Helen’s cheek was hot—burning hot.
But the rest of her was freezing, she realized as she clawed her way up from the dragging darkness and back into consciousness. She was colder than she had ever been and something close to her smelled awful, like rust and rot.
“There she is, she’s come to play! Two more to come, then bombs away!” tittered a wheedling voice. “Prettyprettypretty godling.”
Ares.
Helen held very still and tried not to start shrieking. She needed to think. The last thing she remembered was Automedon’s face over hers, a jab in her neck, and then liquid pain pumping through her body until her brain switched itself off in self-defense.
“I see you there, my pretty little pet,” Ares said, no longer laughing. “You cannot hide behind your eyelids. Come. Open them. Let me see our father’s eyes.”
She heard the note of anger creeping into his voice, heard the threat in his move toward her. He’d called her bluff, and her eyes opened in terror. She disengaged gravity to fly away, but it didn’t work, and she immediately saw why. Even the air was saturated with ice crystals. The cold was so complete it stretched the senses beyond their limit and twisted them back the other way around until ice burned like fire.
In the flickering light of a bronze brazier, Helen could see that Ares had her bound with thick rope, staked to the ground at the entrance of a portal. Helen looked around desperately, but in her heart she already knew she was in the perfect prison. In the Underworld she could transport herself away from Ares with a few words. On Earth, she could at least put up one hell of a fight, and maybe get away. But at a portal, when she was neither here nor there, she was just a teenaged girl, tied up, and at the mercy of a maniac. This was planned, Helen knew. It had probably been planned for, literally, ages.
“Tears! I love tears!” Ares gushed as if he were talking about puppies. “Look how the little godling weeps . . . Still so pretty she is, she is! Let’s change that.”
Ares hit her across the mouth and Helen felt something snap. She took a deep breath. So this was it. She spat and looked up at him, no longer crying. Now that it had started she knew it wouldn’t be long, and in a way that was better than waiting for it. At least if Ares was here torturing her, that meant he wasn’t misleading her father’s spirit in the Underworld. This wasn’t the outcome she’d been hoping for when she’d closed her eyes to follow her father down into the Underworld, but it was better than nothing. Helen looked up at Ares and nodded at him, ready for whatever he had to dish out now that she knew her father was safe.
Ares hit her face again and then stood up so he could kick her in the stomach. The wind came out between the seized-up muscles in her abdomen until she made a strange braying noise, like a donkey. He kicked her again and again. If she tried to avoid the blows by curling up and turning her back to him, he stomped rather than kicked. She felt her forearm snap and tried to bring her leg up to protect her side, but that only made him attack her more viciously. When she stopped trying to dodge the blows and just let them come, he backed off.
Helen rolled around on the ground, struggling to find a position that would make it possible for her to breathe with several broken ribs and her hands tied behind her back. Wheezing and writhing, she finally found that kneeling and bending forward with her forehead resting against the fiery ice of the ground was best. The choking, hacking noise she made as she forced air around one of her punctured lungs sounded almost like laughing.
“Fun, isn’t it?” Ares squealed, and started skipping around in a circle. “But I shouldn’t have kicked your middle so very much because now you can’t yell. And that’s what we need, right? So silly of me! Well, we can wait a bit before we play again.”
He knelt down next to her folded form and ran his finger through her hair. The exposed back of her neck crawled as he chose a tress from the nape.
He will yank it out in a moment, she told herself. Just relax and don’t fight it. It will be easier that way.
“You are exceedingly quiet,” Ares sighed as he began to slowly braid the chosen lock. “That is a problem. How will the other Heirs find you if you don’t holler and yell like you’re supposed to? You’re supposed to shout SAVE ME, LUCAS! OH, SAVE ME, ORION!” He momentarily adopted the soprano register of a damsel in distress before immediately switching back to his normal voice. “Just like that. Go on. Try it.”
