Starcrossed (26 page)

feet. She was caked in black marsh mud all the way up to her waist.

“Maybe get a hose,” Helen countered with a laugh.

“I can do better than a hose,” he said with an easy grin, pulling on

her hand to follow him toward to the pool. “Outdoor showers are

sort of a requirement for our family.”

He brought her to the outdoor shower and left her there to go to

the pool house to get some towels and a change of clothes. When

he was completely out of sight she self-consciously stripped down

in the shower area. The beautiful teak walls of the shower curved

around in a spiral that screened off the important parts of her

body, but her feet and the very top of her head were still visible.

She’d taken millions of beach showers like this, but never without

wearing a swimsuit. She washed as quickly as she could and was

nearly finished by the time Lucas returned.

“The T-shirt’s definitely mine, but I have no idea who the sweatpants

belong to. Don’t worry about it, though. No one will care,” he

said, flipping the clothes and a big beach towel over the top of the

screen. Then he put a plastic shopping bag down on the ground.

“That’s for your uniform and sneakers.”

“Thanks,” Helen called out, painfully aware how little space stood

between him and her naked body. It was silly, really. Everyone is

naked under a few millimeters of clothes, but this felt different

somehow. It felt dangerous. She watched his feet through the gap

at the bottom of the screen as he began to turn away, hesitated,

and then hurried off. She let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d

been holding.

The clothes he’d left her were gigantic, but they were soft, comfortable,

and they smelled like dryer sheets. She toweled off, put

the borrowed outfit on, and came out of the shower area carrying

her bag of dirty clothes.

By the time she and Lucas made it into the house, Jason and

Hector were sitting at the kitchen table watching Cassandra and

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Ariadne shower a man Helen didn’t know with affection. Lucas introduced

Helen before giving his uncle a big hug.

Pallas Delos was a large, blond man, still glowing with health and

youth even though he was graying at the temples. He and Hector

shared the same cautious smile and sharp eyes, but there was more

of Jason’s and Ariadne’s prettiness about him than Hector’s blunt

masculinity. He shook Helen’s hand politely, but his curious stare

followed her long after the introduction was over and it began to

make Helen feel uncomfortable. She wondered if he was just reacting

to her taboo name or if he had heard unflattering things about

her from someone in the family. His stare made Helen jumpy. She

tried to hide herself behind Lucas.

“Okay, everybody out. I have to get started on dinner,” Noel

ordered as she entered the kitchen, waving her hands in a shooing

motion. Helen found herself being pulled out the back door by

Lucas.

“It’s a good idea to stay out of my mom’s way when she gets like

that or you’ll end up chopping vegetables for the next hour,” he

said. He led her back outside toward the grassy lawn between the

tennis courts and the pool.

“I don’t mind helping,” Helen said, starting to head back toward

the house.

“I do,” Lucas said with a sly smile, tugging on her hand. “Besides,

I thought you wanted to learn how to fly. Isn’t that what caused all

the fuss earlier this afternoon?”

Helen could tell he was upset and trying not to show it. “About

that,” she began, scrunching her face up guiltily.

“Yeah, that was bad. And it was all my fault. I should have taught

you to fly as soon as we healed from our fall, but I didn’t trust . . .”

he said, stopping himself and shaking his head ruefully. “Never

mind. The point is, once I learned I could fly all I wanted to do was

get back in the air. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. It was stupid of

me to think you would wait.”

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“How old were you when you found out?” Helen asked.

“Ten? But it took me a while to understand it,” he said as if to

prepare her for something. “Scions are born with all their talents,

but it takes time to discover how to use some of them. Especially if

there’s no one with your particular talent to act as a mentor.”

“Did you have one? A mentor, I mean.”

“No. I don’t know any other Scions who can fly besides you. But I

had books, and my family for support.” He pulled up and stopped

to face Helen. “You never had any of that, so this might be a little

harder for you.”

“I’m good at hard, it’s easy I’ve never trusted,” she responded

quickly, but he gave her a look that indicated he thought she had

missed his point.

“I just don’t want you to get discouraged if this takes us a while.

So before we start, I have to explain some things,” he said, suddenly

all business. “Strength, speed, agility, acute hearing and eyesight,

beauty, rapid healing, and intelligence, although that last

one’s debatable, these are all gifts that pretty much every Scion

has, and we don’t have to be trained to use them. But there’s another

group of talents that are rare, and most of them take some

work. Flying is one of the rare ones. And it’s one of the hardest to

get the hang of.”

“I honestly don’t care how hard it is to master this. I don’t care if

this takes me years. I’m just dying to do it again!” Helen bounced

up and down on her toes impatiently.

“Okay, okay! First of all, you have to hold still. The jumping part

comes later when you want speed,” he said with a laugh as he put

his hands on Helen’s waist.

She gasped faintly at the unexpected touch, and tried to make

herself stand still like he had said, but it wasn’t easy. They stood

for a few moments, just staring at each other.

“Close your eyes,” he whispered. Helen’s heart was racing and

she had a feeling Lucas could hear it.

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“Calm down,” he said, smiling with his eyes closed. “Try and slow

your pulse down if you can.”

“I’m trying. Do you have to stand so close?” Helen asked, her

voice thin and shaky.

“Yes. I don’t want you to get away from me. That would be bad,”

he said in a deadpan voice, maintaining his concentration. A few

seconds passed. When he next spoke he sounded very calm and far

away.

