Chapter Twelve
Helen heard something up on the roof. She ran up the stairs to the widow’s walk and threw the door open as fast as she could, but the widow’s walk was empty. She sighed, relieved. She didn’t want any of the Delos kids sleeping on her roof anymore. She especially didn’t want Lucas listening to her while she had nightmares, and she had just woken up from another horrible one. She looked around at the empty widow’s walk, feeling desolate and lonely, but she wasn’t sure if that was because of a dream or because of her waking life.
She went back down to her bedroom and forced herself to notice the writing on the mirror. Then she wrote I SAW IT AGAIN in Claire’s green eyeliner and made herself stare at the words. That was two nights in a row she’d seen the river she couldn’t remember. She was racking her brain trying to picture it, but her mind’s eye kept looking away. Suddenly, she spotted her own reflection in the mirror and gasped.
Her cheeks were sunken in, her nightshirt was pulled out of shape, and her arms and legs were covered in icky black muck. River muck.
She had seen a river with black banks and gray water. She could remember thirst and not being able to drink. But why was it such a struggle to remember anything else that had happened? She focused her thoughts to try and bring the memory back.
Her thirst was tormenting her so she had gone down to the water. She leaned over the foul banks of black mud and saw pale, crippled fish bumping around clumsily, as if they had forgotten how to swim. She backed away from the river, refusing to drink that water even if she died of thirst with the sound of its current rushing in her ears. . . .
Helen ran to the bathroom and threw herself into the shower, rubbing at the black mud and rinsing her mouth out with gulp after gulp of water. She felt polluted. She scrubbed until her skin turned red and her eyes were stinging from being open in the spray.
When she got out of the shower, she dragged her sheets and nightshirt over to the washing machine. There was no blood this time, but Helen doubted she’d be able to get out that river mud. She put a half a cup of bleach into the washing machine and made sure the water was hot, hoping that she would be able to salvage something. Then she went back upstairs to clean all the dirty footprints she’d tracked through the house.
It was early Saturday morning, and usually her father would be home during the day and working at night, but he had opted to work a double to give Kate the day off. Helen had a feeling that the two of them were avoiding each other. She had tried to talk to Kate about it the night before, after Claire left to go to the bonfire, but she just didn’t have the energy to push Kate to open up. Everything felt duller to Helen. Muffled, like her feelings were in storage, buried under mounds of packaging peanuts.
Helen went to her room and switched gravity off and on, alternately floating up and thumping down until she figured out how to swing her legs under her and land on the balls of her feet instead of all over the damn place. She worked a bit with the air currents, but she couldn’t do anything more than finesse her position as she floated or she risked blowing her room to pieces. After a few hours, the constantly ringing phone drove her out of doors. The Delos family wanted to know why she wasn’t at their house yet for practice, and they wouldn’t stop calling until she answered.
Helen had been thinking. She just couldn’t see the point of learning how to swing a sword if she couldn’t be wounded by weapons, and she didn’t need to fight if she could simply fly away. She knew that eventually Hector or Jason would come looking for her at home, so she wandered outside with no clear destination, hoping that a little speed would help clear her head. She was in jeans and a sweater, not exactly running gear, but it didn’t matter. As soon as she was out of the town center she went off Polpis Road, heading east. She didn’t care where she ended up, as long as it was away from people. As she ran she realized that she had come this way once before, and although she didn’t want to think about her first flight and everything that came after it, she knew it was the perfect place to find the solitude she was after.
The sun was going down and she was grateful to be numb enough to experience something beautiful without her depressing thoughts barging in and ruining it. Looking around, she saw a familiar lighthouse. She glanced down at the sand under her feet and wondered if it was the same sand that had cradled her and Lucas when they were in so much pain. When they had died for a moment, she realized.
As soon as the thought occurred to her, she knew it was true. They had done more than just suffer terrible injury that night, they had started to cross over. Or at least Lucas had. And she had followed him down to stop him. And there was a river . . . Wait, what river?
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hector shouted.
He was furious. He stalked up the beach, his legs eating up far more distance than a human’s could as he came toward her.
“How did you find me?” Helen sputtered.
“Your moves aren’t so hard to anticipate,” he sneered. “Now get your ass to my house.”
“I don’t want to practice anymore. It’s pointless,” Helen called over her shoulder as she turned on her heel to walk away. “I just want to be left alone.”
“You want to be left alone, huh, Princess? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way,” he said as he grabbed her shoulders and spun her around. That did it for her. She gave one hysterical laugh—it was either that or start crying—and shoved Hector away from her. Hard.
