Starcrossed (24 page)

father.

“Do what?” he asked. He put the car in gear and drove out.

“Try and talk to you, man-to-man,” Helen said, relieved.

“Well, in that case,” Lucas said. He hit the brakes and shifted into

reverse.

“What are you doing?” Helen put her hand over his to stop him

from shifting.

“I’m going to go inside and talk to your dad. I don’t want him to

feel like he can’t trust me with his daughter.”

“Lucas, I swear to whatever god you think is holy that I will get

out of this car and walk to school if you go inside and talk to my

dad.”

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Lucas smiled and shifted back into first, driving away from her

house. “Who told you the gods were holy?” he asked with a sinister

glint in his eyes. Helen punched him on the arm.

“You just did that to see me freak out, didn’t you?” she asked

indignantly.

“Hey, you’re the one embarrassed by her own father. You’re

pretty cute when you panic,” he said with a huge smile.

Helen tried to smile back at him, but it came out all mangled on

her lips. She had no idea what to think. The use of the word cute

could either encourage her hopes, or eulogize them.

Every person who recognized them honked and waved with big

smiles on their faces. Honking at passing friends was customary on

the island, and it was something that Helen had grown up with,

but it seemed to her as if everyone was leaning on their horns for

an extra-long time this morning.

“So, listen,” Lucas said, changing the tone from playful to

something a little more serious. “Hector told me you found him on

your roof.”

“Yeah,” Helen replied, trying to scrunch down in her seat so no

one could see her. “About that . . .”

“I wanted to explain why we didn’t tell you before. I asked to be

the one to tell you, and I meant to,” he said. He glanced over at her

as if to check how Helen felt about what he was saying. “I just

didn’t figure out how to tell you in time. I didn’t want you to think

I was some shady stalker hiding out on your roof.”

“I’m not going to lie—well, I can’t lie to you, can I?” Helen said

with a grin. “I was a little upset, but I’m fine about it now. If your

family is willing to protect mine, I guess I can put up with a little

shadiness.”

Helen was forced to stop talking because someone was honking

out “Shave and a Haircut” in the most intrusive way possible. She

wanted to tell whomever it was to kiss off, but she couldn’t. These

were her neighbors and she had to be polite. She wasn’t cramping

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up, but she suspected that she might start to. She stuck a fist into

her stomach.

“What’s going on?” Lucas asked intently. “I’ve seen you do that

before. Are you in pain?”

“No, but I think I might be soon. Don’t worry about it, there’s

nothing you can do. Well, I guess you could go away and never

hang out with me again,” Helen answered.

“That’s not going to happen,” he said with raised eyebrows. “But

what are you talking about? Are you allergic to me or something?”

“No.” Helen laughed. “I think I’m allergic to attention. And we

tend to draw a lot of it when we’re together.”

“But it’s not just me, right? You feel those pains even when I’m

not around?”

“Yes. I’ve had this all my life. I don’t know exactly what causes it,

I just know that sometimes when people stare at me I get a terrible

pain in my stomach.”

“Allergic to attention,” Lucas said to himself, absentmindedly

taking Helen’s hand while he thought. He had to let it go to shift as

he parked at school, but as soon as they were out of the car he

claimed her hand again and rolled her fingers around in his.

Helen watched Lucas as they stood at her locker together. He

seemed distracted. His brow was furrowed and his gaze tuned in,

but most disturbingly he seemed to be all blurry.

“What is that you’re doing? It’s giving me a headache,” Helen

said quietly while she turned the combination on her lock.

“Sorry,” he said as he snapped back into focus. “I’m bending the

light. It happens sometimes when I’m concentrating.”

Helen remembered from her reading that Apollo was the god of

Light, and at that moment Lucas was doing things with light that

were impossible outside of a magic show. She realized she had seen

him do this before in the locker room at his house, but she had

taken so many knocks to the head at the time she thought it was

just her vision that was off.

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“Aren’t you worried someone will notice?”

“Actually, sometimes I do this to make people stop noticing me

when I want some privacy to think. People have a hard time forcing

themselves to look at things that they can’t see clearly, or

things that shouldn’t be possible.”

“Because their eyes slide right off,” Helen interjected, remembering

how her gaze was diverted from Lucas’s face in the locker room

even though she had really tried to focus on him.

“Exactly. If I look far away or too hard to see, most people just

block me out,” he said, and then he gave her a knowing smile. “You

slouch to get people to stop staring at you. I blur. It’s useful in a

fight, too, only it’s nearly impossible to do when you’re moving

fast.”

“Are you giving me all your fight secrets?” Helen said cheekily as

she put her books in her bag and shut her locker. “Not so smart,

Houdini.”

“Really? Well, come and get me, Sparky,” he said with a grin as

he backed away.

Sparky? Helen thought, puzzled. But he was already through the

double doors at the end of the hall and she had to go to class.

When the bell for first lunch rang she rushed as fast as she could,

intending to get some answers, but by the time she made it to the

cafeteria, Ariadne was already seated at the geek table, surrounded

by admirers.

Helen shouldn’t have been surprised that Ariadne would join

their table, considering she was in all the AP classes. Unfortunately

for Matt, Ariadne’s presence usually attracted an entourage of

boys—the little lambs to her Mary. Helen tried to fight her way into

the circle, and nearly gave up before she was spotted by Ariadne.

“Zach? Can you make a little room for Helen, please?” Ariadne

asked as she flashed a dazzling smile.

