Goddess (Starcrossed Book 3)

Andy glared at the metronome on top of the organ she was playing and willed it to explode. It didn’t. She took a deep breath, waited a measure, and dove back into Bach. Ten swings of the metronome’s pendulum later and she was growling through her gritted teeth and shaking her fists in the air rather than pounding them on the keys. Abusing instruments was an unforgivable offense in Andy’s mind. But metronomes, on the other hand . . .

“You’re lucky you’re an antique,” she told it, just to let it know how close it had come to a splintery end. She emptied her mind and started again.

This time she let Bach do the work, and for several measures she found the art inside the complicated math of the fugue.

Bliss. Right up until she was interrupted by the ding of an egg timer. Andy’s fingers slid off the keys with the deafeningly loud blarting noise that only a giant, hundred-year-old organ could muster.

“Really?” Andy said to the heavenly glow of the Tiffany window that reached high above her head. Even the beauty of the patchwork colors, warming her face like a bright quilt made out of light, was not enough to calm her. Just when she was getting it, she had to stop.

She repressed the urge to swear in church and looked at her watch. It was 8:00 a.m. already. Drat. Her rehearsal time was over, and she had to hoof it in order to make it to her first class.

It was freezing cold. Outside, the sun was just starting to peek up over the far edge of campus. Andy hunkered down into the boxy layers of flannel and wool she used to conceal her stunning figure and made her way through the frost-stiffened scrub of her “shortcut.” Truth be told, it was a long cut. What mattered was that it was off the path and farthest away from everyone else. Andy wasn’t looking for friends at school. She liked her solitude. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. She hated her solitude, but she trusted it more than she trusted people.

“I saw you playing,” said a young man with a musical voice.

Andy screamed and whirled around. She saw a tall, beautiful youth crowned with golden curls. The edges of him twinkled in the thin sunlight of the chilly November morning.

“What are you doing here?” Andy said calmly. She blinked her sun-dazzled eyes and glanced around for another person. Wellesley College was an all-girls’ school in the most blue-blooded, upper-crusty, and thoroughly traditional area of Massachusetts. Unless this boy was a professor or a security guard, he was not allowed this deep into the campus without a visitor’s badge.

“You’re very talented,” he said, moving toward her.

“You said you saw me, huh?” Andy took a step back, not liking this situation. “How could you see me in the chapel? I was alone.”

He laughed, his voice dancing around the notes like a wind chime. “I wasn’t in the chapel, of course. I saw you through that big window.”

“You saw me through a stained-glass window? How’d you pull that off?”

“I could find someone as beautiful as you no matter where you hide. You’re so radiant, I bet you even glow in the dark.”

The way he said it didn’t sound phony. He wasn’t leering or rude in any way, but he was still moving toward her, even though she obviously didn’t want him to. When he got closer, Andy saw something wrong in his eyes—something distinctly animal and not human at all. She remembered the sunlight hitting her face through the stained-glass window and figured out how he’d seen her. She knew who, or rather, what, she was dealing with now. Andy backed away quickly, her breath starting to rasp with real fear.

“Are you going to run from me?” the youth asked poignantly, like this had happened to him many times before.

“Would you chase me?” she asked, adding to her voice the seductive, hypnotic edge that could drive mortal men to their death. She needed to stall for time, maybe get him to follow her back to the path. There was sure to be someone up there to help her.

“Of course I would,” he said, his eyes smoldering and his voice low. He was aroused, but not hypnotized—unfortunately for Andy. “Only the ones who run are worth catching.”

Doesn’t it figure? she thought with that desperate hilarity that only happens in the most hopeless circumstances. I spend my whole life deathly afraid of tempting a boy, and I end up getting jumped by one at an all-girls’ school.

The light sparked off him again, catching his edges and making him look more real than real, like he existed in 4-D. Andy knew this was no trick of the rising autumn sun. She also knew this was no boy. Her mother had warned her of the possibility of something like this, but Andy had never thought it would come to pass.

“Hey, Andy!” called an intensely chipper girl Andy had met over a month ago at freshman orientation and avoided ever since. She eyed Andy and the boy uncertainly. The noisy cluster of girls behind her went silent when they saw that Andy was with a boy. “Are you coming to class?”

“Hi . . . Susan!” Andy yelled back frantically, remembering the girl’s name at the last moment. “I want to go with you!”