Helen shook her head. Ares leaned over her, putting his lips right up against the cringing skin of her neck. He breathed his foul, rotten breath across her scalp and the backs of her ears. Even in the scouring cold of the portal, Ares still overwhelmed her with the smell of death and decay.
“Yell,” he said quietly, no longer sounding like a madman. For the first time she could remember, Ares had abandoned his usual singsong way of speaking. He sounded sane, and to Helen that made him infinitely more terrifying. “Call out to them to save your life. Call out to them, Helen, or I will kill you.”
“You’re trying to trap them,” Helen said between panting breaths. “I won’t fall for it.”
“How can I trap them? I am as powerless as a mortal in this nowhere place, and they are two against one,” he said, sounding logical. “They might even win.”
He wasn’t lying. His punches and kicks had hurt her insides badly, but she didn’t feel the strength of a god behind those blows. She looked at the knuckles on his left hand, the hand he had used to strike her, and saw that ichor, the golden blood of the gods, oozed out of the deep scrapes on his fist. It made her smile to know that although she’d lost some teeth and she couldn’t see out of her right eye anymore, Ares had most likely broken his hand in the process.
“Call out to them,” he pleaded, like all of this was for her own good. “Why won’t you yellyellyell, broken little godling? They want to save you.”
Helen knew he was right. Lucas and Orion were looking for her, and they didn’t need their Scion powers to fight Ares like she did. Both of them were strong men. She was just a skinny, exhausted, tied-up, Myrmidon-poisoned girl going against a gigantic brute twice her size. They were warriors by nature. Let them do the fighting. They enjoyed it.
Not too far away, she heard Orion calling out to Lucas, leading him through the labyrinth of the caves.
“Do you hear that, Helen? Your salvation is so close.” Ares twisted his fingers to tighten his grip and ripped the braided lock of hair out of her head, tearing an inch wide swath of scalp off with it. Helen couldn’t stop a high-pitched whistling wheeze from escaping the back of her throat, but she managed to keep the volume lower than a whisper. She wouldn’t scream. Ares grabbed another, larger lock—one that was lower and attached to even more sensitive skin.
Out of her one good eye, Helen saw blood from the back of her head running in a stream off her chin and staining the ice below her face. It fanned out in a pool, bright and vibrant, as it climbed its way through the crystal lattice like it was filling the thirsty fibers of woven cloth.
“They aren’t going to just happen to find you, if that’s what you’re hoping for. There are dozens of portals in these caves. Orion knows most of them, but still, it could take them all night to find the right one.” Ares sounded like he was growing tired of this game. “Call out to them now and save what’s left of your skin.”
Staring into a pool of her own blood, Helen saw two armies. She saw them come together in a bright flash of metal on metal. She saw an azure-blue bay fouled by the filth of a siege camp, and then over time, she saw those clear waters muddied and clogged with the ashes of burnt bodies. Finally, she saw Lucas lying lifeless in a burning, smoke-filled room.
That was what happened the last time I let others do my fighting for me.
“I will not call out,” Helen whispered as hot tears joined the blood beneath her face. “I would rather die.”
“You love Orion and Lucas so much you’d die for them? Both of them?” Ares asked quietly. He pushed her over onto her side so he could look at her destroyed face. She worked to focus her one good eye on him and responded without hesitating,
“Yes. I love them both. And I’d die for them both.”
Ares went silent. Watching the muscles of his face twitch, for a moment Helen thought he was struggling to come up with something to say. Then he sucked in a breath and burst out laughing.
“One down, two to go!” Ares said, almost like he couldn’t believe it. “Automedon was right! So ready to bleed and die—and it’s not just you, either. The thing that truly astounds me is that he says your two noble defenders would bleed and die for you as well. Do you know what that means, broken little godling? Do you know what it means if I mix all this blood you and the other two Heirs would so willingly spill for each other? Four Houses, conveniently packaged into three loving, brave, and, thank Zeus, naive Heirs.”
