“That’s not creepy at all,” Aphrodite said softly.
“And yet I have a feeling the title is totally going to fit,” I said. “Okay, here goes.” Gently, I opened the journal and read aloud:
January 15th, 1893, Emily Wheiler’s Journal. Entry: the first. This is not a diary. I loathe the very thought of compiling my thoughts and actions in a locked book, secreted away as if they were precious jewels. I know my thoughts are not precious jewels. I have begun to suspect my thoughts are quite mad.
“Ding! Ding! Ding! Correct answer,” Aphrodite said.
“Damn, 1893. That shit’s old,” Kramisha said. “And she been crazy since then. That’s a lotta crazy. Keep reading.”
So, I did. And as Emily Wheiler’s sad, scary, abusive life unfolded, I was surprised by the sense of pity I began to feel for Neferet.
“Oh for shit’s sake,” Aphrodite interrupted as she sipped her third glass of champagne (her orange juice remained untouched). “Did she just describe a statue of a giant White Bull in her garden?”
My stomach clenched. “Yeah, that’s exactly what she just described.”
“And it’s the only place she felt safe or comfortable.” Stark shook his head in disgust. “That damn bull was stalking her all the way back then.”
“Makes me feel sorry for her,” Kramisha said before I could.
“Don’t.” Stark’s voice was sharp. “No matter what happened to her—Emily Wheiler, and then Neferet, had a choice in how she would react. No amount of awful, abusive father excuses what she became—what she did.”
“And yet Kalona thinks it’s important that we understand what happened to her. It makes me think there might be a point to pitying her,” I said.
“Don’t let her suck you in.” Stark’s eyes were as hard and sharp as his voice. “That girl—that sixteen-year-old Emily Wheiler—she stopped existing more than one hundred years ago. Remember that while you keep reading.”
A chill skittered down my spine. “I will. We will.”
“Here, I’ll take a turn reading,” Aphrodite said. “You’re eating. I’m drinking my breakfast. It’s easier to drink and read than eat and read. Plus, I like to do the voices.”
“The voices? You mean like the ones in your head?” Stark asked, eyes widened in mock innocence.
“My cat will eat your cat,” was all Aphrodite said before she turned to a new page of the journal and kept reading. “April 27th, 1893 …”
I chewed my Count Chocula while I listened to Emily’s tragedy unfold. My eyes looked from Aphrodite to Stark and Kramisha. The journal had definitely captured their attention. Except for an occasional, “Ah, shit, that’s bad,” or other sounds of shock, no one spoke.
The journal wasn’t long. The ornate clock on the wall chimed seven bells as Aphrodite turned to the final entry, made on May 8, 1893, that described how a newly Marked Emily had been rescued from her father’s brutalization and rape by the Tracker, and how she’d had a choice. She could have turned her back on the human world, making a new life at the Chicago House of Night—or she could have allowed what her father had done to her to poison her new life.
We all know what choice she made. After Emily had healed from the rape, she’d returned to her father’s house as Neferet and killed him—strangling him with her dead mother’s pearls. I understand exactly why. Emily had spelled it out for us.
I am not mad.
The horrible events that befell me happened because, as a young human girl, I had no control over my own life. Envious women condemned me. A weak man rejected me. A monster abused me. All because I lacked the power to affect my own fate …
… No one will ever harm me without suffering equal or more in return …
… No one will ever know my secrets for they will be entombed in the land, safely hidden, silent as death. I regret none of my actions and if that curses me, then my final prayer is to let that curse be entombed with this journal, to be imprisoned eternally in sacred ground.
So ends Emily Wheiler’s sad story and so begins the magickal life of Neferet … Queen of the Night!
After Aphrodite read Neferet’s final words, the silence at our table was thick. I felt shell-shocked and unaccountably sad for Emily. Not for Neferet. Like Stark had pointed out—Neferet had a choice. She chose Darkness, violence, and selfish hatred. But Emily Wheiler hadn’t had any choice. And I couldn’t help but pity her.
“Damn. That was bad,” Kramisha said.
“Well, at least now we understand why she hates men so much. Especially human men,” Stark said.
“And why she was such a control freak,” Aphrodite said.
“I understand her anger now,” I said. They gawked at me, and I held up my hand, stopping Stark before he could add his two cents. “I didn’t say I agreed with it. And I also don’t think I would have made the same choices she did, or at least I hope I wouldn’t have. But I understand her, and I have a feeling that was Kalona’s point.”
“In case she somehow gets out of the grotto, you mean,” Aphrodite said.
“Yes.” I turned to Kramisha. “Okay, your turn.” She tore a page from her lavender notebook and handed it to me. Kramisha’s handwriting was pretty—something that I hadn’t taken time to realize a year ago when she’d started writing prophetic poetry, which we’d used to save the world. More than once. But in the year since, our Poet Laureate had been teaching at the Tulsa House of Night, and I’d sat in on several of her classes. She had a raw, honest, irreverent teaching style that totally worked with students. She also had one of the most unusual adult vampyre tattoos I’d ever seen. From a distance, Kramisha’s elaborate sapphire tattoo stretched on either side of the crescent moon resting in the center of her forehead—the same crescent that Marked us all, whether in sapphire or scarlet—looking like an indecipherable script of indistinguishable letters. But when you got closer and really studied it, you could make out words hidden within the script. Words like create, imagine, inspire. And I swear the words change because I can never seem to find the same one again in the exact same place. It was weird and cool, a lot like Kramisha.
“Are you gonna take it, or am I readin’ it to ya?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” I mentally shook myself. I took the purple paper, holding it almost as carefully as I’d held the ancient journal, cleared my throat, and read aloud:
Snowflakes—each unique
yet while falling from
one existence to another
they might touch