P.C. Cast - Hunted

With an effort I put Erik out of my mind. “Sorry…sorry, I’m coming,” I said and hurried into the locker room.

Okay, taking a group shower with girls who had affinities for water and fire was an experience that went from awkward to interesting to pretty darn funny.

At first it was awkward because, well, even though we’re all girls, we’re not exactly used to communal showers. These weren’t horribly barbaric. There were about half a dozen shower heads (which were all bright and shiny and new looking—I’m sure thanks to either Kramisha or Dallas or both, with help from Aphrodite’s popular gold card). Each of them had a separate shower stall one right after another. No, there weren’t any doors or shower curtains or anything. Actually, there was a rail at the top of each one, so my guess was that there used to be shower curtains back in the day, but they were long gone. Oh, the stalls for the toilets did have doors, even if they didn’t want to stay latched. So it was awkward to be naked with my friends at first. But we are all girls, hetero girls at that, so we really weren’t interested in each other’s boobies and such, no matter how hard that is for guys to comprehend, so the awkward part didn’t last long. Plus, the entire locker room was filled with dense steam, which gave the illusion of privacy.

Then, after I picked my shower stall, chose from the lovely assortment of bath and hair products, and started to soap up, it hit me that it was really steamy. As in unnaturally so. And that the “unnaturally so” was happening because all of the shower heads, even in the unoccupied stalls, were shooting jets of hot water from them, causing warm mist to rise and swirl, almost as thick as smoke.

Hmm…

“Hey!” I stuck my head over my stall trying to see the Twins in their showers. “Are you guys doing something to the water?”

“Huh?” Shaunee said, wiping shampoo bubbles out of her eyes. “What?”

“This,” I flailed my arms causing the thick mist to billow around me dreamily. “All of this doesn’t seem like it’s happening without some help from certain someones who know how to manipulate fire and water.”

“Us? Miss Fire and Miss Water?” Erin said. I could barely see the top of her bright blond head through the steam. “Whatever could she mean, Twin?”

“I do believe our Z is implying we’d use our goddess-given affinities for something as selfish as making thick, warm, sweet-smelling mist to help relax all of us after we’ve just had a day that was ever so horrible,” Shaunee said with mock Southern Belle innocence.

“Would we do that, Twin?” Erin asked.

“We absolutely would, Twin,” Shaunee said.

“For shame, Twin. For shame,” Erin said with mock severity. And then they dissolved into twin giggles.

I rolled my eyes at them, but realized Shaunee had been right. The mist was sweet-smelling. It reminded me of spring rain, filled with the fresh scents of flowers and grass, and it was warm—no, the water was hot, like a lazy summer day at the beach. The truth was even though the room was occasionally semi-illuminated by flashes of lightning from the storm that was raging outside, and even though booming thunder was uncomfortably loud, the atmosphere the Twins had created was utterly soothing.

So here’s where the interesting part came in. I decided that.

“Hey, are you sending any of this over to the guys’ locker room?” I asked as I scrubbed my hair.

“Nope,” Shaunee said happily.

“Nada.” Erin grinned.

I smiled back at them. “It’s good to be a girl.”

“Yeah, even if we do have to get butt-ass naked together and shower in what looks like a line of horse stalls,” Erin said.

I giggled. “Horse stalls. I think that makes you guys nags.”

“Nags! Us?” Erin said.

“Oh no, she did not just call us nags,” Shaunee said.

“Get her!” Erin yelled, and she flung her hands at me, causing water to pelt me from all sides.

Of course it didn’t really hurt, so it made me giggle even more.

“I’m heating her up, Twin!” Shaunee said, flicking her fingers at me, and my skin was suddenly very, very warm. So much so that the steam in my stall doubled.

In between giggles I whispered, “Wind, come to me,” and instantly felt the brush of power surround me. Swirling my fingers in the steamy mist that engulfed me, I said, “Wind, send all this back to the Twins!” Then I pursed my lips and blew gently in their direction. With a mighty whoosh the mist and heat and water whirled around me once, twice, and then blew directly at the Twins, who screeched and laughed and tried to fight back. Of course they couldn’t win. I mean, come on! I can call on all five elements, but it was a hilarious version of a pillow fight–water fight that left all of us drenched and breathless with laughter.

We finally called a truce. Okay, more accurately, I made the Twins yell, “We give! We give!” several times, and then I graciously accepted their surrender. It was wonderful to slip into soft terry-cloth robes and feel all squeaky clean and sleepy. We draped our clothes around the shower stalls and called water and mist once more to steam them, and then I commanded fire and air to blow them dry. Then the three of us drifted back down to the tunnels, ignoring the crack-and-boom show that was playing outside, secure in that fact that we were surrounded by the earth and protected by male vampyres who would no way let anyone sneak up on us.

I’d say Stevie Rae had been dead to the world when I got back to her room, but the phrasing scared me. She’d been dead, or almost dead, too many times for my nerves. I will admit I tiptoed over to her and stood there staring to make sure she was breathing before going to my side of the bed and easing myself in under the covers. Nala put her head up and sneezed at me, clearly unhappy at being disturbed, but she padded sleepily over to me and curled up on my pillow, resting one little white paw on my robes. I smiled at her and, clean and warm and very, very tired, fell instantly to sleep.

Then I’d had that horrible dream, which brought me back to current time. I’d hoped replaying everything that had happened in the past several hours would be like counting sheep and maybe help me drift back into a hopefully dreamless sleep. But it was no use. I was too freaked about Kalona and too worried about what I was supposed to do next.

My cell phone was on the bedside table and I picked it up, checking the time: 2:05 P.M. So, great, I’d gotten a whopping three hours of sleep. No wonder I felt like my eyes had sand in them. Brown pop. I needed some brown pop in the worst way.

I checked Stevie Rae again before I left the room, this time being careful not to wake her up. She was curled up on her side, snoring softly and looking about twelve years old. It was hard to imagine her ever having blood red eyes, snarling dangerously, and chomping on Aphrodite with such intensity that the two of them had Imprinted. I sighed, feeling like the entire world was pressing down on me. How was I supposed to deal with all of this, especially when the good guys sometimes seemed bad, and the bad guys were so…so…Images of Stark and Kalona passed through my mind, making me feel terribly confused and stressed out.

No, I told myself firmly, you shared a kiss with Stark as he was dying. He was a different kid before Neferet messed with him, but now she has messed with him and you have to remember that. You shared a nightmare with Kalona. Period. That’s all there was to it.

The fact that in my nightmare Kalona had insisted I was A-ya was just crazy. It wasn’t true. Sure, I’d felt drawn to him, but so had practically everyone else. Plus, I was me, and A-ya had been, well, dirt until the Ghigua women had breathed life and special gifts into her. I must look like her, weird as that is, I told myself. Or maybe he’d called me A-ya just to mess with my head. That seemed more than possible, especially if Neferet had told him stuff about me.