Helen didn’t see Orion for the next few days. She had to descend each night whether she wanted to or not, but she told him not to waste his time meeting her there until they had a plan.
I’m better off alone for now, she texted while Claire drove to school. After all, the monsters think you’re the delicious one.
Smart monsters. I am tasty.
Says who?
Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
Yeah? How?
Bite me.
Helen burst out laughing. Claire looked over at her as they walked across the parking lot.
“What are you two texting about?” Claire asked.
“Nothing important,” Helen mumbled, hiding her phone in her bag.
As she and Orion texted throughout the day, cracking jokes about how exhausting it was to lead a double life, Helen started to get the feeling that he was a little too relieved to be given a break.
You don’t have to jump for joy at the thought of NOT seeing me tonight, you know, she typed testily on her way to lunch.
NOT happy I won’t see you. Happy b/c I need to study. Can’t pay my board w/o full scholarship, and my broke ass has no place else to go. Bad grades=homeless Orion. ☹
Helen stared at his text, her brow pinched together. She could tell he had put the frowny face at the end to make light of what he wrote, but it didn’t work. She thought about what it meant to have no place to live but boarding school.
Where do you go over summer break? Christmas vacation? Do you just stay in the dorms by yourself?
Oh boy. Can of worms . . . he texted after a long pause. Summers I work. Christmas I volunteer.
What about when you were a little kid? When you were only 10? Helen remembered that he’d told her he’d been on his own since then. You couldn’t have had a job that young.
Not in this country. Look, just drop it, okay? Class is starting.
“Helen?” Matt asked, repressing a smile. “Are you going to text with Orion all through lunch?”
“Sorry,” Helen said with a grim expression. She put her phone away, wondering what country Orion meant. She pictured him as a little boy, having to work in some horrendous sweatshop that condoned the use of child labor, and started to get angry.
“Did something happen between you two?” Ariadne asked. “You seem upset.”
“Nope. Everything’s fine,” Helen said as cheerfully as she could. Everyone was staring at her like they didn’t believe her, but she couldn’t tell them what the text was about. It was private.
Orion sent her a “good luck in the Underworld” text that night, but he sent it so late that Helen didn’t get it until the next morning. It was obvious he was dodging her—probably because he didn’t want to talk about his childhood. Helen decided to let it go until he trusted her better. This was not something she could rush, but she was surprised to find that she didn’t mind waiting. So what if she had to work a bit harder to gain his confidence? He was worth the extra effort.
“Is that Orion?” Claire asked, her eyes narrowing when Helen jumped to pull out her vibrating phone.
“He said he found something,” Helen said, ignoring Claire’s disquiet.
Her best friend shot her a concerned look, and Helen hoped Claire would let it go. She didn’t have the energy to deal with a “Do you like this boy, or like this boy?” cross-examination by her best friend, especially not when so much was at stake.
“What is it?” Cassandra asked.
“A scroll from the private diary of Marc Antony that talks a lot about the afterlife. He wants to know if you want him to scan and email it to you.”
Cassandra rubbed her eyes. They had been locked in the Delos library every day after school for three nights in a row, looking for some kind of clue that could lead them to a plan. So far nothing had come up.
“Wait, Marc Antony? As in Antony and Cleopatra?” Ariadne asked with stars in her eyes. “She was such a badass.”
Helen grinned in agreement and typed the question to Orion. She paused to read his response. “Yup, same Roman. I guess he’s a relative on his mother’s cousin’s side. It looks really convoluted, but Orion’s mother was related to both Marc Antony and Julius Caesar if you go back far enough.”
“Yeah, but go back far enough and even you and me could be related, Len,” Claire said wryly. She fluffed her inky black hair to point out how genetically different she and blonde Helen were.
“Huh. I’ve never thought of it like that, but you’re probably right, Gig,” Helen mused. A disturbing idea started to bud in her mind, but Cassandra interrupted Helen’s half-formed thought.
“Helen, tell Orion not to bother. Marc Antony was trying to become Pharaoh, so he would only have been interested in the Egyptian afterlife.” Cassandra’s mounting frustration was obvious.
Helen began to type in Cassandra’s reply, adding the “thank-you” that Cassandra so glaringly omitted.
“Wait a sec, Len,” Matt said before she could send it. “Just because Orion’s information is from a different culture doesn’t make it incorrect.”
“I agree with Matt,” Jason said, perking up from his study stupor. “The Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife. It’s possible they knew more about the Underworld than the Greeks did. They could have exactly the information Helen needs to navigate down there. We could overlook it if we’re biased to favor the Greeks.”
“Sure, it’s possible that the Egyptians had a three-dimensional map of the Underworld complete with magic passwords!” Cassandra responded sarcastically as her frustration boiled over. “But Marc Antony was a Roman invader. An Egyptian priest initiated to the level of knowledge that Helen needs would have died before telling a conqueror even one of the sacred secrets of the Underworld!”
Everyone knew that Cassandra was reminding them that the same level of devotion was expected from the newly ordained priests and priestesses of Apollo. Jason and Ariadne had been raised to deal with these kinds of expectations. Matt and Claire paused to think about it. Helen watched her two oldest friends give each other worried looks. When they both seemed to steel themselves, she couldn’t help but feel proud.
Helen glanced around the room, thinking to herself how freaking awesome her friends were, when her eyes landed on Jason. He was looking at Claire like she had just canceled Christmas. When he saw that Helen was watching him, he looked away quickly, but he still looked pale to Helen.
“What we really need are the Lost Prophecies.” Cassandra started pacing.
“Wouldn’t that make them the ‘Found’ Prophecies?” Matt quipped.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Claire said, ignoring the bad pun. “What are the Lost Prophecies?”