Helen’s mind raced. She struggled back up onto her knees and stared at the blood freezing into ice on the floor. She thought about how special the conditions had to be to make her normally impervious skin bleed, and how much Ares must have gone through to get her here so she could do just that. Then she thought about how much had to happen to get Lucas and Orion to work together when just hours ago they would have been prevented from even being in the same room because of the Furies. There was only one thing that brought them together, and only one thing she knew for a fact both of them would fight, bleed, and die for. Her. And she had already bled and pledged on that blood to do the same for them.
“Blood brothers. We’ll be blood brothers,” she gasped through her split lips. “All Four Houses will be united.”
“And we gods will be free from our prison on Olympus,” Ares said solemnly. “Three and a half thousand years I’ve waited!” His words ended abruptly as his throat closed off in a choked sound.
“No. I won’t let it happen,” she stammered, unable to accept it.
“Do you know what the tastiest part of all of this is for me? Except for the part where I get to torture you, of course,” he continued, ignoring her weak threat. “It’s that, yet again, it’s all for the love of Helen! I would never have believed that not one, but two world wars could be started for the love of a woman. You’d think money, sure. Land, of course. Thousands of wars have been fought over money and land, but LOVE? And yet here we are. Aphrodite wins again! Another war to end all wars starts for your love, and because of your love for two men and three pathetic Furies as well! And lovelovelove will be the reason the world collapses into warwarwar. It is sheer poetry!”
As Ares gurgled with insane laughter, the enormity of Helen’s multiple mistakes fell on her one by one, crushing her beneath them. Morpheus had expressed misgivings about her quest, but she’d never asked why. Hades had explicitly warned her not once, but twice, that she should ask the Oracle—not Cassandra the little sister, but the Oracle, the mouthpiece of the Three Fates—if freeing the Furies was the right thing to do. Even Zach had tried to tell her that she was in danger, but she hadn’t given him a chance to explain.
And biggest of all was the warning she’d gotten from Hector. He’d told her that the most important thing was that she didn’t fall in love with Orion. Hector had always known, even though Helen hadn’t, that this struggle was about love. When he’d told her not to fall in love with Orion, what he was trying to tell her was that love, real love, always made a family—even if it wasn’t a traditional one. Love was what mattered, not the laws or the rules or the gods.
Helen could rant and scream that she’d been tricked, that none of it was her fault, but she knew better. She had charged headfirst into this quest without ever stopping to think about what could go wrong. All along she was so convinced she was right because she was doing a good deed that never once did she listen to anyone who disagreed with her. Lucas had warned her that hubris was the greatest danger to Scions, but she hadn’t really understood why until just that moment. Being a good person and doing good deeds didn’t necessarily make you right all the time.
In the next cavern, Helen heard Orion and Lucas speaking to each other in frantic whispers, urging each other on toward the flickering light of the brazier.
“Please,” she sobbed quietly. “Just kill me now.”
“Soon, soon, pet. Shhh,” Ares cooed as he pulled a little bronze dagger out of his belt and knelt down next to her. Helen felt a sliding, throbbing heat trace across her neck. With one efficient motion, Ares had slit her throat. “You’ll die, but the cut is shallow enough that you won’t die right away. I’m afraid you won’t be able to speak, though. I can’t let you go sharing the plan with the other two Heirs before they do a little fighting and bleeding of their own, now can I? Don’t want to ruin it.”
She tried to scream, but instead a thin membrane of blood shot out of her neck and sprayed across Ares’ face. He grinned and licked his lips.
“Who’s a good girl?” he said in baby talk, making grotesque kissy-faces at her. Then he stood, went to the rock wall, and whispered to it.
Helen had nearly drowned once when she was a child. Since then she had always feared the water, even though she had grown up on an island perpetually surrounded by it. Now it seemed that after all that fussing and fearing over the water she was going to drown on dry land. As blood frothed in her lungs and burned her inner ears, she thought to herself how similar her salty blood tasted to the salt water of the sea. She could hear the little ocean inside her, throbbing and rushing, ebbing out of her with every beat of her heart. Or were those footfalls pounding across the frozen cave floor?
