Keep sticking your chin out like that and I’ll knock it off for you,” Hector yelled. He’d been doing a lot of yelling over the past hour and a half.
Helen obediently tucked in her chin and lifted her fists up to guard her face. She kept her center of gravity low and moved her feet in sweeping crescents in case there were obstacles on the ground that she would need to brush out of the way. She circled Hector, watching his hips in case he shot in to take her to the mat. She did everything he’d told her to. Then Hector smirked and punched her in the face. She fell on her butt for the tenth time and after a moment looked up at him through her ever-healing eyes.
“That was your left again, huh?” she asked mildly.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said in a voice that reminded Helen of Mr. Hergeshimer. “You’re faster than me. Why don’t you get out of my way?”
Helen shrugged and stood up, adopting a defensive stance again. Hector immediately punched her in the gut, and she fell to her knees.
“That’s enough, Hector,” shouted Lucas in a tight voice. Helen held up a hand, gesturing to Lucas that it was okay as she stood up. Again.
She wanted Lucas to stay out of this. For some reason, Helen’s first real sparring session had turned personal for Hector, and she wanted him to go all the way to the end of whatever trip he was on so he could get it out of his system. The punishment hurt, but not nearly as badly as her cramps, so she could deal with it. As soon as she was back on her feet, Hector took them out from under her again with a leg sweep.
“Easy!” yelled Jason. “She’s never fought before, you dickhead!”
Helen looked up and saw Jason place a hand on Lucas’s shoulder, stopping him from jumping into the cage. “I’m fine, guys. Nothing to worry about,” she said as cheerfully as she could, getting up yet again. Hector did not appreciate her tone.
“Why won’t you take this seriously?” he shouted at Helen. She bent down to spit out the taste of the blood in her mouth, and Hector reeled back and punched her again in the head.
“Stop it!” screamed Cassandra from someplace beyond Helen’s vision. “She isn’t a natural fighter, okay? When are you going to get that through your thick skull?”
Helen felt terrible—she knew she must be a bloody mess to get someone who didn’t even like her that upset.
By the time Helen had struggled back up to her knees, Cassandra was no longer in the practice room where the Scions kept their punching bags and fight cage. Helen swallowed a mouthful of spit and blood and instantly regretted it when she choked on one of her own teeth.
“May I have some water, please?” she asked Ariadne, who was standing over her with a damp cloth.
On the other side of the cage, Helen saw Jason standing between Lucas and Hector. Jason’s shirt was half torn off and blood was running from a cut on his head, but still he fought to keep the two larger Delos boys from ripping each other up like wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Hector was yelling at Lucas, pleading his case.
“She can take anything. Anything! I hit her harder than I’ve ever hit anyone and she stood right back up! But she won’t hit back!” Hector roared, his voice cracking with passion. He saw Helen looking at him and pointed an accusing finger at her. “You think you can just stand back and let Luke do all your fighting for you? You’re stronger than all of us combined, but you’re too good to fight, Princess?”
Jason wrapped both his arms around his brother and held on as Hector bucked and struggled.
“I’m not trying to get hit!” Helen lisped through her broken and rapidly regrowing teeth. Ariadne put her own arms around Helen and held her as she stared daggers at her big brother.
“How dare you, Hector? She wasn’t raised like we were, always at each other’s throats. It just isn’t in her,” she scolded.
Hector seemed chastened by his sister’s tone and finally stopped struggling against Jason’s restraint. He slumped against his brother for a moment and then abruptly pushed him away. Then, with one easy leap he jumped over the fifteen-foot-high fence surrounding the fight mat and landed with an intentionally loud slap.
“She’d better get it in her. Because I don’t want any of the people I love to die defending her lazy ass,” he rasped. As he walked out of the fight room, Lucas ran to Helen.
“I’m so sorry.” He reached out and took Helen from Ariadne’s arms. “You don’t ever have to fight him again.”
“Why not?” Helen asked, pushing off his chest, her speech still slurred from taking too many knocks to the head. “I may not be a natural fighter, but he’s right. I need to learn this or someone else could get hurt. Someone like my father, or Claire, or Kate . . . Those women are still after me. They could hurt anyone I care about.”
