Stark

As Stark awoke, just for a second he didn't remember. All he knew was that Zoey was there, in bed, beside him. He smiled sleepily and turned, reaching an arm out to pull her close to him.

The chilled, lifeless feel of her unresponsive flesh brought him fully awake, and reality crashed and burned the last of his dreams.

"Finally. You know, you red vampyres might be all strong and whatever at night, but during the day you sleep creepily like the dead. Hello, I have one word for you: stereotypical."

Stark sat up, scowling at Aphrodite, who was sitting in one of the cream-colored velvet chairs, long legs crossed gracefully, sipping a cup of steaming tea.

"Aphrodite, why are you in here?"

Instead of answering him, her gaze went to Zoey. "She hasn't moved at all since it happened, has she?"

Stark got out of bed and gently tucked the blanket back around Zoey. He touched her cheek with his fingertips and kissed the only Mark left on her body, an ordinary fledgling's crescent tattoo in the middle

of her forehead. It's okay if you come back as a regular fledgling. Just come back, he thought as his lips brushed her Mark. Then he straightened and faced Aphrodite. "No. She hasn't moved. She can't.

She's not here. And we have seven days to figure out how to get her back."

"Six," Aphrodite corrected.

Stark swallowed hard. "Yeah, you're right. It's six now."

"Okay, come on then. Clearly we don't have time to waste." Aphrodite got up and started out of the room.

"Where're we going?" Stark started following her but kept glancing back over his shoulder at Zoey.

"Hey, you gotta snap out of it. You said it yourself: Zoey's not here . So stop gawking at her like you're a little lost puppy."

"I love her! Do you even know what the hell that means?"

Aphrodite stopped and turned to face him. "Love doesn't have shit to do with it. You're her Warrior.

That means more than 'I heart Zoey,' " she said sarcastically, using air quotes. "I have my own Warrior, so I do know what that means, and here's the truth: if my soul was shattered, and I was stuck in the Otherworld, I wouldn't want Darius to boo-hoo about it and be all heartbroken. I'd want him to get the hell to work and figure out how to do his job, which is to stay alive and protect me so that I can figure out a way to get home ! Now are you coming or not?" She flipped her hair, turned her back to him, and started twitching down the hall.

Stark closed his mouth and went after her. They walked silently for a while as Aphrodite led him down some stairs, around increasingly narrow corridors, and down more stairs.

"Where are we going?" Stark asked again.

"Well, it feels like a dungeon. Smells like mold and kinda weird b.o., the institutional decor is suitable for either a prison or a hospital psych ward, and it makes Damien think he's died and gone to dork heaven.

So take a guess."

"We're going back to human high school?"

"Close," she said, her lips lifting in a hint of a smile. "We're going to a really old library filled with the frantically studying nerd herd."

Stark let out a long breath in a loud sigh to keep himself from laughing. Sometimes he almost liked Aphrodite - not that he'd ever admit it.

Stark

Aphrodite had been right - the basement of the palace did remind him of a tacky public school media center, minus the foldout windows and cheap, ratty mini-blinds, which was weird as hell because the rest of San Clemente Island was over-the-top rich. Down in the basement, though, there were just a bunch of worn wooden tables, hard benches, bare white stone walls, and tons and tons of shelves filled with a zillion different sizes, shapes, and styles of books.

Zoey's friends were clustered around one big table that was overflowing with books, pop cans, crumpled bags of chips, and one humongous tub full of red licorice whips. Stark thought they look tired but totally wired on sugar and caffeine. As he and Aphrodite walked up, Jack was holding up a large leather book and pointing to an illustration.

"Check it out - this is a copy of a painting of a Greek High Priestess named Calliope. It says she was also the Poet Laureate after Sappho. Doesn't she look exactly like Cher?"

"Wow, that's insane. She does look just like young Cher," Erin said.

"Yeah, before she started wearing those white wigs. What the hell's up with that?" Shaunee said.

Damien gave the Twins a look . "There is nothing wrong with Cher. Absolutely. Nothing."

"Uh-oh," Shaunee said.

"Stepped on a gay nerve," Erin agreed.

"I had a Cher Barbie doll. I loved that doll," Jack said.

"Barbies, herd of nerd? Seriously? You're supposed to be saving Z, remember?" Aphrodite said, shaking her head in disgust and curling up her lip at the licorice whips.

"We've been at it all day. We're just taking a little break. Thanatos and Darius went out for more food,"

Damien said. "We have made some headway, but I'll wait until they get back to report everything." He waved at Stark, and his "hi" was echoed by the other kids.

