Dreamless

eye on him and responded without hesitating,
    “Yes. I love them both. And I’d die for them both.”
    Ares went silent. Watching the muscles of his face twitch, for a moment Helen thought he was struggling to come up with something to say. Then he sucked in a breath and burst out laughing.
    “One down, two to go!” Ares said, almost like he couldn’t believe it. “Automedon was right! So ready to bleed and die—and it’s not just you, either. The thing that truly astounds me is that he says your two noble defenders would bleed and die for you as well. Do you know what that means, broken little godling? Do you know what it means if I mix all this blood you and the other two Heirs would so willingly spill for each other? Four Houses, conveniently packaged into three loving, brave, and, thank Zeus, naive Heirs.”
    Helen’s mind raced. She struggled back up onto her knees and stared at the blood freezing into ice on the floor. She thought about how special the conditions had to be to make her normally impervious skin bleed, and how much Ares must have gone through to get her here so she could do just that. Then she thought about how much had to happen to get Lucas and Orion to work together when just hours ago they would have been prevented from even being in the same room because of the Furies. There was only one thing that brought them together, and only one thing she knew for a fact both of them would fight, bleed, and die for. Her. And she had already bled and pledged on that blood to do the same for them.
    “Blood brothers. We’ll be blood brothers,” she gasped through her split lips. “All Four Houses will be united.”
    “And we gods will be free from our prison on Olympus,” Ares said solemnly. “Three and a half thousand years I’ve waited!” His words ended abruptly as his throat closed off in a choked sound.
    “No. I won’t let it happen,” she stammered, unable to accept it.
    “Do you know what the tastiest part of all of this is for me? Except for the part where I get to torture you, of course,” he continued, ignoring her weak threat. “It’s that, yet again, it’s all for the love of Helen ! I would never have believed that not one, but two world wars could be started for the love of a woman. You’d think money, sure. Land, of course. Thousands of wars have been fought over money and land, but LOVE? And yet here we are. Aphrodite wins again! Another war to end all wars starts for your love, and because of your love for two men and three pathetic Furies as well! And lovelovelove will be the reason the world collapses into warwarwar. It is sheer poetry !”
    As Ares gurgled with insane laughter, the enormity of Helen’s multiple mistakes fell on her one by one, crushing her beneath them. Morpheus had expressed misgivings about her quest, but she’d never asked why. Hades had explicitly warned her not once, but twice, that she should ask the Oracle—not Cassandra the little sister, but the Oracle , the mouthpiece of the Three Fates—if freeing the Furies was the right thing to do. Even Zach had tried to tell her that she was in danger, but she hadn’t given him a chance to explain.
    And biggest of all was the warning she’d gotten from Hector. He’d told her that the most important thing was that she didn’t fall in love with Orion. Hector had always known, even though Helen hadn’t, that this struggle was about love. When he’d told her not to fall in love with Orion, what he was trying to tell her was that love, real love, always made a family —even if it wasn’t a traditional one. Love was what mattered, not the laws or the rules or the gods.
    Helen could rant and scream that she’d been tricked, that none of it was her fault, but she knew better. She had charged headfirst into this quest without ever stopping to think about what could go wrong. All along she was so convinced she was right because she was doing a good deed that never once did she listen to anyone who disagreed with her. Lucas had warned her that hubris was the greatest danger to Scions, but she hadn’t really understood why until just that moment. Being a good person and doing good deeds didn’t necessarily make you right all the time.
    In the next cavern, Helen heard Orion and Lucas speaking to each other in frantic whispers, urging each other on toward the flickering light of the brazier.
    “Please,” she sobbed quietly. “Just kill me now.”
    “Soon, soon, pet. Shhh,” Ares cooed as he