Burned (House of Night #7)(48)

"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."