“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 classical Spanish guitar, because we lived in Spain for so long, and American finger picking. I actually haven’t played at all since we left Cádiz.” 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 compassionate guy. God. 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 hellscapes 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 hell, 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 compassion 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 hell. 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 gods, 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 he
rs. 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.”