"Yeah, don't be so judgmental, Aphrodite. We've been working hard, you'll see."

"You're talking about dolls," Aphrodite said.

"Barbies," Jack corrected her. "And just for a second. Plus, Barbies are cool and an important part of American culture." He nodded in emphasis and clutched the "Cher" portrait to his chest. "Especially celebrity Barbies."

"Celebrity Barbies would only be important if they had interesting accoutrements you could buy with them," Aphrodite said.

"Accoutre-whats?" Shaunee said.

"You sound like you swallowed a French guy and are trying to spit him out," Erin said, and the Twins giggled.

"Left and right brain - listen up. Interesting accoutrements equals cool stuff, like unusual accessories,"

Aphrodite said, picking delicately at a chip.

"Okay, if you don't know anything about Barbies, your mother seriously hated you," Erin said.

"Not that we don't understand that," Shaunee added.

" 'Cause everyone who even had one Barbie knows you can buy stuff for them," Erin finished.

"Yeah, cool stuff," Jack agreed.

"Not cool by my definition," Aphrodite said with a superior smirk.

"What's cool by your definition?" Jack asked, making Shaunee and Erin groan.

"Well, since you asked - I'd say it would be cool if Barbie made a Barbra Streisand doll, but you'd have to buy her fingernails and nose separately. And her fake nails would come in lots of different color choices."

There was a shocked silence, and then Jack, sounding awed, whispered, "That would be cool."

Aphrodite looked smug. "And how about a bald Britney Spears doll that had extras like an umbrella, a fat suit, weird wigs, and, of course, optional panties."

"Eww," Jack said, and then giggled. "Yeah, and a Paris Hilton doll that had an optional brain."

Aphrodite raised her brow at him. "Don't go all crazy. There are some things even Paris Hilton can't buy."

Stark stood there, dumbfounded, and when they all burst into giggles, he thought his brain was going to explode.

"What the hell is wrong with all of you?" he yelled at them. "How can you laugh and joke like this?

You're focusing on toys when Zoey is days away from dying!"

Into the shocked silence, Thanatos's voice sounded abnormally loud. "No, Warrior. They're not focusing on toys. They're focusing on life and being among the living." The vampyre stepped from the doorway, where she and Darius had been silently observing the kids. Darius followed her, placing a tray filled with sandwiches and fruit in the middle of the table. He then joined Aphrodite's side of the wooden bench. "And take it from someone who knows more than a little about death - focusing on life is what you should do if you want to keep drawing breath in this world."

Damien cleared his voice, calling Stark's glare to him. Unruffled, the fledgling met his eyes, and said,

"Yeah, that's just one of the things we learned from all the studying we've been doing."

"While you were sleeping ," Shaunee murmured.

"And we weren't ," Erin added.

"So, what we found out from our research," Damien broke in before Stark could say anything to the Twins, "is that whenever a High Priestess suffered such a shock that her soul shattered, her Warrior didn't seem to be able to stay alive."

Barbies and bickering Twins forgotten, Stark's face was a question mark as he stared at Damien and tried to make sense of what he was hearing. "Do you mean the Warriors all dropped dead?"

"In a way," Damien said.

"Some of them killed themselves so that they knew they could follow their High Priestesses to the

Otherworld and continue to protect them there," Thanatos took up the explanation.

"But it didn't work because none of the High Priestesses returned, right?" Stark said.

"Correct. What we know from Priestesses who, through their affinity for spirit, have journeyed to the Otherworld is that those lost High Priestesses couldn't bear the death of their Warriors. Some of them were able to heal their souls in the Otherworld, but they chose to remain there with their Warriors."

"Some of them healed," Stark said slowly. "What happened to the High Priestesses who didn't?"

Zoey's friends shifted uncomfortably, but Thanatos's voice remained steady. "As you learned yesterday, if a soul remains shattered, the person becomes Caoinic Shi', a being that will never rest."

"It's like a zombie, without the eating people part," Jack said softly and then shuddered.

"That can't happen to Zoey," Stark said. He'd sworn to protect Zoey, and if he had to, he would follow that Oath into the Otherworld to be sure she didn't become some kind of horrible zombie thing.

"But even though the end result was the same, not all of the Warriors killed themselves to follow their High Priestesses," Damien said.

"Tell me about the others," Stark said. Unable to sit, he paced back and forth in front of the table.

"Well, it was pretty obvious that no Warrior or High Priestess returned when the Warrior killed himself, so we found records of Warriors who had done lots of different things to try to get themselves into the Otherworld," Damien said.

"Some of them were crazy - like one who starved himself until he was delirious, then he kinda left his body," Jack said.

