“Hey,” she said softly. “You know what always bugged me about history class?”
“What?” Orion was startled out of his morose reverie by Helen’s seemingly random question, just as she intended.
“It’s all about war and battles and who conquered whom.” Helen wrapped both her hands around one of his thick forearms and started to lead him along again. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
His face broke into a smile as he allowed her to lead. Helen was delighted to see the storm clouds that had darkened his face clear so quickly, as if she had the power to banish them at will.
“I think for every battle date they make us memorize in history class, they should make us learn at least two awesome things. Like, how many people get saved every year by firefighters, or the number of people who’ve walked on the moon. You know what’s awful? I don’t even know the answer to that.”
“Neither do I,” Orion said with a quiet smile.
“And we should know that! We’re Americans!”
“Well, officially I’m Canadian.”
“Close enough!” Helen said, waving an enthusiastic hand in the air. “My point is that considering all the amazing things that people are capable of, why do we focus on war? Humans should be better than that.”
“But you’re not human, not really, not wholly human. Pretty little godling,” hissed a slippery, wheedling voice.
Helen heard a ringing scrape, and a bright flash caught her eye as Orion unsheathed one of the many blades he kept strapped under his clothes. He pushed her behind him and dug his fingers into her hip, his large hand pinning her in place in case she tried to do something idiotic, like jump out and start swinging.
“Come and face me,” Orion challenged to their adversary. His voice was calm, icy—almost like he had been waiting for this.
Frustrated with herself for being so helpless without her lightning, Helen resolved to learn how to fight like a mortal as soon as she was back in the real world. If she ever made it back.
A thin, warbling laugh echoed through the forest of bones, and a haunting almost-song wove its way toward them.
“Big baby godling! Bigger than most, like the hunter he was named for! Want to fight me, foolish Sky Hunter? Caution! I invented war. War, little beauties, I invented it. But, no, Sky Hunter won’t heed. He will fight! And he will forever chase her across the night! For how prettyprettypretty she is!”
The singsong voice slid off into peals of childlike laughter that made Helen’s teeth grind together until they squeaked. As Orion circled defensively, Helen caught a glimpse of a long, gangly figure darting this way and that through the Ice Giants’ graveyard. He was scrawny, nearly naked, and painted all over with blue-dye curlicues, like some Stone Age wild man.
“So like my sister, my lover. So like the Face! Oh! The Face that loved, that launched, that spilled so much bloodbloodblood! Again, again! I want to play the Game with the pretty little godlings again!” Giggling, he darted in close, trying to lure Orion away from Helen, but Orion didn’t fall for it.
As the wild man came nearer, Helen got a better look at him. Horrified, she pressed herself tighter against Orion’s back. The wild man had bulging gray eyes and long dreadlocks that looked like they might have been platinum blond or white before they were matted with blue dye and clotted blood. Blood seemed to bubble up out of his skin. It ran from his nose and ears—even from his scalp, as if his rotted brain leaked gore from any handy hole.
In his hand was a raggedy sword, its edges orange with rust. Whirling around as Orion intercepted one of the wild man’s feints, Helen caught a whiff of him. Her stomach heaved at the necrotic stench. He smelled like sour fear-sweat and rotting meat.
“Ares,” Orion whispered to Helen over his shoulder as the god skipped off, giggling hysterically, to hide among the bones. “Don’t be afraid, Helen. He’s a coward.”
“He’s insane!” Helen whispered back frantically. “He’s completely and totally insane!”
“Most of the gods are, though I hear Ares is by far the worst,” Orion said with a comforting smile. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t let him near you.”
“Um, Orion? If he’s a god, can’t he pretty much crush you?” she asked delicately.
“We don’t have our demigod powers here, so why should he have his god powers?” he said with a shrug, like he was tossing an idea out there. “And he’s the one running away from us. That’s usually a pretty good sign.”
Orion had a point, but Helen still didn’t relax. She could hear the mad god humming to himself as he trotted off in the distance. He didn’t sound very afraid of them.
