Hunted House of Night - By Kristin Cast Page 0,114

no breeze, but her long hair was lifting around her, as if the strands had a life of their own. Her eyes glowed a nasty scarlet, more rust than red. Her body was semi-transparent; her skin shimmered with an unearthly light.

I focused on the one thing that allowed my terror to thaw enough for me to speak--if her body looked transparent, then she really wasn't there.

"Don't you have more important things to do than spy on me?" I was glad my voice didn't shake. I even raised my chin and glared at her.

"You and I have unfinished business." Her mouth didn't move, but I heard her voice echo eerily around us.

I mimicked one of Aphrodite's haughty sneers. "Okay, so maybe you don't have anything better to do than spy on me. I, on the other hand, am way too busy to be bothered by you."

"Once again you need a lesson in respecting your elders." As I watched, she began to smile, and her wide, beautiful mouth stretched and stretched and stretched until, with a horrible gagging sound, spiders exploded from that gaping maw and her image broke apart into hundreds and hundreds of seething, multilegged creatures.

I sucked air for a huge scream, and had already started scurrying backwards, when I heard a rustling of wings and a Raven Mocker landed in the crotch of the tree. I blinked, expecting him to be overrun with spiders, but they shimmered and then seemed to soak into the night and disappear. There was only the tree, the Raven Mocker, and my lingering fear.

"Zzzzzoey," the creature hissed my name. Obviously this was one of the bottom-feeding Mockers whose ability to speak wasn't nearly as refined as Rephaim's. "You ssssmell like ssssummer." It opened its dark beak and I saw the forked tongue that flicked out hungrily, like it was tasting my scent.

Okay. Enough was enough. Neferet had scared the bejeezus out of f zfwide, beame. And now this...this...bird boy was going to try to bully me, too? Oh. Hell. No.

"Alright, I am sick and tired of you freaks and the way you and your daddy and nasty Neferet think you can take over everything."

"Father ssssays, find Zzzzzoey, and I find Zzzzzoey. Father ssssays, watch Zzzzzoey. I watch Zzzzzoey."

"No. No. No! If I wanted a pain-in-the-butt dad to follow me around and check up on me, I'd call the Step-loser. So to you, your daddy, the rest of your bird-boy brothers, and even to Neferet, I say: Get. Off. My. Back!" I lifted my hands and flung fire at him. He screeched and took off, flapping wildly and flying erratically out of the tree and away from me as fast as he could go, leaving behind the scent of singed feathers and silence.

"You know, it's not smart to antagonize them," a voice said. "They're normally annoying. Once you ruffle their feathers they're really hard to get along with."

I turned back to the stable building to see Stark standing in the open door.
Chapter Twenty-eight
"See, that's one of the differences between you and me. You want to get along with them. I don't. So I don't care if I piss them off." I told Stark. I channeled what was left of my fear and turned it into anger. "And you know what? Right now I really don't want to hear anything more about it." Still sounding pissed, I added, "Did you see that?"

"That? You mean the Raven Mocker?"

"I mean the disgusting spiders."

He looked surprised. "There were spiders in the tree? For real?"

I blew out a long, frustrated breath. "Lately I'm not sure I can tell you what's for real and what's made up around here."

"I did see you being pretty pissed off and tossing fire around like a beach ball."

I saw his eyes travel down to my hands and realized that not only were they shaking, but they were still glowing with the aura of flame. I drew a deep, calming breath and willed the shaking to stop. Then, in a much calmer voice, I said, "Thank you, fire. You may depart now. Oh, wait. First, could you get rid of some of that ice for me?" I pointed my flame-shining hands at the section of sidewalk between where I stood and the stable, and like a lovely miniature flamethrower, fire jubilantly spouted from my fingertips, and gaily licked against the thick coating of ice, causing it to turn to cold, wet mush. But at least the mush wasn't slippery. "Thank you, fire!" I called as the