“What are you going to do? What? Are you going to beat me to death? You can’t! You’re not strong enough,” Helen said as she hit him repeatedly on the shoulders, trying to instigate a fight. “So go get a sword. Go ahead. Oh, wait, I forgot. That doesn’t hurt me, either. So what are you going to do, you big bully? What do you have to teach me?”
“Humility,” he said quietly. He moved fast, but he was also bending the light funny the way Lucas did. While she was still trying to focus her eyes, pissed that she hadn’t even considered that Hector could have this talent as well, Hector grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and started walking toward the water.
Enraged, Helen used her full strength against him for the first time. She didn’t care how much she hurt him. She pushed until she unlocked herself from Hector’s grip. She heard his arm break as she physically separated herself from him. Then she changed states to fly away. As she summoned a wind to take her away, he grabbed her with his other hand. His more dominant hand. Helen realized, a bit too late, that Hector had allowed her to break his left arm so that she would chose weightlessness—weightlessness and momentary weakness. Before she could digest what he was doing and shift back to the gravity-state to get enough purchase to push him off, he dragged her easily into the water where her weight mattered not at all.
Hector walked right into the water and trudged down, down, down until they were both completely submerged under what seemed to Helen like fathoms of dark water. She struggled uselessly. This was Hector’s element and he had complete control. He could even speak and be heard underwater.
“You aren’t the only one with talents, Princess,” he said.
There were no bubbles streaming out of his mouth, just clear speech. He could breathe, he could talk, he could walk on the seabed as if he was walking on firm ground. Helen finally understood why Hector terrified her so much. He was an ocean creature, and she was deathly afraid of the ocean.
Ever since she’d almost drowned as a child, Helen had suspected that the ocean had it in for her, but she’d never told anyone that because she was pretty sure they would think she was crazy. Now, almost a decade later, as she looked into Hector’s blank blue eyes, she knew she had been right. Helen bucked and squirmed under Hector’s relentless grip. Great gouts of bubbles flew from her mouth as she screamed in soundless panic. She scratched at his face and kicked her feet, but there was nothing she could do to make him let her go. She was going to drown.
Acid fizzed in her veins and the edges of her vision smudged as she started to black out. As her eyes closed, she felt him tug on her legs as he towed her back to shore. He hauled her out of the water by an ankle and swung her over his head and down onto the sand like a mallet, hard enough to dislodge the liquid from her lungs. She puked burning salt water and coughed until her inner ears stung and she could hear the blood thumping in her head.
“If you had been training with me today, you would have known that you can use your bolts underwater,” he said, yanking on his broken arm to straighten out the bones with a sickening crack. He screamed and fell to his knees, panting for a moment before continuing through gritted teeth. “But you didn’t show up for practice.”
They sat next to each other on the sand for a while, both of them too injured to move. As they healed, the setting sun seemed to give up on the day and jump headlong into the water. The sky grew dark.
“I thought you were descended from Apollo,” Helen rasped.
Her vocal cords were still damaged, but she didn’t need to say anything more, anyway. Hector didn’t come off like the smartest member of the Delos clan, but Helen was starting to suspect that even if he didn’t spend as much time reading books as Cassandra did, he was every bit as clever as the rest of his family.
“A minor sea goddess called a Nereid mixed with our House somewhere along the way. There are a lot of minor gods and spirits of the water or the woods still running around here and there, and things happen over thousands of years. None of the House lines are purely descended from one god or another anymore, and all the younger generation of Scions have more talents than their parents,” he answered.
“Why is that?”
“Cassandra thinks it has something to do with the Fates wanting the Scions to acquire more talents and become more powerful so they can rule Atlantis, but personally I just think it’s because we’re all mutts. My great-great-grandfather sleeps with a nymph, and I get to walk underwater. You don’t need the Fates to explain that one.”
“Is that how you knew I can drown? Because you have power over water?”
“That was common sense. And I don’t have power over water, I’m just at home in it,” he said. He turned to look her in the eye. When he continued speaking it was in a tone that was excruciatingly similar to the voice Lucas used when he’d taught her to fly, and it tugged at Helen. “You don’t think like a fighter yet. You have all these amazing talents—talents most Scions would trade half the years of their lives for—but you can’t use them because you don’t think tactically. Just stop and use your head for a second. The ocean isn’t a weapon, but it can kill. The air isn’t a weapon, but if I were to deprive you of it, you would die. The earth isn’t a weapon . . .” he began.
“But if I were to slam into it hard enough . . . I get it,” she finished for him, swallowing hard and staring out at the unforgiving waves.