“You there, little godling! Hiding from the others?” Ares suddenly called out, a few hundred yards away. “So inconvenient, when I need all three of you together to start my favorite Game! Soon, soon. For now I will settle. I will watch you play with my uncle’s pet instead. Here he comes, little godling!”
“Who’s he talking to?” Orion whispered over his shoulder to Helen.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s us. Maybe he’s seeing things?” she guessed.
“Maybe not. Earlier, I thought I saw . . .” Orion’s sentence was abruptly interrupted.
A great howl sounded through the bone forest. It was so deep and loud Helen could feel it vibrating inside her chest. A second howl, then a third followed, each one closer than the last. Helen froze out of sheer instinct, like a white rabbit in the snow.
“Cerberus.” Orion’s voice cracked. He recovered from his fear quickly. “Move!”
He grabbed Helen’s arm and dragged her along, snapping her out of her terrified trance. The two of them ran for their lives with Ares’ cackling laughter ringing in their ears.
They vaulted over brittle bones, trying to keep the howling behind them while making sure not to run down a dead end. Luckily, the bones kept getting smaller and smaller as they zigzagged out of the forest.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she panted. Orion twisted his wrist out from under the sleeve of his jacket and looked at the golden cuff.
“It glows when I’m near a gate,” he shouted back at her.
Helen dodged around a particularly sharp-looking pelvis, and then glanced at Orion’s cuff. It wasn’t glowing, not even a little bit. The howling of Hades’ three-headed hellhound was getting closer by the second.
“Helen. You have to wake up,” Orion said grimly.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“This isn’t up for debate!” he shouted at her with real anger. “Wake up!”
Helen shook her head stubbornly. Orion caught Helen roughly by the arm, forcing her to stop. He shook her shoulders and glared into her eyes.
“Wake. Up.”
“No.” She glared back at him. “We leave together or not at all.”
Another chest-rattling howl split the air. They both turned and saw Cerberus, less than a football field away, bounding through the diminishing cover of the boneyard.
A strange squeak came out of the back of Helen’s throat at the sight of him. She didn’t know what she was expecting—maybe a pit bull or a mastiff with the head of a Doberman thrown in to round out the trio. The sight of any recognizable breed would have been a comfort. But, no. She should have known that none of those familiar, tame dogs existed eons ago when this beast was whelped.
Cerberus was a wolf. A twenty-foot-tall, three-headed wolf with salivating jaws, and he did not have a tame chromosome in his body. As one of the heads snapped at her, its eyes rolled back to show the whites. One head zeroed in on Helen, the other two on Orion. The hackles rose on their shared back, and all three heads dropped into a menacing crouch. One paw padded forward, then another, as a low growl rumbled in all three throats.
“EEEYAYAYA!!”
A piercing cry broke Cerberus’s deadly concentration, followed by a shower of bone bits that pelted the left-most head.
All three heads reacted immediately. Cerberus turned and
sprinted off after the mystery yodeler, abandoning Helen and Orion. Helen tried to see who had saved them, but she could only make out a faint shadow among the gnarled stumps of bone.
“Go-go-go!” Orion urged optimistically as he turned Helen around. Taking her hand and holding it hard, he ran toward a stone wall that had appeared in the distance. Helen resisted.
“We have to go back! We can’t leave . . .”
“Don’t waste a perfectly good act of heroism with a bad one of your own!” he hollered as he dragged her along. “You don’t have to out-valor everyone, you know.”
“I’m not trying to . . .” Helen started to argue, but another series of snarling barks from Cerberus changed her mind. The hellhound had apparently finished with the yodeling hero and was on their trail again. It was time to shut up and run.
Helen and Orion bolted pell-mell toward the wall, hands locked as they encouraged each other on. They were both beyond tired. Helen had lost count of how many hours they had been in the Underworld, and how many miles they had traversed in that incalculable amount of time. Her mouth was so dry her gums ached, and her feet felt swollen and bruised inside her boots. Orion wheezed painfully at her side as if every breath were like sandpaper in his lungs.
