Starcrossed (54 page)

as she went. As she passed India Street, she heard the slaps and

thuds of what sounded like a massive hand-to-hand fight. Her feet

pounded against the pavement as she ran up the middle of the

road toward the sounds, already knowing where she was going,

where the Fates would have arranged this. The Nantucket

Atheneum.

Helen rounded a corner and saw that a dark pall erased the entire

end of the street. Even in a dark room it’s possible to sense

other things around you, but Creon’s shadows were so complete

they robbed Helen of more than just her vision; they uprooted her,

tilting all of her other senses off balance as well. Looking at the

thing he created, Helen understood why Creon was called a Shadow

Master. He did more than simply take away the light; he made

that same thing that lurks under the basement stairs or at the back

of the closet—that full darkness that your brain believes is stuffed

with serial killers and monsters. Helen had to swallow down a

scream just looking at it.

Somewhere inside that terrifying black hole, she could hear

Creon and Hector hammering away at each other in a blind rage.

Helen was at a loss. She was so scared of the disorienting nothingness

that Creon had created she couldn’t force her feet to run into

it. She screamed Hector’s name and scrunched her fists up in frustration,

and as she did so her hands began to glow with the stark

blue-white glow of electricity. Then something occurred to her.

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When she was fighting for her life against Creon in her foyer, her

spark had thrown back the gloom so she could see him. Even

though he could control other kinds of light, her lightning had to

be different somehow. Acting immediately, Helen held out her

hands and summoned a bright spark to dance between her palms.

She lit up the whole scene in front of her.

Hector was on his back and Creon was over him, beating his head

repeatedly into the marble steps of the library. The blue glow

snapped and hummed with increasing intensity around Helen’s

hands, and Hector turned his swollen eyes toward her bright light.

He smiled. Freed from Creon’s disorienting shadows, Hector was

able to struggle out from under his cousin’s grip and he stood to

face him.

They came at each other before Helen could take another step.

Clashing together, Creon and Hector ground each other’s faces into

the marble steps. They threw each other into the Doric columns,

and yanked at one another’s skin and bones, each of them trying to

pull the other apart. Helen began running, yelling at them to stop,

but she was too late. While she was still half a block away, Hector

managed to get behind Creon. With one cracking yank, he broke

Creon’s neck.

Helen stopped running and froze in the middle of the street, her

mouth hanging open as Creon’s lifeless body tumbled down the

steps. Hector looked down at the body, and then up at Helen, momentarily

free of the Furies and in complete possession of his own

passion. For a split second, Helen knew that Hector understood

what he had done, and that what he had done was unthinkable. He

had killed his own cousin.

A dark comet fell out of the sky and plowed into Hector’s distracted

body, knocking him through three columns and cracking the

very foundation of the faux temple.

“Lucas, stop!” Helen screamed, her voice breaking painfully as

she cried out with all of her strength.

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Lucas couldn’t hear her. The Furies had him. All he could hear

were their commands to kill the kin-killer. Lucas hit Hector over

and over, trying to beat him to death.

Helen half flew the last few strides to the battling pair. She threw

herself up into the air and then came crashing back down on top of

them with as much gravity as she could muster. Pushing the two

boys back into the cracked rubble of the library steps, Helen threw

her arms up in a V over her head and summoned matching bolts

for each hand. Before either of them could block her, she brought

her bolts down onto the heads of the warring cousins and shocked

them both into unconsciousness. As they fell still under her hands,

Helen could hear rapid footsteps behind her. The rest of the Delos

family was coming.

“Get back,” she screamed with her ruined voice as she spun

around to face Ariadne and Pallas, who were both running toward

her from opposing streets.

Hector was unconscious, but he could still incite the Furies in his

family. His sin was so recent that the impulse to kill him would be

urgent and blinding, even to those who loved him the most. Helen

had made peace with the House of Thebes, but she had not become

a part of it, so she was mercifully free of the urge to kill Hector,

who had now become an Outcast. She got in touch with the sensation

that connected her to her lightning and felt a disappointingly

small spark. She had been running around for hours now without a

sip to drink.

She looked back at Hector and Lucas, made sure that they were

both breathing, and then stood up and walked out into the street,

putting herself in between Hector’s unconscious form and his infuriated

family.

“Don’t come any closer,” Helen said, forcing what voltage she had

left to spark out of her fingertips in a false show of power.

Helen held out her icy blue hands as she came down what was

left of the steps and looked from Ariadne’s sly eyes to Pallas’s

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bared teeth. They were not themselves anymore, but blunt instruments

for the Furies. She stepped into the street and raised her

glowing hands to warn them off. At the sight of Helen’s lightning,

they backed off a step or two, but just as they were about to back

off completely, Castor rounded a corner, following the whispers of

the Furies.

Helen was ridiculously outnumbered. She had no idea how far

she would have to go to protect Hector from his own family. She

couldn’t kill any of them any more than she could let them kill him.

If they didn’t buy her bluff, she was out of options. She had never

felt so alone in her entire life.

“Helen, I’ve got Hector! Stay between us while I take him away,”

Daphne called out behind her. “Whatever you do, don’t let them

lay eyes on him or we will lose this fight!”

Helen sighed at the sound of her mother’s voice, so relieved that

she had someone on her side that she found the strength she

needed to make the only choice that she could.

