The Helicon Muses Omnibus: Books 1-4

by V. J. Chambers

  Every day, she thought about having to do it, and she thought that she wouldn’t be able to. She wouldn’t be able to eat those horrible foods, to shove them in her mouth and chew them up and swallow them. It was wrong for her to eat them. She knew that.

  She didn’t say anything to the nymphs. She knew that they wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t that the foods were wrong in and of themselves. They were totally okay for other people to eat. But Maddie was super sensitive to them. They would make her balloon out and become huge again.

  And if she was huge again…

  Well, if she was fat, really fat, she didn’t think that she wanted to live. She was in terror of gaining weight. Abject terror of it.

  But the terror of eating was worse.

  She had spent years of her life getting herself under control. A long time ago, she’d been a different Maddie. That Maddie was completely unrestrained. That Maddie ate whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She ate more than she needed. That Maddie had not only been fat, but she’d been a disgusting person with no discipline. Morally insufficient. Inferior. Undeserving.

  It hadn’t been easy for Maddie to change herself from that kind of person. She’d worked very, very hard to get to the point where she ruled over her hunger and her body with an iron will. Why, the entire first year had been touch and go. She remembered that she’d been dating Daryl back then, and that she’d occasionally had trouble following her newly imposed strictures on her diet. And after Daryl had gone missing, she’d rebounded bad, holing up in her tent and doing nothing but eating desserts. Chocolate. Chocolate was her downfall.

  She’d cut it completely out of her diet. She didn’t touch the stuff anymore.

  Cultivating that kind of control, well, it had taken work. She had to create restrictions in her brain that kept her from indulging. When she saw something she wanted, she told herself over and over again that only nasty, horrible, fat girls wanted that. After a while, she didn’t want it anymore. She was neither nasty, nor horrible, nor fat, so she had completely turned the want off.

  Now, she had to eat things…

  One night, the nymphs brought her brownies and fudge and ice cream, and she had to eat it.

  The whole time she did, it was like there were bombs going off in her head, voices jeering at her. Nasty. Fat. Weakling. Slob. Horrible.

  When it was over, Maddie huddled in a corner and sobbed. She was consumed with so much guilt. She knew she had to eat this food to help the nymphs, but all she could think of was what they must think of her. She probably ate it too fast. They were probably all thinking about what a glutton she was. They were probably all disgusted by the way she inhaled all that food. Maddie was disgusted with herself. The guilt ate at her.

  She had never been so miserable in all her life.

  Never.

  As more time passed, things began to happen to her body. She started to gain weight—an alarming amount of it all at once, in fact. Her clothes clung to her in funny places, her stomach swelled. Even her face seemed to be ballooning.

  When the nymphs brought her food after the weight gain, she tried to only eat half of it. She was gaining too fast, and she needed to slow it down.

  But Dakaste only laughed at her, telling her it was water weight, and that it would all even itself out if Maddie would keep eating. In fact, Dakaste thought Maddie should eat more than she was.

  Maddie wasn’t participating in regular meals, only in the gorging nighttime sessions. Dakaste said that Maddie’s body was weak, that she needed enough calories to keep herself moving, plus extra to heal all the damage that had been done to her body by starving it for so long.

  But that was simply far too much for Maddie to handle. Eating at night was all she could do. She would not also eat during the day. “And I don’t want to eat the rest of this food tonight either,” she begged.

  But the nymphs were adamant. They needed more power. They needed her to give in completely.

  She ate the rest of the meal. But she didn’t like it, and she didn’t think she ever would.

  Dakaste tried to talk to her about the benefits of a hedonistic lifestyle, why it was virtuous and good to give in to your desires. “Eating is pleasure. Why not have pleasure?”

  “Because all pleasure is paid for with pain,” said Maddie.

  “All pleasure?” Dakaste shook her head. “What pain does your dancing cause, little one?”

  Maddie just pressed her lips together. Dakaste didn’t understand. Dancing was pleasure, but it was also necessity. It had to be done to inspire the mundane world. But overindulgence in food? No one needed to do that.

