I was in a beautiful meadow that was in the middle of what looked like a dense forest. A warm, soft breeze was blowing the scent of lilacs to me. A stream ran through the meadow, its crys tal water bubbled musically over smooth stones. "Zoey? Can you hear me, Zoey?" An insistent male voice in truded 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 Ok lahoma 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 sud den 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 sud denly 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 vi sions, even though Neferet had spread the word that her visions were false ... to the small, almost imperceptible sense of wrong ness that had grown like a fungus around Neferet, until it culmi nated Sunday night in her undermining the decisions I'd made for the Dark Daughters ... to the nasty scene I'd witnessed be tween 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 be come 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 mem ory." 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 God dess ... 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 re turned 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 dark ness 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 bot toms 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 dark ness has destroyed in my mind, and restore my memory!" Some thing 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."