Starcrossed (33 page)

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

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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 had died for 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.”

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“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

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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.

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

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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 is 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

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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,

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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 her 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

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her jeans to call Claire and get her to come outside, and then