"He died," Shaunee said.

"Yeah, the story was gross. He did lots of screaming and was hallucinating and stuff about his High Priestess and what she was going through before he actually croaked," Erin said.

"You. Are. Not. Helping," Aphrodite told them.

"Some of the Warriors did drugs to put themselves in a trancelike state, and they actually managed to get their spirits to leave this world," Damien continued, while the Twins rolled their eyes at Aphrodite.

"But they couldn't enter the Otherworld. We know because they came back to their bodies long enough to tell witnesses that they'd failed." Damien stopped there, glancing at Thanatos.

She took up the story. "Then the Warriors died. Each of them."

"Failing to protect their High Priestesses killed them," Stark said, his voice completely expressionless.

"No, turning their back on life killed them," Darius corrected.

Stark turned to him. "Wouldn't you? If Aphrodite died because you couldn't protect her, wouldn't you choose death rather than live life without her?"

Aphrodite didn't give Darius a chance to answer. "I would be super pissed if he died! That's what I was trying to tell you upstairs. You can't keep looking behind you - not at Zoey, not at the past, not even back to your Oath. You have to go forward and find a new way of living, a new way of protecting her."

"Then tell me something, anything that you found in all these damn books that can help me instead of just showing me how other Warriors failed."

"I'll tell you something I didn't read in a book. Stevie Rae accidentally evoked the white bull last night."

"Darkness! A fledgling called Darkness into this world?" Thanatos looked like Aphrodite had just exploded a bomb in the middle of the room.

"She's not a fledgling. She's like Stark, a red vampyre, but yes. She did. In Tulsa. It was an accident."

Ignoring Thanatos's shocked stare, Aphrodite pulled a slip of paper from her pocket, and read: "The bull said: 'The Warrior must look to his blood to discover the bridge to enter the Isle of Women, and then he must defeat himself to enter the arena. Only by acknowledging one before the other will he join his Priestess. After he joins her, it is her choice and not his whether she returns.' "

Aphrodite looked up. "Anyone have a clue what that might mean?" She waved the paper around, and Damien took it, already rereading as Jack peeked over his shoulder.

"What price did Darkness exact for such knowledge?" Thanatos asked. Her face had gone absolutely white. "And how did she survive the payment of it without losing her mind or her soul?"

"That's what I wondered myself, especially after Stevie Rae told me how bad the white bull was. She said she didn't think anything could defeat it except for the black bull, which was how she got away from it."

"She evoked the black bull, too?" Thanatos said. "That is almost unbelievable."

"Stevie Rae has some mad earth skillz," Jack said.

"Yeah, that's how she said she got the good bull to Tulsa. She drew power from the earth to call it,"

Aphrodite said.

"And you trust this Stevie Rae vampyre?"

Aphrodite hesitated. "Most of the time."

Stark expected at least one of the kids to jump in and correct Aphrodite, but they all stayed quiet until Damien said, "Why do you ask about trusting Stevie Rae?"

"Because of the few things I know about the ancient beliefs of Light and Darkness symbolized in the bulls, one is that they always exact a price for their favors. Always. Answering Stevie Rae's question was a favor from Darkness."

"But she called up the good bull and it kicked the bad bull's butt. That kept Stevie Rae from paying a price to him," Jack said.

"So she then owed payment to the black bull," Thanatos said.

Aphrodite's eyes narrowed. "That's what she was talking about when she said she wouldn't ever evoke

either of the bulls again because the price was too high."

"I think you should look to your friend and discover what payment she rendered the black bull,"

Thanatos said.

"And why she wouldn't tell me about it," Aphrodite added.

Thanatos's eyes looked old and sad as she said, "Just remember, there are consequences for everything, whether good or bad."

"Can we stop looking back at what has happened with Stevie Rae?" Stark said. "I need to move forward. To Skye and a bridge of blood. So let's get going."

"Whoa, big boy," Aphrodite told him. "Settle for a second. You can't just show up on the Isle of Women and bumble around looking for a bloody bridge. Sgiach's protective spell will kick your butt - as in kill you dead."

"I don't think Stark's supposed to be looking for something literal," said Damien, studying Aphrodite's note again. "It says to look to your blood to discover the bridge, not look for a blood bridge."

"Ugh, metaphor. Just one more reason I seriously hate poetry," Aphrodite said.

"I'm good at metaphors," Jack said. "Let me see." Damien handed him the paper. Jack chewed his lip while he read the line again. "Hmm, if you were Imprinted with someone, I'd say it meant that we should talk to whoever that is, and maybe they'd know something."

