“It glows when I’m near a gate,” he shouted back at her.
Helen dodged around a particularly sharp-looking pelvis, and then glanced at Orion’s cuff. It wasn’t glowing, not even a little bit. The howling of Hades’ three-headed hellhound was getting closer by the second.
“Helen. You have to wake up,” Orion said grimly.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“This isn’t up for debate!” he shouted at her with real anger. “Wake up!”
Helen shook her head stubbornly. Orion caught Helen roughly by the arm, forcing her to stop. He shook her shoulders and glared into her eyes.
“Wake. Up.”
“No.” She glared back at him. “We leave together or not at all.”
Another chest-rattling howl split the air. They both turned and saw Cerberus, less than a football field away, bounding through the diminishing cover of the boneyard.
A strange squeak came out of the back of Helen’s throat at the sight of him. She didn’t know what she was expecting—maybe a pit bull or a mastiff with the head of a Doberman thrown in to round out the trio. The sight of any recognizable breed would have been a comfort. But, no. She should have known that none of those familiar, tame dogs existed eons ago when this beast was whelped.
Cerberus was a wolf. A twenty-foot-tall, three-headed wolf with salivating jaws, and he did not have a tame chromosome in his body. As one of the heads snapped at her, its eyes rolled back to show the whites. One head zeroed in on Helen, the other two on Orion. The hackles rose on their shared back, and all three heads dropped into a menacing crouch. One paw padded forward, then another, as a low growl rumbled in all three throats.
“EEEYAYAYA!!”
A piercing cry broke Cerberus’s deadly concentration, followed by a shower of bone bits that pelted the left-most head.
All three heads reacted immediately. Cerberus turned and
sprinted off after the mystery yodeler, abandoning Helen and Orion. Helen tried to see who had saved them, but she could only make out a faint shadow among the gnarled stumps of bone.
“Go-go-go!” Orion urged optimistically as he turned Helen around. Taking her hand and holding it hard, he ran toward a stone wall that had appeared in the distance. Helen resisted.
“We have to go back! We can’t leave . . .”
“Don’t waste a perfectly good act of heroism with a bad one of your own!” he hollered as he dragged her along. “You don’t have to out-valor everyone, you know.”
“I’m not trying to . . .” Helen started to argue, but another series of snarling barks from Cerberus changed her mind. The hellhound had apparently finished with the yodeling hero and was on their trail again. It was time to shut up and run.
Helen and Orion bolted pell-mell toward the wall, hands locked as they encouraged each other on. They were both beyond tired. Helen had lost count of how many hours they had been in the Underworld, and how many miles they had traversed in that incalculable amount of time. Her mouth was so dry her gums ached, and her feet felt swollen and bruised inside her boots. Orion wheezed painfully at her side as if every breath were like sandpaper in his lungs.
Looking down at Orion’s hand linked tightly to hers, Helen saw the cuff on his wrist begin to glow. With every stride closer to the wall, the golden haze coming from the cuff grew until it surrounded his body in a nimbus of gilded light. Helen tore her eyes away from Orion’s illuminated shape to watch a glowing crack form between the dark rocks of the wall ahead.
“Don’t be afraid! Just keep going,” he yelled as they ran toward it on a collision course.
She could hear the slap of massive paws gaining on them as the hellhound closed the distance. The ground shook and the air grew hot and wet as Cerberus literally breathed down Helen’s neck.
The rocks did not part. They did not move reassuringly aside to give Helen and Orion a clear opening. Clinging tightly to Orion’s hand, Helen charged ahead without hesitation.
They jumped through the solid wall, soared through a chasm of empty air, and hit what seemed to be another wall. Helen heard a sickening crunch as her temple hit the hard surface. Unable to catch her breath, Helen waited to slide down the wall and hit the ground, but she never did. It took a moment for her to realize that gravity had done a one eighty, and that she was already on the ground. She was lying on an icy floor in a very cold, very dark place.
“Helen?” Orion’s worried voice splintered off in the dark and echoed down many separate passages.
She tried to answer him but all that came out of her mouth was a wheezing sound. When she tried to pick up her head, her stomach heaved weakly. There was nothing in her belly to throw up.
“Oh, no,” she heard Orion breathe as he shuffled toward her in the dark. She heard a snapping, grinding sound, followed by a bright orange flame as he flicked a lighter. She had to shut her eyes or she knew she’d throw up for sure. “Oh, Helen, your head . . .”
“C-cold,” she managed to groan, and she was. It was even colder here than it was in her bedroom, and she couldn’t lift herself away from it. She twitched her fingers and they seemed to work, but for some reason her arms wouldn’t move.
“I know, Helen, I know.” He moved around her frantically, but talked in a soothing whisper, like he was trying to calm a child or an injured animal. “You hit your head pretty bad and we’re still at the portal—neither here nor there. You can’t heal yourself unless I move you, okay?”