Starcrossed (31 page)

She tried to banish it as she had done since childhood, but this

time the thought wouldn’t go away.

“We think that means you are descended from Zeus,” Cassandra

said. “But from which House is still uncertain. Three of the Four

Houses were founded by either Zeus or his god-children,

215/395

Aphrodite and Apollo. Only the fourth House, the House of Athens,

was founded by Poseidon, so it can be ruled out. Well, maybe.”

“My House?” Helen said, still so wrapped up in her own head

that she was having a hard time understanding English. She was

remembering a blue flash from her past, and a scary man that kept

trying to touch her hair, flying away from her off the back of the

Nantucket ferry. The smell of burning filled her throat. Helen

rubbed her hand over her face and tried to rebury that memory.

She had always believed that she couldn’t have been the cause of

that. And worse—had she hurt Kate, too?

“When we say your House, we mean your heritage, Helen,”

Castor said gently, noticing Helen’s disquiet. “Zeus had a lot of

children—including our father, Apollo—so your House can’t be

pinpointed with any certainty yet. But don’t worry, we’re still trying

to find out who your people were.”

“Thanks,” Helen muttered, still overwhelmed.

“You can’t control the lightning yet, it sort of jumps out of you

when you’re upset,” Lucas said after a long pause. He was looking

at her strangely.

“Is it like a Taser?” Helen asked anxiously, suddenly snapping

out of her trance.

“Yeah,” Hector said as if he was recollecting both sensations and

comparing them in his mind. “But stronger.”

“Does it really hurt?” Helen said quietly. She felt sick to her

stomach.

“I guess,” Hector said with a condescending shrug. “You know, if

you put in some real training, you could probably generate a lethal

charge soon.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Helen said, jumping to her feet, horrified

with the suggestion. And with herself.

“Wait, Helen, it could be a good thing,” Jason replied. “You could

learn how to use your bolts instead of fighting.”

216/395

“You don’t have to use them to kill. Just to knock people out,”

Lucas amended, aware now that something was disturbing Helen

deeply.

He couldn’t know that what he was saying to make it better only

made it worse. Helen thought of Kate’s unconscious body—how

Kate had convulsed in that nauseating way when the blue light

flashed. How her head had lolled back and her mouth fell open uncontrollably

when Helen had picked her up off the ground. She

couldn’t get the horrifying images out of her head so she started

pacing around, wringing her hands to dispel the nervous energy

she felt. She knew everyone was staring at her. She looked up and

locked eyes with Pandora, who was clearly attentive to her strange

reaction.

“Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow?” Pandora said to the

room in general. “Hector needs to eat and everyone else needs a

shower. No offense, but pee-ew, guys.” She got a few laughs, but

more important, she got the focus off Helen. Helen could have

kissed her.

“Are you okay?” Ariadne whispered in Helen’s ear as the family

meeting broke up. Helen squeezed Ariadne’s hand and tried to

smile, but she had no idea what to say. She started to wander toward

the door.

“I’ll take you home,” Lucas called out over his shoulder to Helen,

ending the brief conversation he was having with his father and

uncle.

“I’m supposed to watch Helen tonight,” Jason said apologetically.

“And I have my bike,” Helen said. She couldn’t bear to be with

him alone.

“I don’t care,” Lucas replied bluntly to them both. He stared

down Jason for a moment, speaking volumes with his eyes, then

turned back to Hector. “I need your truck,” he said with barely controlled

anger. Hector nodded, glancing over at Helen and back at

Lucas with something approaching sympathy.

217/395

Lucas grabbed Helen’s hand and pulled her outside. He loaded

her bicycle into the back of Hector’s SUV, held Helen’s door open

for her while she got in, and drove out of the garage without a

word. Once off the Delos property he pulled over into one of the

many scenic park-and-gawk spots and turned in his seat to face

Helen.

“What’s going on?” he asked, angry and frustrated and frightened

all at the same time.

Helen didn’t have an answer for him.

“Will you at least tell me what I did wrong?”

“I already told you, you didn’t do anything,” Helen said to her

lap.

“Then why are you treating me like this? Look at me,” he

pleaded, taking her hand. She stared at their linked hands like it

was the first time she had ever seen anything like it.

“What the hell is this?” she asked. She pulled her hand out of his

with disgust. “You know what? I take it back. You did do

something to me. You led me on.”

Luke’s whole face crumpled. Helen had had no reason to hope

after what she had heard the night before, but for some reason

there was a tiny spark still glowing in her that maybe, somehow,

she had misunderstood. Or that he would change his mind. It went

out completely when Lucas nodded.

“I led you on,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut and clenching his

fists so hard Helen thought for a moment he was going to rip the

steering wheel off. His voice was harsh, almost a snarl. “You and I

can’t be together, so just get it out of your head and move on.”

Helen unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car.

“Wait, please,” he started to say, almost as if he was in pain, but

Helen slammed her door shut and cut him off.

“Wait for what? For you to tell me that I’m a really nice girl but

you’d never touch me? Thanks, I got that part already. Now open

the back so I can get my bike,” she bit out. Her voice was foreign to

218/395

her, so bitter and loaded with sarcasm that it sounded like

someone else’s.

“I promise I won’t say anything the rest of the way if you don’t

want me to. Just let me take you home,” Lucas replied calmly. She

hated that he was calm.

“Open the damn door, or I’ll rip it off!” Helen yelled back.

She knew she was making a fool of herself, throwing a tantrum in

the middle of the road like this, but she couldn’t stop. Humiliation

was leaking out of every pore and she needed to get away from him

fast. She didn’t want to leave anything behind, either—nothing that

would force her to come back to him later to ask for what was hers.