Looking down at Orion’s hand linked tightly to hers, Helen saw the cuff on his wrist begin to glow. With every stride closer to the wall, the golden haze coming from the cuff grew until it surrounded his body in a nimbus of gilded light. Helen tore her eyes away from Orion’s illuminated shape to watch a glowing crack form between the dark rocks of the wall ahead.
“Don’t be afraid! Just keep going,” he yelled as they ran toward it on a collision course.
She could hear the slap of massive paws gaining on them as the hellhound closed the distance. The ground shook and the air grew hot and wet as Cerberus literally breathed down Helen’s neck.
The rocks did not part. They did not move reassuringly aside to give Helen and Orion a clear opening. Clinging tightly to Orion’s hand, Helen charged ahead without hesitation.
They jumped through the solid wall, soared through a chasm of empty air, and hit what seemed to be another wall. Helen heard a sickening crunch as her temple hit the hard surface. Unable to catch her breath, Helen waited to slide down the wall and hit the ground, but she never did. It took a moment for her to realize that gravity had done a one eighty, and that she was already on the ground. She was lying on an icy floor in a very cold, very dark place.
“Helen?” Orion’s worried voice splintered off in the dark and echoed down many separate passages.
She tried to answer him but all that came out of her mouth was a wheezing sound. When she tried to pick up her head, her stomach heaved weakly. There was nothing in her belly to throw up.
“Oh, no,” she heard Orion breathe as he shuffled toward her in the dark. She heard a snapping, grinding sound, followed by a bright orange flame as he flicked a lighter. She had to shut her eyes or she knew she’d throw up for sure. “Oh, Helen, your head . . .”
“C-cold,” she managed to groan, and she was. It was even colder here than it was in her bedroom, and she couldn’t lift herself away from it. She twitched her fingers and they seemed to work, but for some reason her arms wouldn’t move.
“I know, Helen, I know.” He moved around her frantically, but talked in a soothing whisper, like he was trying to calm a child or an injured animal. “You hit your head pretty bad and we’re still at the portal—neither here nor there. You can’t heal yourself unless I move you, okay?”
“’Kay,” she managed to whine. She was starting to get freaked out that her limbs weren’t responding properly.
She felt Orion wedge his hands under her prone body, felt him brace himself for one brief moment, and then she felt shafts of pain shoot from her temple to her toes.
Orion was murmuring to her as he carried her out of the cold zone and into someplace slightly warmer, but Helen had no idea what he was saying. She was too busy trying not to throw up. The whole world was tilting and reeling, and she was desperate for Orion’s jarring steps to stop. Every time he planted a foot it felt like he was stepping on her head. Finally, he crouched down, cradling her across his lap, and she heard the snap of his lighter again.
She could feel a warm glow from behind her closed eyelids as Orion lit a candle. Helen felt him brush her hair back from her temple and try his best to wrap her up inside his jacket, close to his skin. After a moment she started to feel a bit better.
“Why do I feel so sick?” she asked when her voice had grown stronger.
“Never had a concussion?” he asked in return, sounding almost amused. He squeezed her tighter in a brief hug. “It’s okay. You’re healing fast now that we’re away from the portal. You have your Scion powers back in this part of the cave, so you’ll be all better soon.”
“Good,” she said with complete faith. If Orion said she was going to be okay, Helen knew she would be. After just a few more seconds, she felt nearly back to normal and she relaxed in his arms. But as she did, she felt him stiffen.
“I have to leave you now,” he said in a gentle voice.
“Huh?” Helen said, lifting her eyes to Orion’s. He looked at her sadly.
“We’re back in the living world, Helen. They’re going to come for us.”
As soon as he finished speaking, a pitiful sobbing came from everywhere at once. Orion dropped his head with a pained look and sighed heavily. In a sudden, violent motion, he kicked over the candle next to them, putting it out. He tried to push Helen out of his lap so he could stand and throw her off him in the sudden dark.
