“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.