“The whole block is out,” he said. “And massive lightning bolts are headed this way. I guess we’re stuck here for a while.”
“You two stay here in case Helen gets free and makes her way back,” Lucas said as he turned for the door.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Hector demanded, grabbing Lucas by the shoulder and trying to turn him around.
“Don’t,” Lucas warned quietly. They stared at each other until Hector finally backed down and removed his hand from Lucas’s shoulder.
“Just stay out of the sky,” he cautioned. “You’re no good to her dead.”
Lucas strode off into the dark storm without responding. He was frustrated with not being able to fly and trying to think of where to start. If he could get airborne he could see around, get his bearings and look for anything suspicious, but the storm had him completely grounded. It suddenly occurred to him that if he had just drugged a girl who was known on sight by most of the locals of a tiny island, he would want to get off that island as soon as possible, and if Lucas was grounded, all air travel was almost certainly canceled as well. The only way to get Helen off island would be by boat, and even that was a long shot. Going out on the water would be suicide.
He ran to the dock, where he learned that the last ferry had left over an hour earlier and that the coast guard had officially suspended all travel in and out of the marina and airport while the storm lasted. New England was going to get pummeled with a good old-fashioned nor’easter that night, and the impassable weather would probably last into the next day. Lucas relaxed a little when he heard that. He’d left Helen less than an hour earlier, after the last ferry had already departed, so the chances were high that she was still on island. Hopefully, she was in a hotel, and relatively safe.
He wasted a few more hours wandering in and out of every motel and bed-and-breakfast near the ferry, asking if two women had checked in that evening. Unfortunately, although there were a lot of people stranded on the island and filling up the hotels due to the storm, there were none that fit Helen’s description. Lucas knew it was futile. No Scion would be stupid enough to walk into a hotel with an unconscious girl slung over her shoulder and ask for a room. Whoever had taken Helen may have broken in someplace, or even bribed someone at the desk, but either way, Lucas knew they weren’t going to announce themselves. He was chasing his own tail, but still, he couldn’t give up. He checked back at home, found out what Cassandra had seen in her next vision while he’d been gone, and then ran back into the storm before his father could even start to argue.
The wind was so strong it was tearing down trees and taking apart the stoic Nantucket architecture. Even Lucas, as strong as he was, had to switch over into his supermassive state to stay anchored to the ground as bits and pieces of people’s houses tumbled down the streets around him. His bare face was getting lashed by the swirling debris in the air, and the sideways rain was clawing at his eyes. All night he wandered around outside every hotel, inn, and bed-and-breakfast he could think of, looking in the windows with eyes that could see in even the dimmest of light, hoping for a glimpse of Helen.
He knew he wouldn’t get it. Cassandra had told him that Helen would be standing in a hotel window the next morning, but he still couldn’t make himself stop. He wouldn’t stop, because if by some miracle he did find her, take her out of that hotel, and bring her back to her family, he could prove Cassandra wrong. All he needed was to beat Fate once and he would know that he was the master of himself—not just a prewritten story that gets reread every now and again to amuse the cosmos—but a truly blank slate that he would be allowed to fill with whatever future he decided to write for himself. If he could just find Helen that night and bring her home, then he knew that someday they would beat Fate, and that they could be together.
He walked all night.
Helen’s head was pounding and there was a sour, chalky taste in the back of her mouth, like she had chewed an aspirin and didn’t rinse afterward. Her eyes felt swollen and puffy, and the skin on her face felt clammy and hot, but she didn’t feel as dehydrated as she usually did when she visited the dry lands. This was different. She’d been drugged, she suddenly remembered, by a woman. A woman that looked just like her, but older.
“Take a sip,” said a voice as Helen felt a straw being pressed to her lips. Her eyes flipped open and she saw the woman again, leaning over her and holding a glass of water.
