The Helicon Muses Omnibus: Books 1-4

by V. J. Chambers

  The land started to get rocky down here, big stones peering up through the snow.

  They took several more steps, and then Agler couldn’t see the ground ahead of them. He halted, holding onto Maddie so that she didn’t go on without him. “Careful, I think we’re close.”

  She looked ahead. “Yeah, I think that’s the edge.” She pointed. “The waterfall should be over there. Let’s just go down a little further…”

  He stopped her, arms around her waist. “Hold up. If we get too close and it’s slippery and icy, we’ll fall right off.”

  “There are rocks down there,” she said, struggling.

  He was struck by just how tiny she was. She seemed to be getting smaller and smaller by the day. He could almost encircle her waist with one of his hands. He rested his forehead on top of the hood of her coat. “Hey, Maddie, you really need to eat more.”

  She ripped herself out of his grasp, so suddenly that he couldn’t stop her. “What the hell?”

  “Watch out!” he said. “The edge is right there.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “Why would you bring that up right now? We’re having a romantic night out here, and you’re ruining it.”

  “I just worry about you. You know that.” He sighed. She had some weird thing about food and her weight. He remembered that a few years ago, she’d been a little overweight, and he guessed she was self-conscious about it. But honestly, when he thought back on the way she’d looked then, he just thought she was kind of adorable. He wouldn’t have minded if she looked that way now. Maddie was insistent on being a stick figure, though.

  “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “It can’t be good for you is all. You’re wasting away.”

  “I am not.” She turned her back on him. “I was going to show you the waterfall, but it doesn’t matter now. I’m not even in the mood to be around you. We might as well just go back to the dance.”

  “Maddie—”

  “Except now my dress is all ruined, because it’s soaked all the way up to my knees.”

  “I told you it would get wet if we came out here.” When it came down to it, his pants were soaked through too. When they’d been close, walking with their bodies touching, he’d hardly felt it, but now the chill was uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, well, next time that you’re making brilliant predictions about the future, ask yourself what’s going to happen if you start an argument about my weight.”

  He sighed. “You make it sound like I’m being critical of you.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m not. What I’m saying is I like you fine no matter what size you are. You don’t have to keep losing weight for me. I don’t want you to be this thin.”

  “See, you are criticizing me.”

  He let out a sigh of frustration. She was infuriating. “All right, fine, you win. Let’s stop talking about it.” He was worried about her, but he’d learned that it was better not to confront her directly about it, because it just made her shut down. It was much easier to try to coax her to eat when they were in public. She wouldn’t be so argumentative in front of her friends, and he could often convince her to put more in her stomach than she generally would. But even that wasn’t a solution, because he was fighting her. He wanted her to like herself just as much as he liked her, and he didn’t know how he was ever going to convince her that she was beautiful no matter what. She only valued herself if she was thin enough. And she was never thin enough.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “It’s all pointless now.”

  “Let’s just calm down.” He went to her and put his arm around her. He lowered his voice. “We can get out the wine you brought from the ball, have a few pulls. We’ll feel warmer, and everything can go back to the way it was.”

  “No, it can’t.” But she let him hold her.

  “You still have the wine?”

  “Yeah it’s in one of the pockets Sawyer sewed into my dress.”

  He started to explore her skirts. “Where is it?” he murmured, taking care to caress her legs and hips when he could feel them through the fabric.

  “Agler.” She was trying to sound annoyed, but she was failing.

  “Aha,” he said, as he found the wine. He pulled it out of the pocket. “One problem, though. What are we going to do about the cork?”

  “You don’t have your pocket knife?”

  “Oh. Maybe. Here, hold this.” He handed her the wine while he searched his own pockets.

  “What’s that?” said Maddie.

  He looked up. “What?”

  She nudged him in the direction she was looking. “Down over the edge? You see that?”

  There was a light emanating out of the side of Helicon—at least that’s what it looked like. “Is that where the cave is?”