“It’s a mystery,” Jason answered with a shake of his head. “They’re supposed to be a collection of the prophecies that Cassandra of Troy made right before and during the ten years of the Trojan War. But no one knows what’s in them.”
“That’s big. How’d they get lost?” Claire asked.
“Cassandra of Troy was cursed by Apollo to always prophesy with perfect clarity—not easy by the way—but to never be believed,” Cassandra said distractedly.
Helen remembered the story, even though it was just a small part of the Iliad. Apollo fell in love with Cassandra of Troy right before the war. When she told him that she wanted to remain a virgin and rejected his advances, he cursed her. A dickhead move if ever there was one.
“Apollo’s curse made everyone think Cassandra was crazy. The priests still kept records of what she foresaw during the war, but they didn’t think they were very important. Most of them got misplaced or only parts of them survived,” Ariadne said with downcast eyes as if her ancestors embarrassed her. “That’s why all the prophecies about the Tyrant are so spotty. No modern Scion has been able to find them all.”
“What a waste,” Matt said darkly. “I wonder how many times the gods have gotten away with something criminal like that, just because they could.”
Ariadne’s head snapped around at Matt’s sharp tone. She was surprised to hear him speak so passionately, but Helen had seen this side of Matt before. He had always hated bullies. He’d had a thing about tough guys throwing their weight around for as long as Helen could remember. It was one of the main reasons he wanted to be lawyer. Matt thought powerful people should protect the weak, not beat up on them, and Helen could see the same childhood anger against injustice seething in Matt again at the thought of Apollo cursing a young girl because she wouldn’t have sex with him.
Helen had to admit that Matt had a point. Most of the time, the gods seemed like big, supernatural bullies. Helen wondered why humans had ever worshiped them at all. As she puzzled over this, her phone buzzed again.
“Orion says he figured the diary was a long shot because it’s really stupid,” Helen read aloud. His next text made her burst out laughing. “He just called Marc Antony a flaming twit.”
“Aw, really? That’s too bad,” Ariadne said, flapping her incredibly long eyelashes in disappointment. “Antony always seemed so romantic on paper.”
“Shakespeare can make anyone look good,” Matt said, smiling to see that Ariadne’s budding crush on a dead guy had been quashed. He turned to Helen. “You know, it’s really nice to see you laugh, Lennie.”
“Well, it is Friday night. I figured, what the heck?” Helen joked, but no one laughed. Everyone but Cassandra was staring at her expectantly. “What?” she finally demanded when the silence dragged on too long.
“Nothing,” Claire answered, slightly annoyed. She stood and stretched, signaling that the night was over as far as she was concerned. Taking her cue, Cassandra left the room without even saying good-bye. Everyone else stood and started to gather their things.
“Do you want to stay and watch a movie?” Jason asked Claire hopefully. He looked around to include everyone in his invitation. “It is Friday.”
Matt glanced over at Ariadne. She smiled and encouraged him to stay, and then everyone looked at Helen. She didn’t want to go home alone, but she knew she couldn’t bear to sit in a dark room with two hormonally fraught not-quite couples.
“I’ll be asleep before the popcorn is out of the microwave,” Helen lied, and forced a laugh. “You guys have fun, but I think I should rest.”
No one argued with her or tried to convince her to stay. As Helen walked outside, she wondered if they didn’t put up a bigger fight because they knew she needed to sleep, or because they didn’t want her around. She couldn’t blame them if they wanted her gone—no one likes a fifth wheel, and a heartbroken fifth wheel is even worse.
Taking in a lungful of the crisp autumn air, she turned her face to the clear night sky with the intention of taking flight. Her eyes were drawn to the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt, and she smiled at the constellation, thinking, “Hey, dude” in her mind.
She had the sudden urge to walk home instead of fly. It was far, nearly the entire length of the island from ’Sconset to her house, but these days she was used to spending hours wandering around in the dark. Helen stuffed her fists into her pockets and started trudging down the road without a second thought. Glancing at the sky, she realized that what she really wanted was to be with Orion, even if this Orion was just a bunch of chilly stars. She missed him.
Helen was halfway down Milestone Road, wondering if anyone would think she was crazy if they caught her out walking clear across the dark interior of the island in the middle of the night, when her phone buzzed. The number was blocked. For a moment she wondered if it was Orion. She answered quickly, hoping it was him. When she heard Hector’s voice on the other end she was so startled that she could barely stammer out a greeting.
“Helen? Shut up and listen to me,” Hector interrupted with his usual directness. “Where are you?”
“Well, I’m walking home right now. Why, what’s up?” she asked, more curious than offended by his abrupt tone.
“Walking? From where?”
“Your house. I mean, your old house.” She bit her lower lip, hoping she hadn’t said something stupid.
“Why aren’t you flying?” He was practically shouting at her.
“Because I wanted to take a . . . Wait, what the hell is going on?”
Hector quickly explained that Daphne had confronted Tantalus and then been injured and lost at sea for over a day. He told her how it had taken Daphne three days to recover enough to be able to tell Hector about the Myrmidon parked outside Helen’s front door.
Helen knew she should have been worried about her mother, but she heard the word mur-ma-don and had to stop Hector to ask what that was.
“Did you even read the Iliad? You didn’t, did you?” Hector admonished, his voice rising again. Helen could picture Hector’s face turning purple with frustration.
“Of course I read it!” she insisted.
Hector cussed loudly and then explained as calmly as he could that the Myrmidons were the elite warriors that fought with Achilles during the Trojan War, and Helen put it together. She was familiar with Achilles’ special squad of nightmare soldiers; she had just never heard the word pronounced properly before. Myrmidons weren’t human, but ants transformed into men by Zeus.
