Dreamless

by Josephine Angelini

  Zach took a seat on the now-vacant upper deck. The other members of the Hundred who’d come with Automedon to the island had all been called back by Tantalus shortly after the confrontation with Hector, Lucas, and Helen in the woods. Zach wasn’t sure exactly why, but he thought it had something to do with Tantalus being attacked. Whatever had happened must have been big in order for Tantalus’s elite guard to circle the wagons the way they had. All Zach knew was that now an entire battalion of the Hundred Cousins was committed to chasing some mystery woman across the world.

  The voices belowdecks rose slightly in disagreement, and then quickly softened as one or the other side backed down. Zach knew better than to interrupt, so he waited on one of the teak benches.

  They knew he was there, of course. Zach had learned that his master could hear him no matter how softly he tried to walk. Whoever was down there with him was equally as gifted—either a high-ranking Scion, or something else even more powerful. His master did not use that reverent tone of voice on any being he deemed less than himself, and there were very few beings on the planet that Automedon did not rank as beneath him.

  When he heard the group belowdecks begin to ascend, Zach stood respectfully. Following his master up the stairs was a tall woman and a pale young man. They looked like fashion models with their delicate beauty and luminous gray eyes, and they moved like they were floating.

  But, on closer inspection, there was too much white in their gray eyes, and they seemed to pant instead of breathe. Zach backed away, and by the displeased look on his master’s face knew he had done something terribly wrong. The panting woman waggled her head toward Zach, like a snake zeroing in on its target.

  “Kneel, slave!” Automedon commanded.

  Zach dropped to his knees but continued staring at the hypnotically ugly woman. It had taken him a moment to realize it, but for all her height and sharp features, she wasn’t a beautiful fashion model. She was repulsive, and so was the stooping, stumbling boy next to her.

  They were the source of that horrid smell—bad milk mixed with sulfur. It made his eyes water, so he shut them. Violent, chaotic emotions began to bubble up inside him. He wanted to hit someone or light something on fire.

  “Finally, some reverence,” the woman hissed.

  “He is ignorant,” Automedon said dismissively.

  “Is he too stupid to fulfill his duty?”

  “Not at all. He is native to this place and quite tied to the Face,” Automedon answered smoothly. “If these are the Three Heirs of the prophecy, I expect my slave to behave just the way we need him to. Like an envious human.”

  “Good.”

  Zach didn’t hear the woman and the young man walk away, but when he opened his eyes, they were gone. Only the hideous smell lingered. The reckless feeling overwhelmed him, and he looked around the deck of the ship for something to break.

  The Furies whispered names and hiccupped with pitiful sobs.

  Helen told herself to take her hand off Orion’s chest and back away. She could feel him between her legs, but she couldn’t see him in the pitch black of the cave. That helped. If she could just stop touching him, she would be able to calm down, and she needed to calm down. She was so angry that she could have sworn she felt the earth shake.

  But she didn’t back off. Without ever making a decision, she found herself digging her fingers into him, clutching at his shirt and wrenching him closer to her as he tried to back away.

  Another tremor rocked the cavern floor beneath her, and this time she knew it was not her imagination. The quake was so strong that it knocked her off Orion. A great booming noise thundered through the cave as the ground heaved up and came slamming back down. She heard Orion’s breath catch in his throat as he tried and failed to say her name. Somehow, he had scrabbled out from under her, but Helen knew that he was still close.

  Desperate for some light, Helen thought about summoning a bolt. She was severely dehydrated after toiling for so long in the Underworld, and she knew that dehydration would make her lightning highly unstable. If she didn’t have full control over her bolts, one could explode out of her at full force and collapse the already earthquake-damaged cave. The cestus protected Helen from weapons, not poor judgment, and the earth could smother her as quickly as the sea could drown her.

  “Helen. Run,” Orion managed to say in a raspy voice. “Please.”

  His voice scratched at her nerves like nails on a chalkboard, but at least it guided her back to his position.

