Dreamless (Starcrossed 2)

The funny thing was, Helen could sense that Hades had followed every twist and turn of her emotions as she spoke. She knew that he could read her heart, and she didn’t know if she should be afraid or happy that he would be waiting to judge her heart again on the day of her death.

“You may descend at will, niece,” he said in a kindly way. “But I strongly suggest you ask your Oracle what she thinks of this quest.”

Helen felt herself being scooped up by his mile-wide hand and then gently p

laced back in her bed. Later, she awoke in her room, freezing cold and dusted with ice crystals, but alert and refreshed for the first time in a long time. The space in the bed next to her was empty.

Lucas had gone, but in a way Helen was relieved. Waking up next to him would have been too hard on them both, especially after what she had experienced with Morpheus.

As Helen thought back, guilt overpowered her, even though she tried to tell herself that feeling guilty didn’t make any sense. She couldn’t be cheating on Lucas with Orion because she wasn’t even supposed to be with Lucas in the first place. It didn’t matter who felt like a house or a home or a frigging motel to her. She and Lucas could never be together. Period.

She had to toughen up, she realized. Some people weren’t meant to live happily ever after, no matter what they felt for each other. Hades and Persephone were a perfect example of that. Hades had told Helen that he and Persephone were each other’s joy, but they were both miserable. Their “love” kept them locked inside prisons that made one of them half dead when they were together and the other half dead when they were apart. That wasn’t joy. Joy was the opposite of a prison. It opened the heart instead of locking it away. Joy was freedom—freedom from sadness, bitterness, and hatred. . . .

Helen had a brain wave.

Throwing the stiff blankets off her, she ran clumsily on dangerously chilled legs to her dresser and grabbed her phone.

I think I know what the Furies need, she texted Orion. Joy. We need to get to the River of Joy. Meet me tonight.

Daphne poured the wine and reminded herself to stand on both feet, like the big, beefy woman she currently looked like, instead of on one leg with a cocked hip, the way she normally would. She could feel the heavy body weighing on her, making her lower back ache slightly. She was over six feet tall and about two hundred pounds, and readjusting her internal awareness to account for all that extra muscle and bone was complicated.

She tried not to yawn. Conclave was never fun, but doing it while wearing the shape of Mildred Delos’s ape of a bodyguard was downright exhausting—not just because of all the extra weight, but because Mildred Delos was a straight-up bitch. She overreacted to everything, like an anxious little dog that barks and growls constantly because it knows it’s surrounded by much stronger animals that would gladly eat it as a snack.

“Scylla! Did you open the pinot gris?” Mildred snapped testily. “I said grigio, not gris. Pinot grigio. It’s an entirely different grape.”

“My mistake,” Daphne-as-Scylla answered calmly. She knew the difference between the two wines, and had done it on purpose. She couldn’t resist baiting Mildred. “Shall I open the grigio?”

“No, this will do,” Mildred said dismissively. “Go stand over there somewhere. I can’t bear how you loom over me all the time.”

Daphne went and stood up against the wall. Mildred could growl all she wanted, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. She was useless now that Creon was dead. She had no Scion child to give her any say among the Hundred, and if she didn’t have another child by Tantalus she would remain powerless—no more than a forgettable footnote in the long history of the House of Thebes. Mildred was an ambitious woman, and Daphne trusted that she would try to get pregnant again soon. That required the presence of her husband.

If there were any other way to find Tantalus again, Daphne would have gladly taken it, but infiltrating Conclave as Mildred’s bodyguard killed two birds with one stone. Daphne needed to be present in case there was anything she could do to help Castor and Pallas in their attempt to get Automedon away from her daughter.

Castor and Pallas didn’t know she was there, of course, or that Hector was staying a few nights a week in one of Daphne’s safe houses in lower Manhattan, but that didn’t matter. Free of the Furies for over a decade now, and capable of wearing any woman’s face she needed to, Daphne had always been able to sway the other Houses from the inside to accomplish her goals. Once Castor and Pallas got Automedon’s boot off her daughter’s throat, Daphne would finally be able to kill Tantalus.

Mildred’s cell phone rang. She looked at the screen and then answered it hastily.

“Tantalus. Did you get my recordings?” Mildred said in a slightly higher than usual voice.

She had been sending recordings of the daily meetings to Tantalus, and even though phone calls were forbidden, he would call with detailed instructions for her every night. Daphne could hear both ends of their nightly conversations because Tantalus had to speak loud enough for his human wife to hear, which was loud enough for any Scion to overhear, even from the other side of the room. As yet, Tantalus hadn’t revealed his location to his wife, and she hadn’t asked. Apparently, neither of them trusted anyone with that information, not even Mildred’s bodyguard.

“I did,” he replied coldly. Daphne imagined herself digitized so she could dive through Mildred’s phone and jump out of Tantalus’s—her hands re-forming solid out of ones and zeros to choke him. “They still call me Outcast. You were supposed to fix that.”

“How? The Hundred won’t listen to me anymore. Everyone listens to Castor now, and since he found out you’re an Outcast he’s been saying it openly. You’ve lost a lot of support,” she replied in a clipped, accusing voice. “And there’s nothing I can do about that, as things are.”

“Not this again,” he sighed. “Our son hasn’t been dead a month and already you want to replace him.”

A long, uncomfortable silence followed.

“Automedon has been slow to respond to my calls,” Tantalus said tersely, breaking the chilly stalemate. “And when he does, he always has a less than satisfying excuse.”

“No,” Mildred said, half rising out of her seat. “What does this mean?”

Daphne had to work to keep her face impassive. Myrmidons were the consummate soldiers. They never ignored their masters.

“I’m not sure,” Tantalus sighed. “It could be nothing, or it could be that he’s working for someone else. Maybe he was already pledged to another master before I hired him. Either way, I don’t think I control him anymore, and if that’s so I can’t stop him from killing Helen if that’s what his other master wants. This cannot happen, or I’m a dead man. Daphne has pledged herself . . .”

“Must you always find a way to bring her up?” Mildred said, a bitter sneer curling her lip. “Do you do it just to say her name?”