Dreamless

with a pinched expression. “I can’t. I don’t want to think about it any more than I have to. I’m sorry, Lucas. I don’t mean to make you angry,” she said, responding to his huff of frustration.
    He stared at her for a moment, wondering how she could be so wrong about how she made him feel. He tried to stay calm while he asked her the next question, but still, it came out rougher than he would have liked.
    “Is someone hurting you down there?”
    “There’s no one down there but me,” she replied. By the way she said it, Lucas knew that her solitude was even worse somehow than torture.
    “You’ve been injured.” He reached out across the few feet separating them and briefly ran a finger across her wrist, tracing the shape of the fading bruises he had seen there.
    Her face was closed. “I don’t have my powers in the Underworld. But I heal when I wake up.”
    “Talk to me,” he coaxed. “You know you can tell me anything.”
    “I know I can, but if I do, I’ll pay for it later,” she groaned, but with a touch of humor. Lucas pressed on, sensing her lightening mood, and wanting so much to see her smile once more.
    “What? Just tell me!” he said with a grin. “How painful could it be to talk to me about it?”
    Her laugher died and she looked up at him, her mouth parting slightly, just enough so Lucas could see the glassy inner rim of her lower lip. He remembered the feel of it when he kissed her and he tensed—stopping himself before he dipped his head down to feel it again.
    “Excruciating,” she whispered.
    “Helen! How long does it take to use the powder—” Cassandra cut off abruptly when she saw Lucas’s back moving away down the hall, and Helen blushing furiously as she darted toward the library.
    Helen hurried through the room with the peeling petunia wallpaper, avoiding the rotted floorboards by the soggy, mold-infested couch. It seemed to glare at her as she ran past. She’d already come this way a dozen times, maybe more. Instead of taking the door on the right or the door on the left, both of which she knew led nowhere, she decided she had nothing to lose and went into the closet.
    A mossy wool overcoat loomed in the corner. There was dandruff on the collar and it smelled like a sick old man. It crowded her, like it was trying to shoo her out of its lair. Helen ignored the cantankerous coat and searched until she found another door, hidden in one of the side panels of the closet. The opening was only tall enough to permit a small child to pass through. She knelt down, suddenly creeped out by the wool coat that seemed to watch her bend over, like it was trying to peek down her shirt, and hurried through the child-sized door.
    The next room was a dusty boudoir, caked with centuries of heavy perfume, yellow stains, and disappointment. But at least there was a window. Helen hurried to it, hoping to jump out and free herself from this terrible trap. She pushed the lurid peach taffeta curtains aside with something approaching hope.
    The window was bricked up. She hit the bricks with her fists, just jabs at first, but with increasing anger until her knuckles were raw. Everything was rotted and crumbling in this labyrinth of rooms—everything except the exits. Those were as solid as Fort Knox.
    Helen had been trapped for what felt to her like days. She’d become so desperate she’d even closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep, hoping to wake up in her bed. It didn’t work. Helen still hadn’t figured out how to control her entrances and exits from the Underworld without half killing herself. She was frightened that she was actually going to die this time, and didn’t want to think about what she would have to do to herself to get out.
    White spots crowded her vision, and several times now she had almost passed out from thirst and fatigue. She hadn’t had any water in so long that even the sluggish goo that spattered reluctantly out of the taps in this hell-house was starting to look appealing.
    The strange thing was that Helen was more frightened in this part of the Underworld than she had ever been, even though she wasn’t in any imminent danger. She wasn’t hanging from a ledge, or trapped in the trunk of a tree, or chained by the wrists to a boulder that was dragging her down a hill and toward a cliff.
    She was just in a house, an endless house with no exits.
    These visits to the parts of the Underworld where she was in no immediate danger lasted the longest and