Dreamless

keep up with her friends.
    Lucas circled the Getty Museum, a gleaming white building elegantly perched on top of one of Los Angeles’s more scruffy hills. The white stone structure capping the dry, rocky hill was strikingly similar to the Parthenon. The Parthenon was originally a treasury, so Lucas felt it was fitting that he was coming to the Getty to make a withdrawal of coins.
    He was searching for a spot that would hide him for the one moment of his landing when he would have to slow down enough that he could be seen. Lucas moved in faster than a human could see, settling too lightly on the ground to leave any footprints. The instant he touched down, Lucas half ran, half flew to the door so quickly that all a security camera picked up would be a faint blur. Stopping right next to the door, Lucas froze and disappeared.
    In the last few weeks, he had learned that if he didn’t move around too much he could scatter light so that the surface of his body looked like whatever was behind it. In the beginning, before he had perfected his invisibility cloak, it was still possible for a Scion to make out a faint fracture between the picture he created and his surroundings. Luckily, only one Scion had ever noticed it, and that had been Lucas’s own damn fault.
    After a half an hour wait, a maintenance man finally came out the door with a rake in one hand and his early morning thermos of coffee in the other. Lucas simply slipped around him and walked in without tripping a single alarm. He could have ripped the door off its hinges, but he didn’t want to attract too much attention to himself. Lucas didn’t know whether his plan would work, but he didn’t want his family to get suspicious and interfere.
    He’d always been taught that museums were sacred places because they housed so many Scion relics, but he never imagined that one day he’d be pushed to a point where he’d consider breaking into one. Now he was desperate. He had to do something to help Helen.
    His father had been wrong. All it took was one look at Helen—her clothes torn and covered in that black mud from the Underworld—and Lucas knew for sure that he wasn’t Helen’s problem. He had done as his father had ordered, but she was still suffering. Staying away from her was not enough.
    Lucas knew Helen was strong, and he trusted her to make good decisions even when he disagreed with her. She had insisted that Orion was helping her, so no matter how much it ate him up inside to think of the two of them alone together, Lucas had stepped back.
    He’d promised himself after the night Pandora died as he watched the dawn break from Helen’s widow’s walk that he would suffer anything as long as Helen moved on and lived a full and meaningful life. He’d turned himself into something twisted in an attempt to break things off between them. Yet that morning she’d looked sicker than she had before Lucas had pushed her away.
    Whatever was happening to her went far beyond her feelings about their doomed relationship.
    Lucas moved so quickly down the hallways of the museum that his face couldn’t be recorded. Even though his surroundings changed by the nanosecond, Lucas knew where he was going. There were plenty of signs to point him in the right direction. the treasures of ancient greece was a huge crowd pleaser, and this famous exhibit of recently unearthed gold artifacts had already traveled all over the world. This month it was the Getty’s turn, and they had plastered the place with bright silk banners in celebration.
    They’d also put a lot of pictures of the artifacts online. In true Southern California style, the smaller, less impressive pieces of gold that had been left out of other museums’ promotional pictures were clumped together in huge, sparkling group shots. Los Angeles just loved to get as much dazzle as it could into one frame, and after over two weeks of flying all over the world, searching every museum, that was how Lucas had finally found what he was looking for. On the internet.
    Compared to the other pieces in the collection, the small handful of gold coins was hardly worth displaying. He had to go to one of the back cases to find them, but when he did, he didn’t waste any time. As far as he knew these three coins—each with a poppy flower engraved on one side—were the last remaining obols that had been forged in honor of Morpheus, the god of dreams.
    Lucas stole them all.
    “We’re going around in circles!” Helen moaned