Goddess (Starcrossed)

then there was something terribly wrong with the universe.
    “Test.” Hades’ lovely mouth twisted bitterly around the word, as if he could read Helen’s thoughts and agreed with her. “If life is a test, then who do you think grades it?”
    “You?” she guessed.
    “You still don’t understand.” He sighed. “You don’t even understand what this is.” He gestured to the land around him, indicating the Underworld. “Or what you are. They call you the Descender because you can come here at will, but the ability to enter the Underworld is the smallest manifestation of your power. You do not understand what you are enough to judge others yet.”
    “Help me then.” He seemed so sad, so beat down by his lot in life. She suddenly wanted to see his eyes very badly and leaned closer to Hades, trying to dip her head down to see under the fabric obscuring his face. “I want to understand.”
    The shadows spun out again, hiding him and murmuring the regrets of the dead. Helen’s insides chilled. The words from the Tyrant prophecy came to her mind— born to bitterness . She sat back.
    “Shadowmasters,” Helen whispered. “Do they get their power from you?”
    “A long time ago, a woman known as Morgan La Fey from the House of Thebes had the same talent you have—the one that allows you to come to the Underworld. She bore me a son named Mordred, and since then my burden has haunted the House of Thebes.” His voice trailed off regretfully before he stood and held out a hand to her. She slipped her hand into his and allowed him to help her stand. “You must go back now. Come to me as often as you like, niece, and I will try my best to bring you to understanding.” Hades tilted his head to the side and laughed quietly to himself. His lips parted, revealing diamond-shaped incisors. “That’s why I’ve allowed you, and those with the same talent before you, to enter my realm—to learn about yourselves. But right now you are too badly injured to be here.”
    The world shifted, and Helen felt his mile-wide hand lifting her out of the Underworld and placing her gently back in her bed.
    “Wait! What about Zach?” she asked. As Hades released her, Helen heard him whisper in her ear.
    “Zach drinks from the River of Joy, I swear it. Rest now, niece.”
    Helen reached out to move the shadows away from his face, but Hades had already left her. She fell into a deep slumber, her broken body greedily sucking up sleep as it tried to heal itself.
     
    After Ares was sealed away in Tartarus and the rift in the ground closed, Daphne had carefully collected her daughter’s broken body as Castor carried Lucas and Hector carried Orion back to the Delos compound. Daphne had only been running for a few moments when her daughter fell asleep in her arms. For a moment, Daphne was worried. Helen’s injuries had been horrible—some of the worst Daphne had ever seen—but when she listened for the sound of Helen’s heart, she heard it beating slowly but steadily.
    It wasn’t much past dawn by the time they made it back to Nantucket from the caves on the Massachusetts mainland. In the early morning light, Daphne carried Helen up the Delos staircase and down the hallway to the first room she could find that seemed to belong to a girl. She looked regretfully at the pretty silk comforter that her filthy, blood-soaked daughter was about to ruin. Not that it mattered. The House of Thebes had a large enough fortune to replace it. A fortune that had, in part, once belonged to Daphne and Helen’s House—the House of Atreus.
    Tantalus could scream “holy war” and rant about how it was the “Scions’ turn” to rule as much as he wanted, but he’d never fooled the Heads of the other Houses. The Purge some twenty years ago was just as much a grab for the other Houses’ wealth as it was a grab for immortality.
    The prophecy that started the Purge said that when the Four Houses were made into One House by the shedding of blood, then Atlantis would rise again. The exact wording that Daphne had memorized stated that in the new Atlantis, the Scions could find immortality. The prophecy didn’t actually say that the Scions would become immortal—it just said they could find immortality there. Daphne wasn’t optimistic enough to think immortality was a sure thing. But Tantalus was, and he’d used this prophecy to rally the Hundred Cousins of Thebes around him to kill off all the other Houses.
    The whole thing was a sham, as far