"Yeah, maybe it'll stay off this time," Shaunee said.

"Stop it," I said. When the Twins turned slant-eyed looks of pissed-off-ness on me, I felt my stomach clench. Did they really hate me as much as they looked like they did? It made my heart hurt to think about it, but I lifted my chin and stared right back at them. If I completed the Change to vampyre, I would someday be their High Priestess, and that meant they had damn well better listen to me. "We've already been through this. Aphrodite is part of the Dark Daughters now. She's also part of our circle, being as she has an affinity for the element earth." I hesitated, wondering if she still had that affinity, or had she lost it when she'd gone from fledgling to human and then, apparently, back to fledgling again, but that was just too confusing, so I hurried on. "You guys know you agreed to accept her in each position, without name-calling and hateful remarks."

The Twins didn't say anything, but Damien's voice, sounding uncharacteristically flat and emotionless, came from the other side of me. "We agreed to that, but we didn't agree to be friends with her."

"I didn't say I wanted to be your friend," Aphrodite said.

"Ditto, bitch!" the Twins said together. "Whatever," Aphrodite said, moving like she was going to pick up her tray and leave.

I'd opened my mouth to tell Aphrodite to sit down and the Twins to shut up when a bizarre noise echoed down the hall and through the open doors to the cafeteria.

"What the--?" I began, but didn't get the whole question out before at least a dozen cats streaked into the cafeteria, hissing and spitting like crazy.

Okay, at the House of Night, cats are everywhere. Literally. They follow us around, sleep with, and in my cat Nala's case, often complain at, the fledgling of their choice. In Vamp Soc class, one of the first cool things we learned was that cats had long been familiars of vampyres. This meant that we were all majorly used to having cats everywhere. But I had never seen them act so absolutely insane.

The Twin's huge gray tomcat, Beelzebub, jumped right up between them. He was puffed up to twice his already ginormously large size, and he stared back through the open door to the dining hall with amber eyes slit in anger.

"Beelzebub, baby, what's wrong?" Erin tried to soothe him.

Nala leaped up on my lap. She put her little white-tipped paws on my shoulder and gave a scary, psycho-cat growl as she, too, stared at the door and the chaotic noise still coming from the hall.

"Hey," Jack said. "I know what that sound is."

And it hit me at the same time. "It's a dog barking," I said.

Then something that resembled a large yellow bear more closely than a dog burst into the cafeteria. The bear-dog was followed by a kid who was being followed by several uncharacteristically frazzled-looking professors, including our fencing master, Dragon Lankford, our equestrian instructor, Lenobia, as well as several of the Sons of Erebus Warriors.

"Got ya!" the kid yelled once he caught up with the dog and came to a skidding halt not far from us while he swooped down, snagged the barking beast's collar (which I noted was pink leather with silver metallic spikes all around it), and neatly clipped a leash to it. The instant his leash was reattached, the bear stopped barking, plopped its round butt down on the floor, and stared, panting, up at the kid. "Yeah, great. Now you want to act right," I heard him mutter to the obviously grinning canine.

Even though the barking had stopped, the cats in the cafeteria had definitely not stopped freaking. There was so much hissing around us, it sounded like air escaping from a punctured inner tube.

"You see, James, this was what I was trying to explain to you earlier," Dragon Lankford said as he stared, frowning, down at the dog. "The animal just won't work at this House of Night."

"It's Stark, not James," the kid said. "And like I was trying to explain to you earlier--the dog has to stay with me. It's just the way it is. If you want me--you get her, too."

I decided that the new dog kid had an unusual way about him. It wasn't like he was being openly rude or disrespectful to Dragon, but he also wasn't speaking to him with the respect, and sometimes outright fear, with which the vast majority of newly Marked fledglings spoke to vampyres. I checked out the front of his vintage Pink Floyd T-shirt. No class insignia there, so I didn't have a clue what year he was and how long he'd been Marked. "Stark," Lenobia was saying, obviously trying to reason with the kid, "it's just not possible to integrate a dog into this campus. You can see how much he's upsetting the cats."