Helen. But Lucas wouldn’t leave her for a moment, and it forced Creon to keep his distance from her. He couldn’t confront his cousins directly or his undercover mission would be spoiled, but there had been a few times when Creon had considered it. Helen’s face had stayed with him. He thought back again to their confrontation out on the moors. The fear and anger in her eyes while she chased him had been pure, so passionate it was almost too much to resist. She was powerful, and yet so unaware of her potential she was nearly helpless. His hands shook at the thought of conquering her, but he had to be patient.
His mother had begged him to wait until she could quietly ask around and find out if there was a possibility someone in the family had left a bastard in Massachusetts. Creon had reluctantly agreed to wait a week on her reply, but he knew what the answer would be. Even though he hadn’t seen the Furies when he first encountered her, he knew Helen wasn’t his cousin.
There were rumors that a few Scions in the past had found a way around the Furies, and Creon believed Helen was one of them. His mother said it was impossible—that all the other Houses had been destroyed—but Creon had more to go on than a gut feeling. The traitors were guarding her like she was the last enemy Scion, and she was so untrained, so ignorant of who and what she was, it seemed obvious to Creon that she had been purposely hidden away from all the Houses, even her own. But above any of these other reasons, it was Creon’s body that told him she was not related to him. He had met dozens of his female cousins, all beautiful as the daughters of Apollo should be, but not one of them kept him up at night the way Helen did. Heknewshe was from another House.
He was obligated by family duty to watch and wait for a few more days in order to remain true to the promise he had made his mother, but very soon he would prove himself. He was up to this challenge, and although there was an alternative for unification of the Houses other than combat, Creon forced himself not to think about it, no matter how tempting it was. This was his one chance at the glory he deserved, the last chance at this type of glory for any Scion. There was another Triumph waiting to be captured, and in his heart he knew that this Triumph would be the one to open the gates of Atlantis.
Creon was destined to be the Scion to make his family immortal, and for that his father would honor him above all others.
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 wroteI SAW IT AGAINin 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 haddiedfor 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.
