Dreamless (Starcrossed 2)

“They must not!”

An insistent susurration flooded the cave, and the sound quickly rose to shouting. The Furies were at a fever pitch, and for the first time Helen could remember, they actually touched her.

Thumping their damp foreheads and their brittle, ash-dusted limbs against Helen’s back, the Furies closed in on her. Stumbling forward, they scratched her face and pulled her hair, tearing at Helen with their sharp little nails to break her out of Orion’s thrall.

A thousand unavenged murders flashed red in Helen’s thoughts.

“Kill him! Kill him now!” they hissed. “He still owes a debt to the House of Atreus. Make him pay in blood!”

Overwhelmed by the Furies, Helen’s heart slipped out of Orion’s invisible hand and filled with rage. She reared back and hit him as hard as she could manage—trying to ram her fist down his throat.

Whatever control Orion had been exerting over himself was lost. The Furies were quick to possess him. He snarled like an animal and shot forward, grabbing Helen’s upper arms and pushing her roughly onto her back. With his Scion powers restored, he was faster and stronger than she could have imagined. Hector had been right. Orion was enormously powerful. Helen tried to struggle out from underneath him, but it was too late. He had the upper hand now, and with his size and skill he could easily keep her pinned down.

Risking a catastrophic eruption of electricity, Helen allowed a current to run across her skin. She was hoping to

knock Orion unconscious, but fatigue made her fall short of the mark, and the painful shock she delivered only made him angrier. Orion screamed and twitched with agony, but he didn’t let her go. When he recovered from the electrical storm in his head he leaned down hard on her shoulders, grinding her back into the wet floor of the cave until a gasp of pain escaped from her lips.

Helen realized then that she had misjudged Orion horribly, and that she would pay for it. She still couldn’t see him, but she could feel the full mass of him looming above her. She had never noticed how large he was until now, probably because she never had reason to fear him before. As she pushed uselessly against his face and throat, she knew that she would not win this fight. She was injured, dehydrated, and beyond exhausted. Orion was going to kill her.

Helen didn’t even have to think about it. She knew she’d rather die buried under a thousand tons of rubble than submit to him. She relaxed and began to summon a true bolt—one that would easily kill him and most likely collapse the cave and kill her as well. But she didn’t get the chance to release it.

Suddenly, Orion let go of her and pushed himself up, as if he were waking from a dream. She heard him frantically scrambling away from her in the dark. Not knowing where he’d gone made her desperate for some light. Straining her ears against the pounding silence, Helen waited for the sound of another attack.

Orion’s boots creaked somewhere out there. The Furies hissed, calling out to Helen from Orion’s hiding place. They were directing her, wanting her to finish the fight.

But now that she was no longer touching him, Helen felt uncertain. Orion wasn’t her enemy, was he? In fact, she cared for him—so much that she was starting to worry that she had really hurt him. But the impenetrable dark of the cave revealed nothing, no matter how hard Helen tried to stare through it.

She decided that she needed to know two things. First, was he was okay? Second, if he was, was he about to attack her?

Focusing all her remaining strength on maintaining a balanced charge, Helen conjured a small globe of glowing electricity in her left hand and held it up above her head. Her eyes darted around the toothy stalactites and stalagmites until she spotted Orion. He was backed up against the wall on the other side of the small cavern, his eyes pinched closed. Blood was running down his chin.

“If you’re going to kill me, do it now while my eyes are closed.” His deep voice rang out sure and steady, echoing down the empty passageways. “I won’t fight you.”

Generating light had been a mistake. Now Helen could see the Three Furies gnashing their teeth and raking their fingers down their bodies in the shadows. They tore their clothes and left deep red welts on their bleached and clammy skin.

Helen stood up and stalked toward Orion robotically, like a clockwork killer full of cogs instead of thoughts. In an ecstasy of hate, she fell down on her knees in front of him and put her right hand under his shirt.

Sliding her hand along Orion’s belt, Helen felt for the knife she knew he kept strapped to his back. He must have known what she was doing, but he didn’t try to stop her. Helen unsheathed his knife and held the tip of the blade against his chest.

“I don’t want this,” she said. Her voice shook and her eyes were blurry with tears that gathered, tipped, and then tumbled down her hot cheeks. “But I need it.”

Orion kept his eyes shut, his hands gripping the cavern wall. In the icy, erratic light of her barely controlled electricity, Helen saw him calm himself, as if he’d done this many times before. The ghost-white limbs and ashy hair of the Furies blinked in and out of the corner of Helen’s eye.

“I feel it, too. The bloodlust,” he whispered, so softly Helen understood his meaning more than heard his words. “It’s okay. I’m ready now.”

“Look at me.”

Orion opened his bright green eyes. The Furies screamed.

A boyish, surprised expression stole across his face. He began to take labored little breaths and his head fell listlessly toward Helen, inch by inch, until his lips grazed lightly against her own. His mouth was very warm and soft. Like a new flavor she couldn’t quite place but that she wanted to swallow whole, Helen pulled his lower lip into her mouth to take a bigger sip of him. Catching his face in one of her hands so she could tilt his wilting mouth toward hers, she noticed something sticky between her fingers. Helen pulled back and looked down.

There was blood on her hands.

Stunned out of her trance, Helen looked down and saw a dark, wet circle expanding across Orion’s shirt. His surprised look. She had stabbed him. And then she kept pushing the tip of the blade into him a tiny bit at a time as they leaned toward each other. And he had allowed her to do it without complaint.

Seeing what she had done, Helen yanked the blade out of Orion’s chest and sent it clanging against the floor behind her.

He pitched forward with a small sigh and crumpled up at her knees.