Lucas caught her as she fell over. He looked over her mashed-up face inch by inch as he carried her out of the cage and into a back area that served as both locker room and medical facility.
He sat her on top of a stainless-steel table and left her for just a moment to gather some gauze, a basin of water, and, strangely, a juice box and a jar of raw honey. He didn’t say a word, but gestured for her to open her mouth, which she did, and then he started drizzling honey onto her tongue. As soon as her taste buds registered the oily sweet sunshine taste, she understood. Honey was the perfect health food for demigods. A feral need kicked in, and she grabbed his wrist with both her hands and held on until she was licking the jar clean.
When the honey was gone she finally caught her breath. She looked up and met Lucas’s eyes, and nodded at his inquisitive look, as if to say that she was better now. Without a word, Lucas pushed a plastic straw into the juice box and gave it to Helen to hold on to as he started in on her cuts with the gauze and some hot water.
Helen was having a hard time seeing straight. Everything was out of focus, and her eyes couldn’t seem to get hold of Lucas. It was strange. Her vision kept sliding off his shape, as if it was too slippery for her gaze. She tried to watch Lucas’s expression as he doctored her cuts, but it was almost impossible to see him. As the minutes ticked by and Helen healed on her own, Lucas became visible again and Helen could see that the grooves of worry dug into his forehead loosened and went away. He dabbed at the leftover blood and sighed.
“Why didn’t you get out of Hector’s way, Helen?” he asked softly, breaking the long silence. “Why didn’t you block with your hands?”
“He’s faster than me,” she replied, but they both knew that wasn’t the whole truth, and as she took in his skeptical look she continued. “I knew if I started blocking him he’d just get angrier, and then I would eventually have no choice but to hit him so hard he wouldn’t be able to hit me back.”
“That’s sort of the point of fighting, you know,” Lucas said with a touch of a smile.
“Then I don’t want any part of it,” Helen said seriously. “I don’t want to hurt people, Lucas. Can’t you teach me something else?”
“Like what?” he asked, at a loss.
“Like what you did in the hallway at school that first time we saw each other. How you spun me around and stood between my legs so I couldn’t get at you? That didn’t hurt me at all, but you still had me beat. Or what you did on your lawn that night. Remember? I was on top of you and then you did that thing with your hips?” she said with building optimism. He nodded and looked away.
“It’s called jujitsu. It’s for hand-to-hand fighting and I’d rather you never got that close to your opponents. But I’ll teach it to you if you want,” he said quietly.
Looking up at Lucas, Helen realized she was still seeing spots. She had to brace herself by putting her hands on his waist. As the spots went away she could see the color rising in Lucas’s cheeks, and she felt waves of heat coming off his skin. Helen could smell his scent and it made her feel quiet and still, almost drowsy.
“And flying,” Helen said, suddenly breaking herself out of her languid mood. “You still have to teach me how to get airborne. Once I learn that, I can just fly away from the bad guys.”
“I’ll teach you how to fly,” he said softly, nodding his head and looking down. Helen searched for his eyes, but he wouldn’t look at her. She wiped a hand across her face and it came back streaked with blood.
“Am I really that hideous right now?” she asked as she leaned away from him, suddenly self-conscious. To Helen’s surprise he didn’t reply, he just pulled her against him and held her.
“Promise me something,” he said into her hair. He waited for her to nod before continuing. “Promise me that next time you fight you’re not going to just stand there and let the other guy beat the crap out of you until he’s too tired to lift his arms.”
“If I can avoid it, believe me, I will,” Helen said with a little laugh, but Lucas pulled away from her so he could look her in the eye.
“I won’t watch that again. You understand me?” he said sternly.
She nodded slowly and saw his face relax a little. His eyes were so intense she had to glance around for something else to talk about.
“Your shirt,” Helen said, pointing to the bloody print of her face on his chest. “Which reminds me. I’ve ruined these workout clothes Ariadne gave me. Should I change into another set, or are we done?”
“We’re done. You can put your street clothes back on after you wash up,” he said briskly as if to banish the heavy mood he had fallen into. He took her face in his hands one last time and examined her former cuts. After a few moments he released her. “You certainly do heal fast. But you’ll still have some impressive bruises, so if I were you I’d avoid your father for the rest of the night.”