“Uncle! Let me through,” Ares hissed more loudly at the rock wall.
Nothing happened. The look on Ares’ face grew frantic.
“Helen! No!” Lucas screamed across the yawning cavern. His cry echoed off the walls, filling the dark corners of the caves and multiplying inside of them.
Ares spun around and put his hand on his knife. As he looked down at Helen, she could tell he was contemplating a hostage scenario.
The ground heaved up and came slamming back down, making Ares stumble away from Helen and clutch at the wall. “Get away from her,” Orion growled.
Unable to roll over to look at them, Helen stared at Ares’ petrified face through her one good eye. His eyes were flying back and forth between Orion and Lucas as Ares backed up against the wall of the portal. Orion was right. The god of war was a coward.
“Hades! You have your orders!” Ares screamed hysterically as he slapped his hand repeatedly against the frozen rock wall. “Let me pass!” The portal sucked him in and Ares was gone. After a brief pause, Helen heard hurried steps behind her.
“Luke. Oh, no,” Orion groaned.
“She’s not dead,” Lucas said through gritted teeth. “She can’t be dead.”
Helen felt both Lucas and Orion kneel down next to her. She felt hands cup her shoulder and her hip to tilt her gently toward them. She squirmed, trying to shrug them away. She would have gotten up and run away from them if she could. Even their delicate touches felt like whips across her skin, but the pain wasn’t the reason she wanted them to stop touching her. She couldn’t let them get her blood on their hands.
“Easy, easy. It’s okay, Helen,” Lucas said in a high whisper. “I know it hurts, I do, but we have to move you.”
No. What they had to do was get away from her. She tried to tell them to go, but all that came out of her was a gush of blood from her neck.
“I have a knife,” Orion said, and Helen felt the bonds on her wrists cut away.
Lucas scooped her up into his arm and she fought him lamely, struggling to get him to drop her. She wanted to die in the portal, before the blood brother ritual could be completed. But as she flailed and coughed she only made it worse. She was literally spraying blood from her neck, covering Lucas and Orion. Ares might be a coward, Helen thought, but he knew everything there was to know about hurting people. The wound he had given her had made it a sure thing that anyone who came within five feet of Helen got bathed in her blood.
“I’ll lead the way,” Orion said in an urgent voice.
Helen felt a vague swaying motion, and saw the bobbing beam of Orion’s flashlight ahead as they began their ascent. She could hear just fine, and her vision wasn’t too bad, but she couldn’t move or speak. She tried to wiggle her toes or move a finger. None of her limbs responded. She told herself to blink, but she couldn’t even close her good eye. Helen was locked inside herself and completely conscious. She knew she would have to watch as the events unfolded and wondered if this was some special torture that Ares had devised for her. Maybe he’d poisoned the blade to paralyze her?
Or maybe I’m just dying, she thought hopefully. If I hurry, maybe I can still stop this.
“There’s the exit,” Orion called back over his shoulder with relief. Helen could make out his beautiful profile, backlit by a bright moon and a thousand stars winking through the dark squeeze of the cave’s mouth.
She saw Orion’s face fall as something outside the cave caught his eye. He spun around to face Helen and Lucas, crowding them back into the cave as he hunched his big shoulders over the two of them protectively. Helen saw his mouth drop open in a gasp and his bright eyes grow wide as the tip of a sword appeared under his breastbone. The ground shook. Over Orion’s shoulder, Helen saw Automedon’s shiny red insect eyes staring at her.
“Orion!” Lucas exclaimed. He reached out a hand from under Helen and grabbed Orion’s shoulder, trying to hold him up as Orion and Lucas sank to their knees together with Helen pressed between them. The tip of the blade disappeared as it was yanked out, and the shiny metal was replaced by a rush of dark blood. Helen watched as if in slow motion as a drop of Orion’s blood fell on one of her many wounds and mixed with hers.
