She could feel his breath quicken and see his eyes gleam with more than just the cold. "You remember, months ago, you gave me some advice about how I should go about making tough decisions?" he asked.
"Decide what you absolutely can"t handle, and do the opposite," she said, surprised that he was bringing this up when she had been thinking pretty much the same thing not too long ago.
"That"s why I won"t kiss you." He raised a hand and touched her face, and quickly dropped it. "Eventually, we"ll have to go back, and I"ll lose you again. I know for a fact I can"t handle that."
Nor could Helen, and she was starting to consider other options. Like figuring out a way for Aphrodite to remove the curse that required Helen to have a daughter in the first place. Maybe instead of accepting her situation-which was ridiculously unfair-she needed to at least try to fix it.
"I"m tired of going round and round," Helen sighed.
The carousel came to a stop. She stood up and jumped down, the lights of the carnival shutting off section by section around her as she walked off the fairgrounds. She dropped her wand, and snow began to fall. Billions of tiny stars were blotted out and seemed to fall through the night sky as unique little crystals. It looked like the air around them whirled with shimmering bits of frozen stars.
"Helen," Lucas began, following her. She heard him bracing himself for another one of their legendary arguments.
"I"m not angry with you because you won"t kiss me," she said, turning around and stopping him. "I get why you won"t kiss me. I can"t go through all that again, either."
"So what"s the matter?" he asked patiently.
"I"m sick of believing that there are these shadowy all-powerful deities who are greater than me, keeping me from what I want. Because that"s a lie. I"m just as strong as any of the beings who would hold me back. And I know I can beat them."
"Ah. Helen?" Lucas hazarded. "You"re not going to run off and start picking fights with the G.o.ds or anything like that, are you?"
"Well, no," she said, shifting uncertainly from foot to foot. "I was thinking I"d start by asking a few questions and take it from there."
"Good," Lucas said, relieved. He reached out and took her hand, his eyes narrowing with determination. "And if talking doesn"t work, we"ll bury them."
Helen watched a dark shadow pa.s.s across his face. "We"ll think about this later," she said, leading him to a path that wound into the woods. "I"m not ready for our date to be over yet."
ELEVEN.
About half an hour after Tantalus, Daedalus, and Pallas left his camp, Matt heard the alarm again. There was a commotion outside, the sound of struggling, and moments later Telamon was at the entrance of Matt"s tent with a report.
"A Scion was found sneaking around the beach and captured," Telamon informed him. "I would have sent her back to her House, only . . . it"s her, Master."
"It"s all right," Matt said, nodding his head. "Bring her in."
Ariadne was led into the tent, held on either side by a Myrmidon. Her hair was tangled, and her face was red with exertion. She"d obviously put up a fight, but she was no match for even one of Matt"s soldiers, let alone a full company of them.
"Let her go. Then leave us." The guards obeyed silently. He turned to Ariadne. "How did you find us?"
"I followed my father. He was acting weird tonight," she whispered. Ariadne stood as far away from Matt as she could and rubbed her arms where the guards had held her.
"Did they hurt you?" he asked quietly. She ignored his question.
"How can you be him? You"re not a Scion."
"Neither was Achilles."
She dropped her face into her palms and rubbed her eyes roughly. "No," she said, lifting her head suddenly. "No, I don"t believe any of this. I can"t."
She ran for the exit, but Matt moved faster than she ever could and was there before her. He caught her wrist to stop her from leaving. She stared at him in shock.
"Believe it." Her skin felt soft and warm in his hand. He let her go and turned away. He knew it was better this way, even though it didn"t feel like it. "Go home. My men won"t stop you."
She didn"t leave.
Matt heard her crossing the s.p.a.ce to him and turned, already shaking his head. "Don"t."
She kissed him, anyway. He knew he was supposed to stop this. She might know the story word for word, but she didn"t actually remember the ending the way he did. He was just about to pull away and send her home to her brothers when she pressed her thumb into that U-shaped hollow under his Adam"s apple while she kissed him. Just like she used to a hundred lifetimes ago.
As Matt picked her up and carried her over to his bed, he marveled at how simple a gesture it was. Really-it was a silly habit she had of touching his throat with her thumb. But once she did that, Matt didn"t care who he had to kill.
"Sing for me," Helen pleaded. She lifted her head off Lucas"s chest and stared down at him.
"Right now? With no accompaniment?" Lucas asked. Lying on his back, he looked up at the ceiling of their little cabin in the woods and blushed a bit.
"Yes. Please? I really want to listen to music, but I want it to be something from you, not from my imagination."