She stood at the back of his car with her head down and her arms

crossed tightly over her sore heart. She knew he was looking at her

in the rearview mirror, so she angled her body away. Finally, he

popped the back. She got her bike out and rode off without another

word.

When she got home she fell into bed without even taking her

clothes off. She could hear Jason moving around on the widow’s

walk as he settled down for the night, but she didn’t feel guilty

about leaving him up there. All Helen wanted was to run as far

away from the Delos family as fast as she could.

She was on the edge of the dry lands, in a new place that she had

seen from a distance, but had never thought she could reach. It

was still rocky, but interspersed with the tufts of razor-sharp

grass, there were tumbled-down drums of mason-carved marble,

a thousand Parthenons’ worth of scattered columns. There had

once been an empire here. No longer.

Far off, there was the promise of a river. Helen couldn’t tell if

she could hear it, or if she felt the extra part per million of moisture

in the air, but she knew there was running water nearby. She

felt so dry and empty inside. Where was the river?

219/395

As she searched, she looked down at the fallen architecture and

read the names graffitied on its sides. Gracus loves Lucinda.

Ethan loves Sarah. Michael loves Erin. For what seemed like days

she ran her fingers over the names carved into the broken bones

of fallen loves, stepping around the tumbled pillars of unkept

vows and dusting the headstones in the graveyard of love with

her hands. Every kind of death had a resting place in the dry

lands.

She walked until her feet bled.

Helen woke to a room filled with sad blue light. She tried to roll

over and felt tied to her mattress, like she had been jumped by the

Lilliputians in the middle of the night. Somehow in her sleep she

had shucked off her shirt and shoes, but her jeans were so tangled

up in her sheets that she had to push herself off the bed and fight it

out on the floor to unwrap herself. It was an ugly battle, especially

since she was still covered in dirt from the trench Lucas had dug

with Hector’s body, dried blood from her cut feet, and a gray,

powdery dust from the dry lands. Her feet had healed themselves,

of course, but still there were blood-encrusted foot smears all over

her sheets. They were ruined, and she would have to buy new ones.

Luckily, her dad was too squeamish about girl stuff to ask

questions.

She shimmied out of her jeans on her way to the bathroom and

climbed into the shower before the water even had a chance to heat

up. Opening her mouth, she gulped down as much of the cold

spray as she could catch. She was so dry inside. Her body ached

from walking hundreds of miles under a dead sun—the cold water

was like a blessing even though it made her shiver. Helen looked

down at her skin and watched the water get forced into little rivers

by the raised hairs of her goose bumps. It made her think about the

river she had seen from a distance right before she woke up.

She couldn’t remember it.

220/395

She knew she had felt a sigh-worthy relief, and only one thing

could have made her feel that way in the dry lands. Water. But she

couldn’t remember anything about it. How could she forget a river

in the dry lands? It was unthinkable, so she stopped thinking about

it.

It bothered her that her brain refused to think about it. She

walked, still naked and dripping wet, to the vanity in her bedroom,

picked up some old viper-green eyeliner Claire had left the last

time she slept over, and wrote THE RIVER I CAN’T REMEMBER

on the mirror, just in case she forgot again. Then she got dressed.

It was getting cold out, and the air was damp with fog. Helen

zipped her jacket up to her throat and regretted not bringing

gloves. As she rode to school she had to keep one hand in her pocket

and one on the handlebars, and then switch off when the hand

she was using to steer got too numb.

When she arrived she saw Lucas waiting in the parking lot, leaning

up against an Audi she’d seen in the Deloses’ garage, but never

seen him drive before. It reminded her how stupid she’d been to

think he was going to kiss her that night in his garage. She dropped

her head and hurried toward the school without waving to him. He

took a step after her and opened his mouth to say something, but

stopped himself and let her go.

When Helen got to the door, she heard Claire call out from behind.

She paused and waited for her to catch up.

“Are you two fighting?” she asked, glancing back at Lucas’s

stooped form. When she got a good look at how terrible Helen

looked she burst out, “Holy crap! What the hell happened to you?”

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” Helen mumbled.

“Your eyes look black and blue, Len. Like you haven’t slept in

weeks,” Claire responded, sounding seriously worried. “Were you

crying a lot?”

221/395

“No. Not at all,” Helen said. It was true, too. She was sad, but she

never felt like crying when she was depressed. She felt like

sleeping.

“Can you tell me what the fight was about?” Claire asked

cautiously.

“There was no fight, really. Lucas just doesn’t want to be with

me,” Helen said. She rammed her fists into her pockets. She found

that if she tensed her muscles she could keep herself from giving

up on moving.

“I don’t believe that,” Claire said doubtfully. “He punched Hector

in the face for just talking to you and pretty much announced to

the whole school that you were his girlfriend.”

“Well, I guess he must have changed his mind since then,” Helen

said, shrugging. She didn’t have the strength to argue. She barely

had the energy to turn the combination on her locker. She was so

tired from walking for weeks, but that had been a dream, hadn’t it?

How could she be physically worn out from something that had

only happened in her mind?

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Claire asked, studying Helen’s

hunched-up body.

“Uh-huh. He doesn’t want me, Gig. He told me so himself. Can

we drop it now? I’m just too tired.”

“Yeah. No problem,” Claire said, rubbing Helen’s back. For a

second, Helen let herself lean against Claire in a sideways hug.

“Shit. I’ll kill him,” Claire offered. Helen tried to laugh at that,

but what came out of her sounded more like a hacking cough.