Hunted

"Here you are. This time you bring me to a place of your choosing, rather than me calling to you."

Kalona stepped into view beside the marble bench, as if he had materialized out of the air. I didn't say anything. I was too busy trying to control the panicked beating of my heart.

"Your Goddess is quite unusual," he said in a friendly, conversational tone after he sat beside me on the bench. "I can feel the danger in this place for you. It surprises me that she would allow you here, especially because she must know you would call me to you." I imagine she believes she is warning you, readying you, but she is mistaking my intentions. I mean to resurrect the past, and to do so the present must die." He paused, and with a contemptuous gesture waved away the riches on the shore across the water from us. "All of that means nothing to me."

I had no clue what he was talking about and when I finally found my voice, all I could manage was a brilliant, "I didn't call you to me."

"Of course you did." He was intimate and flirty, like he was my boyfriend and I was being kinda shy about admitting how much I liked him.

"No," I spoke without looking at him. "I did not call you to me," I repeated. "And I don't have any idea what you're talking about."

"My musings are unimportant. All will be clear with time. But, A-ya, if you did not call me, then explain how I joined you in your dream."

Steeling myself against the allure I already felt from just the sound of his voice, I turned my head to look at him. He was young again, and appeared eighteen or nineteen. He was wearing jeans that were comfortably loose and had that sexy, these-are-my-favorite-pair- because-they-fit-perfectly look. And that was it. He didn't have shoes or a shirt on. His wings were miraculous. They were the black of a starless sky and glistened in the fading light with a silky beauty all their own. His flawless bronze skin seemed to be lit from within. His body was beyond incredible. It was like his face--so handsome, so perfect, that it was impossible to describe.

With a deep sense of shock I realized that was just like how Nyx's appearance had seemed to Aphrodite and me. She had been so otherworldly in her beauty that we'd been unable to describe her. And, for some reason, that similarity between Kalona and Nyx made me incredibly sad, sad for what he might once have been and for what he had become.

"What is it, A-ya? What has made you look as if you would weep?"

I started to pick and choose my words carefully and then stopped. If this was my dream--if bringing Kalona to me was somehow my doing--then I was going to be nothing but honest. So I spoke the truth.

"I'm sad because I don't think you were always what you are now."

Kalona went utterly still. It seemed the perfection of his features solidified and turned him into the statue of a god.

In the dream I felt timeless, so it might have been a second or a centu2-' Ayry before he responded. "And what would you do if you knew that I have not always been as I am now, my A-ya? Would you save me or would you entomb me?"

I stared at his luminous amber eyes and tried to see through them into his soul. "I don't know," I said honestly. "I don't think I could do either without some help from you."

Kalona laughed. The sound danced across my skin. It made me want to throw my head back and my arms wide and embrace the beauty of it. "I think you are correct," he said, smiling into my eyes. I looked away first, staring out at the ocean and trying to forget how incredibly seductive he was.

"I like this place." I could hear the smile in his voice. "I feel power--an ancient power. No wonder they chose to come here. It reminds me of the place of power from which I arose inside the House of Night, though the earth element is not strong here. That is a comfort to me. It is pleasant."

I focused on the one thing he'd said I could actually understand. "I guess it's no surprise you'd be more comfortable on an island. Being as you don't so much like the earth."

"There is only one thing I like about the earth, and that was resting in your arms, though your embrace lasted too long for even my great capacity for plea sure."

I looked at him again. He was still smiling gently at me. "You have to know that I'm not really A-ya."

His smile didn't falter. "No, I do not know that." Slowly, he reached out and took a long strand of my dark hair between his fingers. Staring into my eyes, he let my hair slide into his palm.

"I couldn't be her," I said a little shakily. "I wasn't in the earth when you got free. I'd been living on the earth for the past seventeen years."

He kept caressing my hair as he answered me, "A-ya had been gone for centuries, dissolved once more into the earth that made her. You are simply she, reborn through a daughter of man. That is why you are different from the others."

"That can't be true. I'm not her. I didn't know you when you rose," I blurted.

"Are you quite sure you didn't know me?" I could feel the cold of his skin radiating toward my body, and I wanted to lean into him. My heart was beating hard again, only this time it wasn't from fear. I wanted to be close to this fallen angel worse than I'd ever wanted anything in my life. The desire I felt for him was even more than the pull of Heath's Imprinted blood. What would it be like to taste Kalona's blood? The thought made me shiver with the delicious, forbidden impulse. "You feel it, too," he murmured. "You were made for me; you belong to me."

