Dreamless

youthful—and unbelievably sensuous. Helen couldn’t take her eyes off him.
    “What can one so young know of justice?” he prompted while Helen gawked.
    “Not much, I guess,” she finally answered in a wavering voice, still trying to process the enigmatic god in front of her. “But even I know it’s wrong to keep a woman locked away from the world. Especially in this day and age.”
    Surprisingly, the full mouth parted in something that was almost like a laugh, and Helen relaxed. The gesture made him seem approachable and human.
    “I’m not the monster you think I am, niece,” he said sincerely. “I agreed to honor my oath and be the lord of the dead, but this place is entirely against my wife’s nature. She can only survive here a few months at a time.”
    Helen knew this was true. His position as lord of the dead had been forced on him by chance. Hades had drawn the short straw, and while his brothers claimed the sea and the sky as their realms, he had been doomed to the Underworld. The one place the love of his life could not survive for long. It was tragic, a terrible irony, but it was still his choice to imprison Persephone—regardless of how bad a hand the Fates had dealt him.
    “Then why do you force her to stay here at all, if you know it causes her pain?”
    “We all need joy in our lives, a reason to keep going. Persephone is my only joy, and when we are together I am hers. You are young, but I think you know how it feels to be separated from the one you love because of your obligations.”
    “I am sorry for you both,” Helen said sadly. “But I still think you should let her go. Allow her the dignity of choosing for herself if she wants to be here with you or not.”
    The funny thing was, Helen could sense that Hades had followed every twist and turn of her emotions as she spoke. She knew that he could read her heart, and she didn’t know if she should be afraid or happy that he would be waiting to judge her heart again on the day of her death.
    “You may descend at will, niece,” he said in a kindly way. “But I strongly suggest you ask your Oracle what she thinks of this quest.”
    Helen felt herself being scooped up by his mile-wide hand and then gently placed back in her bed. Later, she awoke in her room, freezing cold and dusted with ice crystals, but alert and refreshed for the first time in a long time. The space in the bed next to her was empty.
    Lucas had gone, but in a way Helen was relieved. Waking up next to him would have been too hard on them both, especially after what she had experienced with Morpheus.
    As Helen thought back, guilt overpowered her, even though she tried to tell herself that feeling guilty didn’t make any sense. She couldn’t be cheating on Lucas with Orion because she wasn’t even supposed to be with Lucas in the first place. It didn’t matter who felt like a house or a home or a frigging motel to her. She and Lucas could never be together. Period.
    She had to toughen up, she realized. Some people weren’t meant to live happily ever after, no matter what they felt for each other. Hades and Persephone were a perfect example of that. Hades had told Helen that he and Persephone were each other’s joy, but they were both miserable. Their “love” kept them locked inside prisons that made one of them half dead when they were together and the other half dead when they were apart. That wasn’t joy. Joy was the opposite of a prison. It opened the heart instead of locking it away. Joy was freedom—freedom from sadness, bitterness, and hatred. . . .
    Helen had a brain wave.
    Throwing the stiff blankets off her, she ran clumsily on dangerously chilled legs to her dresser and grabbed her phone.
    I think I know what the Furies need , she texted Orion. Joy. We need to get to the River of Joy. Meet me tonight.
    Daphne poured the wine and reminded herself to stand on both feet, like the big, beefy woman she currently looked like, instead of on one leg with a cocked hip, the way she normally would. She could feel the heavy body weighing on her, making her lower back ache slightly. She was over six feet tall and about two hundred pounds, and readjusting her internal awareness to account for all that extra muscle and bone was complicated.
    She tried not to yawn. Conclave was never fun, but doing it while wearing the shape of Mildred Delos’s ape of a bodyguard was downright exhausting—not just because of all the extra weight, but because Mildred Delos