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“You descended into the Underworld? When? How?” she asked, trying not to squeak.
“Saturday night. Ares saw me hiding in the boneyard and talked to me. I was the other ‘little godling.’ Remember? Then I distracted Cerberus when she chased you.”
“The yodeler?” Helen asked in disbelief. “Wait, she’s a she?”
“Yes,” he said through a chuckle. “I was the yodeler and Cerberus is a she-wolf. Now go wash up. I’ll be right here.”
“But . . .”
“Hurry,” he urged. “I had to wait until you were away from our family to bring you this, but I can’t stand to see you so sick for much longer.”
Helen bolted into the bathroom and nearly washed her mouth out with soap and brushed her face with toothpaste, she was shaking so badly. She stripped and scrubbed and flossed and combed pretty much everything at the same time before jumping into clean pajamas and running back into her bedroom.
He was still there, just like he’d promised, and Helen’s last nagging doubts evaporated. The unnatural separation was over, and they weren’t going to start yelling at each other or pushing each other away anymore.
“Oh, good. I’m not hallucinating,” she said, only half kidding. “Or dreaming.”
“But you need to dream,” he said softly across the room, staring at her. Helen shook her head.
“This is better,” she said certainly. “Even if it kills me, staying awake and seeing you in my bed is better than any dream.”
“You’re not supposed to say things like that,” he reminded her.
He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them he smiled resolutely and lifted up the edge of the covers. Helen ran and dove into them, beside herself with happiness. She didn’t care about right or wrong anymore. She was dying, she reasoned; shouldn’t she at least die happy? Helen turned over onto her back and lifted her arms up to him invitingly, but he captured her face between his palms and made her settle back into the bed. He hovered over her, on top of the covers, pinning her safely beneath them.
“This is an obol,” he said, holding up a small gold coin. “We Scions put them under the tongues of our dead loved ones before we burn their bodies on the pyre. The obol is the money the dead use to pay Chiron, the Ferryman, to leave the shadow lands, cross the River Styx, and enter the Underworld. But this obol is special, and very rare. It wasn’t made for the Ferryman. It’s for another dweller of the shadow lands.”
Lucas held up the coin so Helen could see it clearly. On one side there were stars and on the other side there was a flower.
“Is that a poppy?” Helen asked, trying to remember where she had seen this little gold coin before. A newspaper headline flashed into her thoughts. “You stole these from the Getty! Lucas, you broke into a museum!”
“That’s part of the reason why I can’t let my family know I’m here, trying this. But you know my real reason . . . cousin,” Lucas said.
He suddenly leaned down and brushed his lips across her cheek, but he didn’t kiss her. It was more like he was inhaling her. Feeling his warm lips so close to her skin made her shiver.
Helen knew exactly why he had to hide this from his family. Theft was nothing compared to the immorality of what they were doing. Helen knew she should be disgusted that she was in bed with someone who was so closely related to her, but she couldn’t seem to convince her body that it shouldn’t want Lucas. Matt felt like her brother, Orion felt new and strange and so intense it was a little dangerous, but Lucas felt right. If other men were houses, Lucas was her home.
How could she be so mixed up? She pushed against him gently to make him lean back and look at her. She still needed answers, and she couldn’t think with his face so close to hers.
“Lucas, why did you steal them?”
“This obol isn’t for Chiron. It was forged for Morpheus, the god of dreams. This will bring your whole body down to the land of dreams when you fall asleep.”
“The land of dreams and the land of the dead are right next to each other,” Helen said, finally understanding why he did it. “You stole them to follow me down, didn’t you?”
He nodded and ran his fingers across her face. “There’s an old legend, that says if you give Morpheus a poppy obol he may let you visit the land of dreams still in your body. I thought if I offered him a trade he might let me cross his lands and go all the way to the Underworld. I didn’t know if it would work, but what choice did I have? When I saw you Saturday morning in the hallway . . .”
“You jumped out a window,” Helen reminded him. A smile crept across her face as she realized that she had just done pretty much the same thing to Ariadne.
“To go steal these,” he said, smiling down at her. “I knew you were sick, I knew that pushing you away hadn’t helped, and I couldn’t sit back anymore and watch. I had to go down into the Underworld and find out why. Orion got a glimpse of me following the two of you and figured out on his own who I had to be. Then he mostly figured out how I was able to get into the Underworld.”
“Mostly?” Helen asked.
“He thought that since I’m a Son of Apollo, it had something to do with music. Which wasn’t a bad guess,” Lucas admitted begrudgingly.
“You do have a beautiful voice,” Helen said. She wanted to keep Lucas talking, just to hear that voice and feel him stretched out next to her in her bed for as long as she could. “But why music?”
“Orion originally thought I was doing what Orpheus did when he followed his dead wife into the Underworld to try and sing her back to life. But eventually, he put the stolen obols together with me, changed Orpheus to Morpheus, and guessed how I did it. Then he told me why you were so sick and asked me to try this with you,” Lucas said in such a way that led Helen to suspect a lot more had gone on in those text conversations than Lucas was letting on. “He’s a smart guy.”
