“I can’t. I have track,” Helen reminded him.
“I have football. I’ll drive you back here after we’re both done. And I can pick you up for school in the morning if you’d like.”
“I thought you weren’t allowed to do sports anymore.”
“That’s mostly cleared up,” he said with a huge grin. “Look, all I’m going to say is I’ve seen the football team. And believe me, they need my cousins and me.”
“I should probably be offended by that, but I’ve seen the football team, too,” Helen said, mirroring his grin. “But regardless, I can’t come over after tomorrow. I have to work on Monday nights.”
“Tuesday then,” Lucas said.
“I can’t. I have to cook dinner for my dad,” she said in a rushed voice.
“He can come, too. My mom wants to meet him,” Lucas said with growing uncertainty. He glanced over at Helen. “Don’t you want to come?”
“It’s not that,” she said, feeling cornered and frustrated and not knowing why. “My dad won’t allow it, okay?” Helen looked out her window at the golf course and felt Lucas take her hand and shake it a little to get her to look at him.
“No one will tell your father about you if you don’t want them to,” he said, glancing from her to the road and back again.
“It’s not that. He doesn’t let me go out on school nights,” she said, looking back at him, but he was frowning deeply and staring at the road. As the minutes ticked by silently, Helen could feel Lucas’s mood getting worse and worse.
“Nope. This isn’t going to work,” he said suddenly, pulling the car over to the side of the road, yanking on the parking brake, and turning in his seat to face Helen. When he saw Helen’s startled face he took a shaky breath to control himself before he started. “I don’t know if my dad explained this to you, but the different Houses are the descendants of different gods,” he began.
“Yes, he said something like that,” Helen responded quietly. She felt like a kid in the principal’s office and she had no idea why. He tried to smile at her but gave up.
“My family’s House, the House of Thebes, are the descendants of Apollo. He’s primarily known as the god of Light, but he was also the god of Music, Healing, and ofTruth. Falsefinders—Scions who can feel lies—are very rare, but I’m one of them. I always know a lie when I hear it, and if it comes from someone close to me I can’t stand it. So you can’t lie to me, Helen. Ever. If you don’t want to tell me the truth, please, for my sake, don’t say anything all,” he pleaded.
“Does it hurt?” Helen asked, her curiosity piqued.
“I’ve tried to explain to Jase how it feels, but I’ve never been able to get it right. It’s almost like that feeling you get when you’ve lost something really important and you can’t find it, but it’s much worse. The longer the lie hangs there, the more frantic I get to find the truth. I’ll dig and dig for it...”
“I just need a little bit of time to adjust,” Helen admitted in a rush. “I’m not ready to tell my dad about me, or about my mom, because I don’t know what it would do to him. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll ever tell him. But I know I need a minute to get used to all of this. A few days at least.”
Lucas’s face relaxed immediately and he let out a held breath.
“Why didn’t you just say that to begin with?”
“Because it’s, it’s too...” she trailed off, not knowing why it was so hard.
“Too raw. Like being naked,” Lucas said for her. Helen nodded her head. “Well, sorry. But with me you have to be either honest or silent.” He released the brake, put the car in gear, and merged back into traffic.
As soon as he could stop shifting, he grabbed her hand and held it on his leg, and when the fading sunlight forced him to turn on the headlights, he let go of the steering wheel rather than let go of her hand.
Lucas pulled into Helen’s driveway behind the Pig, then killed the lights and engine. “Stay here for a sec,” he said before hopping out of the car and disappearing around the back of the house.
Helen craned her head to look for him as she waited, but she didn’t hear anything—not even the sound of his footsteps. Annoyed that he would just run off like that, she got out of the car and walked up to the Pig to get a better view. She noticed her purse lying on the ground behind the front tire. Oops. She picked it up and fished out her phone. There were over a dozen missed calls.
She remembered that her purse was lying on the ground because she had been attacked, and she suddenly realized that her attacker wasnotHector or Lucas, as she had assumed the other night.
Now that she could look back on it without the Furies there to warp her judgment, she figured out that there had been someone else here waiting for her when she came home. Someone with wiry arms—a woman, she thought, recalling the smell of cosmetics—had grabbed her from behind, then been scared off by the arrival of the Delos family. Lucas had sent Ariadne and Jason to chase after her, but the woman must have gotten away because there was no mention of her this weekend. In the shock of the past few days, Helen had completely forgotten about the attack.
“Lucas?” she called, heading toward the shadows off to the side of her house. He had been gone too long. She heard a muffled thud behind her.
“I asked you to stay in the car. It’s for your safety, Helen,” Lucas said with frustration. She spun around to face him, gesturing wildly with her cell phone still in her hand.
“That woman! You’re looking for that woman who jumped Kate and me,” Helen said, finally understanding it all. “She’s a Scion, too. She has to be!”
“Yes, of course she is....” he interrupted her. “But listen to me. There are two of them—two different women are after you, and we haven’t caught either of them yet.”
