“No! You’re misunderstanding what I . . . Daphne never asked me to say anything,” he stammered. Helen made a derisive sound that kept him from continuing. She was angry again, but she didn’t exactly know why. Not knowing made her even angrier. She stomped past him and started marching out of the weeds.
Helen broke through the tall grass and started climbing a steep hill that was lousy with the remains of some tumbled-down medieval castle. As she stomped past a stone stairway that broke off in midair, Helen asked herself why she was so angry. She realized that it wasn’t just one thing. Several things were ticking her off simultaneously, and she was now facing them at the same time.
First, Daphne had sent Orion into the Underworld without bothering to mention it. Second, Cassandra was keeping Claire and Matt from helping her when it was her butt that was dragging through the Underworld every night, not Cassandra’s. And Lucas . . . how could he treat her that horribly? Even if he hated her, how could he do that to her? For the first time, Helen felt angry about what he had done, rather than devastated.
As she stomped along, taking her feelings out on the ground, Helen realized that, most of all, she was angry with herself. She had been so paralyzed with sadness that she had stopped making choices. She had allowed herself to drift along like a helpless bit of fluff. That had to end.
When she was out of breath from hiking up the steep incline at a breakneck pace, Helen braced herself against a massive, mossy block of granite that had once been part of the moldering castle’s outer wall. She whirled around to grill Orion, who was struggling to keep up with her.
“Do you even know why you’re here?” she snapped.
“I’m here to help,” he said through panting breaths.
“You told me my mother sent you. Do you know what the cestus is?”
“Son of Aphrodite, by the way,” he said pointing to himself. “The cestus doesn’t work on me. Daphne can only influence hearts. I can control them.”
“Oh, wow. That’s a pretty terrifying power,” Helen mumbled, momentarily sidetracked. “But you still seem awfully willing to do whatever Daphne tells you to do. Does she have something on you?”
“No! I’m not here because of Daphne, you lunatic! I’m here because I think that what you’re trying to do is amazing, and probably the most important thing any Scion has done since the Trojan War! The Furies destroyed my family, and there is nothing I want more than to stop them from doing that to anyone else. You’re the Descender, and this is your task, but you are an embarrassingly bad fighter without your powers. I’m here to pull you out of whatever smelly hole you fall into so that you actually live long enough to do what you’re meant to do!”
Helen closed her mouth with a snap. It was obvious that Orion was being honest. He had no hidden agenda, even if she still suspected that Daphne did. In fact, the deeper Helen looked into his eyes, the more convinced she became that he would do anything to help her stop the Furies.
The Bough of Aeneas was a monster magnet, but she could see that Orion needed to help her in any way that he could or he would go crazy sitting on the sidelines. And Helen knew that she would go crazy with sadness if she had to do this alone. She needed help, and Orion needed to give it—in a way, it was perfect.
“I’m sorry, Orion. What I said was unfair. It’s just that I feel like so many people are trying to tell me what to do right now, but no one is actually telling me anything. . . .” Helen stopped, struggling to find the right words.
“I get it. You’re so crucial that everyone’s afraid of saying the wrong thing to you.” He sat down and rested for a moment on the grass. “But I’m not afraid, Helen. I’ll tell you everything I know, if you want me to.”
An ominous howl echoed through the valley. Orion jumped up and his head snapped around, seeking the source. He reached under his shirt to draw the long knife that was concealed underneath as he took a hold of Helen’s shoulder and began pushing her in front of him as he moved.
“Uphill,” he ordered in a tight voice.
Helen craned her head to look back and caught a glimpse of a distant patch of reeds being mowed down in a swath. The threat was steamrolling its way toward them. Helen had seen enough to know that whatever it was that was making its way through the marshland was gigantic.
Without her Scion strength and speed, she felt like she was barely going faster than a walk. Orion forced her up the steep hill, one hand on his knife and one hand on the small of her back to keep her from losing her footing. The thing in the grass was gaining on them.
“Go!” Orion barked into her ear.
“What do you mean, go? Go where?” she screeched, not understanding. Orion pushed her as hard as he could toward higher ground, and she stumbled forward onto her hands and knees.
She looked back over her shoulder at Orion who stood a few paces away, facing the thing that Helen could hear scrabbling toward them but still couldn’t see. Orion looked back over his shoulder at her, his green eyes so intense they nearly glowed. Helen had seen that look before and she knew what it meant. It meant that he was digging in. She couldn’t run off and let him fight that thing on his own. She slid back downhill to make her stand with him.
“Get out of here!” he screamed.
“And where the hell am I supposed to . . .”
CHAPTER SIX
The sun was just starting to come up. Helen woke in her bed, freezing cold and reaching out to grab on to a boy who had never been in her bedroom.
“No!” she exclaimed in a ragged voice. Her breath puffed out of her mouth like smoke in the subzero room. “Oh, no no no, this can’t be happening!”
Helen scrambled out of bed and staggered to her dresser on numb legs to get her phone. The message light was blinking. She went into her messages and read:
That sucked. I’m going to bed now. Text me later.
She sat down on the edge of her bed. Relieved laughter bubbled out from between her chattering teeth as she shivered in her freezing-cold bedroom. She checked the time; Orion had texted her at 4:22 a.m. It was 6:30-ish now, and Helen wondered if that was late enough. Deciding that it was silly not to try to get in touch with him she sent back: