Burned

Screaming his anger and rage and fear, Stark ran at the bull. The creature lowered his massive head as if he would gore Stark.
    No!
Stark leaped at the bull, and with a motion that was dreamlike, grabbed his horns. At the same instant the creature threw up his head, and Stark vaulted over his body. He felt like he was diving froman impossibly high cliff as he hurled forward farther and farther, and somewhere, behind him in the black soullessness, he heard the bull’s voice echoing three words:
Well done, Guardian . . .
    Then there was an explosion of light around him just before he tumbled onto a hard-packed piece of ground. Stark picked himself up slowly, thinking how weird it was that even though he was nothing but spirit, he still had the form and feeling of his body, and looked around.
    In front of him was a grove, identical to the one that grew near Sgiach’s castle. There was even a hanging tree before it, decorated with strips of cloth too numerous to count. As he watched, the cloth changed, taking on different colors and lengths and shimmering like Christmas tree tinsel.
    The Otherworld—this had to be the entrance to Nyx’s realm. Nothing else could look this magickal.
    Before stepping forward, Stark glanced behind him, thinking it couldn’t be this easy to get in and expecting the giant black bull to materialize and this time gore him for real.
    All that was behind him was the black nothingness from where he’d come. If that wasn’t creepy enough, the segment of ground he’d been dumped onto was a small, half circle patch of red dirt that reminded him unexpectedly of Oklahoma, and in the center of the patch a gleaming sword was stuck halfway up to the hilt. It took two hands to pull the sword free, and then, as Stark automatically wiped the otherwise spotless blade on his jeans to clean it, he realized that, like the Seol ne Gigh, the original color of the ground had been tainted by blood.
    He finished wiping the blade hastily, for some reason not liking the thought of blood staining it, and then he turned his attention to what was in front of him. That was where he needed to go. His mind, heart, and spirit knew it.
    “Zoey, I’m here. I’m coming to you,” he said, and stepped forward, running into an invisible barrier hard as a brick wall. “What the hell?” he muttered, moving back and looking up to see that a stone archway had suddenly appeared.
    There was an explosion of a cold white light that gave Stark the creepy image of a freezer door opening to expose dead flesh. Blinking, his eyes traveled down, and what he saw in front of him shocked him to his very core.
    Stark was staring at himself.
    At first he thought the archway must have a mirror in it, but there was no blackness reflected behind him, and his other self was grinning a familiar, cocky smile. Stark definitely wasn’t smiling. Then he spoke, dispelling all thoughts of mirror images and rational explanations.
    “Yeah, fucknuts, it’s you. You’re me. To get into this place, you’re gonna have to kill me, which is not gonna happen ’cause I’m not so cool with dying. What is gonna happen is that
I’m
gonna kick your ass and kill
you
dead.”
    While Stark stood there, speechless and staring at himself, his mirror image lunged forward, slashing with a broadsword identical to the one Stark held, drawing a line of blood down his arm.
    “Yep, this is gonna be as easy as I thought,” his other self said, and lunged at Stark again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
    Aphrodite
    “Yeah, light’s on, but there’s definitely no one home.” Aphrodite waved her hand in front of Stark’s open but unseeing eyes. Then she had to snatch her hand out of the way as Seoras, ignoring that he came close to cutting her, too, made another knife wound down Stark’s blood-drenched side.
    “He already looks like hamburger. Do you have to keep doing that?” Aphrodite asked the Guardian. There was no love lost between her and Stark, but that didn’t mean she was cool with watching him get sliced to pieces.
    Seoras appeared not to hear her. He was utterly focused on the boy who lay before him.
    “They are bonded by this quest,” Sgiach said. She’d left her throne to stand beside Aphrodite.
    “But your Guardian is conscious and present in his own body,” Darius said, studying Seoras.
    “Yes. His consciousness is here. It is also so completely attuned with the boy that he can hear his heartbeat—feel his breathing. Seoras knows exactly how close