His words slashed through the haze of my desire. I stood up and stepped around the end of the bench, putting the marble arm of it between us. "No. I do not belong to you. I don't belong to anyone except myself and Nyx."

"You always hearken back to that wretched Goddess!" The seductive intimacy evaporated from his voice, and he was once again the cold lB. VG, amoral angel whose moods shifted on a whim and who could kill with little more than a thought. "Why do you insist on being loyal to her? She isn't here." He spread his arms wide and his magnificent wings rustled around him like a living cape. "When you most need her, she steps away from you and lets you make mistakes."

"It's called free will," I said.

"And what is so wonderful about free will? Humans eternally misuse it. Life can be so much happier without it."

I shook my head. "But I wouldn't be me anymore without it. I'd be your puppet."

"Not you. I would not take your will away." His face changed instantly, shifting back to loving angel, the being who was so beautiful it was easy to understand why someone might throw away their free will just to be close to him.

Thankfully, that someone wasn't me.

"The only way you could get me to love you would be to take away my free will and then order me to be with you, like I was your slave." I braced myself for the explosion I thought my words would cause, but he didn't yell or jump off the bench or throw any kind of fit. Instead he simply said, "Then we are to be enemies, you and I."

He didn't say it like a question, so I decided my best bet was not to answer him. Instead I asked, "Kalona, what do you want?"

"You, of course, my A-ya."

I shook my head and impatiently brushed aside his answer. "No, I don't mean that. I mean, why are you here to begin with? You're not mortal. You...Well..." I paused, not sure how far I could push this subject safely, then finally decided I might as well go for it; he'd already said we were going to be enemies. "You fell, right? From, I don't know, someplace that must be what many mortals would call heaven." I paused again, waiting for some kind of response from him.

Kalona nodded slightly. "I did."

"On purpose?"

He looked vaguely amused. "Yes, it was my choice that brought me here."

"Well, why did you do it? What do you want?"

Another change came over his features. He blazed with a brilliance that could only be immortal. Kalona stood, threw his arms wide as his wings unfurled, spreading around him with a magnificence that made it hard for me to look at him and impossible for me to look away.

"Everything!" he cried in the voice of a god. "I want everything!"

And then he was there before me, a shining angel--not fallen at all, just miraculously here, within reach. Mortal enough to touch, but too beautiful to be anything but a god.

"Are you sure you couldn't love me?" He pulled me into his arms. His wings swept down and enfolded me in their soft darkness, a blanket that was in direct contradiction to the wonderful, painful chill of his body that I was coming to know so well. He bent, and slowly, as if giving me time to pull away, brought his mouth down to mine.

When our lips met, the kiss burned with colbea ^r Ed heat through my body. I felt myself fall. His body, his soul, was all that I knew. I wanted to press myself into him, have him lose himself in me. The question wasn't, could I love him, but how could I not love him? An eternity of embracing him--possessing him--loving him--couldn't possibly be enough.

An eternity of embracing him...

The thought speared through me. A-ya had been created to love him and embrace him for eternity.

Oh, Goddess! my mind cried, am I really A-ya?

No. I couldn't be. I wouldn't let myself be!

I shoved against him. Our embrace had been such a complete and passionate surrender that my sudden rejection caught him by surprise. He staggered back, letting me slip through the double embrace of his arms and wings.

"No!" I was shaking my head back and forth like a crazy woman. "I am not her! I am Zoey Redbird, and if I love someone, it's because he's worth loving, and not because I'm a piece of dirt that's been brought to life."

His amber eyes narrowed as anger flashed across his face. He started toward me.

"No!" I screamed. I was jolted awake to the sounds of Nala hissing like crazy and someone sitting on the side of my bed, trying to defend himself against my flailing arms.

"Zoey! It's okay. Wake up! Ow! Shit!" the guy said as my fist connected with his cheek.

"Get away from me!" I cried.

He trapped both of my wrists in one of his hands. "Get a grip!" Then he reached out and flipped on my bedside light.

I blinked up at the guy who was sitting on my bed rubbing his cheek.

"Stark, what the hell are you doing in my room?"