Starcrossed (49 page)

staring up at the hotel windows with his reflection-defying vision.

His eyes dropped down when he saw Daphne. Then he looked at

her suitcase, squinting his eyes in concentration.

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As soon as she saw Creon, Helen’s senses rewound to her last encounter

with him. She could still feel his humid breath on her neck

as he whispered preciosa in her ear right before he stabbed her.

Most of all, she remembered the suffocating darkness that had left

her feeling like she was lost in space and utterly helpless. The

terror-echo she felt made her forget for a moment that both she

and her mother were protected by their borrowed shapes.

“Mom! Stop!” she screamed instinctively, reaching out to pull

Daphne back into the hotel.

Creon made eye contact with Helen as she shouted. Then he saw

his cousin Lucas stride up and grab the strange girl frantically.

Creon looked from the cute brunette to Lucas, noticing how they

held each other so protectively. Then he looked back at the tacky

woman with the expensive luggage and smiled. He ran across the

street, his head lowered and his shoulders rounded like a bull.

“Daphne! He knows!” Lucas shouted, throwing Helen behind

him and moving impossibly fast to intercept Creon.

The cousins collided in the middle of the street, both of them using

their momentum to put power into their first punches. But Lucas

could do something Creon wasn’t expecting. At the last moment

he made gravity pull harder on him, and in his massive-state

he pushed his stunned opponent back into the asphalt with so

much force he fractured the surface of the street.

A split second later Lucas glanced up and saw Matt’s terrified

face through the windshield of his car as he slammed on his

brakes. Matt tried to stop, but it was too late. He hit the two figures

that had appeared out of thin air in the middle of the street and his

car crumpled in on itself as if it had run it onto a brick wall.

“Lucas!” Helen screamed as she tried to run past her mother.

Daphne grabbed Helen and restrained her just as Hector’s big

SUV screeched to a halt in front of them, blocking Helen’s way to

the accident. Ariadne jumped out of the passenger side before

Hector had even come to a full stop and sprinted to the wreck.

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“Get in the truck!” Hector bellowed at Daphne as he came around

from the driver’s side and stomped to the smoking front end of

Matt’s car.

Helen struggled, unable to see what was going on. She was still

calling Lucas’s name as Jason and Daphne bundled her into the

back of the SUV.

“Luke’s fine!” Jason said to her through gritted teeth as he

wrestled with her. “Helen, please! We’re attracting enough attention

as it is.”

Reminded where she was, Helen forced herself to calm down and

get into the backseat. She slid over to one of the tinted windows,

and sighed with relief when she saw Lucas standing up in front of

Matt’s destroyed car. He was uninjured and holding on to Hector

to keep him from running off somewhere. Creon was gone, so

Helen assumed that Hector was trying to follow him. For a moment,

it looked like Lucas was going to hit Hector, but then he

whispered something that seemed to convince his stubborn cousin,

and all at once Hector calmed down and nodded.

“He looks just like Ajax,” Daphne whispered behind her, her eyes

glued to Hector.

Helen glanced briefly at her mother, then turned her attention

back to the wreck. Ariadne was helping Matt out of his car, holding

him up. He was reeling and bleeding from the head, ash-white and

owl-eyed with astonishment, but he didn’t seem to be badly hurt.

“We should get you to a hospital,” Cassandra insisted as she studied

Matt’s uneven pupils.

“No,” Matt said vehemently. “There’s no way to explain this.

Normal people don’t get up and walk away after you run them over

with a car.”

They all knew he was right. Even concussed, Matt was a quick

thinker.

“You hit your head,” Jason warned as the Scions shot each other

uncertain looks.

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“And I still know what I saw. Look, don’t worry about me, I’d

never rat out a friend, but we have to go now,” Matt insisted. “Before

the police come.”

“Ari?” Jason asked as he met his twin’s eyes in an honest exchange.

“Is it life threatening?”

Ariadne ran her hands just over Matt’s skull, a faint glow coming

out of her palms. “He’ll be just fine,” she said after a brief moment.

She started to lead Matt toward Hector’s truck, but Matt giggled

and stopped dead.

“Wow. What did you do to me?” He gave her a goofy smile.

“I healed you. That’s my gift,” she answered as she smiled back at

him, suddenly looking exhausted.

“Thanks,” Matt said. He allowed himself to be moved toward

Hector’s truck. “Wait. Where’s Claire?” Helen was out of the truck

and barreling down on Matt before her mother could even hold out

an arm to stop her.

“What do you mean ‘where’s Claire’?” Helen demanded, balling

her fists so hard her arms started shaking. “Where did you last see

her?”

“The front seat,” Matt replied weakly as he gestured toward his

car.

Jason’s whole body went rigid. Moving so fast he was little more

than a blur, Jason tore the door of the car off with one hand and

tenderly scooped Claire out from underneath the dashboard with

the other. She was unconscious, bleeding, and as limp as a wet cotton

doll.

“No,” Jason whispered to her. “You were supposed to stay away

from me.” He placed his lips a hair’s width away from hers and

held statue still.

“How is she?” Ariadne asked urgently.

“She’s breathing,” he said after a moment, his voice breaking. He

lifted his head up and met his twin’s eyes.

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“Well, can you heal her or not?” she asked him calmly, as though

she and her twin had prepared themselves for this.

He clenched his jaw and nodded, but didn’t speak, carrying

Claire into the back of the truck and holding her carefully on his

lap while everyone else organized.

“I’ll take care of Matt’s car and meet you back at home,” Lucas

said to Hector, already obscuring the particulars of the wreck by

bending the light around it.