  She dove on top of him, straddling him again and pinning him down tightly between her knees. She felt his hands grip her forearms, stopping her from raining blows down on his head. Each of his hands was wrapped around each of her wrists in the dark.

  As they struggled, Helen felt a third hand, insubstantial as air but unmistakably Orion’s. It reached up to touch her chest. She shook and shivered convulsively, away from the shock of his impossible touch.

  With infinite tenderness, Orion’s third hand passed through her clothes, her skin, and her bones. It strummed the branching nerves caged inside her backbone, then cupped that place behind her breastbone where her laugh began—the same place that had ached so terribly since she had lost Lucas.

  While Helen knew that an organ in her chest was not responsible for her emotions, it felt as if Orion held the center of her heart in his invisible hand.

  She froze, overwhelmed by this new sensation. Orion sat up under her, their faces inches apart in the dark.

  “We don’t have to hurt each other, Helen,” he breathed softly. His lips brushed against the hypersensitive patch of skin between her ear and jawbone. The dusting of hairs across Helen’s cheek stood up and reached out to touch Orion’s mouth as if he was summoning them. Her fists relaxed and fell from their combative posture, drifting down uncertainly, until her palms came to rest on Orion’s warm, thick shoulders.

  Inside her, Orion’s third hand flexed and rushed out in five directions, like five fingers extending. His inner touch flooded down each of her four limbs and, lastly, the fifth finger reached up to fill her head.

  “I could never hurt you.” His voice broke, and his real hands ran down her back to cradle her hips.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing to me,” Helen whispered, keeping her voice nearly soundless so she didn’t groan or sob or scream by accident. She couldn’t decide if Orion’s inner touch was the most amazing thing she’d ever felt, or if it was so intimate it passed through pleasure and became pain. “But I don’t want to hurt you, either.”

  “They must not!”

  An insistent susurration flooded the cave, and the sound quickly rose to shouting. The Furies were at a fever pitch, and for the first time Helen could remember, they actually touched her.

  Thumping their damp foreheads and their brittle, ash-dusted limbs against Helen’s back, the Furies closed in on her. Stumbling forward, they scratched her face and pulled her hair, tearing at Helen with their sharp little nails to break her out of Orion’s thrall.

  A thousand unavenged murders flashed red in Helen’s thoughts.

  “Kill him! Kill him now!” they hissed. “He still owes a debt to the House of Atreus. Make him pay in blood!”

  Overwhelmed by the Furies, Helen’s heart slipped out of Orion’s invisible hand and filled with rage. She reared back and hit him as hard as she could manage—trying to ram her fist down his throat.

  Whatever control Orion had been exerting over himself was lost. The Furies were quick to possess him. He snarled like an animal and shot forward, grabbing Helen’s upper arms and pushing her roughly onto her back. With his Scion powers restored, he was faster and stronger than she could have imagined. Hector had been right. Orion was enormously powerful. Helen tried to struggle out from underneath him, but it was too late. He had the upper hand now, and with his size and skill he could easily keep her pinned down.

  Risking a catastrophic eruption of electricity, Helen allowed a current to run across her skin. She was hoping to
knock Orion unconscious, but fatigue made her fall short of the mark, and the painful shock she delivered only made him angrier. Orion screamed and twitched with agony, but he didn’t let her go. When he recovered from the electrical storm in his head he leaned down hard on her shoulders, grinding her back into the wet floor of the cave until a gasp of pain escaped from her lips.

  Helen realized then that she had misjudged Orion horribly, and that she would pay for it. She still couldn’t see him, but she could feel the full mass of him looming above her. She had never noticed how large he was until now, probably because she never had reason to fear him before. As she pushed uselessly against his face and throat, she knew that she would not win this fight. She was injured, dehydrated, and beyond exhausted. Orion was going to kill her.

  Helen didn’t even have to think about it. She knew she’d rather die buried under a thousand tons of rubble than submit to him. She relaxed and began to summon a true bolt—one that would easily kill him and most likely collapse the cave and kill her as well. But she didn’t get the chance to release it.

