Starcrossed (47 page)

to do with who parented us. You know that as well as anyone!

Helen’s mother could be any one of the five different Daphnes who

were killed in the slaughter eighteen years ago.”

“You’d do anything to keep the peace, wouldn’t you? Even let that

woman get away,” Pallas said, pushing past Castor and throwing

Hector’s restraining hand off his shoulder.

Lucas took an automatic step forward to get his cousin’s back.

Hector could easily overpower his father if he had to, but Lucas

didn’t want them to fight at all. A fight would delay him from finding

Helen, and he had to see her. They weren’t supposed to be separated,

and Lucas couldn’t shake the overwhelming sensation that

something very wrong was happening.

“Where are you going, Dad?” Hector asked wearily, backing off

from a physical fight.

“To find the woman who murdered my brother,” Pallas said

through gritted teeth as he strode toward the door.

“You will not go,” Cassandra said.

Everyone in the room froze at the sound of her voice. There was a

chiming tone to it, as if more than one person was speaking at the

same time. The voices coming out of her were old and young and

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everything in between, all speaking in harmony. Lucas saw Claire

take an instinctive step back toward Jason in terror. Cassandra’s

mouth was glowing, and her hair was writhing around her head

like snakes.

“Lucas, son of the sun, is the only one who can see the face he

seeks,” she continued to prophesy. “He will find the daughters of

Zeus, they who are beloved by Aphrodite, and give them shelter in

the Royal House of Thebes. Oh! Caution! Betrayal . . .” She broke

off uncertainly. The light left her, and she began to shake. She

looked frightened, but not even Lucas wanted to go near her.

“Are you okay?” Lucas asked her quietly from across the room,

breaking the unnatural silence. She nodded and rubbed her hands

over her shoulders and upper arms, suddenly looking much smaller

than she was.

“You’re going to need to take Hector and the twins with you,” she

warned. “I think there’s going to be a fight.”

“I’ll go, too,” Castor said, but Cassandra shook her head.

“If Daphne sees you or Pallas, she’ll run,” she said with an apologetic

shrug.

“So our children are to go face her alone? No. Daphne is too dangerous.

We can’t let them anywhere near her,” Pallas objected as

his anger gave way to fear. “She seduced Ajax and murdered him!”

“We don’t know that!” Castor yelled out in frustration.

For a moment it looked like Castor was going to hit his brother,

but Hector insinuated himself in between them. Lucas nearly

screamed with frustration, wondering how Scions had ever survived

this long. They were always at each other’s throats, and none

of this infighting got him any closer to Helen.

“Everyone calm down! Uncle. Father,” Hector said, turning from

one to the other, and assuring both of them. “We can handle this.”

There was a gasping laugh, a bitter sound that caught everyone’s

attention. When Lucas looked over, Pandora had a hand over her

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mouth and her eyes were filling up with tears. She looked tenderly

at Hector, and spoke to him from behind her hand.

“You look just like him, you know,” she said with an odd smile.

“Like Ajax. It’s as if another cycle is starting.”

“There’s no cycle waiting for me, Aunt Dora. I’ll be fine,” Hector

said with a cocky smile. “We’ll all be back in a couple of hours with

Helen and Daphne, safe and sound.”

“Where is she?” Lucas asked Cassandra, relieved to finally be doing

something.

“Helen and her mother are somewhere close to the ferry, but they

are moving around so I can’t see exactly where,” she replied.

Lucas felt his cousins fall in behind him as he turned and headed

for the door.

“Wait! I’m going with you,” Claire insisted as she scurried to

catch up with the fast-moving Scions. “Lennie needs me.”

“You really are insane, you know that?” Jason said scornfully, but

Lucas could hear admiration behind his false anger. “You’re staying

here.”

“But I can talk to her! She’ll listen to me,” Claire reasoned, holding

up her hands and pressing against Jason’s chest to keep him

from walking past her. She looked at Lucas, begging him to agree

with her, but he couldn’t do that.

“You’re not going, Five-Two,” Hector said, ending the argument.

“If there’s a fight you’d be a target, and I don’t want anyone getting

hurt trying to protect you.” He glanced at his brother meaningfully.

“Don’t worry, I’ll bring her back,” Lucas assured Claire. He followed

his cousins and jumped into the truck. “Just please stay

here, and stay safe.”

“Of course,” Claire replied in her most deferential tone. Lucas

didn’t need to be a Falsefinder to know she was lying.

He hoped she wouldn’t do anything too stupid, but he couldn’t

stop to find out what she was scheming. Helen was about to leave

the island. Lucas didn’t know if he had a touch of his little sister’s

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talent or not, but he just knew that if Helen left him then, he might

lose her forever.

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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

Chapter Seventeen

Creon stood along the side of the compound, entirely

cloaked in shadows, and waited until his cousins sped off

in their black SUV before he ran after them. He could easily

keep pace with the moving car, and as long as he

stayed inside a cloud of darkness, he could depend on the

dreary weather to keep him perfectly hidden. No other Scion for

hundreds of years had Creon’s control over light, and on a cloudy

day not even another Son of Apollo could see him.

Creon had followed Hector and Jason back to the compound

from Helen’s place that morning. Having nothing else to go on, he

decided the best thing to do would be to eavesdrop on his estranged

family. His father had told him about the shape-shifting

qualities of the cestus, and he knew that he had no other choice but

to wait for his quarry to reveal herself. He guessed that eventually

she would make contact with the traitors, and he had been right.

Now all he had to do was follow them and trust that eventually his

cousins would lead him right to her.