“Water is your Achilles’ heel. It’s the one element you fear because you have no control over it.”
Helen didn’t know how he had figured that out, but she knew he was right. Somehow, even when she had been ignorant of her abilities, she had known deep down on an unconscious level that she had less to fear from three of the four elements. She could command the air and summon winds, she could manipulate the gravity of the earth, and she could easily tolerate the heat of fire because in order for her to create lightning she had to be able to withstand temperatures that were hotter than any flame. But water was the one element that rendered her completely helpless. Finally, she understood her own fear, even if she wasn’t any closer to conquering it.
“How could you have known that about me?” Helen asked, slightly awed.
“Because I’ve been trained to think tactically and find my opponent’s weaknesses since the day I was born. You haven’t. There are so many ways to kill a person, Helen. You think you’re safe because you passed Cassandra’s test with the sword, but you’re not,” Hector said, his voice thick with frustration and worry. “I know you’re still in shock, but I don’t have time to wait for you to get comfortable with what you are. People are coming for you. You have to grow up, and you have to do it now or a lot of people are going to die. So go home. Eat something and get some rest. You look sick and I don’t want Luke blaming that on me. But tomorrow you come to train. No more excuses.”
Without waiting for a response, Hector stood up and left her alone on the dark beach. She fiddled with her heart necklace, running the charm along her lower lip as she sat there feeling ashamed of how she had acted. Her clothes were heavy with water, but she didn’t wring them out. She felt like she deserved to be waterlogged and uncomfortable a little longer.
Obviously, she had to keep training with Hector, but that meant she had to go to the Delos house. That meant she had to see Lucas, and she absolutely could not do that. No matter how she turned it over in her mind she felt like she was choking whenever she thought about having to see him every day, knowing that he was forcing himself to be nice to her, that he probably pitied her. She still couldn’t figure out how she could have been so wrong about Lucas in the first place, and it stuck inside her like a splinter that can’t be found and dug out. She didn’t expect him to fall at her feet or anything, but to go from holding her hand everywhere they went to saying he would never touch her? How could that be?
Unable to sit still with these thoughts in her head, Helen jumped up into the air with a little cry and let an easterly wind take her out over the water. For a few heartbeats she hung in a calm envelope of air as the stars switched on, desperately sucking up the beauty of that experience like it was emotional Novocain.
When she was calmer, she circled higher and hitched a ride on a steady westerly gust that brought her back over the island. She was not a graceful flyer yet—in fact she was barely competent—but if she didn’t think about it too much she knew what to do to move herself along. She had no clear idea where to go, but suddenly she was freezing cold and in need of comfort. Without making a conscious choice, she found herself circling over Claire’s house.
Helen alit in Claire’s front yard, and then realized that in her condition she couldn’t just go up and ring the bell. She was soaking wet and shaking with cold. Mr. and Mrs. Aoki would call her father immediately if they laid eyes on her like this.
Circling the house on foot, Helen peeked inside the windows, trying to figure out where Claire was. She fished her cell phone out of her jeans to call Claire and get her to come outside, and then smacked herself on the forehead when she saw that her two-day-old phone had been ruined by the salt water. She heard Claire yelling at her mother in Japanese as she stomped upstairs to her room. Claire’s bedroom light switched on, and she slammed her door shut behind her.
It was a terrible way to come out to Claire, and Helen was vaguely aware of that fact as she floated toward the window and saw her best friend sitting on her bed with her mouth hanging open. Helen waited for her to scream, but when Claire didn’t, she motioned to the locked window.
“Let me in,” she said urgently through her chattering teeth.
“Oh, damn it. You are a vampire,” Claire said. She had a disappointed but completely unsurprised expression on her face.
“What the hell? No! Just open the window, Gig, I’m freezing!” Helen said in a loud whisper. Claire dragged herself off her bed and walked to the window with her shoulders slumping dejectedly.
“I know it’s popular and all that, but I really don’t want you to suck my blood. It’s just so unsanitary!” Claire whined pitifully as she opened the window.
She put a protective hand over her bare throat, but she still let Helen inside despite the danger, and that fact was not lost on Helen.
“Oh, for the love of Pete, I’m not a frigging vampire, Gig! See? No fangs! No crazy eyes.” Helen lifted up her upper lip to expose entirely normal incisors, and then opened her eyes extra wide to show a complete lack of bloodlust.
“All right! But it was a valid question, considering the circumstances!” Claire replied defensively as Helen wafted through the window and then transitioned into the gravity-state in front of her.
“All right! I agree, it’s a valid concern,” Helen conceded, but something was wrong. “I just flew in your window. Why aren’t you more surprised?”