The beautiful youth smiled sadly at Andy as the chattering knot of young women moved closer to collect her. Then he turned and ran off toward Lake Waban.

“Where did your friend go?” Susan asked, perplexed.

“He’s not my friend,” Andy said, grasping at Susan’s mitten-covered hand with relief. “We need to go to campus security right now.”

“I can describe him!” squealed a girl in Susan’s posse who had shiny black hair and cinnamon skin. She told the security guard, “He must have been freezing because he was only wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt!”

“He had curly blond hair, and he was really tan. Like a Malibu surfer boy,” a chubby girl with stick-straight, blonde hair blurted out, like she couldn’t contain her exuberance.

“He had really smooth skin, too. Like a dolphin!” tittered the cinnamon girl back to the blonde girl, and the two of them fell in a fit of snickers, drooling over Andy’s almost-rapist.

Andy dropped her face into her hand and rubbed her eyes while she listened to more of the same from the rest of the witnesses—or “groupies” as she was beginning to think of them. She reminded herself that they couldn’t help their response. They were only human.

After spending the next two hours with security, relating the entire experience, and walking the guards to the exact spot where she had been accosted, Andy had gratefully accepted a new fob for her key chain. She had an official stalker, one who had made it onto the campus, without a pass no less, and the guards were not about to let her wander around without taking a few precautions. The fob was a panic button that would bring them to her in an instant. If she even caught sight of the boy again, she was to summon them. Andy wondered if she would really press it and endanger them all, or if she would face him alone.

Although Susan and her gaggle had stepped up and corroborated Andy’s story, they all did so with a touch of confusion. Andy had reported word for word what the boy had said to her, and any one of them would have given her eyeteeth to have the same things said to them by such a hottie.

Andy couldn’t explain that this wasn’t romance. Men had always said things like that to her, but it had nothing to do with love. She went to all-girl Catholic schools her entire life and had run away from every man who’d pursued her, but that didn’t stop them from chasing. She’d run away from the girls who had pursued her, too, and there had been plenty of those. After that horrendous experience in seventh grade when her best friend had tried to kiss her in front of Sister Mary Francis’s history class, she’d never even allowed herself to have girl friends.

Andy stayed away from people as a rule. It was for their own good. Her kind were too dangerous for mortals to be around.

Somehow, after several classes, she managed to get rid of Susan and her entourage. Susan had looked at her with a mixture of worry and longing when Andy made it quite clear that she was ditching them. Andy felt bad about it. Susan was pretty and popular and seemed like a genuinely good person. That was exactly why Andy had to nip this relationship in the bud. She didn’t want to hurt someone as awesome as Susan just so she could have a friend. Susan deserved better than that.

It was after 9:00 p.m. when Andy’s astronomy class ended, and she made her way past Paramecium Pond to her dorm. Her nose itched. She took her hand out of her pocket, letting go of the fob for just a moment, and felt thick, muscular arms grip across her chest from behind.

“Run,” he whispered in her ear. “I love to chase.”

Helen dreamed of dolphins, but this was no happy little dream about visiting SeaWorld. The dolphin Helen saw did not do flips or tricks. The dolphin in the dream was hunting a girl about Helen’s age. The girl tried to swim away from it, but the dolphin kept pushing her down beneath the surface, hitting her with its flippers and tail until she bled.

The girl swam for a buoy, bobbing out in the middle of nowhere, gasping and crying as she struggled through the waves. The dolphin attacked, but this time, instead of flippers, a man’s arms wrapped around the girl and squeezed.

Helen’s eyes snapped open and she gasped for air, feeling like a vise had clamped down on her chest. She awoke to darkness.

How many days had she been fading in and out? she wondered. She remembered her mother cleaning off the worst of the blood and dirt with a wet sponge, Kate spoon-feeding her soup, and Claire dividing an orange between her and a puce-colored Ariadne. She remembered Orion’s scars, and her heart squeezed painfully for him all over again.

Helen remembered other things, too—things that had never happened to her, like tying a toga (Chiton, she remembered. The Greeks wore chitons, and the Romans wore togas) and carding wool. Helen Hamilton was damn sure she’d never tied a chiton or carded wool in her entire life, but she remembered doing both.

Those “visions” of Helen of Troy always felt like memories, and now that she was fully awake, Helen was pretty sure that’s exactly what they were. But how could she remember someone else’s memories? It was impossible. And considering how horrible these borrowed memories were, what Helen really wanted to know was how she could make them stop.