She didn’t care if she drained every last drop of water out of her

body. The only thing that concerned her was stopping the vengeance

cycle before it devoured a family that she loved. She flung

her arms out wide and with a last gasping push made her lightning

dance in a great, blinding circle around her body. Ariadne, Pallas,

and Castor threw up their arms to protect their eyes from the one

kind of light they had no control over.

Helen’s halo of ball lightning was hotter than the surface of the

sun. It melted the pavement under her feet into lava and heated up

the air around her until it literally hummed. The Delos family

jumped away from the intolerable light and heat, but more important,

they jumped away from Daphne as she ran into the darkness

with Hector’s unconscious body slung over her shoulder.

The pain was unbearable. Helen couldn’t hold the ball of electricity

for more than a few seconds. As soon as she heard Daphne’s

footsteps move away, she switched off like a fried lightbulb and

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stumbled desperately out of the white-hot liquid asphalt that was

pooling below her, burning her and choking her with noxious

gases. She crawled on hands and knees toward Ariadne, Castor,

and Pallas, their faces matching masks of agony as they all suddenly

became aware of what they had nearly done. But Helen

couldn’t let them fall apart just yet.

“Lucas needs help!” she rasped, gesturing back to the shattered

steps of the Atheneum.

“Ariadne,” Castor said in a brittle voice. “Go get Lucas. Helen,

can you walk?”

“No,” she admitted, shaking her head.

“Mortals will be coming,” Castor said as he picked Helen up and

started to carry her off, but he stopped when he noticed his brother

wasn’t following. “Pallas! We need to go!”

“My son,” Pallas whispered, unable to move.

“Dad, come on! You have to take Creon’s body!” Ariadne hissed

from the stairs of the Atheneum. She had Lucas draped over her

shoulders and she was glancing around frantically to see if there

were any witnesses.

The sound of his daughter’s voice managed to distract Pallas

enough to get him to pick up Creon and follow Castor out of the

town center and out into the moors.

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Chapter Nineteen

Helen stared at the glass of water in front of her as it

sweated condensed moisture onto the kitchen table.

She’d already drunk what seemed like a bathtub full of

water and she wasn’t thirsty anymore, but she held on

to this last glass to give herself something else to look

at besides the bereft faces around her.

“His whole life is this family. This House,” Ariadne said. Her eyes

were wide, red, and staring, like someone who had been stuck in

too many different airports in too many different time zones for

too long. They all looked like that—like they’d woken up to find

themselves on the wrong side of the planet. “How can Hector be

Outcast from the House of Thebes?”

“I could have stopped him,” Jason said with grim certainty.

“You can barely sit up straight in your chair right now, Jase,” Ariadne

said, shaking her head. Jason had yet to recover from healing

Claire, and his twin wouldn’t let him take responsibility for

something that he hadn’t even seen. “I was there. I should have

stopped it.”

“You weren’t on India Street when Hector killed Creon, Ari,”

Helen said, still staring at her water glass. “I was.”

“Stop it, Helen,” Lucas said. “You and your mother saved this

family, or at least, you saved what’s left of it.”

Lucas’s words brought fresh tears for Pandora. After several

minutes of quiet crying, the family lapsed back into silence.

Everyone was thinking the same thought, that if each of them had

done one thing differently that day they could have staved off all

the pain that they were all suffering. Cassandra had told everyone

they couldn’t have known what was going to happen, but in saying

that she seemed to take the burden of guilt onto herself. She

seemed locked in her own head, unable to let go of the fact that

she, of all people, should have been able to protect her family.

“Call your mother,” Noel said suddenly to Helen, breaking everyone

out of their tortured thoughts. “I’m the only one who can bear

to be near Hector now, and I want to see my nephew. He’ll need

me.”

Helen nodded and pulled out her cell phone. It was the same

phone Hector had given her with bloody knuckles and a toothless

grin after Lucas had beat the stuffing out of him, but she buried

that memory and dialed her mother’s number. As her phone connected,

she stood up to leave the kitchen and wandered toward the

front of the house, which was usually quieter.

She heard two rings at the same time, one in her ear and one

somewhere inside the house. Helen looked around and found her

mother’s bag hanging on a hook in the front entryway. She chided

herself for not being more aware. Daphne had been kidnapped; of

course she had left her things behind. Helen hit END and heard the

phone in the bag cease ringing. She stared at her mother’s purse,

and was overcome with an irresistible urge. Just as Helen reached

for it, there was a knock at the front door a few feet away from her.

Helen hastily opened her mother’s bag and took out the cell

phone. She quickly scrolled down the list of latest calls as footsteps

approached from the kitchen. Concentrating on the glowing

screen, Helen saw a few incoming unlisted numbers and a single

outgoing call to someone named Daedalus before she had to shove

the phone back in the bag.

Ariadne appeared in the entryway to answer the door, and a moment

later Castor and Pallas appeared behind her. They were tense

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and probably expecting either the police or a member of the Hundred

Cousins. After the briefest of pauses they nodded to Ariadne,

signaling that it was okay for her to open the door. When she did,

Daphne was standing on the doorstep.

“I call for a meeting between the House of Atreus and the House

of Thebes,” Daphne announced as she crossed her arms in an X

over her breast and tilted her upper body forward, giving the suggestion

of a bow.

Castor and Pallas looked at each other. Whatever hatred they carried

toward Daphne needed to be put down now, and they both

knew it. Pallas swallowed hard and finally nodded.