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“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 enormi
ty 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.”