That’s one, Helen thought helplessly. Thunder rolled across the clear, cloudless sky.
“My knife,” Orion breathed.
Lucas nodded almost imperceptibly, understanding Orion’s meaning. Helen tried to speak, hoping she had healed enough to at least warn Lucas not to fight, but instead all that came out of her was gasping cough.
“Can you take her?” Lucas whispered, looking into Orion’s eyes and begging him to be honest. In answer, Orion slid his arms under Helen and took her weight.
Lucas reached under Orion’s shirt to unsheathe the long blade. In a blindingly fast motion, he sprang to his feet, vaulted over Orion and Helen, and pushed Automedon away from the wounded pair.
Orion held Helen close to his chest as he panted for a few moments, like he was willing himself to heal faster. With a painful groan, he finally hauled himself to his feet and shuffled out of the cave with Helen in his arms.
Outside, pressed up against the wall next to the mouth of the cave, Helen spotted Zach—his eyes wide and staring. Still paralyzed, she screamed on the inside, but nothing came out. Zach looked at Helen’s ruined face and made a desperate sound, catching Orion’s attention. Orion glared at him, and Zach stared back at Orion in terror.
Helen felt Orion’s head tilt down to look at the sword in Zach’s hands, and then back up into Zach’s eyes. Without pause, Zach held the hilt of the sword out to Orion, offering him the weapon.
“I’m a friend of Helen’s. You fight. I’ll stay and guard her,” he said in a level voice. Orion looked at Lucas, caught in a clinch and getting kneed in the gut by Automedon, and made up his mind quickly.
Helen tried to struggle when Orion put her down on the ground at Zach’s feet. She tried to spit out the word traitor but all she could do was stammer the letter T a few times and twitch.
“I’ll make sure he comes back to you,” Orion promised quietly, and kissed Helen’s forehead. Pressing on his wounded chest as if that could make it stop hurting, Orion took the sword from Zach and charged into the fray to fight alongside Lucas.
“Don’t worry, Helen, I just called Matt. They’re all coming. Hector said even your mother is on her way.” Zach tried to make her more comfortable by tugging ineffectually at the tears in her dress and smoothing her blood-soaked hair. As he looked her over, his hands started to shake and tears began to gather in his eyes. “I’m so sorry, Lennie. Jesus, look at what he did to your face!”
Breathing hard and coughing up inhaled blood, she stared at Zach and focused all her energy on making her frozen tongue move.
“Khl ma,” she slurred. Zach narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out if she’d said what it sounded like she said. Helen braced herself and tried again. “K-hill me.”
Finally able to move her fingers, she scrabbled at her slit throat, looking to rip off her heart necklace so Zach would be able to kill her. Zach slowly shook his head at Helen, choosing to misinterpret what he’d heard her say. He caught her hands and held them still, took off his shirt, and pressed it against the wound at her throat.
Incensed with frustration, Helen watched helplessly from the ground as Lucas and Orion fought Automedon, all three of them moving so quickly she could barely make out their separate shapes. Automedon stood between the two of them, mechanical and accurate, every motion begun and completed with surgical precision.
Helen knew just enough about fighting to know that she was watching the perfect warrior. He was stronger, faster, and more patient than any fighter Helen had ever seen. If Orion or Lucas darted in to wound him, he took the blade into himself and let it leave again without concern. He leaked a vaguely greenish-white fluid from several places, but Helen already knew that he couldn’t be killed that way. He was just waiting for them to get tired.
Still bleeding from the chest, Orion faltered and took another wound to the stomach. As he fell back, Automedon saw his moment. Rather than attack Orion on the ground, he engaged Lucas. With a deft flick, Automedon spun Lucas’s smaller blade out of his hand, sending it flying. Then he made a move to go after Lucas while he was unarmed.
“Luke!” Orion yelled, his voice breaking with exhaustion. He tossed Lucas his sword and left himself defenseless. Automedon let Lucas catch it.
