A pocket of gas bubbled to the surface, sending up a plume of stench. Helen vomited, unable to control herself. When she eventually drowned, the putrid dirt would rush into her nose, her eyes, and fill her mouth. Even though Helen was only up to her waist, she knew it was coming. She began to cry. She couldn’t take it anymore.
“What else can I do?” she screamed, and sank lower.
She knew thrashing didn’t work,
but maybe this one time she would reach the dry reeds on the side of the pool and be able to grab them before the heavy muck swallowed her. She waded forward, but for every inch of progress she paid with an inch of depth. When she was up to her chest she had to stop moving. The weight of the quicksand was pressing the air out her, like a great weight settling on her chest—like a giant knee was pressing down on her.
“I get it, okay?” she cried. “I put myself here by being upset when I fall asleep. But how am I supposed to change the way I feel?”
The quicksand was up to her neck. Helen tilted her head back and thrust up her chin, trying to will herself higher.
“I can’t do this alone anymore,” she said to the blank sky. “I need someone to help me.”
“Helen!” a deep, unfamiliar voice called out.
It was the first time Helen had heard another voice in the Underworld, and at first she assumed she was hallucinating. Her face was still tilted up, and she couldn’t move it to look or she’d be sucked under.
“Reach toward me, if you can,” the young man said in a strained voice, like he was struggling at the edge of the pit to get to her. “Come on, try, damn it! Give me your hand!”
At that moment her ears filled, and she could no longer hear what he shouted at her. All she could see was a flash of gold—a bright glimmer that pierced through the dull, defeated light of the Underworld like the lifesaving beacon of a lighthouse. She caught the barest glimpse of an angular chin and a full, sculpted mouth at the very edge of her vision. Then, under the surface of the quicksand, Helen felt a warm, strong hand take hers and pull.
Helen woke up in her bed and pitched forward, frantically scraping the muck out of her ears. Her body was still racing with adrenaline, but she forced herself to stay very still and listen.
She heard Jerry make a cawing sound downstairs in the kitchen—a high-pitched “WHOOP-WHOOP” siren noise that was more suited to the middle of a crowded dance floor than it was to Helen’s snug Nantucket home. Jerry was singing. Well, sort of.
A burst of relieved laughter jumped out of Helen. She was safe at home, and this time she hadn’t broken anything, stabbed herself, or drowned in a festering bog. Someone had saved her.
Or was it all in her head?
She thought about the deep voice and the warm hand that had pulled her from the pit. Healers like Jason and Ariadne could go down around the edge of the Underworld in spirit, but no one except Helen could physically get into the Underworld with his or her body still attached to the soul. It was supposed to be impossible. And Helen had been in Tartarus—the lowest of the low. Even farther down in the Underworld than Hades itself. Not even the strongest Healers had ever come close to it. Was she so desperate for help that she had hallucinated?
Confused about whether or not she had imagined the whole thing, Helen sat in her sodden bed for a few moments and listened to her father mangle Prince’s “Kiss” while he made breakfast.
Jerry was getting half the lyrics wrong—which meant he was in a great mood. Things between him and Kate were going very well: so well that Helen hadn’t seen much of her father the past three weeks. Even their timeworn system of trading weeks cooking for each other was all thrown out of whack, but that was okay with Helen. She wanted her father to be happy.
Jerry repeated the line “you don’t have to be beautiful” four times in row, probably because he couldn’t remember any of the other words. Helen smiled and shook her head, thanking her lucky stars she had a father like Jerry to wake up to, even if he was a terrible singer. She had no idea why he could never get the words to songs right, but she suspected it had something to do with being a parent. Nobody’s parents were supposed to sing Prince well. It would be disturbing if they did.
Throwing back her covers, Helen launched into cleaning mode. Two weeks ago, Claire had taken Helen to the mainland to get the special plastic sheets that moms use if they have a kid who wets the bed, making a thousand cracks about the Princess and the “Pee” along the way. Helen didn’t mind. The sheets were uncomfortable and super-embarrassing to buy, but a necessity since every night she came back from the Underworld either bleeding or covered in yuck.
She stood up and started stripping her bed as fast as she could. In the laundry room, she took off her muddy boxer shorts and threw out her ripped T-shirt, putting everything that could be salvaged into the wash. She took a quick shower, and then retraced her path with a rag to clean up the dirty footprints she had tracked across the floor.
A few days ago she had considered using her superfast Scion speed to get through this new and annoying morning cleaning ritual, but she decided that it would probably scare her dad to death if he ever caught her doing it. Instead, Helen had to either get up at the crack of dawn or run around frantically at normal human speed to cover her tracks, like she was doing that morning. Out of time, Helen wiggled into some jeans before she had completely dried off while trying to pull a sweater over her damp hair. It was so cold in her room that the tips of her ears were beginning to go numb.
“Lennie! Your breakfast is getting cold!” Jerry shouted up the stairs.
“Oh, for crying out . . . Crap!” Helen cussed as she stumbled over her book bag. Her sweater wasn’t all the way on yet, and it was still covering her face and pinning her arms over her head.
After a moment of flailing around like a muppet, Helen regained her footing and paused to laugh at herself, wondering how a demigod could be such a damn klutz. She assumed it had to have something to do with the fact that she was so tired. Helen righted her clothing, grabbed her school things, and ran down the stairs before her dad could start singing “Kiss” again.
Jerry had gone hog wild on breakfast. There were eggs, bacon, sausage, oatmeal with nuts and dried cherries, and of course, pumpkin pancakes. Pumpkin pancakes were a favorite of Jerry's and Helen’s, but around Halloween, which was only about a week and a half away, anything with pumpkin in it was on the menu. It was sort of a competition between the two of them. It started with roasted pumpkin seeds and went all the way to soups and gnocchi. Whoever found a way to sneak pumpkin into a dish without getting caught was the winner.
The whole pumpkin thing had started when Helen was a little girl. One October she’d complained to her dad that pumpkins only got used as decoration, and although she loved jack-o’-lanterns, it was still a big waste of food. Jerry had agreed, and the two of them resolved to start eating pumpkins instead of just carving them up and then throwing them out.
Unfortunately, they found that pumpkins on their own are so bland they’re practically inedible. If they hadn’t gotten creative with the cooking, they would have given up on their Save the Pumpkins crusade after the first year.
There were a lot of nauseating creations, of which the pumpkin popsicles were by far the worst, but the pancakes stood out as the biggest success. They instantly became as large a part of the Hamilton family tradition in late October as turkey was on Thanksgiving. Helen noticed that Jerry had even made fresh whipped cream to put on top, and that made her feel so guilty she could barely look at him. He was worried about her.
“Finally! What were you doing up there? Quilting?” Jerry joked, trying to make light of his worry, as he looked her up and down.