“Now. Focus on your body. Take a deep breath and follow it in,

like your brain is floating gently inside that air you’re breathing.”

He waited a few moments for Helen to get to where he was.

It took her a few breaths, but eventually she was able to do it. He

knew exactly when she was ready. “Good. Now you’re inside of

yourself,” he said triumphantly. “Can you feel the weight of you, all

stacked up and all tied together?”

She did feel it. She could feel the weight of her skin on top of her

muscles on top of her bones, all stacked up, just like he had said.

There were millions and millions of little bits of her, all marching

around like soldiers with different but cohesive orders. Those were

her cells, she realized at once. She giggled, thinking how strange it

was to be this massive army and never feel it. She heard Lucas

laugh, too, and she knew that he was right there with her, experiencing

what she was experiencing.

“Now I want you to do something really hard,” he said, his voice

light and curious, almost childlike. “I want you to stay inside, but

also look out, if you can. Don’t be scared. I’m right here with you.”

Helen did as he told her, but the sensation was way too intense to

process.

She had lost her sunglasses once. She’d looked all over, in the kitchen,

the living room, back up in her bedroom, but she couldn’t

find them anywhere. It was annoying because she knew she had

just had them in her hand, but she couldn’t remember what she’d

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done with them. Then her dad told her that her sunglasses were on

top of her head.

In that moment she realized that she had been using the wrong

sense. She had been looking when she should have been feeling.

She reached up and felt her glasses with her hand, but she also felt

them with her scalp, and when she thought about it she realized

that she had been feeling her glasses up there the whole time.

She’d just been so busy looking she hadn’t thought to feel.

This was similar. Again, she was realizing that there were many

different ways to experience the world around her. Now, she was

still aware of all of her millions of cells, but she could also feel

something new. She felt herself falling toward something truly

huge, and she knew she had another sense that could stop the

falling.

Scared out of her mind, she instinctively pushed with this new

sense. She needed to put some distance between her little army

and the big, fast monster she was falling toward—the monster she

suddenly realized she had been falling toward every second of

every day of her life.

A moment too late to stop herself, Helen realized that the monster

was the earth, and the falling sensation was gravity—and that

what she had just done was switch it off. Vertigo sucked at her,

pulling her off balance. She grabbed on to Lucas, frantically burying

her face against his chest. He was the only unmovable object in

the entire universe, and if Helen let him go of him she knew she

would spin off into space forever and ever.

“It’s okay,” he whispered into her ear. His breath was warm, and

his voice soothed her. “I won’t let you go, Helen. I promise. Do you

trust me?” The temperature dropped and great gusts of wind

tossed her hair around in a tangle.

She kept her face pressed against the L-shaped hollow where Lucas’s

shoulder turned into his neck. She told herself that this is

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what difficult felt like, this was the “hard” that she had been cavalier

enough to tell Lucas she preferred to “easy.”

“Yes,” she whispered, feeling the cold, thin air crawl into her

clothes and snatch the sounds she made away from her lips as soon

as she spoke.

“Then prove it,” he whispered back. “Open your eyes.”

They stayed in the air until the sky was almost completely dark and

Helen was so cold she couldn’t stop shaking. There was a lot for

her to learn. Defying gravity was a big deal, but it was only half of

flying. The other half was less of a mental leap, but it was also

much trickier. Helen learned that to move through the air she

couldn’t just flap her arms or kick her feet. She had to manipulate

the air around her. Lucas started to teach her how to command the

air, make it denser on one side and thinner on another so that a

tiny, Helen-sized current was created around her. When Lucas did

it, it seemed as if he were floating underwater. The wind didn’t

whip at his hair or clothes, but flowed around him, gently holding

him or quickly pushing him depending on how fast he wanted to

go.

Lucas spent most of this first lesson just floating there in front of

Helen as if he were in the ocean, his long limbs sinuously riding

the currents, his fingers splayed to stave off random eddies. He

kept his arms out and ready to catch her in case she shot off too

fast, or slipped off a current of air pressure that she had created

unevenly before she tumbled into a spin. Flying was complicated,

and Helen didn’t have the feel of it yet. It was a bit like learning to

drive a car and aim a rifle at the same time. It required a light

touch and complete concentration.

Lucas also taught her tricks for not getting spotted by the “gravity

impaired,” as he called the poor landlocked suckers they were looking

down on. Helen was surprised to learn that early evening was

actually the most dangerous time to fly. Sunset was when people

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looked up to admire the pretty colors, and on Nantucket it was also

when half the island’s residents were making their living taking

photos or churning out watercolors.

Several times, Lucas had to grab Helen and fly out over the ocean

so they weren’t seen. Apparently, flying any time during the day

was dangerous, but if Helen stayed high enough, anyone who spotted

her would think she was a bird. Night was the safest time, of

course, and that’s when they could fly closer to the ground, which

Lucas promised was a thrill. But all of it was a thrill to Helen, and

when Lucas finally said that they should go in, she literally whined

and asked for five more minutes. Lucas just laughed.

“Believe me, I know how you feel. But I’m freezing,” he said.

Helen pushed away from him with narrowed eyes and a small

smile. She swooped over his shoulder and around his back, softly

brushing against him as she passed.

“Tomorrow?” she asked, feeling shy and powerful at the same

time. He rolled over gracefully and captured one of her arms just

before she could drift away.

“Tomorrow. I promise,” he said quietly as he reeled her in. “But

it’s nearly dark and my family will worry about us if we stay out