On the last episode of The Worst Thing Ever, we hit rock bottom when Zoey did a whole lot of nothing for dozens of pages, then allowed a serial rapist into her inner circle, and banished Kalona and Neferet with the power of love. Tempted picks up moments after the end of Hunted, with Zoey and her party scrambling to tie up loose ends in the aftermath of the fight. 
 CONTENT WARNING FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT/RAPE 
 While Zoey rushes Stark to the infirmary to get his stupidly-shaped burn looked at, Stevie Rae is left in charge of both the fledglings and narration duties for the first time. 
 Yep, Tempted is the book in which the series begins to split the narrative perspective between Zoey and the rest of the cast. We get full chapters with other characters at the wheel, including Aphrodite, Heath, and Stark, but most of the focus shifts to Stevie Rae, who's being maneuvered into a sort of co-protagonist position with Zoey. 
 I have to say, I think this was a really good decision. For one, it helps to feel like more shit is actually happening in this installment. Not to say that Tempted isn't still extremely decompressed - I swear this thing reads like a monthly comic series in the worst possible way - but we at least have multiple storylines running, so that our downtime between the start and climax at least seems like it's filled with things besides Zoey's boy troubles. 
 For two, we get to spend time outside of Zoey's head. Whole chapters, you guys. You wouldn't think that the effect would be that significant, because it's still the same author, and the writing and characters are just as obnoxious in the non-Zoey chapters as they are normally, but holy shit, going from third-person perspective following Stevie Rae or Aphrodite around to one of Zoey's first-person chapters is like getting in a big lungful of shit-scented air before having your head dunked back into raw sewage. 
 I really can't emphasize the difference enough. I'm not a fan of Cast as a writer, but you don't realize just how much Zoey's voice contributes to the insufferability of this series until you're given a chance to experience it from someone else's perspective. 
 Anyway, chapter two puts Stevie Rae in the driver's seat for the first time, and she promptly makes a hard left out of fucking nowhere. 
 Stevie Rae moved before she remembered even making the decision. When she reached him, she only hesitated for a second. He'd passed out facedown, so it was a simple thing for her to move his wings aside and grab him under his arms. He was big, really big -- like, as big as a real guy, and she'd braced herself for him to be heavy, but he wasn't. Actually, he was so light that it was super-easy to drag him, which was what she found herself doing while her mind screamed at her: What the hell? What the hell? What the hell? 
 What the hell was she doing? 
 Stevie Rae didn't know. All she knew was what she wasn't doing. She wasn't killing the Raven Mocker. 
 Enter Rephaim, who had like one line in the last book, and is now looking like he might have been bumped up to series regular. He's introduced as "Kalona's favorite son", his lieutenant, because of course this is House of Night, and he couldn't just be a rank-and-file Raven Mocker. He also has a normal dude voice, so that when Stevie Rae finds him badly injured after the battle, and he asks her to kill him, it hits Stevie Rae right in the "I-don't-kill-people-unless-they're-homeless" feels. Against all established canon and reason, she doesn't finish him off; instead she drags him back to the nunnery and stashes him in a gardening shed, tending to his wounds, and taking on her own dirty little secret. 
 It's a contrived-ass decision, to be sure. Tempted is all about loudly justifying Stevie Rae's choice so that it doesn't feel plot-mandated, jumbling out some stuff about how Stevie Rae's not a killer, and sees herself in the Raven Mockers, but right off the bat it feels plot-mandated. I mean, neither we nor Zoey and her pals have been given any reason to see the Raven Mockers as anything but mindless bestial monsters. Zoey certainly had no problem killing them in the last book - remember how she roasted that one alive back at the train station? 
 Anyway, this provides majority of the material for Stevie Rae's storyline. It's mostly about keeping Rephaim from her friends while angsting about sparing an enemy, and is the decision that sort of "justifies" this new formatting, giving Stevie Rae a redemption plotline of her own to pursue that Zoey doesn't know about. 
 The books are really building Stevie Rae as a red analogue to Zoey - she's been called the red fledgling's "high priestess" for a while now, even though they're pretty vague on what that means or entails - but now she's got her own plotline, her own narration duties, her own secrets, and, oh yeah that's right baby, she's embarking on her own little love triangle with her own morally ambiguous immortal! 
 But we'll save that for later. 
 Meanwhile, Zoey's getting in on that whole making random-seeming decisions. The start of this book has her finally accepting that she's A-ya, even though it seemed to be at least partially in doubt or whatever in the last one. She leaves Stark in the infirmary, and goes to speak with her grandmother. 
