“You would choose to not repay a life debt?” Naomi quirked her head to the side. “You would choose instead to run with your tail between your legs yet again?”

“Of course we will repay the debt,” Eamon sputtered. “But we need to do it according to our laws. We report back to our Queen and await her wishes. She will decide who owes and how much we pay. That has always been our way.”

“My life was saved by one thing only: the blood of an immortal. To not repay such a gift immediately is unthinkable. We will repay the need, which means we will bring them to her door and give them the information they need to survive.”

“The Queen will be angry.”

“The Queen is diplomatic.” Naomi crossed her arms. “If I were to leave when the bearer of my debt is in need, we risk war with the wolves, do we not?” She shifted her gaze to me and raised an eyebrow.

“Um… yes. Absolutely,” I answered, following her lead. “Eamon, you can’t desert us now. Your Queen wouldn’t want a war on her hands. As a rule, wolves must pay up immediately if they can. Nobody wants a life debt hanging over their heads. If you don’t pay it now as needed, I could demand something bigger from your Queen once we return. Then where would you be? There’s not a doghouse big enough, especially with what I’m going to ask for.”

Naomi smiled, covering it up delicately with the back of her hand as she replied, “And once we arrive at Selene’s door, we will stay and help you defeat her. If we make it out alive, my life debt to you will be paid in full.” She inclined her head. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” I said quickly.

Eamon gasped. “We will do no such thing! The venom has gone to your brain and made you rash. It’s too dangerous. I will not willingly return to that place and suffer at her hands agai—”

“We will do it,” Naomi snapped. “You are my blood-kin first; my debts are yours to fulfill by honor. The Goddess will not harm us this time. We are smarter and stronger; we are not the children we once were.”

Eamon raged, his hands balled into tight fists. It looked like steam could possibly pour from his ears.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” I interrupted, trying to diffuse the situation. “How long did you… serve Selene? And why?”

Naomi turned to me, her eyes stark for a moment before she answered. “One hundred and fifty years,” she replied softly. “We did not understand the gravity of our decision at the time. We were fledglings recently turned by a low-level master. Once it was known our special gifts in tracking and sensing were”—she cleared her throat—“rare, we became a bartering tool to make our master wealthy. He offered us to the highest bidder, which was the Lunar Goddess, but the Vampire Queen stepped in and gave us a choice—we could choose her or Selene. We were foolish. We thought being in the company of a powerful goddess would give us great power and ultimate status, that she could protect us better than our own Queen,” she scoffed. “But we were chained and treated like slaves for over a century. Unleashed only when she required us to do her bidding.”

“How did you finally escape?” I asked. I was both curious and appalled.

“She became lazy and began to leave us unattended for small periods. Then I happened across this.” She patted her pocket. “The cross can do more than just heal an immortal. It is a powerful weapon. While it was buried in Danny’s body, burning the poison of the Underworld, he was temporarily void of all his power.”

“Pardon?” Danny interrupted. “I hadn’t any power? That’s funny, because I didn’t feel any different. Though I was unconscious through most of it.” He was still on the ground, sitting upright now, but not ready to stand. We were all following the conversation closely. Ray had taken a seat on a nearby log, and Tyler stood stoically with his arms crossed, patient for now to hear her out.

“If it is used against Selene,” Naomi continued, “it will absorb her powers the same way, rendering her useless for the time it remains in her body. It will not kill her outright, but it will incapacitate her. Once she found out that the cross could work against her, she sought to destroy it… but it was already lost.”

“And once she misplaced it—it was your property to find,” I finished.

“Oui.” Naomi smiled like a shrew. “It was not my fault my jailer became careless and trusting in my company, that she mistook my placation for devotion and faithful servitude.”

Keeping Naomi on my side was an absolute must from now on. She was proving to be a very smart, very powerful supernatural. Behind those petite shoulders and tiny waist was a cold-blooded killer.

“If that cross can cure a supernatural, how come your brother didn’t use it on you? Why use my sister to get blood?” Tyler growled as he joined the conversation. He had calmed down, but not by much.

