“It was enough for me to experience it, even just once. I’ll never forget this, Helen. And I’ll never forget that you were the one who brought me here.”
“You really don’t think you’ll be back, do you?” Helen asked incredulously, watching Orion stow the canteens in his backpack.
He didn’t answer her.
“I’ll see you here again in about eight or nine decades,” she said resolutely. Orion laughed and threaded his arms through the straps of his bag with a wry smile.
“Eight or nine? You realize we’re Scions, right?” he said as he tugged on her hand and led her out into the morning meadow. “We’ve got notoriously short shelf lives.”
“We’ll be different,” she said. “Not just you and me, but our whole generation.”
“We’ll have to be,” Orion said quietly, tilting his head down in contemplation.
Helen glanced over at him, expecting to find that he had fallen into one of his brooding moods, but he hadn’t. He was smiling to himself with a look that Helen could only think of as hopeful. She smiled, too, happy to just walk through the meadow and hold hands with him. The happiness she felt wasn’t like the rapture of the river, but rapture would have been too much to bear for much longer. She realized it would have broken her heart if she’d stayed.
The farther they moved from the River of Joy, the more Helen’s head cleared. She looked down at one of her hands. It had been in the water so long it had grown wrinkled. How long had they been kneeling there?
With every step, she was more and more grateful that Orion had pulled her away. He had probably been as entranced as she had been. Yet somehow, he had controlled himself, and then found the extra strength to help her break away as well.
“How did you do that?” Helen asked quietly. “How did you pull yourself away from the water?”
“There’s something I want more,” he replied simply.
“What could anyone want more than endless joy?”
“Justice.” He turned to face Helen and took both of her hands firmly in his. “There are three innocent sisters who’ve suffered for eons, not because of anything they’ve done, but because the moment they were born, the Fates decided that suffering was their lot in life. That isn’t right. None of us deserve to be born into suffering, and I intend to stand up for those who have been. That’s more important to me than joy. Help me. You know where the Furies are—I know you do. Think, Helen.”
His spoke with such conviction, such passion, that Helen could only stare at him with her mouth hanging open. Her mind went absolutely blank for a few heartbeats, and then a small voice in her head started yelling at her, enumerating all the places where she came up short as a person.
She wasn’t as doggedly persistent as Claire was, or as patient as Matt. She didn’t have impeccable instincts like Hector, or even half of Lucas’s raw intelligence. She certainly wasn’t as generous as the twins or as compassionate and selfless as Orion. Helen was just Helen. She had no idea why she was the Descender, instead of one of these other, far worthier people.
How the hell had she even gotten the job and ended up here in the Underworld to begin with? she wondered. All she knew was that one night she had fallen asleep and found herself wandering through a desert.
A desert so dry, with rocks and thorns so sharp I left a trail of bloody footprints behind me as I walked, she remembered clearly. A desert with a single, tortured tree clinging to a hillside, and under that tree were three desperate sisters who looked ancient, and like little girls at the same time. They reached out to me, sobbing.
Helen gasped and gripped Orion’s hands tightly in hers. She had always known where to find the Furies. They had been begging her to help them from the very start.
“I want us to appear by the tree on the side of the hill in the dry lands,” she announced, looking directly into Orion’s surprised eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lucas had hovered over the water and watched Helen soar away from him as she headed back toward the center of town. That dress and those damn wings had almost done him in. He wondered, not for the first time, how all the full mortals that Helen had grown up with didn’t suspect that there was something supernatural about her. No matter how down-to-earth she was on the inside, Helen’s beauty really was inhuman. Especially when she had held her arms out to him and said his name like she just had.
He’d almost lost it. And the thought of what he would have done if he had lost it turned his stomach, if only because he wanted it so badly. They were inches away from crossing a dangerous line, and unless she stopped tempting him in her maddeningly innocent way, Lucas knew it would happen eventually.
Lucas had lied to Helen. The truth was there were nights, more than just one, where he had ducked under that blue tarp covering her broken window and watched her sleep. He always felt bad after he did it, but
he couldn’t seem to stop. No matter how hard he tried to stay away from her, he would eventually end up in her room and hate himself for it later. Lucas knew that one of these days he was going to be too weak to walk away, and he was going to crawl into bed with her and to do more than just hold her. That’s why he had to make sure that if that day ever came, Helen would kick him right out again.
Lucas had tried everything else, even scaring her away, but nothing worked. Orion was their last chance. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and hoped that Orion would just do what he was good at. Lucas had asked Orion to make Helen stop loving him. Then she would never try to touch him again, never look at him again like she just had. Lucas tried to convince himself it was better if she moved on, even if that meant that she moved on to another guy. But here he stopped.
Helen couldn’t be with Orion, either—at least not forever. That was the only thing that was keeping Lucas from losing his mind. They could never have a life together. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t . . .
He abruptly shut off his thoughts before they could overpower him. Already the dark tendrils were swirling out of him, inking up the sky. He tried to calm down and not picture Orion and Helen together, because he could picture it—all too easily.
Even though Lucas had never laid eyes on Orion in person, he still had a pretty good idea what he looked like. He was a descendant of Adonis—Aphrodite’s all-time favorite lover. Because Aphrodite favored this one guy above all others, the House of Rome handed down close approximations of the Adonis archetype on a regular basis, much the same way the House of Thebes repeated the Hector archetype again and again. Half the paintings and sculptures that came out of the Renaissance looked like him, because the old masters like Caravaggio, Michelangelo, and Raphael had painted and sculpted Orion’s ancestors obsessively. Florence was literally littered with images of the sons of the House of Rome.
But it was more than just good looks that made a legend, especially in the genetically gifted Scion gene pool. There was a reason why both Casanova and Romeo, arguably the two most famous lovers in history, came out of Italy. Calling Orion a “handsome bastard,” while accurate, didn’t even begin to cover the effect he could have on a woman. The children of Aphrodite were irresistible sexually and most of them could sway people’s emotions to a certain extent, but Orion had told Lucas that his gift was much more powerful than that.