Dreamless
forget that you were the one who brought me here.”
“You really don’t think you’ll be back, do you?” Helen asked incredulously, watching Orion stow the canteens in his backpack.
He didn’t answer her.
“I’ll see you here again in about eight or nine decades,” she said resolutely. Orion laughed and threaded his arms through the straps of his bag with a wry smile.
“Eight or nine? You realize we’re Scions, right?” he said as he tugged on her hand and led her out into the morning meadow. “We’ve got notoriously short shelf lives.”
“We’ll be different,” she said. “Not just you and me, but our whole generation.”
“We’ll have to be,” Orion said quietly, tilting his head down in contemplation.
Helen glanced over at him, expecting to find that he had fallen into one of his brooding moods, but he hadn’t. He was smiling to himself with a look that Helen could only think of as hopeful. She smiled, too, happy to just walk through the meadow and hold hands with him. The happiness she felt wasn’t like the rapture of the river, but rapture would have been too much to bear for much longer. She realized it would have broken her heart if she’d stayed.
The farther they moved from the River of Joy, the more Helen’s head cleared. She looked down at one of her hands. It had been in the water so long it had grown wrinkled. How long had they been kneeling there?
With every step, she was more and more grateful that Orion had pulled her away. He had probably been as entranced as she had been. Yet somehow, he had controlled himself, and then found the extra strength to help her break away as well.
“How did you do that?” Helen asked quietly. “How did you pull yourself away from the water?”
“There’s something I want more,” he replied simply.
“What could anyone want more than endless joy?”
“Justice.” He turned to face Helen and took both of her hands firmly in his. “There are three innocent sisters who’ve suffered for eons, not because of anything they’ve done, but because the moment they were born, the Fates decided that suffering was their lot in life. That isn’t right. None of us deserve to be born into suffering, and I intend to stand up for those who have been. That’s more important to me than joy. Help me. You know where the Furies are—I know you do. Think, Helen.”
His spoke with such conviction, such passion, that Helen could only stare at him with her mouth hanging open. Her mind went absolutely blank for a few heartbeats, and then a small voice in her head started yelling at her, enumerating all the places where she came up short as a person.
She wasn’t as doggedly persistent as Claire was, or as patient as Matt. She didn’t have impeccable instincts like Hector, or even half of Lucas’s raw intelligence. She certainly wasn’t as generous as the twins or as compassionate and selfless as Orion. Helen was just Helen. She had no idea why she was the Descender, instead of one of these other, far worthier people.
How the hell had she even gotten the job and ended up here in the Underworld to begin with? she wondered. All she knew was that one night she had fallen asleep and found herself wandering through a desert.
A desert so dry, with rocks and thorns so sharp I left a trail of bloody footprints behind me as I walked , she remembered clearly. A desert with a single, tortured tree clinging to a hillside, and under that tree were three desperate sisters who looked ancient, and like little girls at the same time. They reached out to me, sobbing .
Helen gasped and gripped Orion’s hands tightly in hers. She had always known where to find the Furies. They had been begging her to help them from the very start.
“I want us to appear by the tree on the side of the hill in the dry lands,” she announced, looking directly into Orion’s surprised eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
L ucas had hovered over the water and watched Helen soar away from him as she headed back toward the center of town. That dress and those damn wings had almost done him in. He wondered, not for the first time, how all the full mortals that Helen had grown up with didn’t suspect that there was something supernatural about her. No matter how down-to-earth she was on the inside, Helen’s beauty really was inhuman. Especially when she had held her arms out to him and said his name like she just had.
He’d almost lost it. And the thought of what he would have done if he had
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