“I’ve known you could fly since we were kids. I even pushed you off your roof once to make sure. Sorry about that, by the way,” she said sheepishly.
“You did push me!” Helen breathed, suddenly remembering the whole incident in a flash.
They had been maybe seven years old and goofing off on Helen’s widow’s walk. Helen fell, but she never hit the ground. She’d sort of settled to earth like a leaf falling from a tree. Claire swore up and down that Helen had slipped, but Helen never remembered losing her balance, and because of the way Claire looked at her for weeks afterward, Helen had suspected something fishy before putting it out of her mind. Now it all made sense. Helen stared at Claire, speechless.
“What? I didn’t think you’d die or anything! Long story short—I saw you not fall down my stairs the day before when you actually did slip, so I needed to test my theory,” Claire said as if it all made perfect sense.
“By pushing me off the roof?”
“You have no idea how angry I’ve been with you since then for keeping it from me! You can fly, Lennie, and you never told me!” Claire yelled, completely shifting the argument away from herself, but Helen decided that she should allow it, considering Claire’s obvious hurt.
“I didn’t know until a few weeks ago!” Helen insisted.
“You are such a liar!” Claire said, jabbing a fist against her hip.
“It’s true! My mom put a curse on me when I was a baby so I wouldn’t be able to use my . . . Aw, crap! It would be so much easier if I was a vampire. Then you’d just understand!” Helen huffed, frustrated and feeling misunderstood. She paced around for a bit, raking her fingers through her tangled hair, before she was able to put her thoughts in order.
“Hergie made you read the Iliad, right? You remember how all the heroes had superhuman strength and they could do all kinds of things that normal people can’t?” she asked.
“Yeah. That’s because they were demigods. But that wasn’t real,” Claire said like it was obvious. Then she got it. “Oh, my . . .”
“I’m one of those heroes’ descendents. We’re called Scions, and I have a whole bunch of powers—stuff you wouldn’t believe. But I had no idea what I was or what I could do until just days ago. I wish I could tell you everything, but I don’t know what I can or can’t say. Please, Gig. I know it sounds insane, but I’ve never lied to you. You just have to believe me.”
“Okay,” Claire said, nodding her head once and looking Helen directly in the eye, as if she finally felt like she was getting the respect she deserved. “I’ve had this mostly figured out for a while now, you know. You found out that you were a demigod—how cool is that by the way?—when the Delos family moved here. Because they’re like you. I knew that as soon as I saw them. I just didn’t know what you all were.”
“See?” Helen said with a flustered smile. “That’s why I had to tell you, I need to be able to talk to you about all this so you can help me figure it out. But you can’t tell the Delos family I told you until I find out if that’s okay or not.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can bluff, or pretend I guessed on my own. I sort of did, anyway,” Claire said with a satisfied smile. Then something occurred to her and made her switch to a more serious attitude. “Where have you been, by the way? And why are you such a damn mess?”
Helen was about to explain what happened between her and Hector when Claire’s phone buzzed. Claire checked the text and then started typing in a response.
“It’s Jason. I have to tell him you’re here, he’s been looking for you all day,” Claire told Helen. The phone buzzed again.
“It’s him.” She read the screen. “He wants me to keep you here. He’s on his way over.”
“No! I’m not ready to talk to any of them yet!” Helen exclaimed, backing away.
“Len, he’s really worried about you, they all are.”
“I gotta get out of here,” Helen stammered. She ran a hand over her face and turned for the window.
“Where are you going?” Claire asked, trying to block Helen’s path with an outstretched arm. “I’ll tell him to go away if you want, but you have to let me know that you’ll be okay.”
“I’m just going home. Promise you won’t let him follow me, okay?”
Claire promised and gave Helen a hug. Then Helen jumped out the window, transitioning states in midair. She heard Claire gasp as she flew away. A minute later Helen was landing in her front yard and heading right for the stairs to take a shower and warm up.
He was waiting for her behind the front door. He swept her feet out from under her before he even bothered to slam the front door shut. Everything went completely dark, darker than any night, any blindfold, or any closed room that Helen had ever experienced. She was enveloped in a disorienting blackness that made her feel so dizzy and cut off from the rest of the world that she couldn’t even remember the layout of her own house anymore. Where were the stairs? The furniture? She didn’t know. It was as if she had fallen into a black hole.