Every muscle in Helen’s body went rigid, stopping him from bending forward and standing up. She put a firm hand against Orion’s chest, pushed him back, and threw a leg over him to pin him to the ground. A wave of rage broke over her as she squeezed his hips between her thighs.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she said. Her voice was low and it cracked with hate.
“No, Helen. Don’t,” Orion pleaded, but he knew it was too late.
The Furies had Helen, and they were commanding her to kill Orion.
CHAPTER NINE
Zach drove around the island one final time just to make sure that Hector wasn’t following him, and then returned to his master’s ship. Hector might be an Outcast, but he was still funneling information to the Delos family, and Zach couldn’t afford to slip up. Automedon would do far worse than kill him if he accidentally led Hector to their base on the ship with the red sails.
Killing the engine, Zach stared at the dock that led to the graceful yacht, bobbing gently on the night swells. His palms started to sweat and his stomach fluttered at the thought of walking down that row of planks and delivering his full report to Automedon. The face-to-face report was just a formality—Zach had emailed the entire text thread to his master as soon as he had stolen it—but Automedon liked reminding his minion that every second of his day belonged to his master.
There was no way out of this for Zach. And it was all Helen’s fault. That bitch.
He had just wanted to know what she had been hiding for all those years. He had tried to talk to her about it in private, but no matter how caring he had acted, she wouldn’t let him in. If she had just paid attention to him, maybe gone out with him a few times, none of this would have happened.
Zach ended up getting all the answers he wanted—and much more that he didn’t. Automedon came from an era where the only difference between a free man and a slave was timing, and Zach was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Zach got out of his car and started down the gangplank, reminding himself that at least his master had respected him enough to be honest. He had even been given an important job. He was to spy on his former friends, especially Helen, and give his master any information he could gather about her quest in the Underworld. Dishonorable, but hey, it was a way in to this world, at least. Helen was a snob. And the Delos boys? They were all too busy buffing their pretty muscles an
d sleeping with every hot girl on the island to notice a lowly normal human like him.
Tonight he had served his master well, even though the information he had supplied was not welcome. Zach had proven that there was another surviving Rogue, and if there were two—Helen and this new guy, Orion—then there could be many, many more.
Zach wasn’t an idiot. It hadn’t taken him long to understand the politics or the ultimate prize involved. Raising Atlantis would give immortality to the Scions, and after thousands of years stuck in a stalemate with the gods, the Hundred Cousins were determined to claim their prize.
There was some debate, coming from the whiny Delos faction, about a great war starting as a result of this, but Zach’s master had explained it all to him. War would be a really bad choice for the gods. The Hundred, immortal as soon as they raised Atlantis, would outnumber the Twelve Olympians by at least eighty-eight, and everyone knew that there were more than a hundred cousins in the Hundred.
If the Olympians tried to fight, they would be forced to surrender almost immediately. Humanity would finally have gods who could really understand them, gods who had once been mortal. Maybe, for a change, people’s prayers would get answered instead of ignored.
It made perfect sense to Zach. He knew he was on the right side.
It’s just that sometimes Zach heard his master say horrible stuff, like how he wished all of humanity was either gone or turned into mindless slaves, like in an ant colony. On more than one occasion, Automedon had said that he wanted his master to “wipe the world clean.” Zach had never met his master’s master, and from what he had heard, he didn’t want to. Ever.
Stepping onto the yacht, Zach heard multiple voices belowdecks and smelled an acidic, rancid scent, like sour milk. His body recoiled from the smell of the visitors, but he told himself to ignore it. Sometimes his master didn’t smell right, either. Even though he looked mostly human on the outside, Automedon had an exoskeleton instead of skin and he didn’t breathe through his mouth, but through tiny holes hidden all over his outer surface. He didn’t smell human—more like musk mixed with dry leaves.