“Lennie?” whispered Claire, somewhere by Helen’s feet.

Helen looked down and saw Claire poking her head up over the back of the fainting couch that Ariadne had at the foot of the bed. Usually, Ariadne just threw her clothes over it, so Helen thought of it more as a place to pile outfits than something to sit on.

“Are you awake for real or just visiting for a sec?” Claire asked. Even in the bleached predawn light coming through the window, Helen could see the worry in Claire’s eyes.

“I’m awake, Gig.” Helen sat up painfully. “How long have I been out?”

“About two days.”

That was it? To Helen, it felt like weeks. She looked over at Ariadne, still sleeping. “Is she going to be okay?” Helen asked.

“Yeah,” Claire answered, sitting all the way up. “She and Jason are going to be fine.”

“Orion? Lucas?”

“They’re all right—beat up, but getting better.” Claire looked away, and her brow furrowed.

“My dad?”

“He’s been awake a couple of times, but only for a few seconds. Ari and Jason are doing their best.”

That wasn’t the response Helen had been hoping for. She nodded and swallowed the lump in her throat. Her father wasn’t a Scion, and he’d come closer to death than any of them. It was going to take him a lot longer to recover. Helen pushed the thought that he might never fully recover out of her mind and looked at Claire.

“How are you?” Helen asked, seeing the sad look on her best friend’s face.

“Wicked tired. You?”

“Starving.” Helen swung her legs out of bed, and Claire got up to help her. The two friends wobbled downstairs together to raid the refrigerator. Even though Helen knew she had to eat as much as she could shove down in order to help her body rebuild itself while she healed, she couldn’t take her eyes off Claire.

“What is it, Gig?” Helen asked quietly after swallowing only a bite or two of chicken noodle soup. “Is it Jason?”

“It’s all of you. Everyone got hurt this time. And I know that this isn’t the end of it,” Claire answered, still uncharacteristically sad. “There’s a war coming, isn’t there?”

Helen put her spoon down. “I don’t know, but the gods are free to leave Olympus and come to Earth again. Because of me.”

“It’s not your fault,” Claire began defensively. “You got tricked.”

“So? Tricked or not, I failed,” Helen said in a matter-of-fact way. “I let Ares corner me, even though I’d been warned that something was going to happen.”

She felt horrible, but she knew she couldn’t allow herself to wallow in guilt, so she kept the self-pity out of her voice. The Underworld had taught her that indulging in negativity, no matter how justified, would never solve any of her problems. She filed that revelation away for some other conversation with Hades and got back on topic. “Have the gods appeared anywhere yet? Have they done anything?”

The image of a big, beautiful stallion running down a beach flashed in Helen’s head. There was blood on his forelegs. The image made her shudder with revulsion.

“We haven’t heard anything,” Claire said with a shrug. “At least, no wrath-of-the-gods stuff.”

“What has Cassandra foreseen?”

“Nothing. She hasn’t made any prophecies at all since the three of you were brought back here.”

Helen pursed her lips together, lost in thought. Just when the Scions needed an Oracle the most, of course, she’d be silent. That’s the way Greek drama worked. Still, it bothered Helen. Greek or not, there still had to be a reason Cassandra couldn’t see the future. “Because it’s ironic” just wasn’t a good enough answer for Helen anymore.

“Len?” Claire asked, her voice a frightened whisper. “Can you stop the gods?”

“I don’t know, Gig.” Helen looked over at her best friend. Claire was pale with fear and lack of sleep. “But if any of them try to hurt any of us, I’ll fight them with everything I’ve got.”

Claire smiled, finally relaxing a little. “Eat your soup,” she admonished suddenly, like it just occurred to her.

Helen snickered and obeyed. She knew this was Claire’s way of reassuming her usual role as the boss, and she dutifully reached for her spoon while she thought about the gods. They might not be smiting any mountaintops just yet, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t out and about. After thousands of years in a prison, they had to be back on Earth, but where were they? The Scions were weak and scattered. If the gods wanted to fight them, now would be the time to strike. What were they waiting for? Helen took a few sips of soup before noticing Claire’s wide eyes.

“What is it?” Helen asked around her food.

“You never picked up your spoon,” Claire responded, her eyes unblinking as she stared at Helen’s hand. “You held out your hand, and it just flew to you.”

Helen looked at the spoon and tried to remember picking it up. She remembered reaching for it, but that was it. She put the spoon down and held her hand over it. Nothing happened.

