Dreamless

by Josephine Angelini

  From her hiding place in his bedroom she could hear him in the adjoining study. He was at his desk, writing the legion of letters that he used to direct his cult, the Hundred Cousins. She could almost picture his once-chiseled face, his faded blond hair, and her teeth tingled with the thought of tearing him apart. After so many years, Daphne was just yards away from Tantalus, the Head of the House of Thebes and the murderer of her beloved husband, Ajax.

  Hours passed, and Tantalus was still scribbling away. Daphne knew that each of the letters Tantalus was laboring over would be taken by separate couriers and mailed from different post offices scattered up and down the coast. He was meticulous about disguising his location, and because of that, it had taken her nineteen years to track him down. She’d been obliged to follow the body of his only son back to Portugal, never once letting the corpse out of her sight no matter how many times she had to shape-shift. She knew that even Tantalus would surface long enough to put the ritual coin in his only son’s mouth, and she had been right.

  Finally, she heard Tantalus put down his pen and stand. He called in the mortal porter to take the letters to the couriers. Then he poured himself a glass of something from the well-stocked bar. It took a moment for the scent to waft in to where she was standing, but she knew what he was drinking immediately. Bourbon. Not cognac, not expensive whiskey, but sweet bourbon straight out of Kentucky. He took a few sips, savoring the flavor, then stepped into his bedroom. He shut the door behind him and spoke.

  “You should know, Daphne, that one of those letters was to the Myrmidon I have nested outside your daughter’s charming little house on Nantucket. If he doesn’t hear from me personally, she’s as good as dead.”

  Daphne nearly moaned aloud. She knew Tantalus wasn’t lying about the Myrmidon. It had led a phalanx to attack Hector at Helen’s track meet. If that thing was watching Helen and not chasing Hector as she had assumed, Daphne knew she had no choice. She swallowed her heart and stepped out from her hiding place.

  Tantalus stared at her like a starving man at a feast, his eyes skipping all over her face and body. Even though his gaze made her skin crawl, she tolerated it and focused instead on the small measure of bourbon she had smelled that remained in his glass. That was how he had known she was there.

  “You smelled me, didn’t you?” she asked, her voice catching on the bitter lump in her throat.

  “Yes,” he breathed desperately, almost apologetically. “Even after all these years, I still remember the smell of your hair.”

  Daphne summoned a spark in the palm of her hand, just to warn him. “If you yell for your guards, I’ll kill you where you stand and take my chances of beating that letter back to my daughter.”

  “And if you manage to beat my letter back to Nantucket, then what? Do you honestly think you can kill a five-thousand-year-old Myrmidon? One who fought beside Achilles himself?”

  “Not alone,” Daphne responded coldly, shaking her head once. “But with your brothers and their children? It’s possible we could take the monster down together.”

  “But not probable,” Tantalus said heavily. “And it would end up costing us both. You know Hector would be first into the fight, and first to die. And I wonder if you could stand to lose him again . . . He looks so much like Ajax. But I’m curious, does he feel the same?”

  “You filthy-minded animal!” Daphne sparked and crackled, but eventually controlled herself.

  This was his plan. Make her use up all her bolts on useless anger until she was left without a bargaining chip. That’s what had happened the night she had lost Ajax, but she was older and wiser now.

  It took many times more energy to withhold a bolt to stun a target and not kill, but after years of practice, Daphne had managed to figure out that aspect of her modest power over lightning. She sent a small, baby-blue bolt across the room and put Tantalus on his knees.

  “You have a Myrmidon, not a Scion, nested outside my daughter’s window. Why?” she asked calmly. When he didn’t answer, she crossed the room and touched him with her glowing hand. Tantalus sighed with pleasure, until she sent a charge through her fingertips.

  “She’s protected . . . by the only living Heir to my House,” he huffed, his whole body twitching with electric pain. “Can’t allow more . . . Outcasts. Atlantis . . . too far away already.”

  He still didn’t know about the Rogues, Daphne thought.

