Starcrossed

by Josephine Angelini

  Helen.”

  “Let me talk to her,” Lucas demanded as he jumped up out of his

  chair and held out his hand to take the phone.

  “She called me, not you,” Claire said gently.

  She answered her phone, immediately asking Helen several questions

  at once. Then Claire was quiet for a moment. She put the call

  on speakerphone.

  “Okay, Len, we can all hear you. What is it?” Claire asked, looking

  around at the rest of his family but avoiding eye contact with

  Lucas.

  “I’m with my mother, Daphne, and my mother only. We are not

  being coerced by any other individual, family, or House,” Helen

  announced to the room as smoothly as if she were playing a recording.

  “My mother and I are preparing to leave the island together,

  and we ask that you allow us to leave it in peace. I am not in any

  physical danger. You know all of this is true, because your

  Falsefinders can hear it in my voice. Good-bye. I will miss you all.”

  The line went silent. Lucas stared at the phone as Claire switched

  out of speaker mode, put her phone to her ear, and repeated

  Helen’s name a few times.

  “That wasn’t her,” Lucas insisted, shaking his head repeatedly.

  He felt something was off, like there was a lie lurking somewhere.

  Helen wasn’t supposed to leave him. Ever. “She’d never call me a

  ‘Falsefinder’ like that.”

  “Lucas, it was her,” Claire insisted, finally meeting Lucas’s eyes

  and giving him a sad look as she did so. “I know she sounded really

  weird, but it was Helen. You know that.”

  “Was she lying?” Castor asked Lucas.

  326/395

  “No,” Lucas answered hoarsely, as though his voice couldn’t entirely

  commit to something that the rest of him knew was so

  wrong. “She told no lies.”

  “So Daphne is alive,” Pallas breathed, his eyes wide and blank

  with shock.

  “We still don’t know if ‘Daphne’ is Daphne Atreus,” Castor said,

  blocking his brother from leaving the room.

  “Enough, Castor. Just stop it,” Pallas said, a note of weariness

  weighing his voice down. “I thought Helen was that Atreus whore

  when I first saw her!”

  “And Hector is a dead ringer for Creon, and Lucas looks like one

  of Poseidon’s children from the House of Athens!” Castor shouted,

  losing his patience. “More often than not the way we look has nothing

  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

  327/395

  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

  328/395

  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 bro
ther 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

  329/395

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

  lose her forever.

  330/395

  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

  332/395

  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

  333/395

  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

  334/395

  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

  Kate would open the doors and feed them. With the refrigerators

  out, the perishable would have to be eaten or thrown out, anyway,

  and Kate would much rather give food to her neighbors than watch

  it spoil.

  Helen thought for a moment of how she should be there with

  them, but then she caught a glimpse of her new reflection in the

  one window outside the Overeasy Café that wasn’t broken. She

  wasn’t Helen. She was a cute brunette from the mainland, and she

  and her tacky, horse-faced mother were on vacation in Nantucket.

  These two tourists owed nothing to anyone.

  Helen sat, put her napkin in her lap, and ordered whatever the

  café could make on a gas stove—eggs, bacon, and French-pressed

  coffee. As she pushed her food around, Matt walked into the diner.