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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.
