Dreamless (Starcrossed 2)

Helen saw a twisted tree in her mind, and a hillside of sharp rocks and thorns. Something told her that this was important and that she should include it.

“I want us to appear on the hillside under the tree of the Furies,” she said clearly.

The heat was unbearable, but the flat, blinding light was even worse. Helen shaded her face with her hand and blinked repeatedly, trying to relax the squeezing feeling in her eyes as her pupils rebelled against the insulting brightness. The air was so dry it tasted bitter and caustic—like it was trying to scour the moisture out of Helen’s mouth.

She licked her dry lips and looked around. A short walk away was a tree that was so old and starved that it looked more like twisted rope than a plant. Under the shade of this tree stood three trembling girls.

“We told you not to waste your time,” the one in the middle said. “We are a lost cause.”

“Nonsense,” Orion said cheerfully. He took Helen’s hand and led her to the tree. The Three Furies backed away from them.

“No, you don’t understand! I don’t think I can bear to feel that joy, only to lose it again,” the littlest one whispered urgently, her voice quieter than rustling leaves.

“Nor can I,” said the leader sadly.

“Or I,” agreed the third.

“I don’t think we should drink, sisters,” decided the smallest. “Our burden is heavy enough already.”

The Furies began to shrink away from Helen and Orion, back into the dark shadow of their tree. Helen realized that they were shrinking away from something that could make them happy, even if it was for only a few moments.

She recognized herself in this abnegation, and something inside her lit up. Lucas. Would she really rather forget Lucas entirely? The floodgates opened, and all of Helen’s memories came rushing back in 3-D. She saw the lighthouse on Great Point, her meeting place with Lucas. She also saw another lighthouse, the size of a skyscraper, and shaped like an octagon. Lucas was waiting for her there, about to beg her to run away with him. Standing in the slanted light of winter, he shone like the sun in his armor. Armor?

“I know exactly what you mean. I do,” she said to the littlest one, trying to shake out of her head the image of Lucas taking off a bronze breastplate. “And as far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out on the whole ‘it’s better to have loved and lost’ argument. But this is different. It won’t swallow you whole and then abandon you, like joy always has to. We brought you something that will hopefully last forever.”

“What is it?” the leader asked with cautious hope.

“It’s bliss.”

Orion looked over at her sharply, and she nodded him on. Still uncertain, but following her lead, Orion stepped forward and took off his backpack. As he took out the three canteens the Furies could hear the liquid moving around inside their containers, and it was too much for them to resist.

“I’m so thirsty,” the third one whined, stumbling forward desperately to take a canteen. Her two sisters quickly gave in and followed suit, and the Three Furies gulped the water down.

“Do you really believe that? Ignorance is bliss?” Orion said under his breath to Helen. From the complicated look he gave her, she could tell he had all of his memories back as well.

“For them? Definitely.”

“And for you?” he persisted, but Helen didn’t have an answer. He looked away from her and tensed. “I don’t want to forget anything about tonight. Or about you.”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” Helen began to say, realizing that she had hurt him. She was about to explain that she wasn’t talking about forgetting their kiss, even though just the thought of it made her whole body heat up in a head-to-toe blush, but Orion shook his head and gestured to the Furies. They had finished their canteens, and were looking around shyly, laughing and shrugging at one another like they were waiting for something to happen.

“Hi,” Helen said. The Furies glanced at one another with mounting fear.

“It’s okay,” Orion said in his wild-animal-tamer voice. “We’re your friends.”

“Hello, friends?” the leader said, and then turned her palms up in a questioning gesture. “Forgive my confusion. It’s not that I don’t believe that you are our friends, I just don’t know who we are.”

Her sisters smiled and looked at the ground with relief now that the reason for their anxiety was out in the open.

“You are three sisters who love one another very much. You’re known as the Eumenides. The kindly ones,” Helen told them, remembering what little she could of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. It was the first thing in Greek literature that she’d read, before she even knew she was a Scion. It seem

ed so long ago. “You have a very important job. Which is . . .”

“You listen to people who have been accused of terrible crimes and if they are innocent, you offer them protection,” Orion finished for Helen when she stumbled.

The three Eumenides looked at one another and smiled, sensing that this was the truth. They hugged and greeted each other as sisters, still not fully understanding everything that had happened to them, and that troubled Helen.

“I sort of skipped over a lot of this play. I don’t know that much about the Eumenides,” Helen admitted under her breath to Orion.