I noticed on my Kindle that we’re almost 40% of the way into this book now! That’s quite a lot of book, so I figured it’d be useful to summarize all the plot developments that have happened in the fifth House of Night novel so far!
- Zoey and her friends went to the underground tunnels to hide from Kalona and Neferet
Ok! You’re all caught up!
House of Night (Hunted): Chapter 13
Alright, fine. Lest you think I’m being unfair, some other character stuff has been introduced:
- Aphrodite is drinking a lot.
- Erik and Heath are fighting over Zoey. Wait, that happened in the last four books too. This isn’t a development.
- Neferet’s all “Zoey, come back to the House of Night” and Zoey’s all “nuh uh”. So I’m not sure this counts either, to be honest.
- Zoey steps outside for like two seconds and the plot’s like “Oh my God, finally!” and she got attacked by a raven mocker. And she goes back in the tunnels where everyone hides from the plot. You can’t hide forever, Zoey. Eventually the book needs to happen.
Actually House of Night (Hunted): Chapter 13, For Real This Time
Heath and Erik rush Zoey to Darius to see if he can keep her from dying. Perhaps one of the reasons why so few things have happened in Hunted is because House of Night by this point has so many well-rounded characters with their own stuff going on!
Jack took one look at me, screamed like a girl, and fainted.
I meant stereotypes doing absolutely nothing.
Darius takes one look at Zoey, and – finally – some hope out of darkness for this boring, boring book…
“[We] need to cast a circle and focus the healing powers of the elements on Zoey,” Darius told Aphrodite.
THAT’S RIGHT, Y’ALL. TIME FOR A MOTHERFUCKIN’ CIRCLE!
Damien, Stevie Rae, Erin, and Shaunee get together, but don’t know what to do because Zoey always casts the circles. Aphrodite says she’ll do it, because I guess she’s the only character who’s been paying any attention to the umpteen circles that get cast in every fucking book.
Heath tries to keep Zoey conscious by keeping her talking, and tells her that he hasn’t had a drink in two months. Zoey narrates that she’s happy to hear that because “The reason I’d broken up with Heath right before I was Marked was his drinking”, which totally makes sense because I distinctly remember Zoey denied ever officially dating Heath throughout the entire first book. But good for Heath.
And since I’m sure someone out there is gonna get real mad if I don’t share the description of Zoey’s horrendous injury, here ya go:
Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t have the energy to scream. There was a long laceration that went all the way from the top of my left shoulder, across my chest a couple of inches above my breasts, and didn’t end until it sliced through the skin on my right shoulder. The cut was deep and jagged. The edges of my skin flapped sickeningly apart, showing way more muscle and fat and layers of skin than I was ever meant to see.
Aphrodite casts the circle. I really don’t need to keep summarizing these, right? Darius explains that Zoey needs blood, and that Heath’s blood will be most effective since he used to be Imprinted with Zoey. Zoey knows that this is a life-or-death situation, but can’t help but think that this will be really uncomfortable in front of everybody, including her jealous boyfriend Erik, and this will 100% cause another Imprint between her and Heath, who she’s already sorta cheated on Erik with before.
Thankfully, Aphrodite can provide some laffs during these difficult times.
“Your blood would be even better than Aphrodite’s for her.”
“That’s the first good news I’ve heard in ages,” Aphrodite mumbled.
Zoey sucks Heath’s blood.
We’d instantly Imprinted again.
Aaaand just like that, we have a whole chapter of Erik bitching at Zoey over this to look forward to later. Yay.
Zoey drinks so much of Heath’s blood that he loses consciousness, but Darius assures her he’s fine. The others worry that the red fledglings will attack him while he’s there recovering, but Stevie Rae assures them that they won’t try to drink his blood “now that he’s Imprinted with Zoey again. His blood smells wrong.”
Zoey also narrates a whole bit where she wants to reassure Aphrodite that “there are a lot different kinds of Imprints. What I have with Heath is definitely not what you have with Stevie Rae.” and then starts thinking about Aphrodite and Darius’s sex life and gets grossed out. I’m not kidding, this paragraph is actually, 100% in this scene and I have no idea why.
I realized that it was Darius who was going to have to field her questions. By the intimate smile he gave her in return, I was guessing he was going to like that kind of questioning wayyyy more than I ever would.
To its credit, there’s a quiet, post-disaster moment with a bit of gallows humor that, for once, I actually found really funny.
“Hey, am I done almost dying?” I asked the warrior.
Darius looked up from my wound to meet my eyes, and I saw there a relief that told me exactly how close I must have been to not making it.
“You are done dying.”
But then Darius says “you need more help then I can give you if you’re going to recover fully”. Which sort of sounds like… the opposite of “you are done dying”. If you wanna get annoyingly accurate about, you know, Zoey’s medical status.
“Zoey needs more than a doctor’s care. Zoey needs to be around adult vampyres so that the damage to her body doesn’t become fatal.”
“Hang on. I thought you said I was done almost dying,” I said.
“You are done almost dying from this particular wound, but if you don’t get within a coven of vampyres, and I mean more than one or two or three of us, the damage caused to your body will use up your reserves of strength and you will begin rejecting the Change.” Darius paused, letting what he was saying sink in with all of us. “You’ll die from that. You may come back to us, like Stevie Rae and the rest of the red fledglings did, but you may not. […] So you really don’t have any choice. […] We have to get you back to the House of Night.”
COOL. MAYBE SOME STORY WILL HAPPEN NOW.
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