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. Youarea 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.