Helen was so shocked she didn’t have time to roll over before she felt a very large man cover her from behind. He took her head between his hands and wrenched it to the side, trying to break her neck. She grabbed on to his wrists and pulled them outward, trying to get him to release his grip, but he had leverage on his side. Her neck muscles strained dangerously, and she felt herself start to panic for the second time in an hour. But it was that recent brush with death that informed her as she kicked and struggled. The thought of using her lightning made her stomach turn, but she knew she had no choice.
Helen felt the current start in her belly. It was naturally trying to arc out of her toward the ground, and all she had to do was release it. Untrained as she was, she let the bolt go, and it shot down her legs uselessly, causing her to convulse. In her desperation, she got the last few volts to run up to her hands and jump across her skin into the man’s wrists.
For a brief moment the blue spark lit up the room with a flash, and she saw his eyes widen in surprise. Then she felt him shake with the current, and heard him scream as he was electrocuted.
Helen smelled burnt hair and ozone like a calling card from her darkest childhood nightmare. She felt what must have been half her body’s energy empty out of her, leaving her as weak as a kitten. The burden of the large man on top of her grew intolerably heavy, and she knew she had to get out from under him before he recovered or she would be no better off than she was when he’d had her by the head. While her attacker was still shaking, she managed to kick some of his weight off of her, and as the barest amount of light was allowed to creep back into the room, she finally got a look at him.
The gleaming blond curls and the thick body were Hector’s, and for a moment she feared she had killed him while he might have been trying to teach her a lesson. She leaned right over him to see if he was still breathing. Hanging inches away from his face in the regular darkness of night, she saw it was Creon, but it was too late. The moment she recognized him he opened his eyes and grabbed her to his chest in a deadly bear hug.
Helen screamed and struggled. She reached down into her belly looking for the current, but all that was left was weak static. She had already discharged all the voltage stored up in her muscles. The release of all that energy had left her weak and vulnerable. Her arms and legs had no strength, and she crumpled under Creon’s renewed attack like a paper bag. He fell on top of her, pinning her to the ground as he pulled a bronze knife out of his belt.
“Such a shame, preciosa. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Almost too perfect to cut,” he grunted into her ear. “But Atlantis . . .”
She squirmed her neck away from his lips, shivers of disgust running across her skin. Then he pushed off of her, raising his knife up high over his head. He paused, and for a brief moment Helen thought he wouldn’t do it, but she saw his eyes harden. He brought it down directly over her heart.
Creon’s knife made a dozen pinging noises as it shattered and scattered off of her skin. He had just a moment to register what had happened before a foot connected with his head and sent him flying off of Helen.
Lucas jumped on Creon with a vicious snarl, and the two of them began to fight so fast Helen could barely see their hands move. They punched and grabbed and gouged at each other, both of them changing from claw-handed boxing to some kind of strange wrestling in which they tried to bend each other’s joints in the wrong direction. Helen barely had time to roll onto her knees before it was over. Cornered and still weak from having been electrocuted, Creon cloaked himself inside an eerie shadow and ran at top speed out of the house as soon as he could put even one inch in between himself and Lucas, who chased him halfway across Helen’s lawn before turning around and coming back inside.
“Are you okay?” Lucas practically shouted.
“Yeah, I just can’t . . .” Helen said as she tried to stand and then fell back down on the ground with a woozy thump.
“What did he do to you?” Lucas asked, his voice high-pitched with worry. He picked Helen up and tried to balance her so she could stand on her own. “Are your legs broken?” He suddenly reclaimed her weight as he frantically assessed the damage.
“No, I just . . . Hector said to use my bolts to fight, and I did, but they went the wrong way, I think,” she mumbled. She was confused and seeing spots.
“Why can’t you stand?” Lucas asked as he tried to get her to her feet again. Her heart hurt from seeing Lucas’s beautiful face and smelling his body and feeling his hands on her. She had a vague sense where the ground was, but the whole world was falling over, and she was too tired for this crap. She just couldn’t do this anymore. She needed a nap.
The next thing she knew, Helen could taste something sweet on her tongue. Honey. She opened her eyes all the way and saw that she was sitting on the counter in her kitchen with Lucas standing between her knees, holding her head up and tilted back as he drizzled honey into her mouth from a plastic bear.
“There you are,” he breathed through a small smile when she looked at him. He looked back at her with so much tenderness Helen had to remind herself that Lucas wasn’t really interested. For the thousandth time she wondered what had happened to make him push her away the way he had.
“Hi,” she said, her voice cracking like she’d just woken from a full night’s sleep. “How’d you get here?”
“Cassie got a glimpse of Creon’s attack, but she didn’t know where it was going to take place because all she could see was darkness. I took a guess,” he said, brushing her hair back from her face and placing a long lock behind her shoulder. “Sorry I was late.”
