“It sounds like what happened at the end of World War Two when the Allies divided Germany,” Helen remarked. “They broke the country up, hoping to avoid World War Three.”
“It’s very much like that,” Ariadne agreed. “The Fates are obsessed with cycles, and they repeat the same patterns over and over all around the world—especially when it comes to the Big Three—war, love, and family.” Ariadne trailed off for a moment, thinking some dark thought, before she finished the story. “Anyway, Troy was betrayed by one of their own and burned to the ground, and after a few months of confusion and tricks and payback—most of which is described in theOdyssey—the Olympians finally left the earth. Zeus swore that if the Houses ever united again, he would come back and the Trojan War would pretty much start all over again.”
“And it left off somewhere just short of the total destruction of civilization,” Helen said, trying to imagine what “the end of civilization” would mean now. “If the Trojan War was so destructive with only swords and arrows, what would happen if it was fought with today’s weapons?”
“Yeah. That crossed our minds,” Ariadne broke eye contact and looked at her lap. “That’s why my family—my father, uncle Castor, and aunt Pandora—separated themselves from the rest of the House of Thebes. Even if Tantalus is right, even if unification is the key to immortality, we didn’t think it was worth the total destruction of the earth.”
“That’s a lot to give up. I mean, it’s the right thing to do, obviously, but immortality...” Helen shook her head at the thought. “And Tantalus and the Hundred Cousins just let you go?” she asked incredulously.
“What choice did they have? They can’t kill us because we’re all family, but lately they were starting to threaten us, trying to bully us back to the fold, and some of us—okay, Hector—were starting to fight back. He waslookingfor fights, taking the bait when they called him a coward for not wanting to fight the gods. In our tradition, to kill your own kin is the worst sin imaginable, and he came so close, Helen. My family left Spain because Hector got into a terrible fight and nearly got killed, but worse, he nearly killed someone of his ownblood. There is no forgiveness for a kin-killer,” Ariadne said in a hushed voice.
“But yoursisn’tthe last House. Mine is,” Helen said, the whole truth beginning to dawn on her.
“No one knew about you. About two decades ago there was this ‘Final Confrontation’ between the Houses. All Four Houses attacked one another, each of them trying to eliminate the others. The House of Thebes won, and it was thought that the other three, the House of Atreus, the House of Athens, and the House of Rome, were wiped out entirely. But even though everyone else was supposed to be dead, Atlantis wasn’t raised and the gods did not return. My father, aunt, and uncle thought thatwewere the ones that were keeping the war at bay by refusing to join Tantalus and his cult. We thought ithadto be us because no one else was supposed to be left.” Ariadne took a deep breath and looked at Helen. “But it was you all along. Somehow your mother hid you here, preserved your House, whichever one it is, and kept the war from starting. She—you—also kept Tantalus from attaining Atlantis.”
Helen sat in silence for a moment, realizing how many incredibly strong demigods wanted her dead. The Hundred Cousins believed that if the House of Thebes was unified and the only Scion House left on earth, they would become like gods, and Helen’s life was the only thing standing in the way. Her life was also the only thing keeping the Olympians from coming back to earth and starting World War Whatever. So the Delos family had to protect her even if they all died doing it. And here she was refusing to learn how to fight. No wonder Hector hated her.
“I’m sorry,” Helen finally said, so overwhelmed by her own selfishness that she had almost no emotion in her voice. “Your family is siding with me against your own kin.”
“Your burden is heavier,” Ariadne said, taking Helen’s hand. She was going to say something else, but she was interrupted by Pandora, who burst into the locker room, looking for them.
“Hey! Am I going to have to take someone to the hospital?” she asked, only half joking. “There’s a whole lot of blood out there.”
“No, she’s okay,” Ariadne answered back with a laugh as she stood up.
Something was still bothering Helen. There was a hole in the story Ariadne had just told her.
