“As usual, you have it wrong, Nicole. I’m not gonna tell you what to do.” Stevie Rae spoke in a calm, reasonable voice. She knew from Nicole’s widened eyes that she was probably taking on that green glow that had surrounded her at the House of Night, and she began lifting her hands, drawing more of the rich, vibrant energy of her element to her. “I’m gonna give you a choice, and then y’all are gonna take the consequences for what you choose. Just like all of us have to.”
“How about you choose to take your pussy asses back to the House of Night with the rest of the spineless fucks who call themselves vampyres,” Nicole said.
“You know I ain’t no pussy,” Dallas said, stepping closer to Stevie Rae.
“Neither am I,” rumbled Johnny B from behind Dallas.
“Nicole, I never did like you much. I always thought you had you a bad case of head-up-your-ass-itis. Now I’m sure of it,” Kramisha said, moving up to stand closer to Stevie Rae’s other side. “And I do not like the way you talkin’ to our High Priestess.”
“Kramisha, I do not give one single shit for what you like or don’t like. And she ain’t my High Priestess!” Nicole shouted, spraying white spittle from her lips.
“Seriously gross,” Venus said. “You might want to rethink this whole evil-fledgling thing. It’s making you ugly, in more ways than one.”
“Power is never ugly, and I have power,” Nicole said.
Stevie Rae didn’t have to look up to tell that the Darkness seeping from the ceiling of the kitchen was getting thicker.
“Okay, that’s enough. Y’all clearly can’t be nice, so this needs to be done. Here’s your choice—and each of you need to make it for yourself.” Stevie Rae looked behind Nicole as she spoke, meeting each set of glowing scarlet eyes, hoping beyond hope that she might get through to at least one of them. “You can embrace Light. If you do, that means you choose goodness and the way of the Goddess, and you can stay here with us. We’ll be starting back to school at the House of Night Monday, but we’ll be livin’ here in our tunnels, where we’re surrounded by earth and we feel comfortable and all. Or you can keep choosing Darkness.” Stevie Rae saw Nicole’s little jerk of surprise when she gave a name to it. “Yeah, I know all about Darkness. And I can tell you that messin’ with it, in any way, is a major mistake. But if that’s your choice, then you’re gonna have to leave here, alone, and not return.”
“You can’t make us do that!” Kurtis said from behind Nicole.
“I can,” Stevie Rae lifted her hands, squeezing them into glowing fists. “And it won’t be just me. Lenobia is tellin’ the High Council ’bout y’all. You’ll be officially banished from every House of Night in the world.”
“Hey, Nicole, like Venus said before, you be lookin’ kinda rough. How you feelin’?” Kramisha suddenly said. Then she raised her voice, talking to the kids over Nicole’s shoulder. “How many a you been coughin’ and feelin’ like crap? Ain’t no vampyre been ’round y’all for a while now, right?”
“Ohmygood ness, I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten ’bout that,” Stevie Rae said to Kramisha, then she turned her attention back to the kids in the kitchen, speaking right past Nicole. “So, how many of you wanna die? Again.”
“Looks like bein’ a red fledgling is really just another kind of fledgling,” Dallas said.
“Yeah, you might die if you’re around vamps,” Johnny B said.
“But you for sure will die if you not around them,” Kramisha said, with more than a hint of smugness in her tone. “But you know ’bout that ’cause y’all already died once. Wanna do it again?”
“So y’all need to choose,” Stevie Rae said, still holding up her glowing fists.
“We sure as hell ain’t choosing you for our High Priestess!” Nicole spat the words at her. “And neither would any of you if you knew the truth about her.” With a Cheshire cat smile, she spoke the words Stevie Rae had feared most anyone hearing. “I’ll bet she didn’t tell you she saved a Raven Mocker, did she?”
“You’re a liar,” Stevie Rae said, meeting Nicole’s red gaze steadily.
“How did you know there’s a Raven Mocker in Tulsa?” Dallas said.
Nicole snorted. “He was here. Your precious High Priestess’s scent was all over him because she saved his life. He’s how we trapped her on the roof. She went up there to save him again.”
“That’s bullshit!” Dallas shouted. He pressed his palm against the cement wall. Stevie Rae felt her hair lift in a sudden rush of static electricity.
“Wow, you really have them fooled.” Nicole said mockingly.
“That’s it. I’m done with this,” Stevie Rae said. “Make your choice. Now. Light or Darkness, which will it be?”
“We already made our choice.” Nicole’s hand went up under her baggy shirt and came out with a snub-nosed gun, which she aimed at the middle of Stevie Rae’s head.
Stevie Rae felt one instant of terror, and then she heard cocking sounds and her stunned gaze went from Nicole’s gun to the two Kurtis and Starr had raised and pointed at Dallas and Kramisha.
That pissed off Stevie Rae, and everything kicked into fast-forward.
“Protect them, earth!” Stevie Rae cried. Spreading wide her arms and releasing her fists, she imagined the power of earth, chrysalis-like, enclosing them. The air around her glowed a soft, mossy green. And as the barrier manifested, Stevie Rae saw the oily Darkness that was clinging to the ceiling shiver and then dissipate completely.
Dallas yelled, “Ah, hells no. You’re not pointing that thing at me!” Closing his eyes and concentrating, Dallas pressed both of his hands against the side of the tunnel wall. There was a crackling sound. Kurtis yelped and dropped his gun. At the same instant, Nicole screamed—a raw, primal sound that was more like the roar of an enraged animal than something that should have come from a fledgling, and she squeezed the trigger.
The gunshots were deafeningly loud. The sound echoed painfully over and over until Stevie Rae lost count of how many real shots there were and how many were just an avalanche of sound, smoke, and sensation.
Stevie Rae didn’t hear the screams of the rogue fledglings as the bullets ricocheted off the earth barrier and slammed into their bodies, but she saw Starr fall and watched the terrible blossom of red that bloomed from the side of her head. Two other red-eyed kids slumped to the ground, too.
Pandemonium broke loose, and the unwounded fledglings in the kitchen pushed and shoved and climbed over each other as they fought to get to the narrow entrance that led up to the main depot building above.
Nicole hadn’t moved. She was holding the empty gun, looking wild-eyed and still pulling the trigger when Stevie Rae yelled, “No! You’ve done enough!” Acting on an instinct totally allied to the earth, Stevie Rae clapped her glowing hands together in front of her. With a tearing sound, a raw, gaping hole opened in the far end of the kitchen, where before there had only been the curving side of the tunnel. “You need to leave here and never come back.” Like an avenging goddess, Stevie Rae hurled earth at Nicole and Kurtis and the others who still stood with them, sending a wave of power washing through the kitchen. It lifted all of them and hurled them into the newly opened tunnel. While Nicole snarled curses at her, Stevie Rae calmly waved her hand. In a voice magnified by her element, she said, “Lead them away from here and close behind them. If they don’t go, bury them alive.”
Stevie Rae’s last sight of Nicole was of her screaming at Kurtis and telling him to get his big ass moving.
Then the tunnel sealed, and all was quiet.
“Come on,” Stevie Rae said. Not giving herself time to think about what she was walking into, she strode into the kitchen, straight to the broken, bleeding bodies Nicole had left behind. There were five of them. Three, including Starr, had been struck by Nicole’s deflected shots. The other two had been trampled. “They’re all dead.” Stevie Rae thought it was strange that she sounded so calm.