Starcrossed (15 page)

“I think I’ve gone blind,” Helen replied, unable to chew or swallow

or see straight anymore.

“Finally,” Noel sighed as she sank into a chair across the table

from Helen. She looked as tired as Helen felt. “Jason? Do you think

you could take her up?”

“Sure,” Jason replied, and scooped Helen out of her chair. She

was suddenly very awake.

“I can walk! Really, you don’t have to carry me,” she said,

squirming in his arms.

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“Sure you can. Now hold still or I’ll drop you,” he replied with a

good-natured smile. She had no choice but to relax and let him

carry her.

When they got upstairs, Cassandra came through one of the

many doors, holding a tray stacked to overflowing with dirty

dishes, and Helen got a brief glimpse of Lucas lying in bed. She

tensed and tried to crane her head around Jason’s shoulders to get

a better look, but Cassandra shut the door.

“Is he really going to be all right?” Helen asked Jason as he

brought her into the guest room.

“Yeah,” Jason said, but he didn’t meet her eyes when he said it.

He forced an uncomfortable laugh. “Luke’s just milking it to get

Cass to pamper him. He’ll be fine,” he said. He laid her down and

turned to go.

“I’m really sorry,” Helen called out as Jason reached the door. He

stopped uncertainly and turned to listen as Helen unburdened herself

with increasing emotion. “I was so scared and I was running

away into the fog and then I felt really light and really cold. When I

looked down and realized that I was flying, I fainted. I always knew

I was strange, that there was something wrong with me, but I

didn’t know . . .” Helen trailed off. Jason came back to her bedside

and touched her shoulder.

“Nobody blames you,” he said, but Helen waved a dismissive

hand.

“Yeah, you do. You all do. Because I started this when I attacked

Lucas in the hallway at school.”

“You didn’t start this,” Jason replied forcefully. “This war started

thousands of years ago.” Helen gave him a confused look, but he

shook his head before she could ask any questions. “Get some

sleep, and don’t worry about Lucas. Even compared to other Sons

of Apollo, he’s really tough.” Jason switched off the light on his way

out, but left the door open a tiny crack in case she needed to call

out for help in the middle of the night.

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Helen snuggled into the down comforter and tried to relax, but

she was jittery with exhaustion and overwhelmed with the strangeness

of the room and the house. And the flying. She could

fly—there was no denying it now. She wasn’t just a gifted athlete

with paranoid notions about possibly being some kind of genetic

experiment. She could frigging fly, which is aerodynamically impossible

for a Homo sapiens, so she had to be something else. Something

other than human.

The only explanation was what Lucas had said, but that didn’t

make much sense, either. The Greek gods were myths, anthropomorphic

manifestations of powerful natural forces, not historical

figures with actual descendants—or so she’d been taught in eighth

grade. But now she wasn’t so sure. She thought of how it felt to fly,

how the air had become solid—a malleable object—and she knew

that the argument was over in her heart. Somehow, she was a

demigod, and she was just going to have to accept it.

In the early morning hours, Helen woke up with a start and

looked around at the dark, unfamiliar room. She had been dreaming

about flying, which was great, until she realized she had no

idea how to land. Her first waking thought was that she would have

to get Lucas to teach her. Then it occurred to her he might never be

able to fly again.

Despite what his family said about him being fine, Helen knew

she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep without checking for herself.

She needed to see his face tanned and normal, not white and

scared as it was when they were in the dry lands together.

She touched her feet to the floor and tested them, applying more

pressure until she was sure she could stand, and then made her

wobbly way down the hall to Lucas’s room. She had never had shin

splints, had never had any kind of sports injury at all, but as she

crept along she imagined that what she was feeling had to be similar,

if not much, much worse. Her muscles wouldn’t stretch as far as

usual; her joints felt swollen and hot. By the time she silently

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pushed Lucas’s door open she was covered in a thin, sickly sweat.

Lying on his back and staring at the moon in the window, Lucas

spun his head to look at Helen as she appeared in the doorway. A

moment passed.

“Hi,” he whispered.

“Hi,” she whispered back. “May I come in?”

“Yeah. But quietly.” He gestured to Cassandra asleep on a couch

on the other side of the room. “She was awake for two days

straight.”

Helen made her way into the room, crouching like an old woman

and wincing at the pressure on her feet. She felt like some ridiculous

fairytale hag and she started laughing silently at the thought

of chasing kids off her gingerbread lawn.

“You shouldn’t have come on your own. You’ve worn yourself

out,” Lucas admonished her gently.

“I was fine a second ago, but it was farther than I thought. Your

house is huge,” Helen whispered, aiming her creaky body at the

chair next to his bed.

“You won’t be able to sit up long. Here,” he said as he pulled back

his covers. “You’d better lie down.”

Helen looked uncertainly at his bed. She had spent all of last

night melded to him, but now it was different somehow. If she lay

down with him it would be a choice. She saw him smirking up at

her, and realized he thought she was being silly. Which she was,

because her knees were shaking with the effort to hold her up. She

tried to sit down as carefully as she could so as not to disturb him,

but at the last moment her legs gave out and she pretty much

flopped into bed with him.

“Sorry,” she whispered as she gathered the covers over them.

