face in his hands and kissed her gently, whispering against her lips, “I’m coming for you. This time I won’t let you down.” Then he stood, drew his shoulders back, and went over to the massive stone.
Seoras had moved from his queen’s side and was standing in front of the head of the stone. Meeting Stark’s gaze steadily, he unsheathed a wickedly sharp dirk that had been resting in a worn leather scabbard at his waist.
“Hang on, hang on!” Unbelievably, Aphrodite was pawing around in the abnormally large metallic leather bag she’d lugged all the way from Venice.
Stark had seriously had it with her. “Aphrodite, now is not the time.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake, finally. I knew I couldn’t lose anything this big and smelly.” She pulled out a quart-sized baggie filled with brown twigs and needles, and gestured at one of the Warriors standing around the perimeter of the room, snapping her fingers and looking more regal than Stark would ever admit aloud. She had the burly-looking guy practically running to take the thing from her while she said, “Before you start what I’m sure is going to be some very unattractive blood-letting, someone needs to burn these, like incense, over here by Stark.”
“What the hell?” Stark said, shaking his head at Aphrodite and wondering, not for the first time, if the girl really was mentally damaged.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Grandma Redbird told Stevie Rae, who told me, that burning cedar is some kind of big, powerful, Cherokee mojo in the spirit world.”
“Cedar?” Stark said.
“Yes. Breathe it in and take it with you while you go to the Other-world. And, please, close your mouth and get ready to bleed,” Aphrodite said. She shifted her attention to Sgiach. “I think you’d consider Grandma Redbird a Shaman. She’s wise and definitely hooked into the whole earth-has-a-soul thing. She said cedar would help Stark.”
The Warrior she’d given the baggie to glanced at his queen. She shrugged and nodded, saying, “It cannot hurt.” After a metal brazier had been lit and a few needles added, Aphrodite smiled, bowed her head slightly to Seoras, and said, “Okay,
Stark bit back the words he wanted to yell at annoying Aphrodite. He needed to focus. He’d remember to breathe in cedar because Grandma Redbird knew her stuff, and the bottom line was he needed to get to Zoey and protect her. Stark wiped his hand across his forehead, wishing he could wipe away the tired fog that settled with daylight over his brain.
“Dinnae struggle against it. Yie need tae be feelin’ out of sorts tae slip from yer body. It isnae a natural thing for a Warrior to be doin’.” Seoras used his dirk to point at the flat surface of the huge stone. “Bare yer chest and lie here.”
Stark pulled off his sweatshirt, and the T-shirt under it, and then he lay on the stone.
“I see yie have already been marked,” Seoras said, pointing at the pink burn scar of a broken arrow that covered the left side of his chest.
“Yeah. For Zoey.”
“Aye, well, then ’tis only right that yie are marked again for her.”
Stark braced himself, lying stiff against the bloodstained stone. It should have been cold and dead, but the instant his skin touched the marble surface, the heat in it began to build beneath him. Warmth radiated rhythmically from within it, like a beating pulse.
“Ach, aye, yie can feel it,” said the ancient Guardian.
“It’s hot,” Stark said, looking up at him.
“For those of us who are Guardians, it lives. Do yie trust me, lad?”
Stark blinked, surprised by Seoras’s question, but his answer was unhesitant. “Yes.”
“I’ll be takin’ yie to the place afore death. Yie need to be trustin’ in me to take yie there.”
“I trust you.” Stark did. There was something about the Warrior that resonated deeply within him. Trusting him felt like the right thing to do.
“This willnae be pleasant fer either of us, but ’tis necessary. The body must release to allow the spirit the freedom to depart. Only the pain and the blood can be doin’ that. Are yie ready?”
Stark nodded. Pressing his hands against the hot skin of the stone, he sucked in a deep breath that smelled of cedar.
“Wait! Before you cut him, tell him something that’ll help. Don’t just let his soul flail about moronically in the Otherworld. You’re a Shaman, so Shaman him,” Aphrodite said.
Seoras looked at Aphrodite and then glanced from her to his queen. Stark couldn’t see Sgiach, but whatever passed between the two of them made her Guardian’s lips curl up in the slightest hint of a smile when his eyes went back to Aphrodite.
“Well, ma wee queen. I’ll be telling yer friend this: when a soul wants to truly know what it is to be good, and I do mean purely good for unselfish reasons, that is when the basest of our nature gives in to the desire fer love and peace and harmony. That surrender is a powerful force.”
“That’s too poetic for me, but Stark’s a reader. Maybe he’ll have a clue what you’re talking about,” Aphrodite said.
“Aphrodite, would you do me a favor?” Stark asked.
“Maybe.”
“Stop. Talking.” He looked up at Seoras. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll remember it.”
Seoras met his gaze. “You must do this on yer own, laddie. I cannae even hold yie down. If you cannae bear it, you willnae make it through the gate anyway, and best to be puttin’ this tae an end now, before yie think tae begin.”
“I’m not going to move,” Stark said.
“The heartbeat of the Seol ne Gigh will lead you to the Otherworld. Getting back, ach, well, that’ll be a path yie must be findin’ fer yur-self.”
Stark nodded and spread his hands against the surface of the marble, trying to absorb its heat into his suddenly chilled body.
Seoras lifted the dagger and struck Stark so fast the movement of the Guardian’s hand was a blur. The initial pain of the wound that slashed from his waist to the top of the right side of his rib cage was little more than a hot line in his skin.
The second cut was almost identical to the first, only it made a weeping red line across his left ribs.
And that was when the pain began. Its heat seared him. His blood felt like lava as it poured from his sides, pooling on the top of the stone. Seoras worked the razor-edged dirk methodically from one side of Stark’s body to the other, until Stark’s blood crested the edge of the rock as if at the corner of a giant’s eyes. It hesitated there and finally poured over and down, weeping scarlet tears in the intricate knot-work and then dripping to fill the horn-shaped trenches.
Stark had never felt such pain.
Not when he’d died.
Not when he’d un-died and thought only of thirst and violence.
Not when he’d almost died from his own arrow.
The pain the Guardian made him feel was more than physical. It burned his body, but it also seared his soul. The agony was liquid and interminable. It was a wave he couldn’t escape, which battered him over and over. He was drowning in it.
Stark automatically fought. He knew he couldn’t move, but still he struggled to retain hold on his consciousness.
“Trust me, laddie. Let go.”
Seoras was standing above him, bending again and again over his body to slice his