“I think you need to go back to bed, Gig,” Helen said with a dubious smile.

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” Claire said, but she didn’t look convinced.

When Helen finished her large breakfast, Claire helped her back upstairs and into the shower. While Helen scrubbed away the last of the blood and dirt, Claire sat on top of the sink rubbing lotion absentmindedly on her legs and feet, keeping herself handy in case Helen got woozy.

“Are you sure you don’t need help?” Claire asked for the tenth time.

“I’m sure.” Helen laughed as she toweled off. “Honestly, I feel pretty good.”

“You really are the strongest, aren’t you?”

Helen looked away. Although she and Claire had showered together after track meets a million times and were not the least bit shy around each other, Helen suddenly felt naked. She didn’t like Claire thinking she was some kind of . . . well, demigod. They were more than best friends. They were sisters, really, and Helen hated to be reminded that there was anything unequal about them.

“What makes you say that?” she asked in a tense voice. Claire pursed her lips.

“You should see the guys as soon as you’re done.”

“My dad first,” Helen said with a definitive nod.

Claire helped Helen dress and then let Helen lean on her as they made their way down the hallway. The door was open so she could see Jerry lying in bed, and Kate sitting up in a chair next to him. Both of them were fast asleep. Jerry was so thin and wan that Helen didn’t want to believe it was her dad. She had to remind herself that she should be grateful, but it was difficult to feel anything but fear when he looked so ill.

They walked a few paces down to Hector’s room. Helen could hear deep, male voices behind the door. It sounded like all the guys were in there. They knocked and went in to find that Hector had moved Jason and Lucas in with Orion.

Helen had another vision or memory, or whatever it was. All the men were bunking together in a tent at the middle of a large, dusty camp—the siege camp just beneath the great wall of Troy. She shook her head, and the vision cleared.

“Aren’t you all a little old for a pajama party?” Claire teased.

The guys laughed gingerly at Claire’s joke.

“I got sick of running up and down the hall to check on them, so I just carried all the beds in here,” Hector admitted sheepishly.

Hector the Protector, Helen thought. He could never bear to be away from any of his men when they were injured—whether they were indispensable generals like Aeneas, or simple foot soldiers. That’s why every man in his army loved him and followed him to certain death.

Helen shook her head and tried to blink away the unwanted memories. They weren’t even hers.

“I can’t believe you’re walking,” Orion said to Helen. She could see that despite the adrenaline-fueled burst of energy when Orion woke them with his scream, he and Lucas were still bedridden. They were nowhere near as far along in their healing as she was, and Jason was completely wrung out from saving Jerry. The three of them could barely sit up without wincing in pain, let alone stand.

“Just trying to stick it to you guys. Make you look bad,” Helen joked, trying to hide how worried she was about them all.

Claire went to Jason, and Helen automatically went to sit on the edge of Lucas’s bed. She realized what she was doing at the last minute and changed direction to join Orion. Lucas watched her, a tight expression on his face to hide his feelings. Helen swallowed and forced herself to avoid his eyes. In this life they were cousins, she reminded herself, regardless of what she’d seen in her dreams.

She took Orion’s hand and felt better. He smiled tenderly at her, and her heart tingled. She did love Orion, she thought as she swelled with pleasant warmth. So what if it wasn’t the dizzy rush that she felt around Lucas? Maybe “dizzy” wasn’t the best way to go through life, anyway.

“What are you all talking about?” Helen asked lightly, trying to tell herself that it would get easier someday to see Lucas wearing the blank look he adopted as he watched her hold Orion’s hand. For a moment, Helen thought she saw a toxic, acid-green color flashing underneath Lucas’s skin. She blinked and looked away, hoping her eyesight wasn’t totally messed up because of her damaged eye.

“We were talking strategy. The Scions need a plan, fast,” Hector replied, his face hardening. “We’re weak. Divided. This is the time to strike against us.”

Helen breathed a mirthless laugh. “I was just thinking the same thing.” Hector looked at her approvingly, and Helen considered the possibility that he might have made a soldier out of her after all.

“But we haven’t heard anything. As far as we know, the gods are still on Olympus,” Claire said, frowning with worry. Jason pulled her closer to him.

“Matt found some things. He’s coming now to explain,” he told her. Jason looked at his brother. “Where is he, anyway?”

