Damien, a puffy-eyed Jack, and Duchess (causing all of the cats except Nala to hiss like insane creatures) crowded back into the room then.
“Hey, Heath,” Jack said. “I thought you were on your way home.”
“I can’t get home. Looks like I’m stuck here with you in the left-behind pile.”
Jack frowned, close to bursting into tears again. “Damien’s not leaving me behind. Not really. I just—I just can’t go with him right now this second.”
“That’s right. We’ll be back together as soon as we can,” Damien said, putting his arm around Jack.
“Okay, I hate to interrupt all this gay-boy romance stuff, but I wrote me some more poems when I woke up and thought you better see them,” Kramisha said.
That broke though my confusion about what to do about Heath and Erik. “You’re right. I do need to see them,” I said. “Damien, did Jack get a chance to explain to you about Kramisha’s poetry?”
“Yes. I even got a copy of the poems before Kramisha went to sleep and read them while Jack and I were on watch,” Damien said.
“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Aphrodite said.
“When you were all drunk and disorderly, Z discovered poetry written on the walls of Aphrodite’s room,” Erin said.
“Written by Kramisha, but all of it seemed to be about Kalona, which is totally creepy,” Shaunee said.
“It’s like she’s channeling abstract images about him,” Damien said. “I think the poems in her room were meant to catch our attention, which means we need to check out everything Kramisha writes.”
“Oh, great. That’s all we need. More gloom and doom poetry,” Aphrodite said.
“Well speaking of, here’s two new ones.” Kramisha tried to hand me the couple of sheets of paper the poems were written on, but moving my arms up so I could hold them made me suck air with pain.
“Here.” Erik smoothly took the papers from her. Then he brought them to me and held them up so that Damien, the Twins, Aphrodite, Jack, and I could read them at the same time. The first one was baffling:
What once bound him
Will make him flee
Place of power—joining of five
Night
Spirit
Blood
Humanity
Earth
Joined not to conquer,
Instead to overcome
Night leads to Spirit
Blood binds Humanity
And Earth completes.
“That makes my head hurt. I mean, more than it already does. I cannot tell you how much I hate poetry,” Aphrodite said.
“Do you have a clue about this?” I asked Damien.
“I think it’s giving us directions on how we can make Kalona flee, or run away,” he said.
“We know what ‘flee’ means, Mr. Vocab,” Erin said.
“It’s kinda depressing that it says flee instead of kill,” Jack said.
“Kalona can’t be killed,” I said, speaking the words automatically. “He’s immortal. He can be trapped. He can be chased away, although it boggles my mind to think about what might make him run. But he can’t be killed.”
“Those five thingies together, in a place of power, make him run,” Jack said.
“Wherever that is, and whatever they are,” I said.
“They’re people who represent each of those things. Or at least that would be my first guess. See how they’re capitalized? That usually means they are proper nouns, or names,” Damien said.
“They’re names,” Kramisha said.
“Do you know anything else about it? Can you tell who they are?” Damien asked.
Kramisha shook her head, looking frustrated. “No. It’s just when you said that they be people, I knew you was right.”
“How about the next one?” Damien said. “Maybe it’ll help us make sense of this one.”
I turned my attention to the other sheet of paper. The new poem wasn’t long, but it made my skin crawl.
She comes back
Through blood by blood
She returns
Cut deep now
Like me
Humanity saves her
Will she save me?
“What were you thinking when you wrote this?” I asked Kramisha.
“Nothin’. I was barely awake. I just wrote the words that come to me with both of ’em.”
“I don’t like it,” Erik said.
“Well, it doesn’t help us with the other poem, that’s for sure. Actually, I think it&rsq1awl.
“But who’s speaking? Who is this ‘me’ that’s asking if I’ll save him or her?” I was feeling weaker and weaker by the moment, and the long strip of my wound was throbbing in time with the beat of my heart.
“It could be Kalona,” Aphrodite said. “That’s who the first poem’s about.”
“Yes, but we’re not so sure Kalona ever had any humanity in him to lose,” Damien said.
I carefully kept my mouth shut, even though my first impulse was to say that I did think Kalona had not always been like he was now.
“On the other hand,” Damien continued, “we know that Neferet has turned from Nyx, which could also mean that she’s lost herself, or her humanity. It could be referring to Neferet.”
“Ugh,” Erin said.
“She has definitely lost her damn mind,” Shaunee said.
“Actually, doesn’t it make the most sense that it’s that new undead kid talking?” Erik said slowly.
“You may be on to something,” Damien said. I could practically see the wheels in his mind turning. “The ‘Cut deep now / Like me’ part could be metaphorical for his death. Zoey’s wound is definitely life threatening, and they’ve certainly both been drawn to the House of Night because of blood.”
“And his humanity is missing. Like the rest of the red fledglings,” Aphrodite said.
“Hey, I don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout. I got me plenty of humanity,” Kramisha said, clearly offended.
“But you didn’t have your humanity when you first rose, did you?” Damien said.
His voice was so clinical that Kramisha’s feathers instantly unruffled. “No. You right about that. I had no damn sense about me at first. None of us did.”
“Sounds like a good guess about the meaning of the second one,” Damien said. “And because we have Kramisha on our side, her gift with words gives us a glimpse into the possible future. The first poem…I don’t know. I’ll think about it. What we need is to spend some time brainstorming possible meanings—time we don’t have right now. But that’s really inconsequential. We should still appreciate Kramisha.”
“Hey, not a problem,” Kramisha said. “It’s all part a bein’ the Poet Laureate.”
“The who?” Aphrodite said.
Kramisha fixed a sharp look on Aphrodite. “Zoey made me the new Vamp Poet Laureate.”
Aphrodite opened her mouth, but I beat her to speaking. “Actually, let’s have a quick vote of my Prefect Council on whether Kramisha should be our new Poet Laureate.” I looked at Damien. “What’s your vote?”
“Yes, definitely,” Damien said.
“I say 6 V O Dt tyes, too,” Shaunee said,
“Ditto. We’re due for a female Poet Laureate,” Erin said.
“I already gave my yes vote,” Erik said.
We all looked at Aphrodite.
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” she said.
“And I can promise Stevie Rae will vote yes, too,” I said. “So it’s official.”
Everyone smiled at Kramisha who looked totally pleased with herself.
“Okay, so, to summarize,” Damien said, “we’ve pretty much decided that Kramisha’s first poem is outlining a way Kalona can be forced to run away, even though we don’t really have a good understanding of the details provided in the poem. The second is saying that Zoey’s return to the House of Night might somehow save Stark.” Erik said.