  Suddenly, Orion let go of her and pushed himself up, as if he were waking from a dream. She heard him frantically scrambling away from her in the dark. Not knowing where he’d gone made her desperate for some light. Straining her ears against the pounding silence, Helen waited for the sound of another attack.

  Orion’s boots creaked somewhere out there. The Furies hissed, calling out to Helen from Orion’s hiding place. They were directing her, wanting her to finish the fight.

  But now that she was no longer touching him, Helen felt uncertain. Orion wasn’t her enemy, was he? In fact, she cared for him—so much that she was starting to worry that she had really hurt him. But the impenetrable dark of the cave revealed nothing, no matter how hard Helen tried to stare through it.

  She decided that she needed to know two things. First, was he was okay? Second, if he was, was he about to attack her?

  Focusing all her remaining strength on maintaining a balanced charge, Helen conjured a small globe of glowing electricity in her left hand and held it up above her head. Her eyes darted around the toothy stalactites and stalagmites until she spotted Orion. He was backed up against the wall on the other side of the small cavern, his eyes pinched closed. Blood was running down his chin.

  “If you’re going to kill me, do it now while my eyes are closed.” His deep voice rang out sure and steady, echoing down the empty passageways. “I won’t fight you.”

  Generating light had been a mistake. Now Helen could see the Three Furies gnashing their teeth and raking their fingers down their bodies in the shadows. They tore their clothes and left deep red welts on their bleached and clammy skin.

  Helen stood up and stalked toward Orion robotically, like a clockwork killer full of cogs instead of thoughts. In an ecstasy of hate, she fell down on her knees in front of him and put her right hand under his shirt.

  Sliding her hand along Orion’s belt, Helen felt for the knife she knew he kept strapped to his back. He must have known what she was doing, but he didn’t try to stop her. Helen unsheathed his knife and held the tip of the blade against his chest.

  “I don’t want this,” she said. Her voice shook and her eyes were blurry with tears that gathered, tipped, and then tumbled down her hot cheeks. “But I need it.”

  Orion kept his eyes shut, his hands gripping the cavern wall. In the icy, erratic light of her barely controlled electricity, Helen saw him calm himself, as if he’d done this many times before. The ghost-white limbs and ashy hair of the Furies blinked in and out of the corner of Helen’s eye.

  “I feel it, too. The bloodlust,” he whispered, so softly Helen understood his meaning more than heard his words. “It’s okay. I’m ready now.”

  “Look at me.”

  Orion opened his bright green eyes. The Furies screamed.

  A boyish, surprised expression stole across his face. He began to take labored little breaths and his head fell listlessly toward Helen, inch by inch, until his lips grazed lightly against her own. His mouth was very warm and soft. Like a new flavor she couldn’t quite place but that she wanted to swallow whole, Helen pulled his lower lip into her mouth to take a bigger sip of him. Catching his face in one of her hands so she could tilt his wilting mouth toward hers, she noticed something sticky between her fingers. Helen pulled back and looked down.

  There was blood on her hands.

  Stunned out of her trance, Helen looked down and saw a dark, wet circle expanding across Orion’s shirt. His surprised look. She had stabbed him. And then she kept pushing the tip of the blade into him a tiny bit at a time as they leaned toward each other. And he had allowed her to do it without complaint.

  Seeing what she had done, Helen yanked the blade out of Orion’s chest and sent it clanging against the floor behind her.

  He pitched forward with a small sigh and crumpled up at her knees.

  Horrified, Helen dug her heels into the slippery ground and scrambled away from Orion’s still body, extinguishing her globe of light in the process. Her back hit a stalagmite and she remained motionless, listening for any sound from him. The Furies whispered to her to get up and finish what she had started, but she was too stunned to obey.

  “Orion?” she called across the cavern.