  “The insect isn’t in any Scion House, and wouldn’t become an Outcast if it killed Helen and all the Deloses on Nantucket combined. Which, by the way, would save you a lot of trouble,” Daphne continued, amping up the voltage. “So why haven’t you ordered it to attack yet?”

  “How could I . . . stop you . . . from killing me . . . if I had no collateral?” he huffed. Daphne cut off the current so he could speak clearly. “I want to rule Atlantis, not just survive to see it. I must become part of my House again to do that.”

  His chest squeezed tight, and he rolled onto his back in pain. A moment later, Tantalus took a deep breath and smiled up into Daphne’s hypnotically beautiful face.

  “I knew you’d find me someday and that you’d come to me.”

  There was an insistent knock on the door, followed by a tense inquiry in Portuguese. Tantalus glanced at the door, and then up at Daphne. She shook her head to let him know to keep his mouth shut. Daphne didn’t understand Portuguese and she couldn’t risk letting Tantalus speak, even if his silence was the thing that would give her presence away. She heard the guard at the door hesitate, and then rush off, most likely to get reinforcements. She grabbed Tantalus by the shirt and bared her teeth at him.

  “I will always be behind the door, under the bed, or around the next corner—waiting for my chance to kill you. It’s in my blood now,” she whispered viciously into his ear.

  He understood her meaning and smiled. Daphne had taken an oath that was more binding than any human contract ever contrived. Someday she would have to kill him, or not killing him would kill her.

  “You hate me that much?” he asked, almost awed that Daphne would tie her life to his, even if it was to the death. More guards arrived and began pounding on the door, but Tantalus took little notice of them.

  “No. I loved Ajax that much, and I still do.” She noticed with pleasure how deeply it hurt Tantalus to hear her say that she still loved another more than him. “Now tell me, what do you want from Helen?”

  “What you want, my love, my goddess, my future queen in Atlantis,” Tantalus chanted, helpless as he fell yet again under the spell of that Face. The guards began to knock down the steel-and-concrete-reinforced door, and Daphne was forced to back away from Tantalus.

  “And what do I want?” she asked, her eyes darting over the two-foot-thick stone walls of the chamber, looking for an alternate escape route. There was none.

  Daphne looked out the recessed casement behind her at the sheer drop to the ocean. She looked up, hoping to find a way up and over the parapet top of the citadel, but the overhang prevented her. She couldn’t fly like Helen could. She also couldn’t swim. Daphne was out of time, but she needed to hear what else Tantalus had to say before she jumped out the window and tried, somehow, not to drown. She glared at Tantalus and summoned the last of her sparks to threaten him into talking. He smiled up at her sadly, like he was more hurt to see that she was about to leave him than he was that she was threatening his life.

  “I want Helen to succeed in the Underworld, and rid us all of the Furies,” he finally replied, gesturing to the plush prison that he was forced to live in as an Outcast. “She is my only hope.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Orion swore at the top of his voice as he ducked instinctively and stumbled to the side. “When you descend, you just appear out of thin air?”

  They were standing on some blah part of the salt flats that rimmed a sea Helen had never been able to get to, and therefore suspected didn’t really exist. Just another charming aspect of hell—it promised landscape that it never delivered. Helen looked at
Orion’s panicky face and realized that she had practically materialized in his back pocket.

  “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed sheepishly. “I didn’t mean to come in so close.”

  “That is really unnerving! Is there any way to warn me first?” Orion was still clutching his chest, but he had also started to laugh a bit as well, and the sound was infectious.

  “I don’t think so,” Helen chuckled through her words. It was a nervous chuckle, and Helen tried to ignore that fact. She had been really worried he wouldn’t show, and a bit happier than she would have anticipated that he had.

  “Hey, I may have scared the crap out of you, but at least I remembered to bring your jacket.” She shrugged her shoulders out from under the collar, tilting her face down to hide an overexcited blush.

  “Yeah? And what are you going to wear?” he asked, eyeing her bare arms skeptically. Helen paused in midmotion. She’d forgotten to put her own jacket on under his, and she was only wearing a T-shirt.