"I'm not Imprinted with anyone," Stark said, starting to pace again.

"So that might mean that we need to look at who you are - that there's something about you that's a key to getting onto Sgiach's island," Damien said.

"I don't know anything! That's the problem!"

"Okay - okay, how about we look at the notes we made about Sgiach to see if there's something there that rings a bell with you," Jack said, making consolatory motions at Stark.

"Yeah, chill out," Shaunee said.

"Take a seat and have a sandwich." Erin gestured to the end of their bench with the sandwich she'd begun munching on.

"Eat," Thanatos said, taking a sandwich and sitting beside Jack. "Focus on life."

Stark suppressed a frustrated growl, grabbed a sandwich, and sat.

"Oh, pull out that chart we made," Jack said, peeking over Damien's shoulder as he flipped through the notes he'd made. "Some of this stuff gets confusing, and visual aids always help."

"Good idea - here it is." Damien ripped out a piece of paper from the yellow legal pad he'd almost filled with notes. At the top of it he'd drawn a big, open umbrella. On one side of the umbrella he'd written LIGHT and on the opposite side, DARKNESS.

"The umbrella of Light and Darkness is a good image," Thanatos said. "It shows that the two forces are all-encompassing."

"That was my idea," Jack said, turning a little pink.

Damien smiled at him. "Well done, you." Then he pointed at the column beneath Light. "So under the force of Light I've listed: good, the black bull, Nyx, Zoey, and us." He paused, and everyone nodded.

"And under Darkness I have: evil, the white bull, Neferet/Tsi Sgili, Kalona, and Raven Mockers."

"I see you have Sgiach placed in the middle," Thanatos said.

"Yeah, along with onion rings, Hostess Ding Dongs, and my name ," Aphrodite said. "Just what the hell does that mean?"

"Well, I don't think we've decided if Sgiach is a force for Light or Darkness," Damien said.

"I added the onion rings and Ding Dongs," Jack said. When everyone just stared at him, he shrugged and explained, "Onion rings are deep-fried and fattening, but an onion is a vegetable. So aren't they good for you? Maybe? And, well, Ding Dongs are chocolate, but they have cream in the middle. Isn't that dairy and healthy?"

"I think you're brain-damaged," Aphrodite said.

"We added your name," Erin said.

"Yeah, 'cause we think you're like Rachel on Glee ," Shaunee said. "Super annoying, but she has to be in the show 'cause sometimes she comes up with good stuff and kinda sorta saves the day."

"But we think she's still a hag from hell. Like you," Erin finished, giving Aphrodite a sugary smile."

"Anyway" - Damien quickly erased onion rings, Ding Dongs, and Aphrodite's name, put the chart in the middle of the table, and then went back to the yellow pad - "here's some info we found about Sgiach,"

Damien said, scanning through the notes he'd made. "She is considered a queen of Warriors. Lots of Warriors used to train on her island, so a bunch of Sons of Erebus came and went, but the Warriors who stayed with her, the ones sworn to her service - "

"Hang on, Sgiach had more than one Oath Sworn Warrior?" Stark interrupted.

Damien nodded. "Apparently she had a whole Clan of them. Only they didn't call themselves Sons of Erebus. Their title was . . ." Damien paused, flipping pages. "Here it is. They were called Guardians of the Ace."

"Why Ace?" Stark asked.

"It's a metaphor," Aphrodite said, rolling her eyes. "Another one. It's what they called Sgiach. It symbolizes queen to their Clan."

"I think the Scottish clan stuff is cool," Jack said.

"Of course you do," Aphrodite said. "Guys in skirts is your wet dream."

"Kilt, not skirt," Stark said. "Or plaid. If you're talking about the really old, big one you call it a philamore."

Aphrodite raised a blond brow at him. "And you know this because you like to wear them?"

He shrugged. "Not me, but my grandpa used to."

"You're Scottish?" Damien's voice was incredulous. "And you're just now telling us?"

Stark shrugged again. "What does my human family have to do with anything? I haven't even talked to them in almost four years."

"It's not just a family," Damien's voice rose with excitement as he started ruffling through the pages of his notes again.

"Oh, for crap's sake. Your family is your blood, you moron," Aphrodite said. "What was your grandfather's last name?"

Stark frowned at Aphrodite.

"MacUallis," Stark and Damien said together.

"How did you know that?" Stark asked.

"It was the Clan MacUallis who were the Guardians of the Ace." Damien grinned victoriously, holding up the page of his notes that held the words: CLAN MACUALLIS = GUARDIANS OF THE ACE for everyone to see.

"Looks like we found our blood bridge," Jack said, hugging Damien.