Helen looked out the window of the hotel, searching the nearly

empty street below, but she didn’t see Lucas anywhere. She’d

hoped to see him one last time before she left, even if he didn’t see

her. It was little enough to hope for, but apparently, little was still

too much. Lucas was gone, the storm was ending, and soon she

and her mother would be on the first ferry off island.

“Helen,” Daphne called from behind her. “You’re wearing your

own face. You have to be consistent or we’ll be discovered.”

Helen turned around and concentrated on projecting the image

of the cute brunette she and her mother had decided Helen would

become when they ran away.

“Much better,” Daphne said with a pleased nod. “I still can’t believe

you never stumbled on to this power by yourself.”

Helen didn’t have an answer for that. She was too disturbed by

her newfound power and her newfound mother to decide whether

she was being complimented or insulted. She walked over to the

vanity in the bedroom to look at the stranger in the mirror. The

cestus could make her look like any woman in the world, but she’d

only had a few hours to practice with it. Her mother had promised

to teach her how to become any age, any race, any gender in the future,

but although she’d kept her disguise simple for now, she was

still unrecognizable, as long as she remembered to keep up the

illusion.

“You don’t have to keep your half of the cestus as the heart necklace,

you know,” her mother told her, standing behind Helen and

looking at her in the glass.

“Yeah, I know. I figured out how to do that much on my own, at

least,” Helen answered in the stranger’s voice.

Helen’s necklace was the actual girdle of Aphrodite, the protective

half that made her impervious to weapons. Daphne’s half was

the adornments of Aphrodite, and although she couldn’t stop a

blade or a bomb with her skin like Helen could, what she could do

was potentially more frightening. Daphne was irresistible to

whomever she decided to charm.

“Well, I’m glad. I’ve always worn my half as the heart, and I always

hoped you did, too,” Daphne said shyly. “I guess you probably

think I’ve got no right to be nostalgic about you. But I am.”

Daphne fingered her heart-shaped charm and opened her mouth

to say something else, but she stopped herself and went into the

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other room to sort through her luggage for the tenth time. A part of

Helen wanted to run after her mother and say she had always

hoped her necklace was a tie between them, too. But another part

of her wanted to rip the thing off her neck and throw it in her

mother’s borrowed face.

Helen wasn’t certain how far Daphne’s power of persuasion went

just yet. It came from the cestus, so it might be that Daphne was irresistible

only in a sexual way, but Helen was painfully aware of

how quickly she had agreed to leave her home and the people she

loved. She was following a woman she couldn’t remember to a

place she had never seen, and she had made the decision to do so

in less than an hour. Helen thought through everything she had

learned, looking for some clue that she was being controlled, but as

she added up all the evidence, she knew that she didn’t need to be

brainwashed to want to run away.

After what Daphne had told her, Helen was so disgusted with

herself she would have run away, regardless.

“Are you hungry?” Daphne asked. Helen jumped away from the

window at the sound and dropped the curtain guiltily. Without

even realizing it, she had been looking for Lucas again.

“No,” she replied, unable to look up from the rug.

“Well, you’re still going to have to eat, and we should try out your

new face before we get on the ferry,” Daphne said with a grimace.

“We’re going out for breakfast before we have to travel over that

blasted ocean.”

Helen tried to argue—to a point out how silly it would be to test

her ability to hold her new shape with so little practice—but

Daphne only shrugged and said that it would be easier to test it on

land before they ventured out on the water. It seemed that Helen’s

fear of the ocean was inherited. Daphne loathed it, and remembering

what Hector had told her about how her own dislike of the

ocean came from not being able to control it, Helen assumed that

her mother must be a huge control freak to hate the ocean so

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passionately. After a quick check to make sure that neither of them

were wearing clothes that might get them recognized, Daphne

dragged Helen out onto the street with a promise that it would be

“fun.”

The storm had mashed the fallen autumn leaves into a kind of

red-brown paste that coated the cobblestone streets and clogged

the overwhelmed gutters. The rain was petering out and the wind

was dying down, but the bottoms of the clouds were still a

smudged-mascara color, and water ran in impromptu rivers down

the sidewalks on their way out to sea. Fallen branches lay here and

there, the bushy ends denuded of leaves, and the trunk ends, newly

ripped from the tree, ended in fresh white splinters that stuck out

in all directions like dropped boxes of toothpicks. Helen could

smell the tree sap in the air as the few trees that the island had to

offer bled out after losing their battle with the wind. With the disturbing

image of dead wooden soldiers and giant wooden horses in

her mind, the last thing that she wanted to do was eat.

“Nothing’s going to be open,” Helen protested, but she knew she

it wasn’t true.

“I used to live here, too, you know. And if there’s one thing I

learned . . .” Daphne stomped confidently past the boarded-up

windows of the nervous art dealers and down the block, where a

line was forming outside the Overeasy Café. “It’s that Whalers love

nothing more than a really good storm,” she finished with relish.

It was true. Helen’s fellow Nantucketers were proud of their ability

to live through whatever Mother Nature threw at them. It was a

macho thing, but also a chance to bond. They shared a good laugh

over the howling wind, ice, snow, or rain while they all looked for

their hysterical cats and retrieved their lawn decorations from each

other’s living rooms.

The block didn’t have electricity, and folks were still sweeping up

glass from the broken windows. In spite of all this, Helen wasn’t at

all surprised that the café was seating people. In fact, she knew

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that at that moment her father and Kate were six blocks away at

the News Store, checking out the damage. She also knew that if

people started hanging around out front looking hungry, Jerry and