“The creepy guy that attacked us at my track meet!” Helen exclaimed, covering her mouth with a hand. She finally understood why the leader of the group, the captain Helen suddenly realized, had bothered her so much—because he was really an it. “I thought soldier ants were all female,” Helen added, confused.
“Yeah, and I thought ants looked like ants and humans looked like humans,” Hector said drily. “Don’t be fooled, Helen. That thing isn’t a man, and it definitely doesn’t have the same feelings we do. Not to mention the fact that it’s enormously strong and it has thousands of years of battle experience.”
Helen thought about a program she’d seen on TV about ants. They could march for days, lift loads hundreds of times their weight, and some of them were unbelievably aggressive.
Looking up and down the dark, cold road, Helen suddenly wished that Hector was with her, even if he was a grouchy pain in the ass 90 percent of the time. She also wished she had paid better attention to him when he was punching her in the face. At least then she’d know how to fight.
“So what do I do?” Helen asked as she tried to look everywhere at once.
“Get airborne. It can’t fly. You’re usually safer in the air, Helen. Try to remember that from now on, okay?” he coached. “Go back to the family and tell them what I told you. Then stay there with Ariadne. She’ll keep you safe. Lucas and Jason will find the nest, and my father and uncle will probably have to go to New York to bring this issue before the Hundred. After that, Cassandra will make the decisions. You should be fine.”
Like the great general he was always meant to be, Hector could plan every moment of a confrontation. Still, Helen didn’t think he sounded very convincing when he promised her safety.
“You’re really afraid of this Myrmidon, aren’t you?” Helen asked as she got airborne.
The thought that Hector was afraid of anything frightened Helen more than the empty road in front of her. She heard him sigh heavily.
“Myrmidons have been used as contract killers for Scions for thousands of years. Apart from the House of Rome, which has its own loophole for kin-killing, if a Scion wants to kill a relative without becoming Outcast, he or she goes to a Myrmidon. Of course, this isn’t something we like to talk about. Myrmidons are a part of our world, and not all of them are dishonorable killers. But some are. They’re physically stronger than we are, and they don’t have the Furies to worry about. Using one to spy on your own family is a red flag that someone is about to get assassinated, and it gives my father and uncle the right to call for a formal, closed meeting of the Hundred. Something called a Conclave.”
“But that’s good, right?” Helen asked nervously. “Castor and Pallas can call for this Conclave thingy and get rid of it, right?”
“If they can prove you’re Ajax’s daughter and part of the family, the Hundred would make Tantalus get rid of the Myrmidon. If they can’t, well, then you’re just a member of the House of Atreus to the Hundred, and in their minds you’re a target. But I don’t know what they’ll do. I’m not there, am I?” He sounded more sorry than bitter, like he felt he needed to apologize to Helen for leaving her alone when she was in danger, which was totally insane. He was in exile. Before she could argue, Hector continued in a hassled voice. “Just do exactly what I tell you, and then I’ll be less afraid. All right?”
“All right,” she promised, already feeling guilty because she knew she wasn’t going to keep that promise.
She and Hector spoke briefly about Daphne, although he wouldn’t tell her where they were. He assured Helen that her mother was going to make a full recovery and then promised to get in touch again when he could.
After disconnecting the call, Helen flew to her side of the island to look for the “nest” on her own. She wanted to at least locate it and make sure that her dad was okay. Then she wanted to be the one to decide if it was dangerous or not. Helen wasn’t five. She was competent enough to scout out the situation and decide for herself if it was worth raising the alarm. Besides, she wasn’t exactly helpless. She had the cestus to keep her from harm and her lightning to knock it out if it got feisty. If that Ant-man came anywhere near her or Jerry, she’d toast it first and think up an excuse to tell her dad later.
Scouring the neighborhood, Helen pictured the nest as a big, webby structure, and assumed it would stick out easily. Nothing caught her eye. She was just about to give up when she noticed that halfway up the side of her neighbor’s house and partly obscured behind a gigantic rhododendron bush, there seemed to be a tiny bulge, like the wall was ever so slightly ballooning out.
It was so subtle Helen knew that her mortal neighbors wouldn’t be able to see the difference. The nest was perfectly camouflaged to look exactly like a large patch of shingle siding on the house, right down to the texture and color. The Myrmidon had even masked the bulge it made by spacing the fake shingling to create an optical illusion.
Helen stared at the nest for a few moments, her pulse pounding in her ears, waiting to see if it moved. When she didn’t hear even the slight sound of an occupant breathing inside the slim pocket, she decided it was safe to check it out. She blew on her sweaty palms to dry them, told herself to stop being a baby, and soared close, until she was right alongside it. The nest was made out of some kind of cement-like material that was designed with lots of little peepholes. As she suspected, most of those holes faced her house directly. From that angle, she could even see part of the way inside her bedroom.
The hairs on the back of her neck were starting to prickle with the thought of some giant bug watching her undress, when she heard a chittering noise below her.
Helen soared feetfirst to a safer height. Like an arrow flying backward, she gained altitude while keeping her eyes glued to ground, to see where the noise had come from. Staring up at her from her neighbor’s lawn was the same skeletal face and red, bulging eyes she had seen in the battle in the woods. Its head twitched blindingly fast, like it swiveled atop a stalk instead of on a neck, and that slight but startling motion was enough to break Helen’s nerve. She flew across the island and landed at the Delos compound a moment later.
Walking quickly to the dark front door, Helen realized how late it was. Everyone had gone to sleep. She looked in the silent windows and shifted from foot to foot, feeling strange about ringing the bell and waking up the whole house at two o’clock in the morning. After all, she wasn’t in any immediate danger. From what Hector had said, the Myrmidon had been watching her for weeks and it hadn’t attacked yet. Helen wondered if she shouldn’t just go home, deal with the nest on her own, and tell her cousins about it in the morning.