 I sat beside Grandma, tucking my legs up under me, trying to be careful not to jostle the bed too much. Her face was bruised and burned from the airbag that had saved her life. Part of her lip and her cheek had stitches darkening them. She had a bandage on her head and her right arm was swathed in a scary-looking cast. 
 "Ironic, isn't it, that my wounds look so terrible, but they are far less painful and far-reaching than the invisible wounds inside of you," she said. 
 "Oh Zoey, I'm an old women broken and battered and bruised all to hell, but your fee-fees are hurt, let's talk about you, you're the most important thing ever!" 
 No wonder Zoey's such a fucking narcissist. 
 Zoey chats briefly about about her A-ya fee-fees, and then goes to make sure everyone's settled in all right, during which she has her first actual A-ya flashback. It's a weird bit of flip-flopped pacing, in that it would have made more sense for her to resign herself to her past life if this had happened sooner, but whatever. She remembers the moments just after she trapped Kalona, and it's about fifteen different kinds of fucked-up. 
 "Oh, Goddess, no! Do not let this be!" 
 It was Kalona's voice, and my immediate reaction was to cry out and struggle blindly away from him, but I wasn't in charge of my body and the words that came from my mouth were not my own. 
 "Sssh, do not despair. I am with you, my love." 
 "You trapped me!" Even as he cried the accusation, his arms tightened around me, and I recognized the cold passion of his immortal embrace. 
 "I saved you," my strange voice responded as my body settled more intimately against his. "You were not meant to walk this world. That is why you have been so unhappy, so insatiable." 
 "I had no choice! The mortals do not understand." 
 My arms wrapped around his neck. My fingers twined through his soft, heavy hair. "I understand. Be at peace here with me. Lay down your sad restlessness. I will comfort you." 
 This is so gross. So so so so fucking gross. I mean first, see how quickly she shifts the blame for Kalona's actions away from him? "You were not meant to walk this world. That is why you have been so unhappy, so insatiable." = "It's not his fault he's a raping, murdering monster! It's this world's fault, totally circumstance, you understand. SUCH A POOR, TRAGIC, MISUNDERSTOOD WOOBIE." 
 Then there's this: "I understand. Be at peace here with me. Lay down your sad restlessness. I will comfort you." 
 So many questions. One, why the fuck is A-ya even sentient? If her only purpose was to trap Kalona so that he couldn't rape or murder anyone anymore, why does she need to be self-aware or have a soul AT ALL? Why wouldn't the Ghigua women just make some beep-boop mud robot who detonates upon penetration and leave it at that? 
 Two, if you are going to make her self-aware, why would she be so ~understanding~? She was created by members of the VERY COMMUNITY Kalona tormented for years, why the fuck would they create a trap that would want to comfort him? You'd think if anything she would be programmed to hate him, spend eternity tormenting him, maybe have some vagina dentata going on. THAT would make more sense than her makers programming her to be all "AW POOR BABY, LET ME COMFORT YOU WITH MY COOCH." 
 Finally, since the plot has decided that she is a sentient woman with feelings and shit, WHY OH WHY is it HER RESPONSIBILITY to comfort Kalona? WHY? I mean I get in a literal sense that she's a living trap for his dick, but in a thematic sense, why have the Casts decided that it's a woman's responsibility to rehabilitate the immortal murderer-rapist? 
 I hate this idea so much. It came up with Stark and Zoey in Hunted, Kalona and Zoey later in this book, and even Stevie Rae and her immortal bad boy - this idea that it's somehow these women's mystical duty to reform these guys, who are, for some convoluted reason or another, totally not responsible for their actions. They're all just so tragic and hurt and sad, oh, if only they had someone to pat them on the back and tell them everything was going to be okay, they would obviously stop being monsters, right? 
 That line of reasoning is so fucking dangerous. The idea that because a dude is in pain, it's not his fault when he lashes out at other people, the idea that the "right" woman can fix a broken, violent man, that a "good" woman SHOULD, that the choice to "do good" can and should absolve anyone of their past sins, no matter how destructive or violent, and that anyone who might hold a grudge after that is unreasonable and harsh. 
 This series and its godforsaken "moral themes" are so steeped in rape culture and rape apologia that it's really, really hard to stomach sometimes. 
 Anyway, back on plot: Zoey settles everyone in and begins making her multiple-chapters-long trek to bed, during which she tries to sort out her boy problems, because god forbid we not get right on that. 
 More words, so many more words, like thousands more + quotespam at You'reKilling.Us