Dreamless

like yolk dribbling from a cracked egg.
    “I was supposed to call Lucas and that Orion guy,” Zach stammered. “That’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now, what I was always supposed to do, and I will because he’ll kill me if I don’t, but I know that’s his plan, so I can’t follow it entirely, right? I figured if I tell you, then we can figure something out.”
    “Slow down! What do you mean ‘plan’?”
    “The plan to start the war! He needs all three of them to do it!”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    H elen’s cheek was hot—burning hot.
    But the rest of her was freezing, she realized as she clawed her way up from the dragging darkness and back into consciousness. She was colder than she had ever been and something close to her smelled awful, like rust and rot.
    “There she is, she’s come to play! Two more to come, then bombs away!” tittered a wheedling voice. “Prettyprettypretty godling.”
    Ares.
    Helen held very still and tried not to start shrieking. She needed to think. The last thing she remembered was Automedon’s face over hers, a jab in her neck, and then liquid pain pumping through her body until her brain switched itself off in self-defense.
    “I see you there, my pretty little pet,” Ares said, no longer laughing. “You cannot hide behind your eyelids. Come. Open them. Let me see our father’s eyes.”
    She heard the note of anger creeping into his voice, heard the threat in his move toward her. He’d called her bluff, and her eyes opened in terror. She disengaged gravity to fly away, but it didn’t work, and she immediately saw why. Even the air was saturated with ice crystals. The cold was so complete it stretched the senses beyond their limit and twisted them back the other way around until ice burned like fire.
    In the flickering light of a bronze brazier, Helen could see that Ares had her bound with thick rope, staked to the ground at the entrance of a portal. Helen looked around desperately, but in her heart she already knew she was in the perfect prison. In the Underworld she could transport herself away from Ares with a few words. On Earth, she could at least put up one hell of a fight, and maybe get away. But at a portal, when she was neither here nor there, she was just a teenaged girl, tied up, and at the mercy of a maniac. This was planned, Helen knew. It had probably been planned for, literally, ages.
    “Tears! I love tears!” Ares gushed as if he were talking about puppies. “Look how the little godling weeps . . . Still so pretty she is, she is! Let’s change that.”
    Ares hit her across the mouth and Helen felt something snap. She took a deep breath. So this was it. She spat and looked up at him, no longer crying. Now that it had started she knew it wouldn’t be long, and in a way that was better than waiting for it. At least if Ares was here torturing her, that meant he wasn’t misleading her father’s spirit in the Underworld. This wasn’t the outcome she’d been hoping for when she’d closed her eyes to follow her father down into the Underworld, but it was better than nothing. Helen looked up at Ares and nodded at him, ready for whatever he had to dish out now that she knew her father was safe.
    Ares hit her face again and then stood up so he could kick her in the stomach. The wind came out between the seized-up muscles in her abdomen until she made a strange braying noise, like a donkey. He kicked her again and again. If she tried to avoid the blows by curling up and turning her back to him, he stomped rather than kicked. She felt her forearm snap and tried to bring her leg up to protect her side, but that only made him attack her more viciously. When she stopped trying to dodge the blows and just let them come, he backed off.
    Helen rolled around on the ground, struggling to find a position that would make it possible for her to breathe with several broken ribs and her hands tied behind her back. Wheezing and writhing, she finally found that kneeling and bending forward with her forehead resting against the fiery ice of the ground was best. The choking, hacking noise she made as she forced air around one of her punctured lungs sounded almost like laughing.
    “Fun, isn’t it?” Ares squealed, and started skipping around in a circle. “But I shouldn’t have kicked your middle so very much because now you can’t yell. And that’s what we need, right? So silly of me! Well, we can wait a bit before we play again.”
    He knelt down next to