She heard a thud behind her and spun around, her heart in her throat.
“What are you doing out here?” Lucas asked in a harsh whisper, adjusting the pull of gravity on his body as he transitioned states. He immediately began walking toward her forcefully. His face changed into a frozen mask of surprise as he registered Helen’s anxious state. From the way she was glancing around, wringing her hands, he could tell it had nothing to do with him. “What happened?” he demanded.
“I . . .” she began breathlessly, then broke off when a disturbing thought distracted her. “Are you just getting home now? Where were you?”
“I was out,” he said tersely. Lucas took a few more steps toward her until he was close enough that she had to tilt her head up to look at him, but she refused to give him any ground. She was done with being afraid of him. “Now answer my question. What happened to you?”
“Hector called. Daphne learned that Tantalus sent a Myrmidon to watch me. The thing just caught me snooping around its nest, like, two seconds ago.”
Without warning, Lucas reached out and grabbed Helen by the waist, and threw her straight up into the air. She released herself from gravity as a reflex, and on the momentum of Lucas’s toss, she soared twenty, then thirty, then forty feet up. Lucas rocketed past, catching her by the hand. He pulled her behind him at an unbelievable speed. Helen’s ears popped with the pressure of the mini–sonic boom that she and Lucas created.
“Where’s the nest? Near my house?” he yelled frantically over the rushing wind.
“At my neighbor’s. Lucas, stop!” Helen was frightened, not of him, but that they were moving so fast. He slowed and faced her, but he didn’t stop entirely or let go of her hand. Flying in close, he looked her directly in the eye, searching for a lie.
“Did it sting you?”
“No.”
“Did Hector tell you to go look for its nest on your own?” His words came so quickly she barely had time to process what he was saying.
Helen’s head hurt and her vision swam. They were up so high the air was dangerously thin. Not even demigods could survive space, and Lucas had brought Helen right to the edge.
“Hector said not to go near it . . . but I wanted to see for myself before I made everyone panic. Lucas, we have to get lower!” she pleaded.
Lucas looked down at Helen’s chest and saw it bellowing in and out as she struggled for oxygen. He drifted nearer, and she felt him share the slip of air he had wrapped around himself with her. A gust of oxygen brushed gently past her face. She inhaled, and instantly felt better.
“We can call more breathable air to ourselves, but you need to relax first,” Lucas said. He sounded like himself again.
“How high are we?” She stared at him, shocked that he was being kind to her. She didn’t know what else to say.
“Look down, Helen.”
Overwhelmed, she followed his gaze to the view beneath them.
For a moment, she and Lucas floated weightless above the slowly spinning Earth, just looking at it. Black sky edged the white-and-blue haze of atmosphere swaddling the planet. The silence and the bleakness of space only served to emphasize how precious, how miraculous their little island of life truly was.
It was the most beautiful thing Helen had ever seen, but she couldn’t fully enjoy it. If ever she came this high again, she knew would always recall that Lucas had brought her here first. Now this, too, was something they shared. She was so confused she wanted to cry. Entirely by chance, Lucas had claimed yet another piece of real estate in her mind, and he was the one who had ordered her to stay away from him.
“Why bother to show me this? Or teach me anything at all?” Helen said, choking on the words. “You hate me.”
“I never said that.” His voice held no emotion.
“We should go down,” she said, forcing her eyes away from his face. This wasn’t fair. She couldn’t let him toy with her like this.
Lucas nodded and gripped Helen’s hand tightly. She tried to pull it away but Lucas resisted.
“Don’t, Helen,” he said. “I know you don’t want to touch me, but you could still pass out up here.”
Helen wanted to scream that he couldn’t be more wrong. Pretty much the only thing she wanted was to touch him, and it was eating her up inside. At that moment, she imagined herself drifting closer and brushing against him until she could feel his body heat leaking out through the gaps in his clothes. She pictured how the scent of him would hit her in a wave, riding the tide of that heat. She knew thoughts like that shouldn’t even cross her mind, but they did. Right or wrong, whether she was allowed to act on it or not, it was what she truly wanted.
What she didn’t want was to be pushed and pulled in so many different directions that she didn’t know how to behave. She didn’t even know who she was supposed to be around him anymore. She resented him for it, but worse, she was disappointed in herself for wanting him even after he had treated her so badly.
Ashamed of her own thoughts, Helen didn’t allow herself to look at Lucas as they flew to a lower altitude. When she could breathe easily outside his slip of air, Helen noticed that they were over some dark part of the continent. She searched for the familiar glowing nets that she recognized as Boston, Manhattan, and DC at night, and couldn’t believe it when she found them. By Helen’s estimation they were hundreds of miles away.
“How fast are we?” she asked Lucas in awe.
“Well, I haven’t been able to beat light . . . yet,” he said with a mischievous glint in his eyes. Helen turned her head and stared at him, amazed that he was acting like himself again. This felt right. This was the Lucas she knew. He smiled for a moment, then seemed to stop himself. Still staring at her, his lips slowly slackened and dropped.
Helen felt like she was falling toward him. She realized that Lucas was an emotional black hole for her. If she was anywhere near him, her heart simply couldn’t get away. Helen dropped Lucas’s hand and drifted ahead of him. She needed a moment to get a hold of herself.
She turned her attention back to the situation, forcing herself to focus and take control. She had to keep her mind busy or she was lost.
“I gather from both your reactions that this Myrmidon is a really big problem,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s big, Helen. Myrmidons are faster and stronger than Scions, but worse than that, they don’t feel emotions like we do. Having one spying on you is a very big deal. And I never even knew it was there.” He sighed, like this was somehow his fault.
“But how could you have possibly known? We haven’t been anywhere near each other in over a week.”