Lucas flew over Automedon and landed in front of Orion who was grimacing and clutching his newest injury. He tried to get up, and fell back down with a grunt, blood pouring out of him alarmingly fast. Lucas dug in, making it clear that if Automedon wanted to get to Orion, he would have to go through him first.
Helen saw Automedon smile and felt a panicky thrill radiate out from her belly and shoot down her arms and legs. This what exactly what Automedon wanted. He was counting on them to be brave and selfless. That would be their downfall. Her skin crackled with desperate static, but she didn’t have enough strength to generate a bolt. Ignoring the fiery pain it caused her, Helen managed to flop over onto her broken forearms and began to drag herself toward them.
“Helen, don’t!” Zach said in surprise. He tried to stop her, but as soon as he touched her he jumped back, getting a mild shock.
“Stop fighting him!” she tried to yell as she crawled, but even though she was healing fast, her vocal cords were still severed. The only sound she could make was a harsh, grating whisper. Automedon hefted his sword confidently and swung it over his head.
“Brace yourself,” Orion warned Lucas, and before Automedon could bring his sword down on them, the ground shook violently.
A booming noise sounded out through the dark, and a giant chasm opened up between Automedon and Lucas as Orion yanked the earth apart. Automedon fell to his knees and scrambled frantically as the ground beneath him gave way. Lucas disengaged gravity and floated, while Automedon seemed to magically regain his footing. His sense of balance was so good he could ride an earthquake like a surfer riding a big wave. Seeing this, Orion’s and Lucas’s hopes flagged.
When the shaking subsided, Lucas landed in front of Orion, adjusted his grip on the sword, and faced Automedon grimly. They both seemed to know that they couldn’t win this fight, but neither of them would quit. Automedon faced Lucas and Orion in turn, and then bowed to them courteously.
“Clearly, you are the Three I’ve waited thousands of years for,” Automedon said across the ten-foot-wide rip in the ground. “I thank Ares I’ve had thousands of years of battles to prepare myself for you or I would not have been ready. But the time is here, and I am ready.”
Automedon leapt easily over the gap, landed, and turned to face Lucas and Orion. In three moves, he had disarmed Lucas. In two more moves, he had Lucas on his knees, shielding Orion with his body and bleeding from a deep cut in his shoulder.
Helen heard Lucas scream and her pain vanished. She stood up, her skin glowing blue and coursing with power.
“Don’t you touch him!” she whispered hoarsely, her lips curling with rage. She held out her left hand and a blinding white bolt arced out of her palm and connected with Automedon. He crumpled to the ground, convulsing in agony. Helen dropped her arm and staggered to the side.
Finally able to get to his feet again after Orion’s earthquake, Zach stumbled after Helen and managed to prop her up as she tipped over, nearly fainting with the effort of generating a bolt. He got another nasty shock, but he gritted his teeth and held on to her as they staggered their way toward Lucas.
She fell down next to him, reaching out and pressing on his shoulder as if she could hold him together with her bare hands. She was vaguely aware of thunder rolling and she knew that his blood was mixing with hers, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t stop herself from touching him. All she had to do was get him away from Orion before their blood mixed, and the ritual would be stopped.
Helen felt something grab her bare ankle, and looked back to see Automedon as he yanked her toward him across the ground to keep her from interfering.
“It’s too late, Princess,” he said calmly.
Helen looked and saw Orion holding Lucas up as both of them reached out to her, trying to snatch her away from Automedon. Orion’s wounded chest was pressed against Lucas’s bleeding shoulder. Thunder rolled across the sky for the third and final time.
“It is done,” Automedon said, closing his eyes for a moment in relief.
Helen looked at Lucas and Orion. From their searching, confused expressions, she could tell that they could feel something had happened to them all—they just didn’t know the name for it yet.
“And now to deal with you, slave,” Automedon said as he jumped dexterously to his feet, completely recovered from Helen’s bolt. “You swore on this dagger to serve or die. And in the end you did not serve.”
