“We’ll need to wait a bit before we go overseas. You can barely stay in the air as it is and it’s harder to navigate with no point of reference, plus oceanic air currents can be a nightmare.”
“But I’ll be with you, and you know all that stuff already!” She stopped dead and gripped his hand tightly to her chest. “I’m strong enough now, I swear! Please? I’ve always dreamed of traveling! Lucas, you have no idea! My whole life I’ve wanted off this island.”
“I know, and we will—soon! We’ll tape a map to a dartboard and wherever we hit, we’ll go. Fiji, Finland, Florence, whatever!” he said indulgently, pulling her against him to stop her from jumping into the air and leaving without him. “We can go eat sushi in Tokyo every night until it gets boring. We can do whatever you want, Helen. When you’re a better flier.”
“We really can, can’t we?” she asked breathlessly, noticing the fact that they had both used the word “we.” Then a less-pleasing thought occurred to her. “You’ve been doing this for a while now, haven’t you? Running off to other continents when you have a few hours to kill.”
“Yes, I have.”
“But always alone?”
“We can carry people short distances when we fly if we have to, but it’s unbelievably exhausting to tamper with other people’s gravity. You’d be better off just walking there.”
He was attempting to sound lighthearted about it, but his face was turned down. Helen looked at him sideways, trying to figure out what it must be like to know that you could go to the Louvre and see theMona Lisainstead of just looking at a picture of it in a book, but you’d have to go there by yourself. It must have been so lonely for him. He’d been the only Scion who could fly for his entire life, and that meant that he’d been isolated in a lot of ways—until he met her.
“There’s plenty of time for us to see the world, but for now, I think you’d better stay local. And since I can’t ask you to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself, I promise I won’t go off island without you,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” Helen said, laughing and trying to pull her hand out of his, but he held on to her.
“I’m serious,” he said, tugging on her hand and pulling her toward him until she was practically stepping on his feet. “There’s another reason I want you stay over the island, especially when I’m not with you. My family can’t protect you if they can’t find you. Don’t forget, those women are still out there. And Creonwillbe back for you....”
At the mention of Creon’s name, it came flooding back to her. He had tried to kill her, and he very nearly succeeded. The dizzyingdarknesshad been bad enough, but he had forced her to use her lightning and relive another terrible memory as well.
“Helen?” Lucas said, touching the side of her face and turning her eyes to his. “I’m sorry to bring him up, but you know I had to.”
“I know, Lucas, it’s not that,” she began and stopped, needed a second to regroup. “Do you think my lightning is dangerous?”
“Very,” he said seriously. “But only if you don’t learn to use it.”
“I don’t want to use it! I want to go back to forgetting about it!”
“Helen, you don’t need to run away from yourself anymore,” he said, scowling down at the ground. “Look, this is partly my fault. I should have told you about your lightning sooner, but I could tell you were avoiding it, maybe even repressing it, for some reason. What I really wanted was for you to discover it yourself andwantto learn about it, like you did with flying.”
“Lucas, I...” Helen broke off, shaking her head. “I think I killed someone with it, and even if he was trying to hurt me, it still terrifies me.”
“You can’t be afraid of your power anymore, Helen,” Lucas said gently. “You are the strongest of us all, but all that strength is for nothing until youownit.”
“But I’ve spent my entire life scared to death of using any of my powers,” Helen said in a strangled voice, thinking about her cramps.
“I know I’m asking you to forget about years and years of conditioning, and it probably won’t happen overnight, but it still has to happen, and you have to be the one to decide tomakeit happen. You are the most amazingly talented Scion I’ve ever seen.” Lucas raked a hand through his hair and shook his head, at a loss. “Really, Helen, you can’t see yourself the way I do, but if you could, you’d be speechless. It’s time for you to stop fearing what you can do, and it’s definitely time for you to start using all your talents when you train, especially your lightning.”
“How am I supposed to do that without frying everyone? I don’t suppose you have a garage full of lightning rods?” she tried to joke, flustered that Lucas thought she was powerful, but more important, that he seemed to love that about her.
“I haven’t worked out the details yet,” he said with a grin. “But I’ll think of something.”
When they went into the house it was dinnertime. Helen was happy to see that Claire was still there, sitting at the table, waiting to be fed like the rest of the family, chatting away with the twins about a paper due the next morning for one of their brainiac classes, and stopped only to wave excitedly at Helen when she and Lucas came through the back door.
As usual, the kitchen was packed. Pallas and Castor were hovering hungrily over the stove, burning themselves every time they dipped a finger into a pot to taste what Noel was cooking, but not caring enough to stop. Pandora and Hector were joking around with each other by the sink, laughing identical laughs as they tried to see who was better at spitting a grape into the air and then catching it again in their mouths. Poor Noel couldn’t turn one way or the other without tripping over one of her offspring, a guest, a husband, an in-law, a nephew, or a niece—and, yet again, no one seemed to be lending her a hand.
“You know I can cook, right? Should I offer to help your mom?” Helen asked Lucas sheepishly.
“Are you kidding? My mom loves this. Sometimes I think she’s just waiting for all of us to get married and move out so she can open her own restaurant.” He saw Helen’s dubious look. “I’m serious! She was telling my dad the other day she wants to have a dinner party and invite half the island. She’s insane.”
“There you are, Helen, dear,” Noel said when she looked up, as if she had been truly anxious about Helen’s whereabouts. Then she turned back to her stove top and started talking to herself. “She’ll need extras. So damned thin all of a sudden... Father still doesn’t know the first thing about her so he isn’t feeding her properly and Kate is so worried! Now where is Cassie?”
Noel was mumbling to herself, but loud enough so Helen could hear. She couldn’t tell if Noel was out of her mind with stress, used to being talked over in such a loud room, or if she was intentionally letting Helen in on her thoughts. Noel took a lungful of air and hollered Cassandra’s name.
There was a startled thump from upstairs, and Cassandra’s distant voice yelling back, “Start without me, I’m busy!”