“Don’t worry about it, Zach. She can have my seat,” Claire said in

a caustically cheerful voice, vacating the place next to Ariadne.

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Claire brushed close to Helen as she passed, whispering

something about the “old friends” not being cool enough to sit at

the same lunch table when someone suddenly has a popular boyfriend.

Before Helen could get into a well-deserved fight with

Claire, Ariadne pulled Helen down next to her to stop one of the

hormone-infested boys from getting any closer to her.

By the time the bell rang for classes, all of Helen’s normal friends

had been driven away from the table—a table that had been theirs

since freshmen year. Matt’s sad look made Helen wonder how long

it had been since the two of them had been able to talk. It must

have been months.

Claire wasn’t waiting for her at the trail when track practice started.

It was silly for her to try to avoid Helen by leaving without her,

because they both knew that she could catch up with Claire no

matter how far behind she was, but the intent was clear. When

Helen came jogging up, Claire didn’t even turn to look at her.

“Just keep running, Hamilton. I am so not into you right now,”

Claire said as she veered away and raised her arm in a “talk to the

hand” gesture.

From many years of experience Helen knew that Claire needed to

punish her a little before she’d be ready to move forward. Then

they’d talk on the phone, make up, and the next day everything

would be back to normal. Just this one time, Helen wished they

could skip to the end of the fight, especially since she hadn’t done

anything, but she knew better than to rush Claire. Instead, Helen

dutifully ran past her.

After a few minutes of running alone, Helen started to get bored

with the mortal pace. She looked at her watch to calculate exactly

how much time she would need to kill before making her way back

to the trailhead, and took off across the moors at an impossible

speed. She knew Lucas could simply step up into the air and start

flying, but so far that approach hadn’t worked for her. Maybe she

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needed to be running to get airborne, kind of like an airplane. Here

was a chance to test that theory.

As Helen struck out off the trail and through the marshy land

surrounding Miacomet Pond, she began to sense the lightness she

associated with flight. There was a fluttery feeling in her stomach,

a barely contained wildness that she assumed was an expression of

Scion power. She felt static energy running over her skin. It was as

if she had rubbed a balloon over her entire body and then held it

just far enough away so that her whole surface felt the outward tug

of an electrical field.

Taking an experimental leap, Helen soared up into the air. At

first she thought she had done it, that she was flying, but she soon

felt herself reach the top of a very large arc and begin to descend.

She had merely jumped higher than ever before—too high—and

her brain was still hardwired to believe that when she hit the

ground she would go splat and die.

She tried to grab at the air, and although there was a part of her

that knew how to make it hold her, she was either too scared or not

scared enough to do the trick in time. She hit the ground at an

angle and went into a skid, her feet digging up two loamy troughs

in the mud.

She was fine, of course, but still deeply shaken. Her knees were

wobbly and she had to laugh to let out the crazy feeling flapping

around inside her chest. After she had calmed down a bit she

hauled herself up off her butt. She pulled her feet out of the mud

and started to walk back toward the school, feeling like a jackass.

She was covered in smelly muck up to her waist, and in her head

she pictured how she must have looked as she came down from her

leap, her arms pinwheeling frantically like a cartoon character falling

off a cliff.

She glanced around to make sure no one had spotted her in her

moment of foolishness, just out of habit, but she wasn’t expecting

anyone to be near. Her heart turned over when she saw a dark

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smudge turn into a man’s shape. Then he suddenly stopped and

changed direction just over the next rise. He had seen her get up

and walk away laughing after falling from fifty feet high. Worse

than that, Helen could see there was something wrong with the

way he moved. He was going much too fast to be human.

Her entire body tensed instinctively. Without even thinking

about it she took off after the dark shape. Whoever he was, he was

headed back toward the high school—back toward Claire, who was

probably huffing and puffing along, slow and small and human.

The image of Kate lying unconscious on the ground flashed

through her head and spurred Helen to run faster. She skipped

over massive swaths of landscape, bounding recklessly over hillocks

and cranberry bogs, unable to think of anything but catching

him.

She noticed that she was having a hard time finding him in the

strange shadowy light, but as she got closer, the darkness that

seemed to swath itself around him abated a little and she was able

to pinpoint his location. It looked like he was sucking light out of

the air. There was something creepy about the way the dark shadows

radiated out from him like a sinister halo—he was definitely

controlling the light. That meant he was another descendant of

Apollo—one of the Hundred Cousins from the House of Thebes,

and therefore a threat.

From what she could see, the shadowy man was a few years older

than she was, but still barely out of his teens. When she was only a

few paces behind him she could see that he had fair hair and skin.

With a fresh burst of speed she reached out, trying to grab on to

him, and ripped off his shirt. Finally, he allowed the last of the

darkness clinging to him to be swept away by the sun glowing on

his huge, bare shoulders. Up close, he looked so similar to Hector

in both coloring and build that they could have been twins.

Before she could digest that fact, a horrendous cramp crumpled

up her torso like origami, and Helen tumbled to the ground with a

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scream. She curled up on the ground in fetal position, unable move

or even take a breath. Through the long blades of grass that partially

obscured her vision she could see the blond, shirtless Cousin

trot back toward her with an inquisitive look on his face.

“Interesting,” he said with cocky smile. Something behind Helen

caught his eye and he started to back away. “I’ll see you sooner

rather than later, preciosa,” he promised as he ran off, a dark,

ominous mist collecting to obscure his outline.