“Come on,” he said. Lucas began drifting toward the East Coast, brushing off Helen’s last comment. “We need to get back and tell the family.”
She nodded and took the lead. They didn’t hold hands on the way down, but Helen could still feel Lucas near to her, disturbingly warm and solid. She kept telling herself that she was only imagining that they were in sync, but her actions proved her wrong. They touched down in unison, transitioned, and continued on into the house without ever breaking stride with each other.
Lucas walked in the front door loudly, flicked on the lights in the hallway, and began calling out to the rest of the family. Moments later, everyone was in the kitchen, and Helen was repeating everything that had happened to her that night, minus the bit about visiting the outer atmosphere with Lucas.
“This is cause for a Conclave,” Castor said to his brother. “Bringing a Myrmidon into the equation could be considered an act of war within the House.”
“Did you get a good look at the Myrmidon’s face?” Cassandra asked. Helen nodded and tried not to shudder at the thought of how his head had flicked around like something alien.
“It had red eyes,” Helen answered squeamishly.
“Did Hector happen to mention the Myrmidon’s name?” Pallas asked Helen quietly. “It would help if we knew which one we’re dealing with.”
“No. But next time he calls, I can ask,” Helen replied gently, aware that even saying Hector’s name upset Pallas. Helen could tell that Pallas wished for nothing more than to be able to talk to his son directly. It wasn’t right that Hector couldn’t be there, she thought angrily. They needed him.
Cassandra led everyone into the library. She went directly to a book that was so fragile Castor and Pallas had dismantled it and put each individual page in a separate plastic covering. Helen approached Cassandra as she gently leafed through the stack of pages, and noticed that the book was really old—like King Arthur old.
“This is a codex from the time of the Crusades,” Cassandra said, holding up a painted page of a knight in black armor. Like the Myrmidon, he had bulging red eyes and a skeletal face.
“It looks a lot like him,” Helen said as she peered at the page. It was a beautiful work of art, but it was still a painting, not a photo. Helen shrugged. “I can’t tell for sure from this. Do all Myrmidons look about the same?”
“No, some of them had black, faceted eyes, and some had slightly red skin. A few were rumored to have had antennae that they hid under their helmets,” Castor answered pensively. “Helen, are you sure the one you saw had red eyes?”
“Oh, yeah, no doubt about that,” Helen said positively. “They were really shiny, too.”
“Automedon,” Pallas said, looking at Castor. For the first time Helen could remember, Castor used an English curse word, and a foul one at that, as he nodded in agreement with his brother.
“Makes sense,” Cassandra said. “No Scion ever claimed to have killed him.”
“Because no one could.” Lucas looked over at Helen, shaking his head slowly as if he couldn’t believe this was happening. “He’s immortal.”
“Okay, see, that I don’t get,” Helen said nervously. She was looking for a flaw, something logical that would make the situation seem a little less dire. “If Myrmidons are immortal, then why isn’t the world crawling with them?”
“Oh, they can be killed in battle. And most of them were killed at some point in history. But, see, that’s sort of the catch with Automedon,” Ariadne said with wide, apologetic eyes. “There are stories of soldiers literally cutting Automedon’s head off, and he just picked it up, put it back on, and kept fighting.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Helen said with a raised eyebrow. “How can that even be possible? He’s not a god. Wait, is he a god?” she asked Ariadne in a hurried aside, in case she had missed something.
“No, he’s not a god,” Cassandra answered for her. “But he might have shared blood with one. This is just my guess, but if Automedon became blood brothers with one of the immortals thousands of years ago, before they were all locked away on Olympus, then Automedon can’t be killed, not even in battle.”
“Blood brothers? Are you serious?” Helen asked dubiously. She pictured two kids in a tree house pricking their fingers with a safety pin.
“To Scions, becoming blood brothers is a sacred rite, and it’s pretty hard to do outside of combat,” Jason said with a smile, seeming to understand Helen’s misinterpretation. “You have to be willing to die for someone, and that person has to be willing to die for you. Then you have to exchange blood while you are in the process of saving each other’s lives.”
Helen’s eyes darted over to Lucas. She couldn’t help but think of how they had broken out of the Furies’ curse by nearly dying for each other. From the look in Lucas’s eyes, Helen knew he was thinking exactly the same thing. They hadn’t exchanged blood the night they fell, but they had both saved each other’s lives and that had bound them together forever.
“You can’t make it happen or plan it. It’s something that comes out of an extreme situation,” Lucas said directly to Helen. “And if the two brothers live, sometimes they share a few of each other’s Scion powers. Now imagine doing that with a god. Theoretically, it could make you immortal.”
“But you don’t know for sure if that’s the case with Automedon,” Helen challenged. “Cassandra said she was just guessing.”
“Yeah, but Cassandra’s guesses are usually pretty close to the mark,” he snapped, his temper rising quickly.
“You’ve been blowing this out of proportion since the second I told you! The more I think about it, the more I doubt I’m in any real danger,” she continued defensively.
Lucas’s face blanched with anger.
“Enough!” Noel yelled from the doorway. “Lucas, go upstairs and go to bed.” Lucas whirled around to face his mother, but Noel didn’t give him the chance to start with her. “I’m sick to death of watching the two of you fight! You’re both so tired you’re not even making sense anymore. Helen, go upstairs with Ariadne. You’re sleeping over.”
“I can’t leave my father alone with that thing practically next door,” Helen said, slumping down on the edge of Castor’s desk. Noel was right. All the endless running around, coupled with the emotional minefield she had to navigate whenever Lucas was near, suddenly hit her like a brick. She was exhausted.