  Even so, she kept eating, and the nymphs grew stronger and stronger. Maddie began to put on weight as well, and Dakaste was right that the water weight did even itself out. She felt less cold, and her hair seemed to be growing better. But she was still worried. She didn’t like how much weight she’d put on. She really didn’t.

  Still, after being exposed to the fear of eating every night, she had to admit that she was growing less and less frightened of it as time went on. Sometimes, she gulped down the food without even feeling a hint of anxiety.

  She was curing herself, she realized. Helping the nymphs to stop Nimue and learning to eat again all at the same time. And she felt pleased with her own progress.

  * * *

  In Helicon, time passed for Nora as well. The days were balmy, warm, and sweet. For the most part, she was carefree and happy. From time to time, she did look at Sawyer and Lute together and feel a wistful bit of sadness. But she wasn’t angry or bitter about the situation. She had forgiven Sawyer for hurting her, and there wasn’t anything that she could do about it now.

  Also, from time to time, her thoughts wandered to Maddie, and she hoped her friend was okay. She and Agler sometimes spent time together, talking about what Maddie might be up to. They wished that they could communicate with her, but apparently, it wasn’t recommended by the nymphs for Maddie to have contact with her old life for now. They wondered what Maddie would be like when she came back. Would she be completely cured? Would she still be angry with them? Would they have their old Maddie back?

  But the things that occupied Nora’s mind most—more often than they should have—were thoughts of Owen. She knew that Phoebe had decided that it was a bad idea to see Owen, and Nora agreed. But Halloween, the next cross-quarter day, was coming, and she could get back into the mundane world if she wanted. She knew where to meet Owen. His message had said for her to come. He had said that he wanted to warn her about a danger to Helicon.

  She couldn’t help it. She wanted to know what that danger was.

  And so, sometimes, she considered going to the mundane world. But she knew that would be a terrible idea. She was so sure of it, in fact, that she didn’t even tell anyone that she thought it. And to try to prevent herself from going, once October rolled around, she began working on an elaborate Halloween costume, something that would make her feel stupid if she visited Owen wearing it.

  She decided that she would dress up as Hel, the goddess of the Norse underworld Nifhel. Hel was fearsome. She looked like a regular woman on one side, but the other side of her body was dead and shriveled—skeletal. Nora thought she could achieve the effect with some molds and makeup. So that became her project for all of October. She slaved away in the visual arts enclave, pouring herself into making this costume. It was going to be so elaborate and so accurate that she’d never want to step foot outside of Helicon.

  Finally, after weeks of work, she got the costume finished. And by then, Halloween was only two days away. She felt strange, the costume done and nothing to do, so she threw herself into helping with the decorations for Halloween. All over Helicon, there would be macabre and gruesome tableaus—so realistic an lifelike that they’d make lots of muses let out bloodcurdling screams throughout the night.

  Nora helped work on one in which a mad doctor was using a saw on his patient’s head. She was a little confused about it, though. They
didn’t have doctors in Helicon. She asked one of the designers of the tableau, who informed her that the man wasn’t a doctor. Instead, he was an evil spirit called Saw Bones from one of the stories that a muse had created in the story enclave. “My understanding,” said the muse, “is that it went out on an inspiration thread, and people in the mundane world began associating doctors with this spirit, going so far as to having them wear long white coats and everything.”

  Nora didn’t think that was why people in the mundane world called doctors Saw Bones. She thought it had something to do with amputations. But she couldn’t be sure, of course. People in the mundane world weren’t aware of inspiration threads, after all.

  Later that night, Nora was trying to fall asleep in her hammock, and she had a thought that made her sit straight up in bed.

  She was a total idiot. There was no way that a Halloween costume was going to prevent her from going to the mundane world, because it was Halloween there too.