  “Um . . . Whoops?”

  “Just keep it for now,” he said, shaking his head like he had expected this. “Better give me my wallet, though.”

  “I’ll give you your jacket back at the end of the night,” she promised, handing over his wallet.

  “Sure you will.”

  “I will!”

  “Look, do you really want to argue all night about whether or not girls ever return clothes they borrow from guys? Because from what I’ve noticed, one night can be an actual eternity down here.”

  Helen grinned. She had to remind herself that she didn’t know much of anything about this guy because she was starting to feel like they had been hanging out for years.

  “Who are you?” she asked, trying not to sound too overawed. She’d never met anyone like Orion before. He was obviously just as tough as the Delos boys, but Orion was so different. Sometimes the Delos boys acted a little full of themselves, but Orion was down-to-earth, even humble. “Where’d you come from?”

  Orion groaned. “We’re going to need that eternity after all. Originally? I’m from Newfoundland. Look, my life story is really complicated, so first we’d better head toward some cover before something ugly finds us.”

  “About that,” Helen interjected as they turned their backs on the nonexistent sea and made their way to a thick patch of raggedy marsh grass. “Why is it that every time we’re together you’re getting chewed on by some horrendous monster?”

  “The Bough of Aeneas,” he said, and pointed to the bright golden cuff around his wrist. “It was made by one of my ancestors from a very magical tree that grows at the edge of the Underworld, and unfortunately for me, monsters are drawn to it like insects to a barbecue.”

  “Then why don’t you take it off?” Helen asked, like that was a no-brainer.

  “Because you, Your Chosen Oneness, can come and go down here as you please.” He held apart some tall reeds for her to step between. Helen was about to argue that point, but she didn’t get the chance. “I need the Bough to open the gates between the worlds. If I didn’t have it with me, I’d just be wandering around inside a cave system in Massachusetts right now. Totally lost.”

  “Cave?” Helen asked as she remembered Orion mentioning this before. “The gate to the Underworld is in a cave in Massachusetts?” she asked incredulously. Orion smiled at her and explained.

  “There are hundreds, maybe thousands of gates to the Underworld scattered all over the world. Most of them are in these really cold spots at the bottom of caves. They’re ‘in between’ places that don’t become gates to the Underworld without some kind of key. As far as I know, the Bough is the only relic left that can do it, and because I’m Aeneas’s Heir, I’m pretty much the only person who can use it.”

  That made sense to Helen. She wore the cestus, an ancient relic from the goddess Aphrodite, and only women born to the House of Atreus could wield it.

  “But I thought magic didn’t work down here,” Helen said as she automatically touched her heart necklace. She knew the magic of the cestus didn’t work in the Underworld or she wouldn’t have ever been injured down here, and she got injured almost every time she descended.

  “Only Underworld magic works in the Underworld,” Orion replied. “This is a different universe from ours, and it has its own rules. You must have noticed it. We don’t even have our Scion powers down here.”

  “Yeah, that I’ve noticed,” Helen said. Intrigued by her leading inflection, Orion looked over at her as he stamped down the high vegetation to make a path. He paused in thought, and then laughed when he figured out what Helen meant.

  “The hellhound! You just stood there with your eyes crossed!”

  Helen’s shoulders started shaking with embarrassed laughter. “I didn’t know what to do! I don’t know how to fight without my lightning!”

  “You froze up like you were having an asthma attack or something,” he chuckled. “For a second I thought I needed to have a chat with Daphne about whether I should carry a spare inhaler. . . .”

  He broke off when he noticed how quickly Helen’s mood changed at the mention of her mother. She hated how he could just call her “Daphne” like that, like they were best friends or something.

  “That bad, huh?” he asked quietly after a moment of tense silence.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Helen replied in an angry monotone. She turned, intending to blaze her own trail through the tall reeds, but Orion laid a hand on her shoulder and turned her back around.

  “I’m a Rogue, too,” he said softly. “I know what it’s like to hate your family.”