“I’ll just tell him you abuse me,” Helen said with a shrug. She jumped off the examining table.
“And I’ll tell him you like it,” he teased back, his voice rich and slow. Helen looked up at him, feeling drowsy again. For a moment he was just a breath away from her, but then he backed away.
As he walked out of the locker room he stripped off his bloody shirt and threw it in the garbage. Helen’s vision stabilized again, and she watched his bare back moving away from her. The last cobwebs clearing from her eyes, she decided that if Lucas was gay then she was going to have to get a sex change operation. He would be so worth it.
While she cleaned up she got a chance to examine her mouth. Her left front tooth was still in the process of growing back in, and Helen had to laugh at how ridiculous she looked. How Lucas had managed to keep a straight face while he looked at her when she was as gap-toothed as a six-year-old was beyond comprehension. Then she realized he must have seen it so many times that he barely noticed it. Helen thought about what Ariadne had said—that they had grown up “at each other’s throats.” As if summoned by Helen’s thoughts, Ariadne poked her head into the locker room to check in.
“Do you need a hand healing?” she asked timidly.
“No, but come on in,” Helen replied. Maybe she would get a chance to ask if Lucas still had a girlfriend somewhere. “How’s Cassandra?”
“Overly sensitive, but she’ll be okay. You’re the one that got a Hector beat-down, and since I know what that feels like I’m going to ask you honestly—is anything still broken?” Ariadne glided into the locker room.
“Nothing broken. Well, not anymore,” Helen replied. Everything about Ariadne was so feminine and round and lovely that Helen simply couldn’t imagine anyone hitting her. “Do you guys do this to each other often? The fighting, I mean.” Ariadne was shaking her head before Helen had even finished talking.
“No. We spar together to stay in shape, but only the boys really fight, and only when they need to get something off their chests. Lucas and Hector do most of the fighting, obviously.”
“They don’t get along, do they?”
“Yes and no,” Ariadne began carefully. “Hector is really proud in general, but he’s especially proud of our ancestry and our family. He doesn’t like that we’ve fractured the House of Thebes. Don’t get me wrong—he doesn’t believe all that crap that the Hundred Cousins do, but he hates to see our House divided. And Lucas feels like it’s his responsibility to keep Hector in line because, well, he’s the only one who can.”
“It must be really difficult being separated from the rest of your family,” Helen sympathized.
“We don’t have a choice,” Ariadne said with a tight smile.
“Is it because of the cult?” Helen asked delicately. “Lucas never got a chance to explain . . .”
“Tantalus and the Hundred Cousins believe that if only one House exists, then they can raise Atlantis,” Ariadne said. “That’s why our family has always lived right on the water. Boston, Nantucket, Cádiz . . . They’re all near the Atlantic Ocean. Scions are drawn to it.”
“That’s insane!” Helen blurted out before she realized that Ariadne was serious. “I mean, Atlantis is a myth, right?” The thought of a city existing somewhere, deep under the dark, smothering waves made Helen shudder involuntarily. She took a sip of her juice box to cover her violent reaction and waited for Ariadne to continue.
“Is Mount Olympus a myth? Or heaven? It all depends on what you believe, and most Scions believe that Atlantis is real, but the problem is that we can’t get there until we accomplish a few things first. See, right after the Trojan War ended, there was a great prophecy made by Cassandra of Troy. She said that if only one Scion House remains, then we can raise Atlantis and claim it as our own land forever. The Hundred Cousins interpret that prophecy to mean that if we demigods earn our entrance into Atlantis then we will become immortal, just like the gods of Olympus.”
“Wow,” Helen murmured. “Why wouldn’t you want that?”
“Tempting, isn’t it? Except the problem is that if all four Houses unite, or if there is only one unified House left, then we would be breaking the Truce.”
“What truce?”
“The Truce that ended the Trojan War.”
“I thought the Greeks won. Didn’t they kill all the Trojans and burn Troy to the ground?”
“They certainly did.”
“Then if the Greeks won, what do you need a Truce for?”
“Right from the start, there was a third group that fought in the Trojan War.” Ariadne smiled at Helen’s puzzled look. “The gods. They chose sides, either with their half-human children or with heroes who had particularly pleased them. Some of the gods even came down from Olympus to fight in the war. They fought against each other, and they were deeply invested in the outcome. That complicated everything. The Scions on the Greek side ended up having to make a deal with Zeus.”
