But the rest of her was freezing, she realized as she clawed her way up from the dragging darkness and back into consciousness. She was colder than she had ever been and something close to her smelled awful, like rust and rot.
“There she is, she’s come to play! Two more to come, then bombs away!” tittered a wheedling voice. “Prettyprettypretty godling.”
Ares.
Helen held very still and tried no
t to start shrieking. She needed to think. The last thing she remembered was Automedon’s face over hers, a jab in her neck, and then liquid pain pumping through her body until her brain switched itself off in self-defense.
“I see you there, my pretty little pet,” Ares said, no longer laughing. “You cannot hide behind your eyelids. Come. Open them. Let me see our father’s eyes.”
She heard the note of anger creeping into his voice, heard the threat in his move toward her. He’d called her bluff, and her eyes opened in terror. She disengaged gravity to fly away, but it didn’t work, and she immediately saw why. Even the air was saturated with ice crystals. The cold was so complete it stretched the senses beyond their limit and twisted them back the other way around until ice burned like fire.
In the flickering light of a bronze brazier, Helen could see that Ares had her bound with thick rope, staked to the ground at the entrance of a portal. Helen looked around desperately, but in her heart she already knew she was in the perfect prison. In the Underworld she could transport herself away from Ares with a few words. On Earth, she could at least put up one hell of a fight, and maybe get away. But at a portal, when she was neither here nor there, she was just a teenaged girl, tied up, and at the mercy of a maniac. This was planned, Helen knew. It had probably been planned for, literally, ages.
“Tears! I love tears!” Ares gushed as if he were talking about puppies. “Look how the little godling weeps . . . Still so pretty she is, she is! Let’s change that.”
Ares hit her across the mouth and Helen felt something snap. She took a deep breath. So this was it. She spat and looked up at him, no longer crying. Now that it had started she knew it wouldn’t be long, and in a way that was better than waiting for it. At least if Ares was here torturing her, that meant he wasn’t misleading her father’s spirit in the Underworld. This wasn’t the outcome she’d been hoping for when she’d closed her eyes to follow her father down into the Underworld, but it was better than nothing. Helen looked up at Ares and nodded at him, ready for whatever he had to dish out now that she knew her father was safe.
Ares hit her face again and then stood up so he could kick her in the stomach. The wind came out between the seized-up muscles in her abdomen until she made a strange braying noise, like a donkey. He kicked her again and again. If she tried to avoid the blows by curling up and turning her back to him, he stomped rather than kicked. She felt her forearm snap and tried to bring her leg up to protect her side, but that only made him attack her more viciously. When she stopped trying to dodge the blows and just let them come, he backed off.
Helen rolled around on the ground, struggling to find a position that would make it possible for her to breathe with several broken ribs and her hands tied behind her back. Wheezing and writhing, she finally found that kneeling and bending forward with her forehead resting against the fiery ice of the ground was best. The choking, hacking noise she made as she forced air around one of her punctured lungs sounded almost like laughing.
“Fun, isn’t it?” Ares squealed, and started skipping around in a circle. “But I shouldn’t have kicked your middle so very much because now you can’t yell. And that’s what we need, right? So silly of me! Well, we can wait a bit before we play again.”
He knelt down next to her folded form and ran his finger through her hair. The exposed back of her neck crawled as he chose a tress from the nape.
He will yank it out in a moment, she told herself. Just relax and don’t fight it. It will be easier that way.
“You are exceedingly quiet,” Ares sighed as he began to slowly braid the chosen lock. “That is a problem. How will the other Heirs find you if you don’t holler and yell like you’re supposed to? You’re supposed to shout SAVE ME, LUCAS! OH, SAVE ME, ORION!” He momentarily adopted the soprano register of a damsel in distress before immediately switching back to his normal voice. “Just like that. Go on. Try it.”
Helen shook her head. Ares leaned over her, putting his lips right up against the cringing skin of her neck. He breathed his foul, rotten breath across her scalp and the backs of her ears. Even in the scouring cold of the portal, Ares still overwhelmed her with the smell of death and decay.
“Yell,” he said quietly, no longer sounding like a madman. For the first time she could remember, Ares had abandoned his usual singsong way of speaking. He sounded sane, and to Helen that made him infinitely more terrifying. “Call out to them to save your life. Call out to them, Helen, or I will kill you.”
“You’re trying to trap them,” Helen said between panting breaths. “I won’t fall for it.”
“How can I trap them? I am as powerless as a mortal in this nowhere place, and they are two against one,” he said, sounding logical. “They might even win.”
He wasn’t lying. His punches and kicks had hurt her insides badly, but she didn’t feel the strength of a god behind those blows. She looked at the knuckles on his left hand, the hand he had used to strike her, and saw that ichor, the golden blood of the gods, oozed out of the deep scrapes on his fist. It made her smile to know that although she’d lost some teeth and she couldn’t see out of her right eye anymore, Ares had most likely broken his hand in the process.
“Call out to them,” he pleaded, like all of this was for her own good. “Why won’t you yellyellyell, broken little godling? They want to save you.”
Helen knew he was right. Lucas and Orion were looking for her, and they didn’t need their Scion powers to fight Ares like she did. Both of them were strong men. She was just a skinny, exhausted, tied-up, Myrmidon-poisoned girl going against a gigantic brute twice her size. They were warriors by nature. Let them do the fighting. They enjoyed it.
Not too far away, she heard Orion calling out to Lucas, leading him through the labyrinth of the caves.
“Do you hear that, Helen? Your salvation is so close.” Ares twisted his fingers to tighten his grip and ripped the braided lock of hair out of her head, tearing an inch wide swath of scalp off with it. Helen couldn’t stop a high-pitched whistling wheeze from escaping the back of her throat, but she managed to keep the volume lower than a whisper. She wouldn’t scream. Ares grabbed another, larger lock—one that was lower and attached to even more sensitive skin.
Out of her one good eye, Helen saw blood from the back of her head running in a stream off her chin and staining the ice below her face. It fanned out in a pool, bright and vibrant, as it climbed its way through the crystal lattice like it was filling the thirsty fibers of woven cloth.
“They aren’t going to just happen to find you, if that’s what you’re hoping for. There are dozens of portals in these caves. Orion knows most of them, but still, it could take them all night to find the right one.” Ares sounded like he was growing tired of this game. “Call out to them now and save what’s left of your skin.”
Staring into a pool of her own blood, Helen saw two armies. She saw them come together in a bright flash of metal on metal. She saw an azure-blue bay fouled by the filth of a siege camp, and then over time, she saw those clear waters muddied and clogged with the ashes of burnt bodies. Finally, she saw Lucas lying lifeless in a burning, smoke-filled room.
That was what happened the last time I let others do my fighting for me.
“I will not call out,” Helen whispered as hot tears joined the blood beneath her face. “I would rather die.”