Betrayed Chapter 28

There are two things that PCK is hinting at right now that I hope aren’t true. One, that Zoey’s bite has a protective effect against evil and two, that she’s going to be immune or nearly so to the undeadlings. Being as that hasn’t happened, I won’t spend a lot of time speculating on it. I’ll simply say both would be stupid and I’m ready to tear either if they turn up.

Zoey opens her eyes to find herself back in the stall with her horse. Last time she opened her eyes and found herself in a gas station bathroom surrounded by paramedics with a hypodermic sticking out of her chest. Erik won’t make that mistake twice.

The old downtown depot was six or seven miles away in a dark, unused part of town under a big, scary bridge that linked one part of the city to the other. It used to be majorly busy, with freight and passenger trains coming and going almost nonstop. But in the past couple decades all of the passenger traffic had stopped (I knew because my grandma had wanted to take me on a train trip for my thirteenth birthday, and we’d had to drive to Oklahoma City to catch the train there) and the freight train business had definitely dwindled. Under normal circumstances, it would only take a few minutes to zip from the House of Night to the depot.

Amazing how Zoey has the memory of a Wikipedia article when it comes to landmarks. I should mention that it’s been snowing since Zoey did the ritual so PCK almost set up a plot point. Now that the city is locked down in blizzard conditions, how will she get to the depot so she can rescue Heath in time? Why by taking one of the school horses. Aphrodite shows up and tells Zoey to take the horse or else Heath will die.

Now, I’m not a horse person. I don’t care for them, ride them or even drive past them on a regular basis so anything I say here is speculation based on the information I’ve gotten from people who know what they’re about. For one, riding horse in the snow can be dangerous. Snow can easily hide ice and holes which are not things you want a horse to step on. Secondly, running around in deep snow is tiresome and depending on the horse’s stamina, it might not go very far. Earlier, Zoey told us she saw the plows were having trouble keeping up with the snow so it’s falling fast and there’s probably a lot of it. Thirdly, is the horse properly shod to go running around where there’s snow and possibly ice?

Before Zoey takes off on horseback, Aphrodite says to call her friends. Zoey doesn’t understand and Aphrodite says they can help her, she just doesn’t know how. So Zoey stops and makes a phone call to Shaunee and tells her to go with the others and call their elements. She asks if Zoey is joining them and Zoey says no, she’s off to rescue Heath. Shaunee says Erik isn’t going to like that. Yeah, he hates it when vampires try to do things for humans. Normally Zoey would agree but this one keeps giving her blood so she’s almost indebted to him.

Then Zoey gets mad when Aphrodite says that this is just the newest vision concerning the undeadlings. She says she saw the other two kids getting killed but then instantly redeems herself by saying she told Neferet. Then Aphrodite hands Zoey a blanket and says that Stevie is one of them. Zoey says she knows because she too read ahead and ignored the spoiler tags. Aphrodite says to not act like they’re friends in what may be the more heavily forced case of antagonistic friendship I’ve seen. Then more powers come out of nowhere.

“As long as we have that straight,” Aphrodite said. “Oh,” she added. “Remember to pull silence and darkness around yourself so humans will have a hard time seeing you on the way there. You don’t have time to be stopped.”

Yeah, remember to use your invisibility cloak too because you totally have that. I will be fair and say that they did exhibit that ability last time but now it can apparently extend outwards enough to cover a horse. Does that mean vampires can do that while driving? Even if they can’t that does mean they can circumvent security measures,  which would be fine if I believed for a second that none of them abused it. But hey, it’s the humans who are evil and paranoid and hate them for absolutely no reason.

Now that they’re friends for no reason, Zoey kicks the horse into a trot. PCK then tells us exactly how she rides around the school before getting to the main road. Again, detail I assume was put in there to settle the long internet squabbles about how the school is laid out. Hopefully this should put an end to the flame wars on Nyxsplace.com and redbirdcentral.org.

Now Zoey begins muttering to each of the elements to somehow aid her on her way. You know, PCK, not every element has to be utilized every time. It’s kind of like how you don’t have to use a sledgehammer when playing the most dangerous game with hobos. Sure, its extremely effective often but there’s a time and place for every tool.

Let’s see. More details about Zoey’s route, snow is magically being repelled from the horse’s hooves and Zoey wishes she was going to a frat party with someone her “kingly father” didn’t approve of rather than to “hell”. Yes, because hell is often staffed by three undead students getting ready to torture a lone person.

Zoey gets to the abandoned train station without incident which was just as exciting as you could imagine. There’s some detail about the place but I don’t care. So they circle around looking for the entrance Heath talked about. It doesn’t take her long to find it so I don’t know why she bothered telling us about it. That’s like someone telling you about how they went to get the mail early and it was there even though the mailman doesn’t normally get there until an hour later. It would only be interesting if there was no mail or if a live squirrel had taken to building a nest with all the offers they got from credit card companies.

Zoey goes inside and says that the basement isn’t as bad as she thought it’d be. Then she remarks how there aren’t any homeless people and that a blizzard would be the time you’d expect them to gather in an abandoned structure. Being the smartest person in the series, Zoey only takes another paragraph to figure out that it might be all the undead that either ate them or drove them away.

There’s another grate to go down which Zoey does and keeps to the right just as Heath told her. Zoey gets close enough to smell them and start psyching herself up to attack them. Unfortunately this takes way too long and Zoey ands up being attack by a third raptor she couldn’t smell and gets disemboweled. Heath dies and they both end up together in an unmarked grave which is a hundred times more romantic than anything written so far.

In the reality of the story, Zoey hears Heath scream which spurs her on to action. She steps into the room where Heath is standing with his back to the wall. “Somehow” he’s gotten the tape off of his ankles but not his hands. That’s exactly why you don’t buy your duct tape in bulk from the dollar store. Unless you want your victims running around the streets until they find a police officer. Now that Zoey can see he’s in trouble she’s gets possessive.

And that was my last goad. Heath belonged to me—despite my confusion about the whole blood issue, and despite my feelings for Erik. Heath was mine and no one else was ever, ever going to feed from what was mine.

Notice how she refers to Heath as a what and not a who. It’s a very subtle choice that would go well with making Zoey a bad person. It would be kind of awesome if Zoey ended up being a bad vampire and this was just documenting her fall. Every book shows her giving in to a new temptation, showing us how easy it is for vampires to go down that path and how they reconcile it with themselves.

Zoey jumps in front of Heath and says she brought something better than a SWAT team and she’ll show him. Which is interrupted by a light description. Pale, “dirty red” eyes, long dangerous looking fingernails and they all talk with a sibilant s. She recognizes Elliott who says he’s not the Elliott she knew and will show her what he means. Before he can, Zoey focuses on fire and find her hands have burst into flame which she uses to threaten the undeadlings. She says that Elliott was a pain in the ass and death hasn’t changed things.

Wait, aside from the newest ass pull power, what the hell is she talking about? She only knew Elliott for a day and even then she didn’t know him even as an acquaintance. I guess I shouldn’t expect Zoey to be nice to someone who didn’t polish her boots just like she wanted. Then Stevie says that death has changed some things and everyone parts as she approaches. I guess the cliffhanger is supposed to be ‘what could death have changed?’ Aside from the obvious things like vital signs and imminent decay.