  “I think so.”

  “Someone’s in there.”

  “Who could be in there?” she said. “Everyone’s at the ball.”

  “Well, maybe not everyone,” he said. He raised his voice. “Hello? Who’s down there?”

  “Don’t,” said Maddie. Her voice had dropped to a fierce whisper.

  There was no answer.

  He was whispering too. “What if whoever’s down there needs help?”

  “What if it’s people having sex or something?”

  “I doubt anyone climbed all the way down there just to get it on,” he said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Look, I’m just going to get a little closer—”

  “No, don’t.” She grabbed his arm. “Let it alone, Agler. We don’t—”

  BOOM!

  They both whirled.

  Because the noise had come from behind them, from far away, deep in the heart of Helicon.

  When they turned around, they saw a bright flash of light in the center of the ball. It was followed by another boom and another flash, this one accompanied by a shower of blue and silver sparks.

  The explosions kept happening.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. Boomboom.

  Maddie and Agler both took off running back for the ball. Their friends were there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sawyer acted on instinct, barely thinking about what he was doing. He dove onto Nora, knocking her down and covering her body with his own. And then they both watched as the explosions continued.

  They would have been pretty if Sawyer hadn’t been so terrified.

  In the center of the dance floor, bright detonations burst out, raining showers of sparks out around in a wide circle. They were multi-colored—blue, silver, red, green, and purple. The sparks shot high up into the air. They knocked down the icicle chandelier. It fell and shattered on the ground, and the shards reflected the brightly colored explosions, which just kept on coming. Sawyer had lost count, but he felt certain there had been at least ten.

  “Fireworks,” breathed Nora.

  He turned to look at her. “What?” He’d heard her say the word before. Last November, after sex once she’d said that she’d expected making love to be like fireworks. He wasn’t always familiar with all her mundane world ideas, but he’d figured the word was mostly self-explanatory, so he’d let it go.

  She pointed over his shoulder. “Fireworks. Those are fireworks.”

  He turned back to look at the explosions. Now the center of the dance floor was erupting in a shower of multi-colored sparks like a huge fountain of electricity.

  “You know about fireworks, right?”

  He shrugged. “Um, not really.”

  “They do it on the Fourth of July.”

  Now he was really confused. “Why? Why not on the sixth of February?”

  She laughed. “No, the Fourth of July is Independence Day. In America, anyway. Never mind.”

  The sparks were fizzling, slowly getting smaller and smaller. They sputtered, coughed out a few more bright lines of fire.

  And then… died.

  No more explosions. Just a big, blackened hole in the middle o
f the dance floor.

  Slowly, Sawyer got to his feet. He reached down to help Nora stand up as well. All around them, the other muses were righting themselves. There was a buzz of conversation.

  “They’re supposed to be pretty,” Nora was saying. “But you’re not supposed to set them off so close to people. It can be dangerous.”

  “You think?” Sawyer put his arm around her protectively. If anything had happened to Nora, he didn’t know what he’d do. He couldn’t handle the thought of life without her. He looked her up and down. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She peered around the gathering at the other muses present, frowning. “Who would do this?”

  * * *

  Later, Nora sat around the fire in the tweens and rebels enclave with Sawyer, Maddie, and Agler. The latter two had come running up almost immediately after the fireworks had stopped. They were concerned about everyone’s welfare and glad to see that no one had been hurt.

  In light of the fact that all the decorations had been ruined, the Winter Ball had unceremoniously ended. Phoebe Rain, the head of the council, had come out and told everyone to rest assured that they would get to the bottom of who had done this. Not to worry, but to go home. So everyone had trooped back to their various enclaves.

  When Nora and the others reached home, they changed out of their dressy clothes into comfortable attire and settled down together to talk. They were much too shaken up to sleep.

  “You think it’s an attack?” said Maddie.

