Dreamless

practice, Daphne had managed to figure out that aspect of her modest power over lightning. She sent a small, baby-blue bolt across the room and put Tantalus on his knees.
    “You have a Myrmidon, not a Scion, nested outside my daughter’s window. Why?” she asked calmly. When he didn’t answer, she crossed the room and touched him with her glowing hand. Tantalus sighed with pleasure, until she sent a charge through her fingertips.
    “She’s protected . . . by the only living Heir to my House,” he huffed, his whole body twitching with electric pain. “Can’t allow more . . . Outcasts. Atlantis . . . too far away already.”
    He still didn’t know about the Rogues, Daphne thought.
    “The insect isn’t in any Scion House, and wouldn’t become an Outcast if it killed Helen and all the Deloses on Nantucket combined. Which, by the way, would save you a lot of trouble,” Daphne continued, amping up the voltage. “So why haven’t you ordered it to attack yet?”
    “How could I . . . stop you . . . from killing me . . . if I had no collateral?” he huffed. Daphne cut off the current so he could speak clearly. “I want to rule Atlantis, not just survive to see it. I must become part of my House again to do that.”
    His chest squeezed tight, and he rolled onto his back in pain. A moment later, Tantalus took a deep breath and smiled up into Daphne’s hypnotically beautiful face.
    “I knew you’d find me someday and that you’d come to me.”
    There was an insistent knock on the door, followed by a tense inquiry in Portuguese. Tantalus glanced at the door, and then up at Daphne. She shook her head to let him know to keep his mouth shut. Daphne didn’t understand Portuguese and she couldn’t risk letting Tantalus speak, even if his silence was the thing that would give her presence away. She heard the guard at the door hesitate, and then rush off, most likely to get reinforcements. She grabbed Tantalus by the shirt and bared her teeth at him.
    “I will always be behind the door, under the bed, or around the next corner—waiting for my chance to kill you. It’s in my blood now,” she whispered viciously into his ear.
    He understood her meaning and smiled. Daphne had taken an oath that was more binding than any human contract ever contrived. Someday she would have to kill him, or not killing him would kill her.
    “You hate me that much?” he asked, almost awed that Daphne would tie her life to his, even if it was to the death. More guards arrived and began pounding on the door, but Tantalus took little notice of them.
    “No. I loved Ajax that much, and I still do.” She noticed with pleasure how deeply it hurt Tantalus to hear her say that she still loved another more than him. “Now tell me, what do you want from Helen?”
    “What you want, my love, my goddess, my future queen in Atlantis,” Tantalus chanted, helpless as he fell yet again under the spell of that Face. The guards began to knock down the steel-and-concrete-reinforced door, and Daphne was forced to back away from Tantalus.
    “And what do I want?” she asked, her eyes darting over the two-foot-thick stone walls of the chamber, looking for an alternate escape route. There was none.
    Daphne looked out the recessed casement behind her at the sheer drop to the ocean. She looked up, hoping to find a way up and over the parapet top of the citadel, but the overhang prevented her. She couldn’t fly like Helen could. She also couldn’t swim. Daphne was out of time, but she needed to hear what else Tantalus had to say before she jumped out the window and tried, somehow, not to drown. She glared at Tantalus and summoned the last of her sparks to threaten him into talking. He smiled up at her sadly, like he was more hurt to see that she was about to leave him than he was that she was threatening his life.
    “I want Helen to succeed in the Underworld, and rid us all of the Furies,” he finally replied, gesturing to the plush prison that he was forced to live in as an Outcast. “She is my only hope.”
    “Son of a bitch!” Orion swore at the top of his voice as he ducked instinctively and stumbled to the side. “When you descend, you just appear out of thin air?”
    They were standing on some blah part of the salt flats that rimmed a sea Helen had never been able to get to, and therefore suspected didn’t really exist. Just another charming aspect of hell—it promised landscape that it never delivered. Helen looked