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She looked at the sword in her hand, and had no idea what to do with it, so she handed it to Jason. When next she looked up, she saw that Lucas, Orion, Hector, and Jason had formed their own line of defense with Andy, Claire, and Cassandra behind them. They might be mostly immortal, but Claire, Cassandra, and Andy were not Scion strong, and they were even worse fighters than Helen was.
Helen heard Cassandra’s bloodcurdling scream and saw Orion step in front of her to cut the head off of one of Poseidon’s sea monsters. The creature kept charging at Cassandra, anyway, as if it didn’t need its head, which it probably didn’t.
“Prophet!” the creature hissed out of one of its many holes. Orion swung his sword again and cut its carapace in two—cleaving the lobsterlike creature in half and killing it, but too late.
Alerted to her presence, a wave of misshapen creatures began to ooze toward Cassandra. Like limping nightmares, they were not made for land, and their too-soft or too-hard body parts flopped hideously as they dragged themselves toward the precious Oracle.
“Zeus needs her! Apollo lusts for her! Poseidon demands we capture her for Olympus!” they gurgled, reaching their fish-stinking limbs toward Cassandra. She screamed in terror as the largest of the creatures clamped on to her arm with one of its claws, and in a flash, dragged her under its shell.
“No!” Orion bellowed, jumping on top of the horseshoe crab–like creature that had imprisoned Cassandra, hammering away at its armored shell with his bare hands.
The Kraken sounded again, shaking Helen from the inside out. The intolerable noise made her and everyone around her clutch their ears and drop to their knees. A shadow darkened the sky above her. Helen craned her head to see one of the Kraken’s tentacles descending directly over her.
“Enough!” Helen shouted.
The Kraken’s tentacle landed on top of her and she caught it, just as she had done with the Myrmidon’s blade seconds earlier. Every muscle in her body strained under the impossible weight of the Kraken’s blow, but Helen did not break. Instead, she threw the rubbery, sucker-covered limb aside and launched herself into the air.
Helen called storm clouds and lightning to her presence. She made the wind howl around her. She stopped the waves and turned the Atlantic into a watery mirror. She twisted the Earth’s magnetic field until the aurora borealis bent and glimmered around her like the footprints of angels.
“I challenge Zeus!” she cried, her voice echoing across her island home and the vast expanse of ocean beyond it. “Face me or forfeit Olympus!”
Nothing happened. Helen belatedly realized that she had no offering to give Hecate in order to make the duel official.
The number three popped up in Helen’s head, and for some reason she thought of wishes. She had no idea if immortals worked on a barter system or not, but at that moment, Helen had nothing to give but her word and nothing to lose but the whole world.
“Titan Hecate. I offer you three favors in return for your guardianship over the boundaries.” Helen bit her lip and tried not to think anything too incriminating, in case the Fates were listening. “As long as you guard all of the boundaries. Do this for me, I beg you, and I will do your bidding three times in the future.”
Orange fire sprang up in a giant ball around Helen, making an airborne arena. A young, bare-chested man passed through the flames and floated in front of her. Zeus was gorgeous and ruthless and so much like Helen that she could hardly stand to look at him.
They were alone here. No one was watching but the Titan Hecate. This battle was not for spectacle or for the amusement of the Olympians. The whole Earth, Everyland, and Olympus, hung in the balance, but it was so private Helen felt like she’d walked into his bedroom.
“Hello, daughter,” Zeus purred.
She felt his pull. Even though she knew she needed to defeat him, Helen was not immune to the half-animal, half-divine presence that surrounded him. And it was mesmerizing.
“How powerful you are,” he said, moving closer to her. “The clouds twist with color at your command, but they still pale in comparison to your beauty. They’d cry with jealousy if you’d only let it rain.”
“I’m not your daughter,” she replied quietly. “My father is a shopkeeper. He’s a single dad who had to raise me all by himself. He worked twelve hours a day, six days a week his whole life in order to keep a roof over our heads. My father’s worth ten of you, and probably ten of me, too. You don’t get to say you’re my father. You didn’t earn it like Jerry did.”
“He’s awake, you know,” Zeus said in an offhand way. “Give me Everyland, and I’ll leave Jerry and his woman, Kate, alone. After I send you to Tartarus, of course.”
Helen narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ll leave them in peace if I give you Everyland?”
“I swear it by the River Styx,” he said, and the sky rolled around them like a sheet on a clothesline, undulating in the wind. “I have no interest in punishing mortals who haven’t offended me. I never have.”
Helen knew this to be true. Zeus never held grudges against mortals. It was his wife, Hera, who did that.
“And what about my nearly immortal family?” Helen asked. “Lucas, Hector, Orion, Cassandra, Jason, Claire, Andy . . . will you leave them alone, too?”
“Yes, yes. Them too,” Zeus said with a bored wave of his hand. “Why not? They won’t want to face eternity without you, anyway. A few centuries and they’ll opt for a peaceful death.”
“Yes,” Helen said demurely. She looked up at him through her lashes. “But you won’t curse any of them, or Ariadne, in any way, as long as I give you Everyland?”
“By the River Styx,” he swore, and reached out to touch her cheek with his hand. “So caring about those you love. But you do understand that you face an eternity in Tartarus, don’t you?”
“Been there,” Helen said unflinchingly. “I figure spending eternity trapped in any one place, even paradise, is the same as hell after long enough. In a thousand years, I bet even a field of wildflowers begins to feel like a festering bog.”
“How right you are,” Zeus murmured darkly. His eyes shifted strangely, wildly, almost like he lost his grip on the here and now. “And so much time left to go.”