“Don’t sweat it,” she said, her voice still shaking with fear. She took a deep breath to steady herself and pulled herself together.
“You messed him up pretty good. I’ve never seen Creon bolt from a fight like that before,” Lucas said with admiration.
“I just softened him up for you.” She couldn’t resist smiling at him, even though she knew she’d spend hours rethinking and regretting it. “Did I miss anything while I was out?”
“Just a trip from there to here,” he said, pointing over his shoulder then to the counter. “And a quick call to Jason for backup.”
“Lennie!” Claire shrieked frantically as she barged through the front door. She gasped at the knocked-over furniture in the foyer.
“In here. Don’t freak out, I’m all right,” Helen called out to Claire. Then she saw Lucas’s questioning look. “It’s okay, she knows some of it,” she told him. She pushed him back so she could jump down off the counter. Claire came in first, followed by Jason, who looked like he was ready to strangle her.
“Sorry, Luke. I was at her place looking for Helen when you called. I tried to come alone but Five-Two latched on to my arm and wouldn’t let me go without her,” Jason growled, nearly tearing his hair out in frustration.
“Um, excuse me? But she’s my best friend and I could tell something was up,” Claire snapped at Jason. “How could this have happened? You just flew out my window, like, two seconds ago.” Claire grabbed Helen in a hug.
“You know about . . . stuff?” Jason asked, surprised, not sure how much he should say.
“I told her,” Helen admitted as she pulled out of Claire’s enthusiastic hug and rubbed her sore neck.
“But I’ve always sort of known. I just thought she was undead or something,” Claire said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Believe me, I’m much happier you’re all part Greek god instead of part something disgusting like bat or wolf or mosquito.”
Jason and Lucas shared a look over Claire’s head. Helen explained what had happened as quickly as she could while Lucas took Jason outside to look at the tracks, but it was too late to try to follow Creon. They came back inside with grim looks on their faces to find Helen and Claire had switched the lights on to assess the damage in the entryway.
“Are those pieces of a knife?” Claire asked.
“Yeah. He kinda stabbed me in the heart,” Helen said tentatively, not knowing how Claire would react.
“You can still do that? Stop blades?” Claire asked, unsurprised. “What about the lightning thing? Can you still do that, too?”
“How do you know all this about me?” Helen sputtered. Claire sighed.
“After I pushed you off the roof . . .” she began.
“After you what?” Lucas yelled.
“It was when we were seven! And she wasn’t hurt!” Claire yelled back. “Anyway. I knew about the knife thing because, well, I tried to stab you once, too,” she continued bashfully. “But I already knew you’d be fine because of what happened with Gretchen and the scissors in second grade. Remember?”
Helen grimaced. “Oh, yeah! Gretchen and the scissors! She really was trying to kill me, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah, she was. She was crazy jealous of you. But I never wanted to hurt you, I just had to be sure I wasn’t losing my mind. It was scary, you know?” she asked apologetically.
Helen smiled, forgiving her instantly.
“I guess I can’t blame you. But how’d you know about the lightning-bolt thing?”
“Remember when we were nine, we were going off island on the ferry to see the Boston Aquarium, and that creepy guy with that huge gut kept trying to talk to us? Remember how he kept ‘accidentally’ bumping up against you and stroking your hair?”
Helen did remember, even though she had spent a lot of time trying to forget. There had been that horrible smell of burnt hair, and the empty look in his eyes. Helen nodded, shivering at the thought, and dreading where Claire was going.
“Remember how he just disappeared suddenly before we docked? Well, he didn’t just disappear. He tried to grab you, Len, and I saw an electric spark jump from you to him. It blew him right off the deck of the ferry. It looked like lightning, except it came out of you.”
“I think I killed him,” Helen whispered, needing finally to admit what she had done.
“Good! He was a child molester! You should probably get a medal,” Claire insisted. Helen looked at Claire’s earnest face. The man probably did mean to do something terrible, but did that justify frying him?
“First, you don’t know that you killed him. Second, it was a reflex. Whether he deserved to die or not isn’t the point. You shouldn’t feel guilty about something that was done in self-defense,” Lucas insisted. He touched Helen’s shoulder. She moved away from him uncertainly, not knowing how to feel. Luckily, Jason changed the subject.
“So you’ve always known she wasn’t entirely human,” Jason said to Claire with a wry smile. “Didn’t that ever bother you?”