She rolled off of him. The stones in front of the fireplace were nice and toasty under their blanket, despite the snowstorm that swirled outside their cabin. Helen grabbed her mug of tea off the hot flagstones in front of the fire and offered it to Lucas.
"For your throat, if it"s hoa.r.s.e and you think you might sing badly," she said with a challenging grin.
"My throat"s fine," he said, nudging her playfully with his foot. He sat up suddenly. "I"ll make you music. But I"m a much better guitar player than a singer."
"Really?" Helen took his hands and held them up, looking at them. They were hardened, like a fighter"s, but still sensitive, like an artist"s. Just like everything else about him, his hands were the perfect blend of opposites. She ran her finger across the calluses on his finger pads, noticing them for the first time. "Why didn"t you ever play for me before?"
"Why haven"t I ever taken you on a date before?" he said through a bittersweet smile. "There are a lot of things I"ve meant to do with you that I haven"t."
Helen swayed closer to him. Just to breathe his air, or feel his body heat . . . anything to get another dose of him without actually kissing him and breaking the gentle understanding they"d come to.
"How"d you learn?" she asked quietly, a little ashamed that she didn"t know this already.
"My dad taught me." Lucas paused, a serene but sad look on his face. "He taught me cla.s.sical Spanish guitar, because we lived in Spain for so long, and American finger picking. I actually haven"t played at all since we left Cadiz." Again, that slightly sad look stole over his face. "He"s better than me . . . but I"m still pretty good."
For a long time now, Helen had taken for granted that she and Lucas were as close as skin was to bones, that there was nothing about him that she didn"t know. But here she was, learning something new and important about who he was. His dad didn"t just teach him how to swing a sword. Helen could imagine the hours that the two of them had spent together, discussing the art that they loved so much and had so little chance to enjoy.
"I"ll bet." Helen desperately wanted to hear him play now. She imagined him a guitar-the best guitar she think of. "Will this work?"
Lucas took the instrument and turned it over, frowning. "It"s all right." He laughed at the wounded look Helen gave him. "I"m joking! It"s beautiful."
Helen slapped him on the thigh. "Play for me!" she demanded.
Lucas cradled the guitar in his arms, preparing to play, and stopped. "You know what I keep wondering?"
"What?" Helen asked in a mock-frustrated tone, like she thought he was stalling on purpose.
"How you can do this?" he asked seriously. "How do you know how to make carousels and snowstorms and guitars?"
"I"ve had a lot of practice," she said quietly. Helen leaned closer to Lucas and regarded him carefully. "In the Underworld. All that time I spent wandering around, well . . . I didn"t get it then, but Hades was actually teaching me to build worlds."
"Really? And I suppose he did it out of the goodness of his heart?" Lucas asked doubtfully.
"Well, yeah. Actually, I think that has a lot to do with it," she replied. "He"s a really compa.s.sionate guy. G.o.d. Whatever."
"And how has Hades been teaching you, exactly?" Lucas continued, putting the guitar aside.
"The hard way," Helen replied, rolling her eyes at the memory of all her trials in the Underworld, and all of the h.e.l.lscapes she encountered. The tree that imprisoned her, the rusting city, the ledge of the mansion that she"d clung to-all of the places that Helen thought were cleverly designed by Hades to torture her had actually come out of her own mind. She"d created her own h.e.l.l, and now that she had learned how to control her fear, she knew how to create her own paradise.
"What do you mean, the hard way?" he asked as he studied her pensive expression. His eyes were narrowed in anger.
"No, no, he didn"t do anything to me. I did it all to myself." Lucas didn"t look pleased with that answer, either. "Let me start over. Descending isn"t really the right name for the talent I have. I"m a Worldbuilder, Lucas." Helen spread her hands to gesture to the room around them. "Worldbuilding got confused with Descending because Hades has allowed all the Worldbuilders, not just me, to descend to his land in order to learn how to build for themselves."
"Why would he do that?"
Helen paused, thinking about her quest to free the Furies and how much she"d learned in the process.
"I guess because he wants us to really consider what kind of world we want to live in-one based on justice and compa.s.sion for others, or one that only serves the whims of the builder. Wow. I just figured that out." Helen looked at Lucas and smiled. "You always help me figure things out."
"That"s what I"m here for," he said, smiling back at her before growing serious again. "But you could have learned those lessons without having to go through h.e.l.l. Helen, I remember how sick you got. How you would come back from the Underworld covered in mud and leaves and blood sometimes. Did he have to make everything so hard?"
"Yeah, he did," Helen said, and then stopped again, wondering if she wanted Lucas to know the next bit that had just occurred to her.
"Helen?" he said, raising an eyebrow at her. "What aren"t you telling me?"