Ariadne explained that the Trojan War was the most destructive war the ancients had ever seen. This was the first time the separate Houses joined forces to make one giant army. It wiped out most of the Western world, nearly ending civilization as we know it, and it was just as destructive to the gods of Olympus as it was to the humans.
Apollo fought riding in Hector’s chariot, Athena fought with Achilles, and Poseidon fought on both sides of the war, changing his mind as often as the tide. Even Aphrodite, the goddess of love, flew down to the battlefield on one occasion to protect Paris, and as she scooped him up to fly him away from certain death, her hand was cut by a Greek blade.
“When her father, Zeus, saw Aphrodite’s injury, he forbade her to return to Troy. She disobeyed him, of course, and that enraged Zeus, but not enough to get involved. It wasn’t until his daughter Athena and his son Ares nearly sent each other to Tartarus, a hellish place of no return for immortals, that Zeus knew he had to act. The human war was tearing his family apart, and it was threatening his rule over the heavens.
“Zeus’s involvement was nearly too late. Ten years had passed since the war began, and all the Olympians were so invested that the only way Zeus could get the gods to stop fighting among themselves was to get the Scions to stop fighting. After ten years of the gods meddling in their affairs, ten years of the gods dragging the war out and making it worse, the only thing that both the Greeks and the Trojans wanted was to be left alone. Zeus had to bargain with the mortals, offering them something they wanted. The humans and the Scions wanted the gods to go back to Olympus and stay there, and in exchange they agreed to end the war.
“Zeus agreed as well. If the Scions ended the war, he didn’t care how, he swore on the River Styx that the gods would retreat to Olympus and leave the world alone. But before he sealed his vow he wanted some assurance that such a terrible war would never threaten Olympus again. As he saw it, the Greeks’ unification of the Scion Houses in order to fight the Trojans nearly tore Olympus apart. Zeus wanted to make sure that such total involvement never happened again. As he set his seal on the Truce and made his unbreakable vow that the Olympians would leave the earth, he also swore to return and wipe out the Scions if the Houses ever united again.”
“It sounds like what happened at the end of World War Two when the Allies divided Germany,” Helen remarked. “They broke the country up, hoping to avoid World War Three.”
“It’s very much like that,” Ariadne agreed. “The Fates are obsessed with cycles, and they repeat the same patterns over and over all around the world—especially when it comes to the Big Three—war, love, and family.” Ariadne trailed off for a moment, thinking some dark thought, before she finished the story. “Anyway, Troy was betrayed by one of their own and burned to the ground, and after a few months of confusion and tricks and payback—most of which is described in the Odyssey—the Olympians finally left the earth. Zeus swore that if the Houses ever united again, he would come back and the Trojan War would pretty much start all over again.”
“And it left off somewhere just short of the total destruction of civilization,” Helen said, trying to imagine what “the end of civilization” would mean now. “If the Trojan War was so destructive with only swords and arrows, what would happen if it was fought with today’s weapons?”
“Yeah. That crossed our minds,” Ariadne broke eye contact and looked at her lap. “That’s why my family—my father, uncle Castor, and aunt Pandora—separated themselves from the rest of the House of Thebes. Even if Tantalus is right, even if unification is the key to immortality, we didn’t think it was worth the total destruction of the earth.”
“That’s a lot to give up. I mean, it’s the right thing to do, obviously, but immortality . . .” Helen shook her head at the thought. “And Tantalus and the Hundred Cousins just let you go?” she asked incredulously.
“What choice did they have? They can’t kill us because we’re all family, but lately they were starting to threaten us, trying to bully us back to the fold, and some of us—okay, Hector—were starting to fight back. He was looking for fights, taking the bait when they called him a coward for not wanting to fight the gods. In our tradition, to kill your own kin is the worst sin imaginable, and he came so close, Helen. My family left Spain because Hector got into a terrible fight and nearly got killed, but worse, he nearly killed someone of his own blood. There is no forgiveness for a kin-killer,” Ariadne said in a hushed voice.
“But yours isn’t the last House. Mine is,” Helen said, the whole truth beginning to dawn on her.