“Who was it?” Helen asked suddenly, looking up at Ariadne’s puzzled face. “The way we were taught the story, Odysseus tricked the Trojans with a giant wooden horse. Everyone knows about the Trojan horse. But you said someonebetrayedTroy, and I don’t think it was by mistake.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t pick that up,” Ariadne said, looking like she was mentally kicking herself. “There was no wooden horse. It’s a nice fairy tale, but that’s all it is. Odysseus was involved, that’s true, but all he did was convince Helen to use her beauty to charm the guards into opening the gates at night. That’s really all it took. It’s why we Scions never name our children after her. For us, naming your daughter Helen is like a Christian naming their child Judas.”
Helen ran past her dad and upstairs when she got home, claiming she wanted to turn in early. She did her homework and then made herself lie down, but she couldn’t sleep. Her brain kept sifting through everything Ariadne had told her that afternoon, like how much her mother must have hated her to give her such a cursed name, but mostly she thought about the cult of the Hundred Cousins. To distract herself from reflecting on just how many people would want her dead so that they could live forever, she got out of bed and attempted to fly.
She tried to think lighter, then higher. She even tried to sneak up on it by pretending to trip, but all she succeeding in doing was jumping up and down until her father yelled up the stairs for her to stop clowning around.
Hoping a little ancient history would put her to sleep, she picked up the copy of theIliadthat Cassandra had given her and read as much as she could. It seemed like every page was filled with the gods meddling in the world of men. Helen could see why her ancestors had eventually decided that praying for divine intervention wasn’t such a good idea. Another she noticed was how much she disliked Helen of Troy. Helen of Nantucket couldn’t understand why she didn’t just go back to her husband. People weredying. Helen promised herself she would never make the same choices her namesake did.
She was up to the part where Achilles, who struck Helen as the world’s most celebrated psychopath, started sulking in his tent over a girl when she heard a definite footstep overhead. And then another. Relying on the extrasensory hearing she’d always known she had but only recently begun to let herself use, she zeroed in on her father, listening to his rib cage moving against his chair as he breathed in and out. He was watching the late news on the TV downstairs and he sounded perfectly normal to Helen. The widow’s walk above her, however, was now suspiciously silent.
Helen slipped out of bed and grabbed the old baseball bat she kept in her closet. Holding her slugger at the ready she walked sideways, foot over foot, out her bedroom door and to the steps that led to the widow’s walk. She paused for a moment on the landing between the stairs that led down to the first floor and the stairs that led up to the roof, listening again for her father. After a few moments of tense indecision, she heard him cluck his tongue at the antics of some camera-greedy congresswoman on TV and she relaxed. He was still okay, so she knew that whatever she had heard had not made it downstairs yet. With the intention of keeping it that way, she ascended the stairs to the widow’s walk.
As soon as she stepped outside, Helen felt the cool fall air soak through the thin cotton of her nightshirt, rendering it useless against the elements. A flickering shadow in the starlight caught the corner of her eye and she swung at it, but the top of her bat was stopped before it came around in a full arc. She heard the chunky slap of wood on skin.
“Damn it, it’s me!” Hector whispered harshly. Helen saw him hiding in the shadows, shaking out his right hand like it stung.
“What the hell? Hector, is that you?” Helen hissed back. He came closer so she could see him better, avoiding a dark lump on the ground. Helen looked at the lump more carefully and noticed it was her sleeping bag, the one she kept in the waterproof chest her father had given her. “What are you doing?!”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” he responded peevishly, still trying to shake the feeling back into his hand.
“Camping?” she said sarcastically. Then it hit her. All of those sounds she’d been hearing at night—sounds she’d thought were the Furies—had a much more mundane source. “You’ve been up here every night, haven’t you?”
“Almost. One of us is always up here at night to watch over you,” he said, and then grabbed Helen’s arm as she turned away from him in embarrassment. “It’s usually Lucas because he’s the only one who can fly here,” he continued. As if that made it better.
“And you never thought to ask if I wanted you here, eavesdropping on my dad and me?” she asked, furious.
Hector smiled at her, smothering a laugh. “Yeah. Because I can see how you’d want to keep all those discussions about politics and baseball to yourself. So private,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Do you stay all night while I’m sleeping?” she asked, unable to look at him. He suddenly understood why she was so upset, and his smile switched off.