  She would carry him out, she reasoned with herself. The blade hadn’t gone in that deep, so he was just unconscious. Right? Right, she told herself firmly. If he was too far gone to heal himself, she’d bring him to Jason and Ariadne, and they could save him, she knew they could do it. She didn’t care how exhausted she was, how huge he was, or how far she had to carry him. Orion was going to live, no matter what she had to do.

  But the Furies . . . they would make even the compassionate twins want to kill Orion. That is, if Helen could resist the Furies as she brought him back to Nantucket. How could she trust herself with him after what she’d just done to him?

  “Orion, answer me!” Helen cried into the dark. “You can’t die!”

  “Well, someday, I will. But not yet,” he groaned. The Furies’ whispers rose. “You have to get out of here.”

  “I don’t want to leave you. You’re hurt.”

  “I’m nearly healed. Follow the water uphill. It will lead you out.” Orion swallowed painfully. “Please, get away from me!”

  The Furies were talking to Orion now, guiding him toward Helen. She could hear them begging him to kill her. He made a desperate sound and Helen sensed him lunging toward her.

  Narrowly avoiding his tackle, Helen disengaged gravity and soared up into the air. As soon as she was flying she could sense the faintest movement of air, right down to the minute flow around the stalactites that hung from the ceiling. The air currents helped her figure out which way led up and out of the cave.

  She could also feel gusts of air being stirred up by Orion, who was flailing his arms below as he searched for her in the dark. Wounded or not, Helen knew she had to leave him immediately or neither of them would survive the night. She soared out of the cavern and up through the winding passageways until she could see the dim glow of predawn light at the mouth of the cave.

  Helen floated higher to get her bearings. Looking down at the still-dark landscape, she saw that she was near the south shore of Massachusetts and relatively close to the coast. She turned to the first rays of the sunrise, and headed due east out over the open water.

  Somewhere over Martha’s Vineyard, Helen started crying. She kept picturing the stunned look on Orion’s face as she stabbed him—stabbed him, she kept repeating to herself in shock.

  A sob burst out of her and she covered her mouth with her hand. She tasted something very wrong on her lips and looked at her hand in disgust. It was covered in Orion’s blood. She really had almost killed him, and the proof of it was stained into her skin. If he hadn’t kissed her, he’d be dead now.

  Helen swooped dangerously in the air above her house. She tried to clear her eyelashes of the tears that were freezing as soon as th
ey welled up, but they just kept coming. The more she tried to stuff the sobs down, the more violently they seemed to burst out of her. What had Orion done to her heart?

  Helen’s control over the wind began to falter, and she tumbled in midair like a plastic bag in a storm. She dropped out of the sky and made a beeline for the blue tarp covering her bedroom window.

  Tearing the tarp aside, she dove into bed and buried her head under her chilly pillow to muffle the sound of her tears. She could hear her father snoring in the next room, blissfully unaware that his daughter had very nearly become a murderer.

  Helen cried herself out as quietly as she could, but no matter how tired she was, she refused to fall asleep. She couldn’t bear the thought of descending back into the Underworld so soon, although she knew that it didn’t make any difference. This cycle that she was stuck in seemed never ending. If she slept, if she stayed awake, what did it matter? There was no rest for her no matter what she did.

  Zach saw Helen lift up the blue tarp over her window and fly under it. He’d seen his master do a lot of things that were physically impossible, but seeing a girl he’d known his whole life flying was difficult for him to process. She’d always been like an angel, so beautiful she was almost painful to look at, but in flight Helen really did look like a goddess. She also looked upset. He wondered what had happened to her. Whatever it was, wasn’t good. Zach assumed she still hadn’t been successful in the Underworld.

  And how the hell had she gotten out of the house in the first place? he wondered. Then he started to sweat. Somehow, Helen had switched out the lights in her bedroom, and then about half an hour later appeared behind him in midair. Could she teleport now? What was he going to tell his master?

  Zach knew he had to make a report. He turned to walk toward his car, parked down the street, and jumped. Automedon was standing behind him, as silent as a grave.

  “How did the Heir get out?” he asked calmly.