  “How could I have been so stupid?” she moaned. She flopped back on the bed, and she began to worry. She knew that it wasn’t wise to go and see Owen, but she was tempted to do it. Maybe if she brought someone with her…

  No, because the last time she’d faced Owen with other people, Daryl had been sent to an abandoned dimension for decades, and Sawyer had lost his finger. If she did this, she’d do it alone.

  But she wasn’t going to do it. She wasn’t.

  The morning of Halloween dawned crisp and cool. As was the custom, the weather had been altered to match the season. It was fall outside, the leaves on the trees red, orange, and yellow. The cooler air had put a spring in everyone else’s step as they prepared for the festivities that night. But Nora was starting to dread Halloween. She couldn’t decide what to do.

  On the one hand, seeing Owen was dangerous. Everyone said so, and if anyone knew she was thinking about it, they would stop her. She couldn’t trust anything out of Owen’s mouth, so he was probably lying about there being danger. He probably just wanted to hurt her.

  On the other hand, Owen did care about Helicon. It was the only place that he’d ever considered home, and he would do anything he could to keep the place whole and intact. Nora knew that he fully intended to come back if he could. If he had a warning to issue, he might realize that only Nora would take it seriously. She was the only person who’d ever cared about him.

  She tried to shove the whole thing out of her mind. She wasn’t going to the mundane world. She’d promised Phoebe and that was that.

  The day wore on. She helped with some more of the Halloween preparations. Sawyer was helping Lute and other music enclave muses to set up for the music that night. Halloween was the one night of the year in which all of the muses plugged in their instruments, and there were lots of speakers, microphones, and cables that needed lugging down to the main stage.

  She went to dinner at the main fire pit, which was a very light snack of sandwiches, because there would be so much food and candy at the Halloween celebration later. She had even resolved to stay for the council meeting, but Phoebe announced that it was postponed until after the holiday.

  So, Nora went back to her tent and began wrangling with her costume. It was pretty complicated. She had to glue a lot of stuff to her bare skin, so it took quite some time. After that, she had a lot of makeup to put on. She really lost herself in that. She almost enjoyed this part more than the actual celebration. Getting ready was a great deal of fun.

  When she was finally finished, she took a last look at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a wispy white gown. Half of her body was covered in white makeup, and the other half looked as if her skin had been stretched tight over her bone. Fake cheekbones and a fake elbow jutted against the papery fake skin. She looked positively spooky, and she grinned. She loved it. This was the first year that she hadn’t cared if she looked pretty or sexy for a guy, and she thought it had freed up her imagination rather nicely.

  She stepped out of her tent into the gathering darkness. The tweens and rebels enclave wasn’t really all that decorated. Most of the tweens were too lazy for that. There were some orange and black ribbons tied to the archway, nothing more.

  She felt a little twinge of sadness, because she knew that usually, she’d go find Maddie, but Maddie wasn’t there. Nora squared her shoulders and left the enclave on her own.

  Outside, there were rows and rows of glowing jack-o-lanterns flanking the path down to the main stage. Some of them had faces on them, like regular jack-o-lanterns. Others were far more detailed, sculptures of witches and ghouls. Others depicted scenes—castles, wolf’s faces, bats on the full moon.

  Spiderwebs clung to the grass, to the decorations. In the distance, the first strains of an electric guitar wailed through the night. Nora hugged herself, feeling joyous anticipation fill her. She loved Halloween. She loved Helicon. She wasn’t going anywhere. She’d stay here the whole time. Forget Owen.

  She ran into Sawyer and Lute while she was getting drinks. Their costumes matched—something medieval. Sawyer was a princess and Lute was a prince or something. But when she offered her compliments on the princess costume, Sawyer informed her that he was “Guinevere, thank you very much.”

  “Oh,” said Nora giggling. “Well, of course you are.” She supposed that meant Lute was Lancelot, or maybe King Arthur.

  They all sipped at cinnamon ciders, which were bitingly spicy and more than a little alcoholic.

  Lute rolled his eyes, resting his hands on the hilt of his sword. “He says he’s not the girl in the relationship, but he insists on dressing up as Guinevere.”