“I was a little worried she might try to drag me off to hell and drain my essence at some point, but I figured that was still better than having Gretchen for a best friend,” Claire said with just enough honesty to get a laugh. “Plus, I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but this island is full of white people. Not exactly easy growing up Japanese here. But with Lennie around I always knew no matter how strange I was, she would always be way stranger. So that was nice.”
“And you never told anyone else over all of these years? You never mentioned it to someone when you were little, even by accident?” Lucas asked skeptically.
“Come on Lucas, I’m not stupid! I saw E.T., you know, and I know what the men in the white coats did to him and Elliot,” she replied with a disgusted look on her face. “I’d never tell on Lennie. Or you, for that matter.”
“Thanks,” Lucas replied, a little confused by the alien metaphor.
He and Jason shared another look, and this time there was obvious admiration in their eyes.
“You know what I don’t get?” Helen asked, changing the subject. “Why can she be around when I do Scion stuff but it doesn’t affect me? All of these times she saw me use my powers over the years, but I don’t remember ever feeling pain in my stomach.”
Helen explained her mother’s curse to Claire, but no one had an answer to her question. They turned their attention to cleaning up as best they could before Jerry got home. Claire offered to stay with Helen for the night, in case she was too freaked out to sleep alone, but Jason nixed that idea right away.
“And what are you going to do if Creon shows up again? Throw your pocketbook at him and give him a piece of your mind?” he said shaking his head. “Uh-uh. I know you two are like sisters, but you’re not staying here.”
“I’ll stay. You take Claire home,” Lucas said, quietly assuming control before Claire could start another argument with Jason. “Let me know if you see anything around her house.”
“Right,” Jason said with a nod as he guided Claire toward the door.
He didn’t seem surprised that there might be something dangerous lurking around Claire’s house, but Helen and Claire were. Helen lifted her arm to stop them from leaving, suddenly terrified again. It was night and any shadow could have Creon inside it. Sensing Helen’s fear, Lucas intercepted her hand and held it tightly.
“Jase can handle it,” he told her confidently.
“Wait, what do you mean, my house? My parents are home,” Claire said, her anxiety resurfacing as well. “You don’t think the guy who did this . . .”
“Don’t worry,” Jason said with a sensitivity he usually reserved for everyone in the world except Claire. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you or your parents.”
“Thank you,” she said slowly, looking a bit surprised that she had any reason to say those words to him.
She turned and waved at Helen, who thought to herself that the impossible had just happened. Claire had finally run out of nasty things to say to Jason. Helen shut the door behind them and took a deep breath. Then she glanced over at Lucas, and prayed to a pantheon of gods that looking at him would get easier someday.
“You look tired,” she said, realizing it was true as she said it.
“So do you. I hear you’ve been having a lot of nightmares,” he said back, completely unashamed to admit he was asking his cousins about her.
“Why do you care? Please, Lucas, just go away,” she begged, rubbing her face with her hands.
“I can’t. I won’t,” he said, moving forward and pulling her into his arms.
She felt too fragile to fight him off. She melted into his chest and rested there for a few moments.
“Why do you smell like the ocean?” he said suddenly, pulling away from her to get a better look. He studied her bedraggled clothes speckled with sand, and asked suspiciously, “What happened to you today besides Creon?”
“How is that fair?” she demanded. She pushed him from her with a bitter laugh. “If I lie to you you’ll know, and if I stay silent you’ll assume something worse than the truth.”
“Then just tell me as much or as little as you want,” he said quietly, stepping away from her to allow her some personal space. “But tell me something. What happened?”
“I was dodging practice because I couldn’t bear to see you. Hector found me hiding on the beach, I got in his face, and he nearly drowned me to teach me a lesson in humility,” she blurted, tears of exhaustion brimming in her eyes. “Then I went to Claire’s to cry on her shoulder and tell her I was a Scion. Then I flew home, where Creon attacked me, tried to break my neck, and stabbed me in the heart. You pretty much know the rest. Now I just want to take a hot shower and lie down because I’m freezing cold and itchy and I don’t think I can handle anything else happening today.”
“Okay. You go shower,” Lucas said, nodding tightly as he stepped out of her path. “I’ll wait for you in your room.”
Helen staggered up the stairs and ran into the bathroom. She got into the shower and began to cry. Sitting down in the tub with the spray fanning out all around her she couldn’t stop the tears any longer. She tried to be as quiet as she could, and hoped that the droning rush of water would mask the sound of her crying.
When she finally got it all out she dried off and put on a sweet-smelling tank top and pair of sweatpants fresh from the laundry. As she flossed and brushed her teeth in the foggy bathroom, she heard her dad come home and turn on the TV in the living room. She went to the top of the stairs and shouted a good night down to him. He grunted a good night back, but he was too engrossed in the Red Sox race to October to start a conversation. Helen went into her bedroom.
