn’t been seen since then.”
    “Really? I can’t believe they’re saying that.”
    “Believe it. Neferet’s press conference set the stage for her to look like a victim if anything happened to her.”
    “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change the fact that we had to kick her ass to get your grandma back. We were cloaked that night. No one saw us, so all that talk is just bullshit gossip. It doesn’t mean anything.”
    “Gossip always means something, Stark. In this case I think it means that it’s going to take some major bullpoopie hitting the fan for anyone who isn’t a vampyre to know how evil Neferet is.”
    “You’re probably right about that, but that’s actually good news,” Stark said.
    “Huh?”
    “Neferet has never known how to lay low and let a situation cool down. And she sure as hell has never been able to pull off being a victim. If she can manage to get herself together—literally—and manifest a body that’s more than black snot, she’s right back where she was before.