He took a bejeweled bronze dagger out of its sheath on his belt. Before Helen could haul her broken body up onto her knees to shield him, Automedon threw the blade right into Zach’s chest.
Helen caught Zach as he fell down next to her on the ground. She had a memory flash of a time in second grade when Zach fell off the monkey bars and sprained his ankle. He’d had the same wide-eyed and baffled look on his face, and for a moment he looked like he was seven again and they were pals, trading treats out of their lunch boxes.
“Oh no, Zach,” Helen whispered, laying him down as gently as she could. Automedon turned away from the carnage he had caused and raised his hands to the blue beginnings of the dawn on the horizon.
“I have fulfilled my end of the bargain, Ares,” he said rapturously. “Now give me what I ask. Reunite me with my brother.”
“Helen,” Zach wheezed urgently, while Automedon was addressing the sky. “His blood brother . . . wasn’t a god, like Matt thought.” He grabbed the blade still sticking out of his chest and started yanking on it, hurting himself more and more.
“No, leave it in. You could bleed to death!” she tried to argue with her cracking, whisper of a voice, but Zach wouldn’t quit until Helen helped him pull it out. He wrapped her hands around the small blade meaningfully.
“It was Achilles.”
Zach let his head fall back and turned his face to Automedon’s feet, which were just inches away from his dying eyes. Without giving it another thought, Helen flipped the blade over in her hand, grabbed the hilt firmly, and stabbed it into Automedon’s heel.
His head snapped around to look down at Helen. Utter shock and disbelief froze his face in a blank O. In mere seconds, he hardened into a stone statue that began to crack, then crumble, and then disintegrate into a pile of ash. Helen looked down at Zach and saw that he was smiling.
“Hold on,” Helen croaked as she looked around for something to put on Zach’s wound. She saw his bloody shirt lying a few yards away and began to scramble toward it.
“Don’t go,” Zach begged, holding on to Helen’s arm. With his other hand, he reached into the pile of dust that had been Automedon, and pulled out the pretty dagger, handing it to Helen. “Tell Matt I said he was a great friend.”
His body relaxed and his eyes emptied, and Helen knew he was dead.
“See, Eris, I didn’t double-cross him—the Myrmidon got his wish,” tittered a voice that made Helen’s heart stop for a moment. “He is reunited with Achilles. Just not on Earth, where he would have liked it!”
“At least his slave will be there to care for him in the Underworld,” hissed a woman’s voice.
Helen closed Zach’s eyes, promising silently that she would make sure Zach made it the Elysian Fields, drank from the River of Joy, and never had to serve anyone again. Then she turned to look at what she could already smell.
Ares stood on the other side of the chasm, flanked on either side by his sister Eris and his son Terror. Helen dropped her head and panted, knowing it was true. The Olympians were free. She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Lucas and Orion crouching next to her.
“How?” Orion gasped, motioning to Ares.
“The three of us,” Helen responded. “We became blood brothers.”
Lucas and Orion shared a pained look, realizing too late how their better natures had been used against them.
“Can you fly?” Lucas whispered, clutching his wounded arm to his side. Orion was next to him, pale and shaking with blood loss. Neither of them was in any condition to fight. Helen looked across the deep rip in the ground at Ares.
She’d felt rage before, but this was different. She thought about how helpless she had felt when she was tied up and completely at his mercy while he beat her. He’d probably done that to countless thousands of people, she thought. And now he was free again. It was Helen’s responsibility to make sure he never tortured anyone else. She had loosed this monster into the world. Now she had to put him down.
“I’m not going anywhere.” She stood up stiffly. One of her legs still wasn’t responding very well, but for what she had planned, she didn’t need it to.
“Are you insane?” Orion sputtered, tugging lightly on her arm, trying to get her to duck down. Helen put her hand over his until he stopped.
“Helen, you can’t hope to win this,” Lucas said resignedly, like he knew he’d already lost this argument. He stood up next to her, took her hand, and looked at Orion. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“Terrible,” Orion winced as he staggered to his feet as well. “And I’m pretty sure I’m about to feel even worse.”