“Trust me, if you’re here, then that creature won’t be far away. I know it’s going to be hard for you to accept this, but both your father and Kate will be safer if you keep your distance from now on.” Noel said it as kindly as she could, but her words were still harsh. “Lucas, I want you to go with your father and uncle to Conclave. I think it would be best for you to spend a little time in New York.”
“Noel! He’s not eighteen yet,” Castor began to argue.
“But he is Heir to the House of Thebes, Caz,” Pallas countered gently. “Creon is dead. After Tantalus, you’re next in line. That makes your eldest the Heir. Lucas has every right to attend Conclave before he comes of age.”
“Tantalus could have another child,” Castor said impatiently.
“The Outcast, marked for death, will bear no more children,” Cassandra chanted in multiple voices from the corner of the room.
The sound made Helen’s spine recoil and bunch up, like someone had poured cold water down her back. As one, the room turned to see the eerie aura of the Oracle flicker across Cassandra’s face and purple, blue, and green lights trace like spirits along the edges of her body. Her usually pretty face was puckered like an old woman’s.
“Lucas, son of the sun, has always been the intended Heir to the House of Thebes. So it has come to pass.” The Oracle cackled, and her body convulsed violently.
The light suddenly went out and Cassandra shrank. She glanced around with terrified eyes and clasped her arms around her body, cowering inside her clothes. Helen wanted to comfort Cassandra, but there was a chill around her that Helen couldn’t ignore. She just couldn’t force herself to take a step closer to the frightened girl.
“Now, all of you, go to bed,” Noel said in a shaky voice, breaking the silence.
She pushed everyone toward the door and corralled the small herd toward the stairs, leaving Cassandra in the library by herself. Helen dragged herself upstairs and collapsed onto the guest bed without undressing or even pulling the covers down first.
When she woke the next morning she was covered in dried slime. Helen had fallen asleep in such a foul mood that when she got to the Underworld, she’d found herself chest deep in a prehistoric swamp. It wasn’t the quicksand pit, which was an enormous relief, but it still stank. It took every ounce of effort to keep the muddy water out her mouth as she waded through it, always just one wrong footfall away from drowning. After a night of half panic, Helen awoke to find herself even more tired than she had been the day before.
She hauled herself out of bed and noticed that her shirt was nearly torn off, there were odd sticks and dead leaves tangled in her hair, and she’d lost a shoe. Of course, she ran into Lucas on her way to the bathroom. He stared at her for a moment, his eyes ticking up and down her bedraggled frame while the rest of his body remained rigid.
“What? You going to yell at me again?” Helen challenged, too tired to be careful.
“No.” His voice broke. “I’m done fighting with you. It obviously isn’t helping.”
“Then what?”
“I can’t do this,” he said, more to himself than Helen. “My father was wrong.”
Her bleary brain was still processing his words when he opened the nearest window and jumped out of it.
Helen watched him fly away, too tired to be surprised. She continued on to the bathroom, sprinkling nastiness all over the floor with every step. She looked down at the mess she was making and thought about how much worse it would get when she undressed. The only solution her partially paralyzed thought process came up with was to step into the shower, still fully clothed. As she rubbed a lemony-smelling bar of soap over her torn shirt she started to laugh. It was an unstable laugh, the kind that threatens to tip into a sob.
Ariadne knocked on the door. Helen stuffed a hand over her mouth, but it was too late. Ariadne took Helen’s silence as a signal that something bad was happening, and barged into the bathroom.
“Helen! Are you . . . Oh, wow.” Ariadne’s tone changed from concerned to dumbstruck in a second. She saw Helen was still completely dressed through the glass door of the shower. “Um, you know you forgot a step, right?”
Helen burst out laughing again. The situation was so ridiculous that there was nothing to do but laugh.
“Are you still wearing a shoe?” Ariadne choked out.
“I woke . . . up . . . with only one on!” Helen lifted up her bare foot and pointed at it. Both of the girls laughed hysterically at Helen’s wiggling toes.
Ariadne helped Helen clean up, and together they dragged the dirty bedding and soggy clothes to the washroom. By the time they made it down for breakfast, everyone else was nearly finished.
“Where’s Lucas?” Noel asked, craning her head anxiously to look behind Helen.
“Jumped out a window,” Helen answered. She got a mug and poured herself some coffee. Lifting her head, she noticed that everyone was staring at her. “I’m not kidding. We bumped into each other in the hallway and when he saw me, he literally jumped out a window. Anyone want coffee?”
“Did he say where he was going?” Jason asked with obvious concern.
“Nope,” she said evenly.
Helen’s hands were shaking, but she stirred some cream into her mug and took a drink, anyway. In the state she was in, she figured it might actually steady her. She felt like her whole body was hot and cold at the same time.
“Helen? Are you feeling ill?” Noel asked with narrowed eyes.
Helen shook her head uncertainly. It was impossible for a Scion to come down with a mortal sickness, yet when she ran a hand across her forehead, it came back wet with sweat. Still staring at her hand, Helen heard an electric car cruise quietly up to the house and stop.
“Lennie! Get your butt out here and help us with these books!” Claire yelled from the driveway.
Helen turned to look out the window behind her and saw Claire and Matt getting out of Claire’s car. Grateful for the interruption, Helen scurried out from under Noel’s piercing look to help them.
“We hear you have an ant problem,” Claire said through a grin, and started stacking books on Helen’s outstretched arms.
“Because that’s exactly what I need, right?” Helen laughed ruefully. “More problems.”
“Don’t worry, Len. We’ll split up into groups and tackle this in shifts. We’ll figure it out.” Matt sounded so certain. He shouldered a backpack full of books, closed the trunk, and put an arm over Helen’s shoulders as they walked together toward the house. “Claire and I didn’t join PETA’s most wanted list for nothing, you know.”