  Helen’s anger evaporated at the sight of his sad eyes. One of her hands reached out to touch him, and she had to snatch it back at the last second. She had forgotten for a moment that Rogues like her could only be claimed by one House. Half of Orion’s family would be compelled to kill him if they ever encountered him, which they were sure to do. The Furies worked like magnets, drawing opposite sides together until they eventually collided. Helen had been hidden on a tiny island, and the House of Thebes had still found her; she could only assume that something similar had happened to Orion.

  “Did you and your family ever find a way around the Furies? You know, like I did with the Deloses?” she asked softly. Helen didn’t want to specifically say Lucas’s name or talk about how the two of them had fallen and saved each other, she just hoped that Daphne had filled Orion in on some parts of her history.

  “No,” he said in a tight voice, understanding Helen’s meaning immediately. “I still owe my blood debt to my mother’s House, the House of Rome.”

  “But you can be with her at least, right?” Helen asked tentatively.

  “No, I can’t,” he said in a final way. Helen recalled that he was the Head of the House of Rome, and not the Heir. He must have inherited his mother’s title when she died.

  “So you were claimed by your father’s side? The House of Athens?” she asked, making an effort to move the conversation away from his mother.

  “That’s right,” he said, turning away from Helen to end the line of questions.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, but I’m just trying to get this straight. You were the one who brought up the whole family thing in the first place. Asking about my mother.”

  “You’re right, I brought it up.” Orion held up his hands and made a frustrated sound. “I’m good at listening, not talking, and I have no idea what you’re feeling right now because I don’t have my powers. I can’t read your heart, and it’s driving me bananas.” He shook his head at a thought. “I guess this is the way normal guys feel it, huh? It’s really scary, so just give me a second, okay?”

  “Okay.” Helen couldn’t look at him. She didn’t entirely trust herself with Orion.

  “I’m going to start over,” he said, almost like he was warning her. Helen nodded and found herself laughing nervously again.

  “All right. Start at the start this time.” Helen steadied her voice, trying not to sound so giggly. It was annoyin
g.

  “Right. Here goes. I’m Head of the House of Rome, but because I was claimed by the House of Athens, the House of Rome has been hunting me since the day I was born. But for other very complicated reasons, the House of Athens has never accepted me, either.” Orion looked at Helen like he was forcing himself to jump off a cliff. “When I was ten my father, Daedalus, became an Outcast defending me from my cousins. He had to kill one of his own brother’s sons to protect me. Since then I haven’t been able to go anywhere near him. The Furies make us try to kill—”

  “Yeah.” Helen cut him off quickly so he wouldn’t have to spell out what he’d tried to do. Orion nodded at her, silently thanking her for stopping him.

  The image of trying to kill Jerry flashed through Helen’s mind and she pushed it away, unable to bear the thought of attacking her own father.

  “Everyone I’m related to wants me dead for one reason or another, and because of that I’ve been in hiding for most of my life. So, I’m sorry I got all aggro with you, but it isn’t easy for me to open up like this, because . . . well, it’s usually fatal for me to get close to anyone.”

  “You’ve been completely on your own since you were ten, haven’t you?” Helen asked in a hushed voice, still unable to wrap her head around everything he had told her. “Running from both sides of your family?”

  “And hiding the fact that I exist from the Hundred.” Orion looked at the ground to conceal the dark look in his eyes. “Daphne’s helped me out when she could. She was there the first time the House of Athens came to kill me. She tried to help my dad, and she saved my life. That paid her side of the blood debt to my House, even though I still owe the House of Atreus. Didn’t Daphne tell you any of this?”

  “Like I said, my mother and I don’t talk much.” Was it too much to think that Daphne should have given her a heads-up about this? Something still bothered Helen. “How did she find you and your dad to begin with?”

  “Daphne’s been on a mission to help the Rogues and the Outcasts for, like, twenty years now. She’s traveled all over the world, and because the Furies draw Scions together, whenever she finds a Scion she finds a confrontation. She has a ton of amazing stories. I can’t believe she never told you any of this.”