  “Remember three years ago when the Influence was getting in because Dirk was ripping holes in the fabric of Helicon?” said Agler. “This looked kind of similar.”

  “No way,” said Nora. “Those were fireworks. The Influence is much worse than that.”

  “She’s right,” said Sawyer. “As scary as this was, it doesn’t seem to have caused any real damage.”

  “It still could be an attack,” said Maddie. “I mean, maybe it just went wrong?”

  “But who would attack Helicon during the Winter Ball?” said Agler.

  They exchanged a glance, all coming to the same conclusion at the same time.

  “Owen,” said Sawyer, looking down at his right hand. He was missing his ring finger there, because Owen had bewitched him into cutting it off. Sawyer clenched his hand into a fist.

  “We haven’t heard anything out of him in over a year,” said Agler. “He was obsessed with you, Nora. He can’t just have disappeared.”

  “That’s just it,” said Nora, “the last time we saw him, he wasn’t obsessed with me anymore.” The obsession had been a side effect of what Owen’s mother Nimue did to him. Nimue had wanted a muse child desperately. She wanted to use the muse magic for her nefarious schemes. She had tried to impregnate herself with a half-muse child, but—to her horror—the man she slept with in Helicon turned out not to be a muse, but the Greek god Dionysus. The product of their union was Owen, and he was useless to Nimue. He wasn’t a muse. So she had trained Owen for hundreds of years, keeping him on the isle of Avalon where he wouldn’t age, using all her power and influence to make Owen obsessed with finding a muse child and bringing that child to Nimue. When she thought Owen was ready, she had sent him to Helicon.

  Owen had indeed taken a muse child from Helicon to give to Nimue. But, though he was still obsessed because of Nimue’s training, he had grown to hate his mother. He pushed her out of a window in a tall tower, and—thinking her dead—fled into the mundane world with Nora. The two spent over ten years trying to find a way back into Helicon. It was only three ago that they’d managed it. Now Nora was at home in Helicon.

  But Owen had been exiled. He was dangerous, and he didn’t care about anyone but himself. He’d also been controlling and abusive towards Nora, because he’d never lost his obsession with her. However, when Owen confronted Nimue two years ago, she’d removed that obsession. Owen had tried to kill his mother yet again. He’d failed, and he might still be trying to kill Nimue. But he was no longer magically obsessed with Nora.

  “You think he just gave up?” said Maddie.

  “Well, the last we heard of him, he gave that contraption to Loki last year,” said Nora. Whatever it was, it had enabled Loki to suck away the muses’ powers. Owen had made it as a child in Helicon. He’d always been devious. “But he didn’t try to hurt me or get into Helicon.”

  “That’s true,” said Sawyer. “And he’s exiled anyway. He couldn’t have caused the explosion himself.”

  “Right,” said Maddie. “He was only able to affect things before because he had Daryl.” Daryl had been Maddie’s boyfriend. He was working with Owen and only pretending to care about Maddie. That way he could be close to the group and spy on Nora. But Owen had gotten fed up with Daryl when he developed real feelings for Maddie, and he’d sent Daryl to another dimension. No one knew where, and no one had seen him since.

  “So, he’d have to be working with someone again,” said Agler. “What about his friends from the security enclave? Kevin, Jed, and Otto? Do we still have any of that truth cordial that Loki gave you so that we can interrogate them again?”

  “I don’t think it’s Owen,” said Nora.

  “I just don’t think he’d go completely silent,” said Agler.

  “But maybe he would,” said Nora. “You don’t understand. Owen never cared about anything except himself. He was cruel to people. He used everyone that he came across. I was the only other person that mattered to him. But Nimue took that away from him. If he doesn’t care about me, he’d have no reason to come here. He wouldn’t do something like this unless it benefited him. And it doesn’t. At all.”

  Sawyer was staring at his hand. “How did it benefit him to take my fucking finger, Nora?”