Lucas was waiting for her in there. When Helen saw him, lying on top of her covers fully dressed with his shoes kicked off, she stopped and stared at him from the doorway. He was too long for her little-girl bed, but even so he looked just right lying in it. He stared back at her for a moment before he swallowed painfully, lifted up the covers, and motioned for her to get in. When she paused, caught between arguing that her father could walk in at any second and asking him to take his clothes off, he spoke.
“I only have so much willpower, Helen,” he whispered. “And since you apparently sleep in the most ridiculously transparent tank top I’ve ever seen, I’m going to have to ask you to get under the covers before I do something stupid.”
The blood rushed to Helen’s face, and she immediately crossed her arms to cover her chest. She ran and jumped under the covers. Lucas just laughed and folded the comforter up over her as if it were some uncrossable line that would magically keep the two of them from doing “something stupid.” As she snuggled down, he wrapped an arm around her and rubbed his face into the back of her neck.
“No need to be embarrassed. After seeing you in my cousin’s nightgown, you’ve got nothing to hide. But why were you crying in the shower?” he murmured into her hair. She could feel his lips moving against her scalp, and feel the press of his hips through the covers, but his arms were an unyielding cage. She tried to turn over to face him, to welcome him under the covers with her, but he wouldn’t let her.
“I was crying because I’m frustrated! Why are you doing this?” she whispered into her pillow.
“We can’t, Helen,” was all he said.
He kissed her neck and said he was sorry over and over, but try as she might, he wouldn’t let her face him. She began to feel like she was being used.
“Please be patient,” he begged as he stopped her hand from reaching back to touch him.
She tried to sit up, to push him out of her bed, anything but suffer lying next to someone who would play with her so terribly. They wrestled a bit, but he was much better at it than she was and felt even heavier than he looked. He easily blocked every attempt she made to wrap her arms or legs or lips around him.
“Do you want me at all, or do you just think it’s fun to tease me like this?” she asked, feeling rejected and humiliated. “Won’t you even kiss me?” She finally struggled onto her back where she could at least see his face.
“If I kiss you, I won’t stop,” he said in a desperate whisper as he propped himself up on his elbows to look her in the eye.
She looked back at him, really seeing him for the first time that night. His expression was vulnerable and uncertain. His mouth was swollen with want. His body was shaking, and there was a fine layer of anxious sweat wilting his clothes. Helen relaxed back into the bed with a sigh. For some reason that obviously had nothing to do with desire, he wouldn’t allow himself to be with her.
“You’re not laughing at me, are you?” she asked warily, just as a precaution.
“No. There’s nothing funny about this,” he answered. He shifted himself off her and lay back down alongside her, still breathing hard.
“But for some reason, you and I will never happen,” she said, feeling calm.
“Never say never,” he said urgently, rolling back on top of her and using all of his unusually heavy mass to press her deep into the cocoon of her little-girl bed. “The gods love to toy with people who use absolutes.”
Lucas ran his lips across her throat and let her put her arms around him, but that was all. He kept her pinned under the blankets, mummified in miserable chastity, allowing her to hold, but not fully embrace him.
“Do you care for me? More than just in a life or death ‘we need to stop the Hundred Cousins from starting a war with the gods’ type of way?” she asked flippantly.
She knew that on some level she was being petty and insecure, but she needed to know how he felt about her. He propped himself up on his elbows so he could see her more clearly and so that she could see him back.
“Of course I care for you,” he said intently. “The only thing I wouldn’t do to be with you is cause innocent people to die. And that’s pretty much it.” He moved on to his back again, jabbing a hand in his hair. “But apparently that’s enough.”
Helen knew there was a lot more behind what he was saying than he was letting on, but she couldn’t bear to ask any questions that might have awful answers. She’d had enough awful for one day. She rolled on top of him and tucked herself into that spot on his chest that she was convinced still held a Helen-shaped dent in it.
“Just so you know? Just so we’re clear. I care about you, too. And if this hug is all I can have, I’d prefer it over anything else from anyone else.”
“That’s because you’ve never been with a man,” Lucas said as he kissed the bit of skin on her forehead that was just about to be hair. “Now go to sleep,” he ordered.
Helen would have argued, but she was too damn tired from fighting for her life twice in one day to do more than blink contrarily. Lucas’s arms wove a safe basket around her mending heart and she relaxed completely into him. She listened to the particular resonance of his breathing, a sound that she already knew so well, and fell into a deep, nightmare-free sleep.