She knew she couldn"t hide it from him for long, and she hated keeping things from him, anyway, so she told him. "Hades had to make it hard so I would toughen up. Because once a Worldbuilder actually builds a world, she has to be strong enough to defend it."
Helen saw Lucas"s face harden. "Defend it from whom?" he asked, his voice low and dangerous.
"The G.o.ds, I think. "Challengers" was all Hades said, so I guess there have been more than one over the years. Look, I"m not going to lie to you. Morgan La Fey built Avalon, and it disappeared in the mists when she lost her fight. Atlantis sank into the sea when Atlanta lost hers. Those are the only two other Scions I know of who have been Worldbuilders, and they both lost. The odds are not in my favor."
"Screw the odds," Lucas said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "That"s not what bothers me." His eyes skipped around as he thought. "What I want to know is who"s going to challenge you, and why is Hades taking the trouble to prepare you to fight back? What does he really want?"
Helen shrugged. "I don"t know. I could ask, but I doubt he"d tell me in a way I"d understand. Hades doesn"t do easy answers."
"I"ll bet," Lucas mumbled, still thinking.
Helen reached for the guitar and slowly nudged it into his hands. He was onto her, though.
"Is this a hint?"
"A big fat one." Helen grinned at him.
Lucas plucked a few strings and grimaced, tightening and loosening k.n.o.bs as he went. "Figures. You"re so tone-deaf even your perfectly constructed guitars are out of tune." Helen"s body crumpled as she laughed at the pained look on Lucas"s face. "And this guitar is strung for a leftie. I"m not Matt, you know."
"Here, let me fix it." Helen concentrated, and all the strings rearranged themselves. Lucas strummed the guitar and rolled his eyes when it made a comical tw.a.n.ging sound.
"It"s out of tune again."
"You did that on purpose," she said, grabbing his toe and squeezing it. "Just play!"
"Yes, your G.o.ddess-ness."
Lying on her side, the warm fire at her feet, Helen"s laughter died away as Lucas suddenly went from tuning to playing.
It was like an orchestra in an instrument.
He played with both hands-not one hand picking and the other holding down strings-but with both hands so that it sounded like more than one guitar was playing. Sometimes he hit the strings to make them hum like a harp, and sometimes he hit the body of the guitar like a drum to add ba.s.s and keep time. It was the most fascinating thing Helen had ever watched, like Lucas had a dozen voices in his head, all singing the same song, and he"d figured a way to make them come out of ten fingers.
Helen looked at his face and could tell why he loved it. It was like thinking for him, only this was a puzzle that he could share with her as he solved it.
He"d walked into her head when he"d come to her world. And she"d walked into his when she finally heard him play.
It was heaven.
"Where have you been?" Helen scolded.
"Waiting, forlorn and heartbroken, for your return," Morpheus answered languidly, his silver eyes melting into hers.
She laughed and squeezed his hand. Helen and Lucas had fallen asleep in front of the fire, and she"d woken up in the shadow lands, lying on her back, shoulder to shoulder with the G.o.d of dreams. Their faces were turned to each other, and their hands tightly entwined.
"Little sneak. How did you know I needed your help?" she asked.
"You brought yourself here. I can"t make you come here, all I can do is leave the door open for you."
"Is that what you did?" Helen said, thinking about the different borders that Hades had made for his world, and Morpheus had made for his. Hades left the door open for the dead, and Morpheus left the door open for dreaming minds.
Helen turned her head and looked up into the night sky of Morpheus" Dream Palace. Her head was cradled in inky silk pillows, and the strange follow-me-lights that looked like a candle flame inside a soap bubble danced over her and her host like they wanted to play.
"Are the borders of our worlds separate from the world itself?"
"I suppose so. Minds come and go, ruffling my hair on the breeze as they let themselves into and out of my land, but they do not control my land once they are here. I make the dreams," Morpheus replied.
"But in Hades it"s the opposite," Helen remarked, on the edge of understanding. "The borders are hard to cross-you usually have to kill yourself to do it, but once inside his world, you make your own existence. Or at least I did when I was there."
"I"ve never thought of it this way, but yes, I"d say the borders are separate from the world. They follow a different set of rules, but they are still controlled by the maker." Then he regarded her with narrowed eyes. "What"s troubling my Beauty so much she must come to me to talk philosophy?"
"I need your help. Who is going to challenge me, now that I"ve built my world, Morpheus?"
"Olympus. Zeus, mostly. In the past, the small G.o.ds challenged some of the other Worldbuilders while the Olympians were trapped by Zeus" oath." Morpheus chuckled. "Odysseus really was a clever one."
"But why do we have to fight at all? Why can"t Zeus keep Olympus, and I"ll keep Everyland and we can call it even?"