“With Ariadne,” Hector replied, testily at first, and then his tone changed. “He checks on her about a dozen times a day.”

“It’s not a dozen times,” Matt protested as he came through the door, propping up Ariadne with one hand and carrying his iPad in the other. “Ten. Tops.”

Helen nearly did a double take when she saw Matt. She’d watched her friend get stronger over the past few months. She’d even noticed that he was turning into quite the piece of man-candy, though the thought of Matt as a love interest was icky to her. But this was different. He looked electric.

“How’re you feeling, little sis?” Hector asked Ariadne, but his eyes ticked up and down Matt, sizing him up. Whatever had changed, Hector saw it, too, Helen was sure of that.

“Ugh,” she groaned comically as she plopped down next her big brother. “Like cud.”

“Cud?” Orion asked like he must have heard her wrong.

“Chewed, swallowed, barfed, and rechewed,” she told him with a grin.

“How are you?” Matt asked Helen while everyone laughed at Ariadne’s gross analogy. And suddenly he was just Matt again, her old pal, and there was nothing strange about him at all.

“I’m all right,” she said, patting the hand that he laid on her arm.

“You sure?” he pressed, looking deeper into her damaged eye. Helen remembered that her confrontation with Ares had left a blue scar running down the iris of her right eye. She was told it looked like lightning, but she hadn’t seen it yet. There had been more important things for her to do than look in a mirror.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, and then she grinned. “I’d be better if I could get Ari to stop kicking in her sleep.”

“Hey, at least I don’t snore,” Ariadne joked back with Helen.

“You both snore,” Claire chimed in, grinning. “It’s like rooming with a couple of dudes.”

They all got a laugh in at Helen’s and Ariadne’s expense. Helen was struck by how happy they all were just to be together—safe and comfortable in each other’s company as if they’d hung out like this a thousand times. But none of them could ignore why they were there for very long, and the easy feeling quickly dissipated.

“So what’ve you found out about the gods, Matt?” Orion asked, sensitive as always to the subtle shift in mood. “Have you heard anything?”

“Yeah. There have been some . . . attacks,” Matt said reluctantly.

“What does that mean?” Claire asked.

Matt tapped his iPad and started flicking through newspaper headlines, and everyone crowded together.

“Two days ago, a woman in New York City was found on top of the Empire State Building gored to death by what looked like giant talons. And this morning, a girl’s body was found trampled to death by a horse on a Cape Cod beach. Both women had been raped before they were killed.”

Hector took the iPad and looked at it. “This is a tabloid headline,” he said dubiously. “It says that the witnesses in New York claimed to have seen a woman getting carried off by a giant bird.”

“Eagle. It was an eagle,” Helen said softly, repressing a shiver. Everyone stared at her for a moment, expecting an explanation. “It’s just a hunch, but I’ve been having strange dreams and weird flashes, I guess you’d call them,” she admitted with a shrug, trying to downplay the full-blown memories she’d been experiencing until she understood them a bit better.

“When did they start?” Lucas asked, concerned. Helen scrunched up her face, trying to think back to the first time she saw him and the other guys in armor.

“Halloween,” she said, realizing it as she spoke. She looked at Orion. “Remember how I forgot everything for a second there after touching the water from that river?” she asked. She avoided saying the name of the River Lethe almost superstitiously, just in case it made her forget everything all over again.

“Uh-huh,” Orion replied with a small smile. Helen smiled nervously back at him, remembering how they had jumped on each other as soon as they forgot who they were. By the warm look he was giving her, Helen was sure he was remembering that as well. Then his face darkened. “You couldn’t even remember your own name for a bit. That was bad.”

“Well, when I did remember again, it was like there was too much in my head or something.” Helen sighed with frustration. “I can’t explain it yet, but now I’m getting all these weird images when I dream.”

“And one of them was of an eagle?” Matt asked.

“Yeah. Why? What are you thinking, Matt?” Helen asked, gesturing to his iPad and the articles about the murdered girls.

“I know this looks like tabloid nonsense, but Greek myths talk about women being carried off by gods disguised as animals all the time. I think the eagle is Zeus and the horse is Poseidon,” Matt said.

“Matt, I can turn into a horse,” Orion said with an apologetic look. “Everyone in the House of Athens can.”

“Get the hell out,” Helen said, whirling on Orion with wide eyes.

“What? I can turn into a dolphin,” Jason said like he was telling them the time.