“Who are you?” Helen asked, her voice crackling. She jerked her mouth away from the suspicious glass of liquid and felt her arms strain against bonds. She was tied to a bed. Still unbearably weak from whatever drug she had been given, Helen knew it would be a while before she was strong enough to break free. She looked around frantically. She was in a hotel room that was lit by candles. It was still night, and she could hear wind and rain battering the window behind the closed curtain.
“Look at me, Helen! Who do you think I am?” the woman asked so forcefully it momentarily stopped Helen from panicking. “Here, I know you’ll need proof. I would.”
The woman took out an envelope full of pictures. They were pictures of herself, when she was in her late teens. In one picture she was holding a tiny baby. In another she was sitting and talking to a young Mrs. Aoki while two baby girls, one blonde, one black-haired, played together on the floor. In yet another she was kissing Jerry over her swollen, pregnant belly.
“Beth,” Helen whispered, her eyes darting over the pictures that she had spent a hefty portion of her childhood searching for.
“My real name is Daphne. Daphne Atreus. I guess it would be too much to ask for you to call me ‘Mom,’ huh?” Daphne said with a wry smile.
Helen gestured to her bound wrists. “You guessed right,” she replied, starting to get angry. “You want to tell me why you knocked me out and tied me up?”
“Because we are out of time, and if I were you I would hate me so much I wouldn’t even give me a second to explain,” Daphne replied with a loving look on her face. “Unless I had been knocked out and tied down first.”
Helen glared at her, furious and still groggy from the drug. “What do you want from me?”
Daphne’s face and body began to shift, not just changed in mood, but in shape. One moment Helen was looking at an older version of herself, and the next moment she was looking at a woman in her sixties with salt-and-pepper hair. Before Helen could even gasp, the dowdy woman disappeared and was replaced by a brunette in her late thirties. Then that woman disappeared and Helen was looking at her mother again. She held up Helen’s heart-shaped necklace in one hand and touched her own identical necklace with the other.
“There are a lot of things I need to tell you about who you are and where you come from. Things that are going to hurt you,” Daphne said in a direct, almost brutal way. “But I don’t have any choice. Creon is on this island right now, and he is coming for you.”
Chapter Sixteen
At around six o’clock in the morning, Lucas finally accepted the fact that he had run out of time. The sun was up. It was the next day, and Helen was probably already standing in a hotel window somewhere, in fulfillment of Cassandra’s prophecy. He knew his best bet would be to give up, go home, and wait for his little sister to see something else, even if it half killed him to admit that. He hadn’t beaten Fate. Again.
Lucas saw the Pig still parked out in front of his house, and had to sneak in. It looked like Jerry, Kate, and Claire had all been forced to spend the night to wait out the storm, and that meant Jerry and Kate still didn’t know that Helen was missing. As far as they knew, Helen was safe at home and stranded there with all three Delos boys on the other side of the island. Lucas knew that lie wouldn’t hold up much longer, but he decided someone else was going to have to think up a new cover story to tell Jerry. He couldn’t control his emotions about Helen long enough to convince anyone she was still safe, let alone her father.
Lucas flew in through his window and paced around his room for another hour. He was vaguely aware of the fact that he should eat or rest or dry off, but the only thought he could keep in his head was the thought of Helen. Cass would know it if she was injured, wouldn’t she?
The houseguests woke and went downstairs. Lucas heard Claire’s phone buzzing with text alerts, and knew that the phones were back on. He listened from his room while Jerry and Kate tried to call Helen. When she didn’t answer either her cell or the phone at the Hamilton household, they got worried and decided to go back home to see if she was there. The roads were a mess, but even though that would slow them down, Lucas knew he only had a few more hours tops to find Helen before her dad realized she was missing and called the police. As soon as Jerry and Kate departed, Lucas met Hector and Jason on the stairs as all three of them came out from hiding in their rooms at the same time.
“Bro, put a clean shirt on, at least!” Hector admonished as soon as he saw Lucas.
“Leave it,” Lucas mumbled, shaking his head and trying to pass his cousins, but Jason stepped in front of him.