“It’s okay. Careful of your toes—my legs are splinted,” he warned

her. Helen peeked under the covers and saw that his lower body

was wrapped in soft casts. “See? You’re completely safe with me.”

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He grinned at her in the dark and she grinned back, until the reason

for her draining trek came back to her. Her smile faded.

“How bad is it? Can you even tell right now?” she asked him seriously.

She propped herself up on an elbow so she could look directly

into his face and scan him for any well-intentioned lies. Even

in the low moonlight dribbling through the casement she could see

the intense jewel blue of his eyes.

“I’ll mend,” he said so softly his lips hardly moved.

“Completely? Will you still . . . you know . . . walk and run and . . .

fly and all that?”

“Yeah,” he whispered before she had even finished talking. “Good

as new in another day.”

It occurred to Helen that all she had to do was lean down and she

would be kissing him. It seemed like such a natural thing to do—as

if she should be kissing him—that she was halfway to his mouth

before she stopped herself and pulled back, stunned by her lack of

self-control. She saw him swallow hard.

“Lie back, Helen,” he told her, which she immediately did to hide

her confusion.

For a few minutes they were both breathing a lot faster than they

should have been, but after a while, Lucas relaxed enough to take

her hand and hold it under the covers. She watched his chest go up

and down in a way that was familiar to her now, and smiled herself

to sleep.

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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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.....................................................................

Chapter Seven

“Because I didn’t want to wake up Lucas!” a frustrated

voice hissed.

Helen had no idea how Ariadne had made it to the

tea table at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ariadne

couldn’t fly.

“Why are you fighting me on this?” Cassandra pleaded quietly.

Hmm. Helen couldn’t be on top of the Golden Gate Bridge so she

must be in bed, but she couldn’t figure out what Cassandra was doing

in bed with her. If she could only open her eyes and see.

“I don’t doubt you. But what can we do?” asked Noel.

“We should leave. Now. Pack up the house and go back to

Europe.”

“You’re overreacting,” huffed Ariadne, not even bothering to

whisper.

“Two nights in a row, Ari. They ate the same food. Shared a roof

and a bed, and now they have witnesses!” Cassandra said just as

loud.

“But they haven’t done the most important thing!” Ariadne

shouted back.

“Girls!”

Even though she was still so tired she felt glued to the mattress,

the yelling made Helen’s eyes open. She saw Ariadne, Cassandra,

and Noel standing over her bed. Correction, they were standing

over Lucas’s bed and Helen was in it. Her eyes snapped open and

her head whipped around to look at Lucas. He was frowning himself

awake and starting to make some gravelly noise in the back of

his throat.

“Go argue someplace else,” he groaned as he rolled over onto

Helen. He tucked himself up against her, awkwardly fighting the

drag of the casts on his legs as he tried to bury his face in Helen’s

neck. She nudged him and looked up at Noel, Ariadne, and a furious

Cassandra.

“I came to see how he was and then I couldn’t get back to my

bed,” Helen tried to explain, absolutely mortified.

She gasped involuntarily as one of Lucas’s hands ran up the

length of her thigh and latched on to the sloping dip from her hip

to her waist. Then she felt him tense, as if he’d just realized that

pillows weren’t shaped like hourglasses. His head jerked up and he

looked around, alert for a fight.

“Oh, yeah,” he said to Helen as he remembered. His eyes relaxed

back into a sleepy daze. He smiled up at his family and stretched

until he winced, then rubbed at his sore chest, no longer in a good

mood. “Little privacy?” he asked.

His mother, sister, and cousin all either crossed their arms or put

their hands on their hips. Humiliated, Helen tried to untangle herself

from the sheets and roll out of bed without attracting too much

attention. Cassandra spun on her heel and stomped out of the

room.

“Ari, help Helen,” Noel said gently as she saw Helen’s difficulty.

Then she turned and bellowed angrily down the hall. “Hector! Get

in here and help your cousin!”

“I’m okay,” Helen protested as she stood up on tender legs, only

using Ariadne’s helping hand to maintain her balance. She realized

she was wearing that ridiculous scrap of silk Ariadne had the nerve

to call a nightgown, although that detail had escaped her notice the

night before when she decided to take her little stroll.

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“Whoa! That’s . . . interesting,” said Hector as he arrived and saw

Helen.

“What’s interesting?” Jason asked as he passed in the hallway.

He poked his head in the door and saw what his brother was looking

at. “Aw, damn!”

They both stared at Helen, half naked and totally busted as she

got out of Lucas’s bed. Then they looked at each other, threw back

their heads in unison and laughed.

“Okay, okay. Enough,” Lucas said defensively. “She was worried

and came to check on me, but by the time she made it here she was

practically falling over. I didn’t want to wake Cassandra to carry

her back to the guest room, so I had her lay down with me. Obviously,

we just slept. Now, can everyone but Hector or Jase get out

of my room, please? That includes you, Mom. I need a shower.”

Helen made it back to the guest room without accepting any

more help than she had to. She was so embarrassed all she wanted

to do was run screaming out of the house, and to do that she was

going to have to prove she was healthy.

“No thanks, I got it now,” she said to Ariadne when asked if she

needed help bathing.

“Okay. Just shout if you need me,” Ariadne replied with narrowed

eyes.

Twice Helen had to sit down on the shower floor to rest, but she

eventually managed to clean all the itchy sand out of her hair and