As soon as he opened the door, he stopped, sensing something wrong.
“Didn’t you bring Helen with you?” Cassandra asked nervously as he stood in the doorway. “I could have sworn I saw you together today.”
Lucas looked around the room and saw Jerry and Kate, the promised cake bristling with unlit candles, and Claire sitting wide-eyed next to Jason.
“I just left her at home to be with you two,” he said gesturing to Jerry and Kate. Panic washed down his legs, nearly making his knees buckle.
Lucas ran out the kitchen door, past the cars in the garage, and ripped the outside door off its hinges as he leapt up into the apoplectic sky. Jumping up twenty feet, Jason tackled him out of the air and dragged him back down, pinning Lucas’s weightless body to the ground.
“Sorry, brother, but the storm is too big. We drive tonight,” Jason said.
“There was someone waiting for her inside her house!” Lucas yelled, taking on mass and throwing Jason off of him.
“We know, you idiot! This afternoon, while you had your phone shut off, Cassie saw that Creon came back to the island,” Jason said, latching on to Lucas to make sure he didn’t change states again and fly off. “But Creon isn’t the one at her house!”
“Then who is it?” Lucas asked, visibly calming down. He and Jason stood up and waited for Hector to pull his truck out.
“Cassandra was getting little images all day long, but she didn’t understand them. One of the things she saw was a woman tailing Creon as he came back to the island. She had this habit of tucking her hair behind her ear with her pinkie finger,” Jason began. The truck pulled out and Lucas and Jason jumped onto it. They eased themselves inside as the truck sped off into the punishing wind and rain.
“Then Cass said she kept seeing flashes of several different women, over and over,” Jason continued. “She didn’t know why she was having visions about women that she didn’t recognize and that didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other. It took a while, but Cass finally noticed that they all had exactly the same way of putting their hair behind their ear, like a nervous tic. Because of that, Cass realized that they wereall the same person,and the most persistent vision she kept having was of one of these women waiting for Helen at her house like shelivedthere.”
“The woman let herself into Helen’s house with her own key and turned on the TV like she’d done it a million times, so at first Cass didn’t think there was any danger. Probably a relative Helen never mentioned, right?” Hector interjected. “It wasn’t until just a few seconds before you walked in the door that she put it all together and knew that she had been seeing Helen’s attacker all day long. We tried to call you....”
“But I had my phone shut off,” Lucas finished for him, adding a foul curse on the end. “What did the woman waiting at Helen’s house look like?” Lucas asked urgently, trying to get a mental image of the threat. “Is she that brunette? Or the old woman who attacked Kate?”
“Neither. Cassandra said she was unbelievably beautiful. Like Helen,” Jason replied.
“Not just beautifullikeHelen—you’re telling it wrong, dumb-ass,” Hector interrupted. He wove through traffic like a madman, blowing through red lights and passing cars illegally. “Cassie said this woman looked almostexactlylike her. But whoever she is, Cass is certain this woman is not on Creon’s side. He doesn’t even know he’s being followed, which may or may not be good for us.”
“Why the hell wasn’t someone guarding the house?” Lucas shouted in frustration, too upset to think about what Cassandra’s vision meant yet.
“It’s my fault,” Hector said, and then continued before his little brother could argue. “Shut up, Jase, I’m the one who allowed her to go off on her own after practice. It was my call, and I made it, even though I knew in my gut it was wrong.”
Lucas wanted to rip Hector’s face off for taking the blame when he knew whose fault it really was. He should have checked his phone, he should have checked the house, he should have paid more attention to Helen’s safety and less attention to her soft hands and warm skin. He scrubbed his hands over his face and made himself take a series of deep breaths. He needed to trust Hector to get them there, and then he needed to focus and be ready for whatever they encountered. If he was going to be at all useful, he was going to have to shut up and calm down.
When they got to Helen’s house, the TV and the lights were off and the front door was locked. Lucas flew up to Helen’s bedroom window, which he knew she always forgot to latch. He let himself in and then went downstairs to open the front door for the others. Nothing was taken and nothing was disturbed in the entire house. It was as if Helen hadn’t even put up a fight.
“She must have known the woman and gone with her willingly,” Hector said, tossing up his hands. “It’s the only reason this place isn’t melting.”
“Unless whoever kidnapped her is justthatgood,” Jason added.
“What are you talking about?” Hector said derisively. “Helen’s a full-on monster now with her lightning. I don’t care who this evil twin is, no one isthatgood.”
“Twin,” Lucas repeated, thinking. “It could be that simple. She’d have the same lightning, the same strength, and a lot more experience.”
The brothers looked at him as he got down on his hands and knees and examined the floor. He reached under an end table and came up with a drained hypodermic needle.
“That rules out Helen going willingly. Whoever she was, she came prepared. And she must have known about the cestus and how it works, or she never would have been able to penetrate Helen’s skin,” Lucas said, his breath catching only slightly when he said her name.
He handed the needle to Jason and dropped back down to examine the floor one last time, in case he missed something. When he was satisfied, he stood up and looked through his cousins instead of at them, still thinking. Then he went to the windows by the door and looked out at the raging storm. Lucas watched mini mudslides slosh down Helen’s driveway and out into the street and knew that any path Helen might have left would be long gone.
“Was there anything else in Cassandra’s vision?” Lucas asked hopefully.
“The last thing she said was that she thought Helen would still be safe tomorrow morning,” Jason replied, shaking his head doubtfully. “Cass had a brief flash of Helen standing in a window that looked like some kind of hotel on Nantucket, but she couldn’t be sure.”
“Maybe Cass has seen something else,” Hector said as optimistically as he could. He opened his phone and tried to dial, but ano signalsign was flashing on his screen. “Check your phones,” he said to his brother and cousin. Neither of them could connect a call, either.
Lucas went into Helen’s kitchen and checked her landline for a dial tone, but it was dead. As he joined his cousins back in the entryway, the power in the house went out. Jason went over to the window and looked at the other houses in the area.