“Shut up!” Claire and Helen shrieked in unison. Jason laughed.

“Some Scions can shape-shift into their god’s animal avatars,” Hector said, giving Helen a weird look. “How can you not know this?”

“Nobody told me, and I’ve never been able to do it!” Helen shouted back. She rounded on Orion again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s not like it’s useful or anything,” he said with a shrug. “Think about it. How many horses do you see trotting around town these days?”

“Yeah.” Jason chuckled. “And then when you change back, you’re buck naked. Try explaining that one. It’s crazy fun to be an animal, don’t get me wrong, but it’s rarely practical.”

“Yeah, but . . . ,” Claire sputtered. “Oh my god!”

“This is so unfair. I get all the miserable talents like descending and having freaky dreams, and you get to turn into a dolphin.” Helen pouted, throwing a pillow at Jason.

“Okay, okay,” Matt interjected, holding up his hands to get everyone back on target. “But how many Scions can turn into an eagle large enough to carry off a woman?”

“None.” Hector cocked his head to the side. “Okay, Matt. What do you think is going on?”

“I think the gods are doing exactly what they used to do before they were locked up on Olympus—running around and raping mortal women. But this time, they aren’t leaving their victims alive.”

“Huh.” Hector chuffed. “They aren’t taking any chances.”

“No. Not this time,” Matt replied.

“What do you mean?” Ariadne asked.

“In every single one of the stories about a god appearing to a woman as a bull or a swan or a shower of gold, nine months later a Scion was born,” Hector said, spreading his hands to indicate all of them. “It’s like they never miss.”

Lucas tactfully ignored Hector’s off-color comment and looked at Helen. “What else have you seen in these flashes?”

“What other animals, you mean?” Helen said haltingly. She’d very nearly blurted out, “I keep seeing us, and we’re married!” but stopped herself just in time.

Lucas narrowed his eyes at her, sensing Helen’s odd fumble, and opened his mouth to begin what she was sure would be an embarrassing interrogation.

“I’ve seen an eagle, a dolphin, and a stallion,” she continued before he could start. Knowing Lucas the way she did, Helen was certain that she had only delayed his questions. He wouldn’t forget, and since he was a Falsefinder she had the choice of either telling the truth or staying silent. Lying to Lucas was not an option—which was a giant pain in the butt.

“And the dolphin is Apollo, right?” Claire asked sharply, looking up from the iPad.

“The dolphin, the wolf, the mouse, and the crow were all Apollo’s animal avatars,” Ariadne answered.

Claire showed them the article she’d been reading about a strange attack at Wellesley College. They all leaned their heads together to read. A girl, whose name was left out of the paper, had been terribly injured by a young blond man the previous night. She fought off his savage attack long enough for campus security to respond to the silent alarm she managed to activate. The young man got away under “suspicious” circumstances. The Wellesley police were looking for leads from the public. They considered her attacker extremely dangerous.

Apparently, more than one eyewitness on the responding security team reported seeing the young man fly away when he realized he was surrounded. The girl was recovering from her injuries at a local hospital.

“And now for the real kicker.” Claire scrolled down to show a pencil drawing of someone who looked almost exactly like Hector.

“Oh. That’s just great,” Hector deadpanned.

“What does this mean?” Ariadne asked, fear widening her eyes as she looked around at everyone. “They’re not going to come looking for Hector, are they?”

No one had an answer.

“I know a few places where you can lay low for a while,” Orion offered quietly. “They’re not exactly nice, but the people in them have a hard time remembering faces.”

Momentarily stunned, Helen studied Orion, wondering what kind of place he was talking about. All kinds of squalid images flashed through her head. For the life of her, Helen couldn’t picture Orion in some seedy flophouse or den of thieves. But she had to admit to herself that he was much more familiar with that world than anyone she’d come in contact with before. Again, she wondered about Orion’s awful childhood and whether he would ever tell her about it—and about how he got those scars.

“Thanks, bro. But I’m not leaving my family again,” Hector said, giving Orion a grateful look.

Orion nodded, but Ariadne started shaking her head vehemently. “No, Hector. No,” she said, her voice getting panicky. “We just got you back. I don’t want someone coming here and dragging you off to jail.”

“It’s all right,” he said, pulling his sister close and patting her shoulder with one of his thick hands. “No one knows I’m on the island. They all think I’m still studying in Europe. I’ll hide here in the house. It’ll be fine.”