  She grimaced. “That wasn’t about you. It was about me. He hurt you to make me cooperate with him.”

  “Bastard,” muttered Agler.

  “Look, those were fireworks,” said Nora. “Anyone who knows what they are wouldn’t think of them as dangerous. They’re entertainment. Kids love them. Owen knows this. He wouldn’t use fireworks to attack. He just wouldn’t think of them as a threat.”

  The others were quiet.

  “I think this was a prank,” she said. “Some younger tween’s idea of a funny joke.”

  “Joke?” said Sawyer. “I thought we were all going to die.”

  “Me too,” said Agler. “That was terrifying.”

  “Well…” Maddie was considering it. “No one actually did get hurt.”

  “Right,” said Nora. “It was meant to scare everyone, but not do any damage. There’s some thirteen-year-old out there laughing his head off in his tent. Mark my words.”

  “I don’t know,” said Agler. “I really think—”

  He was interrupted by Phoebe, her partner Coeus Dust, and Alexander Night, head of the security enclave, who had entered under the arch.

  Phoebe raised her voice. “Attention all tweens. We have received a tip about the perpetrator of tonight’s activities, and we will be searching for the evidence now. We’d ask any tweens already in their tents to please exit them now. No one will leave until our search is complete.”

  “See?” said Nora.

  But her comment was drowned out in a rush of frenzied conversation from the other tweens.

  “Quiet!” yelled Phoebe.

  The conversation died down.

  Tweens were coming out of their tents, some in couples, only wrapped up in blankets.

  Phoebe and the others strode past them, barely paying them any mind. They seemed to know exactly where they were going.

  Silently, all the tweens watched as the adult muses made their way over to the far east side of the enclave, back into the woods. There were tween tents back there, scattered amongst the trees.

  Nora and the others stood up, craning their necks to see where Phoebe was heading.

  A soft buzz of conversation began again.

  “None of the younger tweens live back there,”
Nora murmured. “Why are they going back there?”

  The adults disappeared into the trees.

  Everyone waited.

  And only a few moments later, Phoebe and the others emerged. Coeus had his arms full of fireworks—bottle rockets, roman candles, and fire crackers. None of them had been set off yet. All of them looked brand new.

  “Lute Thundercloud is not in his tent,” called Phoebe. “Does anyone know his whereabouts?”

  Everyone talked at once.

  “Lute?” said Sawyer, shaking his head. “No way. He didn’t do this.”

  “Quiet!” Phoebe yelled again.

  She waited for silence to descend.

  “One at a time,” said Phoebe. She pointed. “Genevieve?”

  “I saw him with Rufus Twigg earlier.”

  “I’m here!” called Rufus. “I haven’t seen him since we left the ball.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Phoebe. “We will find him. He has a lot to answer for.”

  Sawyer was still shaking his head. “No way. No way.”

  Nora gave him a funny look. “I didn’t think you really knew Lute.”

  Sawyer looked away. “Uh, I don’t really.”

  * * *

  The next evening, the council meeting was packed full of muses. There was a council meeting every day after dinner around the main fire pit, but most muses didn’t attend as the council meetings were woefully boring. Half of the enclaves got into spitting matches with the others about who was more important, and so most meetings devolved into the same parties bickering with each other.

  But today, the council was going to deal with Lute Thundercloud, who’d been officially charged with setting off the fireworks at the ball. Everyone was excited about that.

  When they’d awoken that morning, all the snow had been gone, so everything was back to normal now. Even the big, black burnt scar from the fireworks had melted away. It had only been the icy floor of the ball that had been scorched, apparently.

  Nora and the others all sat on benches around the fire pit. They were just finishing up their dessert, which had been an assortment of options. Nora had cookies and cherries jubilee. But Sawyer was eating some mango mousse. The cooking muses didn’t plan their dishes. They just made whatever inspired them. So that meant that the desserts often didn’t really “go together.” No one cared, however. It was all delicious.