“No one knew about you. About two decades ago there was this ‘Final Confrontation’ between the Houses. All Four Houses attacked one another, each of them trying to eliminate the others. The House of Thebes won, and it was thought that the other three, the House of Atreus, the House of Athens, and the House of Rome, were wiped out entirely. But even though everyone else was supposed to be dead, Atlantis wasn’t raised and the gods did not return. My father, aunt, and uncle thought that we were the ones that were keeping the war at bay by refusing to join Tantalus and his cult. We thought it had to be us because no one else was supposed to be left.” Ariadne took a deep breath and looked at Helen. “But it was you all along. Somehow your mother hid you here, preserved your House, whichever one it is, and kept the war from starting. She—you—also kept Tantalus from attaining Atlantis.”
Helen sat in silence for a moment, realizing how many incredibly strong demigods wanted her dead. The Hundred Cousins believed that if the House of Thebes was unified and the only Scion House left on earth, they would become like gods, and Helen’s life was the only thing standing in the way. Her life was also the only thing keeping the Olympians from coming back to earth and starting World War Whatever. So the Delos family had to protect her even if they all died doing it. And here she was refusing to learn how to fight. No wonder Hector hated her.
“I’m sorry,” Helen finally said, so overwhelmed by her own selfishness that she had almost no emotion in her voice. “Your family is siding with me against your own kin.”
“Your burden is heavier,” Ariadne said, taking Helen’s hand. She was going to say something else, but she was interrupted by Pandora, who burst into the locker room, looking for them.
“Hey! Am I going to have to take someone to the hospital?” she asked, only half joking. “There’s a whole lot of blood out there.”
“No, she’s okay,” Ariadne answered back with a laugh as she stood up.
Something was still bothering Helen. There was a hole in the story Ariadne had just told her.
“Who was it?” Helen asked suddenly, looking up at Ariadne’s puzzled face. “The way we were taught the story, Odysseus tricked the Trojans with a giant wooden horse. Everyone knows about the Trojan horse. But you said someone betrayed Troy, and I don’t think it was by mistake.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t pick that up,” Ariadne said, looking like she was mentally kicking herself. “There was no wooden horse. It’s a nice fairy tale, but that’s all it is. Odysseus was involved, that’s true, but all he did was convince Helen to use her beauty to charm the guards into opening the gates at night. That’s really all it took. It’s why we Scions never name our children after her. For us, naming your daughter Helen is like a Christian naming their child Judas.”
Helen ran past her dad and upstairs when she got home, claiming she wanted to turn in early. She did her homework and then made herself lie down, but she couldn’t sleep. Her brain kept sifting through everything Ariadne had told her that afternoon, like how much her mother must have hated her to give her such a cursed name, but mostly she thought about the cult of the Hundred Cousins. To distract herself from reflecting on just how many people would want her dead so that they could live forever, she got out of bed and attempted to fly.
She tried to think lighter, then higher. She even tried to sneak up on it by pretending to trip, but all she succeeding in doing was jumping up and down until her father yelled up the stairs for her to stop clowning around.
Hoping a little ancient history would put her to sleep, she picked up the copy of the Iliad that Cassandra had given her and read as much as she could. It seemed like every page was filled with the gods meddling in the world of men. Helen could see why her ancestors had eventually decided that praying for divine intervention wasn’t such a good idea. Another she noticed was how much she disliked Helen of Troy. Helen of Nantucket couldn’t understand why she didn’t just go back to her husband. People were dying. Helen promised herself she would never make the same choices her namesake did.
She was up to the part where Achilles, who struck Helen as the world’s most celebrated psychopath, started sulking in his tent over a girl when she heard a definite footstep overhead. And then another. Relying on the extrasensory hearing she’d always known she had but only recently begun to let herself use, she zeroed in on her father, listening to his rib cage moving against his chair as he breathed in and out. He was watching the late news on the TV downstairs and he sounded perfectly normal to Helen. The widow’s walk above her, however, was now suspiciously silent.