Believing him, Ariadne calmed down and squeezed her brother’s chest in a fierce hug. Over her head Matt and Hector exchanged a look, Matt silently promising to look after Ariadne if anything happened to Hector. Somehow, Helen could see these emotions pass between the two young men as clearly as she could see colors painted on a canvass. She blinked her eyes furiously, hoping like crazy it stopped.

“What the . . . ,” Orion exclaimed suddenly, jerking up and breaking Helen’s train of thought. He twisted around to reveal Cassandra, who had crept up behind him on the bed. He relaxed as soon as he recognized her.

“Were you here the whole time?” Claire asked, incredulous.

Cassandra shrugged in a noncommittal way, but she didn’t say anything.

“She startles the hell out of me, like, five times a day. I swear, she makes no noise when she moves,” Orion said to Claire. He turned to Cassandra. “Keep it up and I’ll put a bell on you. Like a bad kitty,” he threatened with a stern look on his face, but he didn’t push her away. Instead he scooped her up and placed her on top of his pillows, bringing her inside the circle of conversation.

“So, we all know that someone needs to find that girl and bring her back here as soon as possible,” Orion said, pointing to the article. All the guys nodded.

“Wait. Why?” Helen asked, surprised.

“She’s not safe in the mortal world anymore. Apollo didn’t get her yet,” Jason answered, his voice trailing off at the end. Helen looked at Claire for an answer but Claire shrugged, stumped.

“Apollo never let a girl get away,” Lucas said, like he hated admitting that he was the descendant of someone so loathsome. “When he wanted a mortal he chased her, even if she didn’t want him back. Anywhere she ran, he followed. He wouldn’t give up.”

“Unless she begged a goddess to turn her into a tree or a body of water or something that he couldn’t violate,” Matt said testily. “Haven’t you ever wondered why the House of Thebes, the descendants of Apollo, have so many members?”

“All the gods were miserable, raping, warmongering bastards. Not just Apollo,” Hector said with a grimace. “That’s why we have to find a way to get rid of them. Again.”

Orion, Lucas, and Helen shared a pained look, each of them keenly aware that this was their fault. The three of them had accidentally become blood brothers when they fought Ares, and that had joined the four Houses and unleashed the gods on the world again.

“Hang on. I wasn’t blaming you three,” Hector began apologetically, but Orion smiled and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“We know you didn’t mean it like that,” Orion said.

“But it was still our fault,” Helen reminded them all. “The gods have always backed Scions into a corner and forced us to make a choice between bad and worse, but we’re the ones who have always fallen for their traps. I won’t let it happen again.”

Lucas gave Helen a worried look, but before he could lecture her on the dangers of hubris for the tenth time, she changed the subject. “So who wants to come with me to get this girl?”

“You’re not going,” Lucas and Orion said in unison.

“Yes I am,” Helen replied to both of them. “You two are a mess, and Hector can’t show his face in public. Who else is going to go?”

“I’ll come with you, Len,” Claire said, cutting off Lucas and Orion before they could argue any further. “Don’t worry guys, I’ll watch her. If she keels over, she can land on me, okay?”

“And me,” Ariadne said.

“You’re still way too drained,” Jason said, shaking his head at his twin.

“And that poor girl just got attacked by a god last night. She’s probably too injured to be moved without a Healer. I’m also guessing that right now the last thing she wants is for a man to put his hands on her, so that counts you out,” Ariadne replied firmly to Jason.

“So, it’s Larry, Moe, and Curly to the rescue?” Hector said, rubbing his forehead like his brain hurt.

“Very funny,” Helen said, insulted.

He looked up at Helen, his eyes serious. “How are your bolts?”

She held up a humming globe of power, cupped in the palm of her hand. It sizzled with compressed energy and threw heat out into the room in waves. “Better than ever,” she replied with a cocked eyebrow. “It feels almost effortless now. Like it isn’t draining me at all.”

“Good,” Hector said, visibly relaxing now that he knew Helen could defend the three of them. “Apollo is probably lurking around somewhere near the hospital, so keep your eyes open.”

“I will. But he’s not likely to get too close to me after what I did to his half brother,” she said darkly.

Helen looked down at the ball of energy in her hand, remembering how she’d electrocuted Ares and imprisoned him in Tartarus after he’d tortured her. It felt good to know she’d defeated a god. When she looked up, everyone was staring at her.

She closed her hand and extinguished the bolt.