“Wait,” Daphne commanded. She raised a hand like she was hailing

a cab and closed her eyes. “This will draw less attention,” she

said. Thick wreaths of pearl gray fog rolled off the water and down

the street, the long, ropy tendrils racing toward her delicately tilted

fingers.

“Great Zeus, Cloud-Gatherer,” Hector said under his breath as

the scene of the accident disappeared in the fog. Then he turned to

Lucas. “Where are you going to hide the car?”

“In the ocean. We can clean it up after dark,” Lucas answered as

he plunged into the thick mist to push Matt’s lump of twisted metal

and leaking toxins off the dock.

Everyone else squeezed into Hector’s truck. The whole incident,

from Creon’s attack to their getaway, had only taken a few minutes

and they were a full four blocks from the scene before they heard

the first siren sounding through the fog.

They drove in complete silence, at a completely lawful speed, out

to Siasconset, each of them stuck inside their own thought boxes of

shock and worry. As they cruised along, Helen couldn’t take her

eyes off of Jason and Claire. Jason had started moving his hands

an inch above her body, his palms glowing like his sister’s had

when she healed Matt. He whispered in her ear. He blew soft,

sparkling breaths against her closed eyes as if he was exhaling energy

directly into her unconscious dreams.

Whatever he was doing was helping Claire, but it was also causing

him excruciating pain. A thick, slick sweat beaded up on his

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graying skin as Claire seemed to settle with more comfort in his

arms and gather more color in her cheeks. By the time they parked

at the Delos compound, Jason was so spent Helen didn’t even ask,

she just picked Claire up off his lap and carried her into the house

for him.

“My room. Quickly,” Jason croaked as Helen carried Claire into

the crowded kitchen.

She ducked past the startled faces of the Delos family, cradling

Claire close to her chest to shield her from prying eyes as she and

Jason made their way to the stairs. Halfway up the staircase she

felt Jason put his hand on her shoulder and lean into her for support.

He was so weak he could barely put one foot in front of the

other. Eventually, he made it the rest of the way.

“How can I help you?” Helen asked Jason, easing Claire down into

his bed.

“You can’t,” he replied as he stretched his big frame out alongside

Claire. “I made my choice, and we’re tied to each other until she recovers.

It’s sort of like a Healer’s last stand. At this point we’ll

either make it through that desert together or we won’t.”

“Oh, good,” Helen sighed, finally feeling hopeful. “Claire would

never allow someone she cared about to just go and die, especially

not to save her own life.”

She saw Jason smile and nod humorously as he remembered that

no matter how dire the situation seemed, at least he had tied his

life force to a genuinely legendary fighter.

“I did everything I could to keep her out of this, to protect her

from our kind,” he whispered, meeting Helen’s eyes.

“Yeah, I know. All that arguing you two did, even though you’re

obviously perfect for each other,” Helen said, feeling guilty. Jason

had tried to push Claire away to keep her safe, but Helen hadn’t. “I

get it now.”

“You have other things to deal with,” he said, his eyes already

starting to close. “Go. I’ll guide her through.”

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“If you lose your way, I’ll follow you down,” Helen told him,

already feeling the baked air of the dry lands leaching all the moisture

out of the atmosphere.

Suddenly, Helen knew what the dry lands were and why she had

always been too frightened to recognize the truth when it was staring

her in the face. The desert that she wandered into while she

slept, the land Jason now had to traverse to save Claire, was the

land of the dead. For the briefest of moments she could see Claire’s

fetch, confused, scared, and soundlessly calling out Jason’s name.

Helen banished that disturbing image and spoke directly into

Jason’s ear. “I know the way through the rubble, and I promise, if

you can’t make it on your own, I’ll come down and carry you both

out.”

Jason’s eyes snapped back open in shock, but his spirit was

already following Claire’s, and although he tried to fight it, his eyes

closed again as he slipped into a deep comalike slumber. Helen left

the room, trusting him completely with Claire’s heal. Mentally, she

was already joining the battle that awaited her in the living room.

Helen picked her way down the stairs, hearing her mother’s

raised voice as she neared. It was already hauntingly familiar even

though she had known the woman only a few short hours.

Daphne’s voice was Helen’s own, coming from outside her head

like a recording played back on a crappy answering machine.

Helen hated it—not the sound, but feeling like she was stuck in

someone else’s mistake, doomed to adopt the worst qualities of the

people she was supposed to love the most.

Helen paused for a moment to steel herself before she went into

the living room. In the few short minutes Helen had been upstairs,

a fight had begun.

“I’m to blame?” Daphne shrieked at Pallas, reacting to something

he’d just said. “If you all had just stayed in Cádiz, away from Helen,

none of this would have happened!”

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“That was my fault,” Hector admitted, trying to get everyone to

calm down. “My family had to leave because I nearly killed one of

my own kin.”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Daphne said out of the side of her

mouth.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pallas asked indignantly.

“Are you finally ready to talk about the elephant in the room?”

Daphne said bitterly. “I didn’t kill Ajax. Tantalus did.”

“You’re a liar!” Pallas said, taking a menacing step toward her.

“Then how come I’m alive? Tantalus told all of you that he killed

me himself, didn’t he?”

Pallas stared at her furiously.

“Just answer this one question. If I killed your brother Ajax, then

why don’t you see the Furies right now?” Daphne asked, throwing

her arms out as if to show she wasn’t hiding them anywhere.

Everyone looked around at one another, as if they were expecting

someone else to have an explanation, but no one did.

“Pallas, do you remember how Ajax and I hated each other, more

than just the rage of the Furies could account for, but at the same

time we wouldn’t allow ourselves be parted? Do you remember

how we used to seek each other out, like we couldn’t bear to be separated

for even a moment?” Daphne asked in a softer tone.

“You were his obsession,” Pallas said darkly, his eyes shooting