  Sawyer gave Lute a nasty look. “Nora,” he said, and his voice was tight, “let’s go dance.” He grabbed her hand and tugged her away, leaving Lute behind.

  “What?” said Nora, feeling confused. “Are you mad at Lute?”

  “No,” said Sawyer. “Nice going, dressing up as Hel, incidentally. That doesn’t take me right back to nearly being dead or anything.”

  She yanked her hand out of his. “You’re in a bad mood tonight.”

  “Whatever,” said Sawyer. He threw up his hands and stalked off.

  Nora had no idea what that was all about, but she was supremely happy, she realized, not to be in a relationship. She realized that, since being single, she hadn’t gotten into any arguments. Well, unless you counted the ones with Maddie about her eating disorder. Which really shouldn’t count. Anyway, the fact remained that being single meant that life was much less full of drama, and she actually liked that.

  She danced by herself for a while, until she ran into Agler, who was dressed as a pirate. He lifted his eye patch. “Oh, it’s you, Nora. Bottle of rum?” He held out a big earthen jug.

  “Oh gods, you’re not drinking that all by yourself, are you?”

  “I’m sharing,” said Agler. But from the slur in his voice, she could tell he was already three sheets to the wind. He’d probably be passed out before midnight.

  One less person to stop you from seeing Owen, whispered a voice in her mind, unbidden, unwelcome.

  “Shut up,” she said aloud.

  Agler stumbled backwards. “What’d I do?”

  “Not you, Agler,” she said.

  “You okay?” He staggered back closer to her.

  She giggled. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She linked arms with him. “Let me help you find someplace to sit down, huh?”

  * * *

  Maddie scrambled off the bed as Nimue swept into her tree house. It was evening, and Maddie hadn’t seen any of the nymphs today. She didn’t always see them during the day. They pretended to be weak whenever Nimue could see them, so that she wouldn’t know that they weren’t wasting away from a lack of power. However, Maddie knew what day it was today, and she was worried. It was Halloween, and this was the day that Nimue had claimed that nymphs would be drained of energy, the day that she would be able to force Maddie to drink that horrible tea.

  Maddie had been pressuring the nymphs to do something before n
ow. She knew that they were running out of time.

  But the nymphs kept putting it off. One more night of Maddie gorging herself on food and they’d all be stronger, they said.

  Last night, Maddie had been frantic. They had to do something. Nimue wasn’t going to wait any longer.

  The nymphs had assured her that everything would work out fine. They hadn’t been the slightest bit concerned. And they’d made Maddie eat the biggest meal she’d had to consume yet, so rich and enormous it had made Maddie feel queasy after finishing it. She’d been exhausted and gone to sleep right after, too full to even sit up.

  But now it was night again, and Nimue was there. Maddie stared at the woman, at her cruel, blue eyes, and she was afraid.

  “You know what day it is today, Maddie?” said Nimue.

  Maddie nodded.

  Nimue held out a mug of tea. “Drink this.”

  “No,” said Maddie.

  In a flash, Nimue was across the room. She raised her her hand and the mug floated through the air to Maddie. It hovered directly in front of her face.

  “Drink,” said Nimue.

  Maddie tried to back away, but her feet were glued to the floor. Nimue’s magic was keeping her in place. “Help!” she cried out.

  “Oh, don’t think your nymphs are coming for you,” said Nimue. “They’re helpless and weak now. I locked them up all up in their houses to die.”

  Maddie’s heart started to pound. That couldn’t be true, could it? The nymphs were actually strong, stronger than ever. Weren’t they? If so, where were they? “Help!” she called again.

  “No one’s going to help you.” The mug soared over to Maddie’s mouth, and it began to tip over.

  Maddie could see the gleam of the liquid inside, smell the foul odor of the tea. She clamped her lips together.

  Nimue pointed at her and made a gesture in the air.

  To her horror, Maddie felt her jaws being pried open against her will.