“Yeah, I get that. The Fates are really into repeats.”
“And since Scions usually tend to fall madly in love with one person they are ‘destined’ to be with, and then they go and have about a billion kids really young, the older generation sometimes has the dubious honor of seeing the faces of people they once knew—and here’s the real bitch—the faces of people they oncefought against, in the younger generation. Sometimes, even in their own children or in someone who their children love.”
“Oh. That doesn’t sound good,” Helen said, a strange dread growing in her. “Pallas hated me the first time he saw me. So who do I look like?”
Pandora sighed. The spangles on her wrist shook as she took Helen’s hand.
“This totally sucks,” she said apologetically. “But you look exactly like Daphne Atreus—the woman who killed our brother Ajax twenty-one years ago.”
Helen noticed that Pandora stumbled over his name. For a moment, Helen thought the usually happy Pandora would cry.
“But I didn’t do it!Ididn’t kill your brother,” Helen said, shaken to a whisper by the depth of emotion she was seeing. Hearing Helen’s urgency, Pandora snapped out of her sad thoughts and squeezed Helen’s hand.
“I know that!” she exclaimed kindly. “It’s insane to blame you, and most of us don’t. I certainly don’t. We have no way of knowing if you’re even from her House.”
“But Pallas does blame me,” Helen said, finally getting Pallas’s instant dislike of her. Pandora nodded reluctantly.
“When we lost Ajax it’s like we lost the best of us,” Pandora said, her eyes downcast and her lower lip momentarily catching between her teeth. “Ajax was... the best. You should have seen him. Actually, youcansee him.”
Pandora shook her right wrist out from under the piles of bangles. At the very bottom, clipped tightly to her skin, was a cuff. Pandora opened the oval face to reveal that the cuff was actually a wrist-locket, something Helen had never seen before. Inside was a picture of what Helen first thought was Hector, tickling the daylights out of a little girl with short dark hair.
“My brother Ajax,” Pandora said wistfully. “He always had time for me, which is a big deal when you’re in a family as large as ours. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle, especially when you’re the littlest. I used to follow him around everywhere he went, begging him to give me jobs to do. He started calling me ‘Squire’ and I loved it.”
Helen looked at the joyful little girl squirming under the giant hand of her big brother, and then up at Pandora’s glistening eyes. “Even just looking at this picture I can tell he loved you very much.”
“He did, and I loved him. I used to pretend he was a glorious knight and I was his only trusted sidekick, and he played along. He was so patient. He used to send me on dangerous quests to find his car keys or summon the elevator. I was seven when he died. I wasn’t supposed to be following him that night, but I was. I was there when he was murdered.”
Helen was about to speak, to say something comforting if she could, but Pandora changed abruptly, and continued. “He was like Apollo himself,” she said with a bright, although slightly forced, smile. “Like Hector in a lot of ways... only sweet, and not a cranky wiseass. Don’t get me wrong, I love my nephew, but damn! He can be a such a grouch.” They both broke into a much-needed laugh at Hector’s expense.
“I wish I’d met him. Your brother, I mean,” Helen said, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. Ajax must have been truly special to inspire such enduring love in his younger sister.
“In a lot of ways none of us have gotten over losing him,” Pandora said, shrugging as though she had run out of explanations for Helen. “But my brother Pallas is the only one who can’t look at you and accept that you’re a different person, even though he knows it’s got nothing to do with you.”
“I get it,” Helen conceded. “It’s not fair, and I still think he’s mean, but I get why Pallas hates me.”
“Don’t worry, eventually he’ll get over it. Deep down he knows you didn’t choose your face. The Fates did,” she said. She gave Helen a cheeky smile. “And damn, girl! But you got a nice one!”
“So did you!” Helen insisted, and she meant the compliment she gave.
“Whatever,” Pandora said, rolling her eyes and shaking her tinkling wrists. “I’m probably one in a hundred who gets some stupid handmaiden’s face, or a vestal virgin’s from Troy, considering my luck with men!”
Even while she laughed, Helen couldn’t quite shake a strange doubt. Finally, she gave into it and asked, “So who from Troy do I look like?”
“Hell, no!” Pandora said, standing up. “I promised—we all did. You need to talk to Lucas about that one, Helen. Sorry, but I’ve already given you enough to think about for one night.”
And with a considerable amount of jangling and sparkling, Pandora announced that she needed a glass of wine and disappeared in the mix of her family. Helen grimaced after her. She knew that Pandora had really opened up and entrusted her with an emotionally dense bit of information, but Helen still felt dissatisfied. She wanted to know what role the Fates intended for her to play. She was going to ask Lucas the second she got him alone.
She looked over at him. All night she had felt him watching her, and the weight of his eyes had been like an encouraging hand on the small of her back. She didn’t have to slouch or pretend to be weak or less of a geek than she was. She simply fit in. She realized that this new ease with herself was partly due to the fact that for the first time in her life she was around people who were just as odd as she was... but it was mostly because of Lucas. He never stood next to her, but she could feel they were still tied to each other by the trust they had built during their flight. His gaze had such a positive impact on her that she felt unbalanced as soon as his eyes abandoned her. She looked around to see what had caught his attention and spotted him talking privately with Pallas.
Helen did not approve of using Scion hearing to violate another person’s privacy—she and Hector had already had an argument about just that when she accused him of eavesdropping on her and Jerry from the widow’s walk, but now she couldn’t seem to stop herself. When she heard Pallas say her name, she had to know what they were saying about her.
“I’m not going to lie to you. Helen caught my eye,” Lucas was saying in a low voice. “But nothing’s going on.”
“So everyone keeps telling me,” Pallas replied. Helen saw him rub his lower lip in thought before continuing. “I’m not so worried about that right now, but what I am worried about is a month or two down the road when the two of you are flying off every direction together. Alone. It can’t happen, Luke.”
“It won’t,” Lucas replied coldly. “I’m teaching her to fly and I’m making sure she doesn’t get killed, but there’s no way I’d ever touch her. Give me some credit.”
They continued talking, but Helen had stopped listening. She felt sick. Stumbling in her borrowed shoes, she went over to her dad. She stood right next to him as he talked to Pandora, and stared at his profile until he took the hint and looked at her.
