Free Betrayed by P.C. Cast

or anything that resembled blood (well, except for the red wine). And, of course, I really didn't need to bother about gawking. If they'd been feasting on bloody whatever I would have smelled it. I was intimately familiar with the delicious scent of blood .. .
    "Would the cool night bother you if we sat outside on the balcony?" Neferet asked.
    "No, I don't think so. I don't feel the cold like I used to." I smiled brightly at her, reminding myself severely that she's an intuitive and she was probably "hearing" pieces of the stupid stuff cascading through my mind.
    "Good, I prefer dining on the balcony in all seasons." She led me through the doors to a table already set for two. A server magically appeared—obviously a vampyre by her filled-in Mark and the series of slim tattoos that framed her heart-shaped face, but she looked really young. "Yes, bring me the Bun Cha Gio and a pitcher of the same red wine I had last night." She paused, and then with a secret smile to me added, "And please bring Zoey a glass of any brown pop we have, so long as it isn't diet.”
    "Thank you," I told her.
    "Just try not to drink too much of that stuff. It's really not good for you." She winked at me, making her admonishment a little joke.
    I grinned at her, happy that she remembered what I like, and I started to feel more relaxed. This was Neferet—our High Priestess. She was my mentor and my friend and in the month I'd been here she'd never been anything but kind to me. Yes, she'd sounded scary as hell when I overheard her with Aphrodite, but Neferet was a powerful Priestess, and as Stevie Rae kept reminding me, Aphrodite was a selfish bully who deserved to be in trouble. Hell! She'd probably been gossiping about me.
    "Feeling better?" Neferet said.
    I met her eyes. She was studying me carefully.
    "Yeah, I am.”
    "When I heard about the missing human teenager I began to worry about you. This Chris Ford was a friend of yours, wasn't he?”
    Nothing she said should surprise me. Neferet was incredibly smart and gifted by the Goddess. Add to that the weird sixth sense all the vamps had, and more than likely she knew literally everything (or at least everything important). It had probably been easy-peasy for her to know that I'd had my own intuitive feeling about Chris's disappearance.
    "Well, he wasn't really a friend of mine. We've been at some of the same parties, but I don't really like to party, so I didn't know him that well.”
    "But something about his disappearance has upset you.”
    I nodded. "It's just a feeling I have. It's silly. He probably had a fight with his parents and his dad grounded him or something like that, so he took off. More than likely he's already home.”
    "If you really believed that you wouldn't still feel so worried." Neferet waited until the server finished giving us our drinks and food before she said more. "Humans believe that adult vampyres are all psychic. The truth is that though many of us do have a gift for precognition or clairvoyance, the vast majority of our people have simply learned to listen to their intuition—which is something most humans have been frightened out of doing." Her tone was much like it was in her classroom, and I listened to her eagerly while we ate. "Think about it, Zoey. You're a good student—I'm sure you remember from your history classes what has historically happened to humans, especially female humans, when they pay too much attention to their intuition and begin `hearing voices in their head' or even foreseeing the future.”
    "They were usually thought of as in league with the devil, or whatnot, depending on what time it was in history. Bottom line was they caught hell for it." Then I blushed because I'd said the H word in front of a teacher, but she didn't seem to care, she was just nodding in agreement with me.
    "Yes, exactly. They even attacked holy people, like their Joan of Arc. So you see that humans have learned to silence their instincts. Vampyres, on the other