Helen tried to smile at the two of them and tell them how much she loved them both, but her face hurt too damn much and she could barely speak, so she settled for squeezing their hands gratefully.
“Do we have a plan?” Lucas asked Helen, like he figured the answer was no, but he may as well ask, anyway.
“Are you really going to try to fight me, little godlings?” Ares shouted across the gap incredulously. Helen ignored him.
“How deep is that rift, Orion?” she asked under her breath.
“How deep do you need it to be?”
“Does it go down into the caves? The ones with the portals?” she continued. Orion nodded, still confused. “And can you make it wider when I ask you?”
“Sure, but . . .” Orion broke off as Helen’s meaning suddenly dawned on him. He frowned and began to shake his head at her, but he never got a chance to voice his concerns.
Ares raised his rusty, serrated sword over his head and burst into flames. But if Ares expected her to be afraid of fire, he was sorely mistaken. Helen launched herself over the chasm and landed on him in her supermassive state before he could even finish his battle cry.
She ground him two feet down into the dirt, right at the edge of the chasm. He tried to cut her head off, but she knocked the blade of his sword away with the back of her impermeable hand like she was swatting away a fly. The abominable sword went flinging up over the edge of the chasm. Ares watched it moving away from him with his mouth hanging open.
Before he could recover from his shock, Helen clamped her knees around his ribs and dug her fingers into his throat, choking him with all four of her battered and bruised limbs. His fire burned brighter, like he was trying to scorch her, but Helen only squeezed tighter. Her lightning was ten times hotter than any flame, and to show him, she sent two bolts directly into his neck with both her hands.
As Ares convulsed under Helen’s relentless onslaught, Lucas and Orion threw themselves at Eris and Terror, tackling the startled gods and hitting them repeatedly. None of the Scions could actually kill any of the immortals, but Helen didn’t care. Death was too good for Ares, anyway.
“Orion! Now!” she screamed, clutching Ares in a bear hug and taking on more mass than she had ever attempted before. She felt Ares growing in size, getting larger and larger as he bellowed with fury, and she clamped on to him desperately. For a moment, she thought Orion wouldn’t be able to do it.
The ground beneath them rumbled and shook, and then it gave way. Locked together, Helen and Ares fell down into the deep chasm, tumbling and spinning toward the icy portal that glowed faintly at the bottom.
Helen didn’t know if it would work or not. She could come and go from all levels of the Underworld while she was sleeping, but this was the first time she had ever tried it awake. She didn’t know if she could open a standing portal, or if she could only create new ones when she slept. She concentrated on staying calm, like she did when she relaxed herself into sleep when she descended, and hoped for the best. Right before they hit, Helen spoke.
“Open, Tartarus, take Ares, and seal him up forever with all the evil souls he has double-crossed,” she said.
She couldn’t kill an immortal, but she was pretty sure if she could get Ares through a portal, she could imprison him in Tartarus forever. Helen knew from experience that it was way worse than death.
The ice split, and she and Ares stopped falling and started hovering. A hundred hands came through the rocks and ice and grabbed a different part of Ares.
“Impossible,” he breathed, his eyes locked with Helen’s.
“Go to hell,” she whispered.
And then she released him. With a deafening squeal, Ares was dragged into the dark pit of Tartarus by the hundred hands. An incalculable number of writhing arms closed over him until finally, Ares, the god of war, disappeared underneath them forever.
The portal closed, leaving Helen hovering at the bottom of the dark rift. The only sound was her, panting with exhaustion.
Her vision blurred. Barely able to float, she used her hands to guide her up the wall of the chasm. Her body began to tremble violently and her head lolled on top of her neck. As she got higher, she heard her name being called repeatedly by several voices. She fumbled her way toward the sound, sobbing with fatigue and pain.
Just as her strength failed, two different but dearly loved hands reached over the edge of the pit and hauled her up into the pink air of a new dawn.