As Helen, Claire, and Matt were just about to go back inside, they heard Castor and Pallas saying their good-byes and decided to let the Delos family have a moment alone. From what Helen could gather, Conclave was a big deal, like a Supreme Court trial and an international summit meeting combined. Once it started, no one was allowed to leave until a course of action was decided upon, so sometimes these meetings could take weeks.
Helen tried not to listen in too much while they hugged and said their good-byes, but she couldn’t help herself when she overheard Castor privately pulling Noel aside to ask if Lucas was coming or not.
“I don’t know where he went. He could be in Tibet by now,” Noel replied, sounding like she was on her last nerve. “I was hoping he’d go with you to New York for a few weeks. Get him out of here and give him a chance to . . .”
“A chance to what?” Castor asked sadly when Noel ran out of things to say. “Just leave him be.”
“I have left him be, and it’s obviously not helping!” Noel said. “He’s so angry all the time now, Caz, and I think it’s getting worse—not better.”
“I know. He’s changed, Noel, and I think we’re going to have to accept that it might be permanent. I was hoping he’d just hate me, but it seems like he hates the whole world,” Castor said heavily. “And I honestly don’t blame him. Could you imagine if someone had separated us like I separated them?”
“You had no choice. They’re cousins. That’s not something that’s going to change,” Noel said emphatically. “Still, if your father did to us what you did to Lucas—”
“I don’t know what I would have done to him,” Castor said as if he couldn’t even think about it. Helen heard them kiss and immediately switched off her Scion hearing.
“Let’s go to the library and get to work!” she suggested loudly to Claire and Matt, and started walking around the house to use another entrance. Her mind was racing.
Had Castor really separated her and Lucas, and if so, how? Helen thought back over the outburst at dinner, and realized that Lucas had been just as angry with Castor as he was with her—maybe more. Had Lucas hurt her because his father had ordered him to?
“Len? You know I love you, but you really need to stop spacing,” Claire said with a cute grimace. Helen looked around and realized that she had paused in the middle of the hallway on the way to the library, like her legs had just quit or something.
“Sorry!” she said, and rushed to keep up with her friends.
Lucas circled the Getty Museum, a gleaming white building elegantly perched on top of one of Los Angeles’s more scruffy hills. The white stone structure capping the dry, rocky hill was strikingly similar to the Parthenon. The Parthenon was originally a treasury, so Lucas felt it was fitting that he was coming to the Getty to make a withdrawal of coins.
He was searching for a spot that would hide him for the one moment of his landing when he would have to slow down enough that he could be seen. Lucas moved in faster than a human could see, settling too lightly on the ground to leave any footprints. The instant he touched down, Lucas half ran, half flew to the door so quickly that all a security camera picked up would be a faint blur. Stopping right next to the door, Lucas froze and disappeared.
In the last few weeks, he had learned that if he didn’t move around too much he could scatter light so that the surface of his body looked like whatever was behind it. In the beginning, before he had perfected his invisibility cloak, it was still possible for a Scion to make out a faint fracture between the picture he created and his surroundings. Luckily, only one Scion had ever noticed it, and that had been Lucas’s own damn fault.
After a half an hour wait, a maintenance man finally came out the door with a rake in one hand and his early morning thermos of coffee in the other. Lucas simply slipped around him and walked in without tripping a single alarm. He could have ripped the door off its hinges, but he didn’t want to attract too much attention to himself. Lucas didn’t know whether his plan would work, but he didn’t want his family to get suspicious and interfere.
He’d always been taught that museums were sacred places because they housed so many Scion relics, but he never imagined that one day he’d be pushed to a point where he’d consider breaking into one. Now he was desperate. He had to do something to help Helen.
His father had been wrong. All it took was one look at Helen—her clothes torn and covered in that black mud from the Underworld—and Lucas knew for sure that he wasn’t Helen’s problem. He had done as his father had ordered, but she was still suffering. Staying away from her was not enough.
Lucas knew Helen was strong, and he trusted her to make good decisions even when he disagreed with her. She had insisted that Orion was helping her, so no matter how much it ate him up inside to think of the two of them alone together, Lucas had stepped back.
He’d promised himself after the night Pandora died as he watched the dawn break from Helen’s widow’s walk that he would suffer anything as long as Helen moved on and lived a full and meaningful life. He’d turned himself into something twisted in an attempt to break things off between them. Yet that morning she’d looked sicker than she had before Lucas had pushed her away.
Whatever was happening to her went far beyond her feelings about their doomed relationship.
Lucas moved so quickly down the hallways of the museum that his face couldn’t be recorded. Even though his surroundings changed by the nanosecond, Lucas knew where he was going. There were plenty of signs to point him in the right direction. the treasures of ancient greece was a huge crowd pleaser, and this famous exhibit of recently unearthed gold artifacts had already traveled all over the world. This month it was the Getty’s turn, and they had plastered the place with bright silk banners in celebration.
They’d also put a lot of pictures of the artifacts online. In true Southern California style, the smaller, less impressive pieces of gold that had been left out of other museums’ promotional pictures were clumped together in huge, sparkling group shots. Los Angeles just loved to get as much dazzle as it could into one frame, and after over two weeks of flying all over the world, searching every museum, that was how Lucas had finally found what he was looking for. On the internet.
Compared to the other pieces in the collection, the small handful of gold coins was hardly worth displaying. He had to go to one of the back cases to find them, but when he did, he didn’t waste any time. As far as he knew these three coins—each with a poppy flower engraved on one side—were the last remaining obols that had been forged in honor of Morpheus, the god of dreams.
Lucas stole them all.
“We’re going around in circles!” Helen moaned to the unsympathetic library ceiling. “I know it doesn’t make much sense, but trust me, there’s no such thing as geographical progress down there. Did I mention the beach that doesn’t lead to an ocean? It’s just wet sand like a beach at low tide, except there’s no ocean. Ever. It’s just a beach!”