Naomi turned to Tyler and addressed him directly. “There is a caveat to having ownership of the cross. Once it is yours, it will not work against you, nor will it aid you. The spell is dead to me, though the silver still leaves a mark on my flesh. Selene paid a great deal for its creation, to use against powerful enemies, and had the insurance policy built in that the cross would never be able to harm her. But the crafters of this trinket were very powerful in their own rights, and they played a little game. If the trinket was lost, whoever found it became its rightful owner. Once out of her hands and claimed by another, it could work against her. So in essence she had crafted the only means in the world to render her own powers useless.”

“I’m sure whoever crafted it didn’t advertise their prank and risk her wrath, so how did you find out?” I asked. “Whoever did this played a dangerous game with a very powerful goddess.”

Naomi shrugged. “I didn’t know until I pierced it into her flesh. It worked. Of course, I had a feeling, as I often do with such things, but nothing more.”

“You engaged a goddess on a feeling.”

Naomi started to pace along the tree line. Eamon was still angry, but he held himself silent while she talked. It was clear he didn’t have the power to stop her, or he would’ve used it by now. “Our lives were no longer worth living,” she stated evenly. “I had reached a breaking point and had made peace with a true death. At that point I would’ve been happy to die.”

“But you still have the cross?” I asked, confused. “And Selene’s still alive. How did you get it back once you pierced her? She had to have been pissed off. You had her cross and you stabbed her with it. It must have been Clash of the Titans when she went after you.”

Naomi stopped. “She did not have time to attack. After the cross absorbed her powers, I beheaded her.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed on a low breath. I hadn’t been expecting that.

Danny whistled and Tyler exhaled loudly.

“How could she survive a beheading and still be alive now?” I asked. Beheading was the one thing that could kill a supe, even a powerful one. No head meant no communication with the vital parts that kept you alive.

“She is a goddess.” Naomi shrugged. “I learned too late that in order to kill such a being you have to kill the immortality in her blood, along with the body. I left her to rot, but it was not enough.” She sighed.

“How do you kill immortality?” I asked. I’d never even heard of such a thing, but I was young. The amount of things I didn’t know would fill an ocean. I had some serious catching up to do. I guess that was the hundred-million-dollar question. Not being able to kill Selene in any of the normal ways was going to complicate things to an incredible degree—possibly even make it impossible to give her a true death.

Naomi shrugged again. “I know not how. I have the capability of stripping her of power with this. That is all.” She patted her pocket. “The killing of the immortality will be up to you.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “I thought Rourke was the only one who had bested her and lived.” And I hoped he was doing it again right now. My heart gave an involuntary clench. He was alive. I knew it. But he didn’t have a lot of time left. We had to keep moving. “That’s what your Queen told me anyway. She said nothing about there being another who had escaped her wrath. Why would she lie about that?”

“Our Queen has always been very skeptical of us after all those years spent with Selene,” Naomi replied. “She still wanted our talents, but distrusted our reasons for coming back to her. I divulged what had happened and showed her the cross, begging her for her protection. She demanded I turn it over to her. But she’d made a grave mistake. We had not yet pledged ourselves to her. I was not yet hers to control. A vampire needs to swear fealty and exchange blood with their master before they can manage them. I threatened to leave and she swore an oath that she would never take it from me while I lived. Eamon and I were desperate to belong to a powerful Coven, one that would protect us from the Goddess if she ever rose again, so we accepted.”

“And Selene lived. She knew you took the cross with you. When she woke up… or grew her head back or whatever she did, why didn’t she come after you?” I asked. Revenge would be logical. “That’s a powerful weapon for her to walk away from.”

“She did come and the Queen lied to her and said it was now in her possession, which it was, through me. But to pacify Selene, she agreed to never reveal its existence or what had happened between us. If the power of the cross became known, others would seek to steal it, and in turn it could wind up being used against Selene once again. She has many enemies, so she backed off.”

“How long ago was all this?”

“Three hundred and fifty years ago.”

“And you’ve waited patiently all this time for a chance to give her a true death?” I concluded. Revenge was high on the bucket list for supernaturals. When you lived an eternity, no slight was too small.

“Oui.” Naomi smiled. “I’ve yearned for it.”