Helen slipped out of bed and grabbed the old baseball bat she kept in her closet. Holding her slugger at the ready she walked sideways, foot over foot, out her bedroom door and to the steps that led to the widow’s walk. She paused for a moment on the landing between the stairs that led down to the first floor and the stairs that led up to the roof, listening again for her father. After a few moments of tense indecision, she heard him cluck his tongue at the antics of some camera-greedy congresswoman on TV and she relaxed. He was still okay, so she knew that whatever she had heard had not made it downstairs yet. With the intention of keeping it that way, she ascended the stairs to the widow’s walk.
As soon as she stepped outside, Helen felt the cool fall air soak through the thin cotton of her nightshirt, rendering it useless against the elements. A flickering shadow in the starlight caught the corner of her eye and she swung at it, but the top of her bat was stopped before it came around in a full arc. She heard the chunky slap of wood on skin.
“Damn it, it’s me!” Hector whispered harshly. Helen saw him hiding in the shadows, shaking out his right hand like it stung.
“What the hell? Hector, is that you?” Helen hissed back. He came closer so she could see him better, avoiding a dark lump on the ground. Helen looked at the lump more carefully and noticed it was her sleeping bag, the one she kept in the waterproof chest her father had given her. “What are you doing?!”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” he responded peevishly, still trying to shake the feeling back into his hand.
“Camping?” she said sarcastically. Then it hit her. All of those sounds she’d been hearing at night—sounds she’d thought were the Furies—had a much more mundane source. “You’ve been up here every night, haven’t you?”
“Almost. One of us is always up here at night to watch over you,” he said, and then grabbed Helen’s arm as she turned away from him in embarrassment. “It’s usually Lucas because he’s the only one who can fly here,” he continued. As if that made it better.
“And you never thought to ask if I wanted you here, eavesdropping on my dad and me?” she asked, furious.
Hector smiled at her, smothering a laugh. “Yeah. Because I can see how you’d want to keep all those discussions about politics and baseball to yourself. So private,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Do you stay all night while I’m sleeping?” she asked, unable to look at him. He suddenly understood why she was so upset, and his smile switched off.
“You haven’t had a nightmare in a while,” he started to say.
“Go home, Hector,” Helen said, cutting him off and turning to leave.
“No,” he responded immediately, extending his arm across the doorway to block her exit. “I don’t care if you’re embarrassed. I don’t care if you don’t want us here. There are a lot of people who’d like to see you dead, Princess, and unfortunately my family can’t leave you unprotected until I say you can defend yourself.”
“Why do you get to decide when I’m ready?” Helen crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders against the cold. The wind off the water had teeth.
“Because everyone knows that I’m the only one who won’t go easy on you. And just so you know, I’m not about to apologize for making sure you don’t get kidnapped by one of those batty women running around the island,” he warned. Helen’s teeth chattered. He looked at her standing there shivering and Helen could have almost sworn that he looked guilty for a second. Then he looked off to the side and cursed to himself. “But maybe we should have told you that we were sleeping up here,” he admitted finally.
“You think? I get it, Hector. I’m in a lot of danger. But you should have at least given me a heads-up about this.”
“All right! Point taken!” he said, nearly growling with frustration. “But we’re still not leaving you or your father unguarded at night.”
Suddenly, Helen wasn’t angry anymore. In fact, knowing that Hector and his family extended their protection to her father made her feel ridiculously grateful. She stood there smiling at him for a second.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
He froze midbreath and stared at her, amazed that her mood had changed so quickly. “That’s it? No more arguing?” he asked doubtfully.
“Why, do you want to—” she began, but she was interrupted by her father’s voice from downstairs.
“Lennie?” Jerry called from the hallway in front of Helen’s bedroom. She had been so distracted by Hector she had forgotten to listen for her dad.
“Yeah!” Helen called down, motioning desperately for Hector to get away from the door. She changed places with him and made it inside just in time.
“Are you sleeping up there again?” Jerry asked when he saw Helen shutting the door to the roof and coming down the steps. “It’s way too cold out, Helen.”
“Do you have any idea how late it is? Go to sleep,” she scolded as she hurried past him.
“I know, I’m going to bed right now . . . Hey! You go to sleep,” Jerry scolded back, belatedly remembering that he was the parent.
As Helen jumped into bed and burrowed into her comforter, she could have sworn she heard Hector chuckling softly to himself up on the widow’s walk.
