“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.”