She was so tired she felt like she was starting to crack up, and every now and again she’d shiver unexpectedly, which was beginning to worry her. She couldn’t get sick. It was both impossible and annoying. Helen’s phone buzzed, interrupting her scattered thoughts. Orion was asking if the “Greek Geeks” had come up with anything yet. She smiled at his nickname for her study group and texted back that they hadn’t. She asked him what he was reading on the Roman end.
War, orgy, rinse, repeat. Getting boring, he texted. Almost 😉
“Is that Orion again?” Ariadne asked with a pinched face. Helen glanced up at her and nodded in a hassled way while she typed.
She understood why everyone was concerned—they had to make sure the Houses stayed separate—but sometimes Helen felt insulted. Sure, Orion was gorgeous. And brave. And hilarious. But that didn’t mean they were dating or anything.
“Wait! You can find Orion!” Claire exclaimed, derailing Helen’s wandering thoughts.
“Yeah, I told you already. I concentrate on his face and I appear right next to him, just like Jason and Ariadne do when they bring people back from the edge of the Underworld. But I can only find him if he’s in my same infinity,” Helen answered. “Because if he isn’t, I won’t ever find him, even if he descends the next . . . Oh, forget it.”
“Helen, I understand all that,” Claire groused in frustration. “What I don’t know is if Orion is the only person you can find just by thinking about him.”
“I’ve already tried to find the Furies that way, Gig—a bunch of times. It never works.”
“They’re not people,” Claire said very clearly, trying to contain her excitement. “What if you focused on someone who lives down there? Do you think you could use that person as a kind of beacon?”
“It’s the land of the dead, Gig. Looking for someone who lives down there is kind of an oxymoron, isn’t it?” Helen asked, getting lost in Claire’s logic.
“Not if she was kidnapped, body and soul, by the boss himself,” Claire said. She folded her arms across her chest and smiled like she knew a secret.
Jason made a surprised sound in the back of his throat. “How’d you get so smart?” he asked, gazing admiringly at Claire.
“Just lucky for you, I guess,” she answered with a grin.
Ariadne, Helen, and Matt shared confused looks while Jason and Claire smiled at each other, forgetting that there were other people in the room.
“Um, guys? Hate to interrupt, but what are you talking about?” Matt asked.
Jason stood up and went to the stacks. He brought back an old book and laid it open in front of Helen. She saw a painting of a young black woman, walking away from the viewer, but looking back over her shoulder like she didn’t want to go. She was dressed in a gown of flowers and wore a crown that sparkled with jewels as big as grapes. Her body was as graceful as a ballet dancer’s, and even in the profile view her face was stunningly beautiful. Yet despite her great beauty and wealth, she radiated a crushing sadness.
“Oh, yes,” Ariadne said quietly. “I remember now.”
“Who is she?” Helen asked, awed by the image of this sad, beautiful woman.
“Persephone, goddess of flowers, and the queen of the Underworld,” Jason answered. “She’s actually a Scion. The only daughter of the Olympian Demeter, the goddess of the earth. Hades kidnapped Persephone and tricked her into marrying him. Now she’s forced to spend the fall and winter months in the Underworld. They say Hades built her a night garden next to his palace. Persephone’s Garden.”
“She’s only allowed to leave the Underworld to visit her mother in spring and summer. When she comes back to earth she makes the flowers bloom everywhere she goes.” Ariadne sounded dreamy, like she was enchanted by the thought of Persephone making the world blossom.
“It’s October. She’d be down there now,” Matt added with cautious hope.
“And you’re sure she’s not an immortal?” Helen pinched her eyebrows together in doubt. “How can she still be alive?”
“Hades struck a deal with Thanatos, the god of death. Persephone can’t die until Hades lets her,” Cassandra spoke from across the room, making Helen jump.
She’d forgotten Cassandra was sitting there, writing a letter to her father, who was still in New York City. Castor and Pallas were only allowed to receive written messages while in Conclave, and they had asked for some specific information on the Myrmidon. Cassandra had always had the disturbing ability to remain as still as a statue, and lately that ability had become so pronounced it was getting downright spooky. She joined the rest of the group and stared at Persephone’s picture with a frown.
“So she’s trapped down there,” Helen said, directing her focus back to Persephone’s sorrowful figure.
“But she could still help you,” Cassandra said. “She knows everything about the Underworld.”
“She’s a prisoner,” Helen replied with an angry scowl. “We should be helping her. Orion and I should, I mean.”
“Impossible,” Cassandra said. “Not even Zeus could get Hades to part with Persephone when Demeter demanded her daughter back. Demeter sent the world into an ice age, nearly killing off humanity over it.”
“He’s a kidnapper!” Matt exclaimed, outraged. “Why isn’t Hades locked up on Olympus with the rest of them? He’s one of the three major gods. Shouldn’t he be part of the Truce?”
“Hades is the eldest brother of the Big Three, so I guess that technically he is an Olympian, but he was always different. I can’t remember any literature that says he’s even been to Mount Olympus,” Cassandra said with a quizzical little grimace. “The Underworld is also called ‘Hades’ because it is entirely his realm. It’s not part of the Truce, or even part of this world for that matter.”
“The Underworld has its own rules,” Helen said. She understood this bit better than anyone. “And I’m guessing you all think that Persephone might be willing to break a few of them?”
“I don’t want to promise anything, but if anyone would even be able to help you down there, it would probably be her,” Jason said. “She is the queen.”
Helen’s phone buzzed.
Want to know Julius Caesar’s favorite dirty joke? Orion texted.
Meet me tonight, Helen texted back. I think we’re onto something.
