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by Unknown

  were their commands to kill the kin-killer. Lucas hit Hector over

  and over, trying to beat him to death.

  Helen half flew the last few strides to the battling pair. She threw

  herself up into the air and then came crashing back down on top of

  them with as much gravity as she could muster. Pushing the two

  boys back into the cracked rubble of the library steps, Helen threw

  her arms up in a V over her head and summoned matching bolts

  for each hand. Before either of them could block her, she brought

  her bolts down onto the heads of the warring cousins and shocked

  them both into unconsciousness. As they fell still under her hands,

  Helen could hear rapid footsteps behind her. The rest of the Delos

  family was coming.

  “Get back,” she screamed with her ruined voice as she spun

  around to face Ariadne and Pallas, who were both running toward

  her from opposing streets.

  Hector was unconscious, but he could still incite the Furies in his

  family. His sin was so recent that the impulse to kill him would be

  urgent and blinding, even to those who loved him the most. Helen

  had made peace with the House of Thebes, but she had not become

  a part of it, so she was mercifully free of the urge to kill Hector,

  who had now become an Outcast. She got in touch with the sensation

  that connected her to her lightning and felt a disappointingly

  small spark. She had been running around for hours now without a

  sip to drink.

  She looked back at Hector and Lucas, made sure that they were

  both breathing, and then stood up and walked out into the street,

  putting herself in between Hector’s unconscious form and his infuriated

  family.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Helen said, forcing what voltage she had

  left to spark out of her fingertips in a false show of power.

  Helen held out her icy blue hands as she came down what was

  left of the steps and looked from Ariadne’s sly eyes to Pallas’s

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  bared teeth. They were not themselves anymore, but blunt instruments

  for the Furies. She stepped into the street and raised her

  glowing hands to warn them off. At the sight of Helen’s lightning,

  they backed off a step or two, but just as they were about to back

  off completely, Castor rounded a corner, following the whispers of

  the Furies.

  Helen was ridiculously outnumbered. She had no idea how far

  she would have to go to protect Hector from his own family. She

  couldn’t kill any of them any more than she could let them kill him.

  If they didn’t buy her bluff, she was out of options. She had never

  felt so alone in her entire life.

  “Helen, I’ve got Hector! Stay between us while I take him away,”

  Daphne called out behind her. “Whatever you do, don’t let them

  lay eyes on him or we will lose this fight!”

  Helen sighed at the sound of her mother’s voice, so relieved that

  she had someone on her side that she found the strength she

  needed to make the only choice that she could.

  She didn’t care if she drained every last drop of water out of her

  body. The only thing that concerned her was stopping the vengeance

  cycle before it devoured a family that she loved. She flung

  her arms out wide and with a last gasping push made her lightning

  dance in a great, blinding circle around her body. Ariadne, Pallas,

  and Castor threw up their arms to protect their eyes from the one

  kind of light they had no control over.

  Helen’s halo of ball lightning was hotter than the surface of the

  sun. It melted the pavement under her feet into lava and heated up

  the air around her until it literally hummed. The Delos family

  jumped away from the intolerable light and heat, but more important,

  they jumped away from Daphne as she ran into the darkness

  with Hector’s unconscious body slung over her shoulder.

  The pain was unbearable. Helen couldn’t hold the ball of electricity

  for more than a few seconds. As soon as she heard Daphne’s

  footsteps move away, she switched off like a fried lightbulb and

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  stumbled desperately out of the white-hot liquid asphalt that was

  pooling below her, burning her and choking her with noxious

  gases. She crawled on hands and knees toward Ariadne, Castor,

  and Pallas, their faces matching masks of agony as they all suddenly

  became aware of what they had nearly done. But Helen

  couldn’t let them fall apart just yet.

  “Lucas needs help!” she rasped, gesturing back to the shattered

  steps of the Atheneum.

  “Ariadne,” Castor said in a brittle voice. “Go get Lucas. Helen,

  can you walk?”

  “No,” she admitted, shaking her head.

  “Mortals will be coming,” Castor said as he picked Helen up and

  started to carry her off, but he stopped when he noticed his brother

  wasn’t following. “Pallas! We need to go!”

  “My son,” Pallas whispered, unable to move.

  “Dad, come on! You have to take Creon’s body!” Ariadne hissed

  from the stairs of the Atheneum. She had Lucas draped over her

  shoulders and she was glancing around frantically to see if there

  were any witnesses.

  The sound of his daughter’s voice managed to distract Pallas

  enough to get him to pick up Creon and follow Castor out of the

  town center and out into the moors.

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

  Chapter Nineteen

  Helen stared at the glass of water in front of her as it

  sweated condensed moisture onto the kitchen table.

  She’d already drunk what seemed like a bathtub full of

  water and she wasn’t thirsty anymore, but she held on

  to this last glass to give herself something else to look

  at besides the bereft faces around her.

  “His whole life is this family. This House,” Ariadne said. Her eyes

  were wide, red, and staring, like someone who had been stuck in

  too many different airports in too many different time zones for

  too long. They all looked like that—like they’d woken up to find

  themselves on the wrong side of the planet. “How can Hector be

  Outcast from the House of Thebes?”

  “I could have stopped him,” Jason said with grim certainty.

  “You can barely sit up straight in your chair right now, Jase,” Ariadne

  said, shaking her head. Jason had yet to recover from healing

  Claire, and his twin wouldn’t let him take responsibility for

  something that he hadn’t even seen. “I was there. I should have

  stopped it.”

  “You weren’t on India Street when Hector killed Creon, Ari,”

  Helen said, still staring at her water glass. “I was.”

  “Stop it, Helen,” Lucas said. “You and your mother saved this

  family, or at least, you saved what’s left of it.”

  Lucas’s words brought fresh tears for Pandora. After several

  minutes of quiet crying, the family lapsed back into silence.

  Everyone was thinking the same thought, that if each of them had

  done one thing differently that day they could h
ave staved off all

  the pain that they were all suffering. Cassandra had told everyone

  they couldn’t have known what was going to happen, but in saying

  that she seemed to take the burden of guilt onto herself. She

  seemed locked in her own head, unable to let go of the fact that

  she, of all people, should have been able to protect her family.

  “Call your mother,” Noel said suddenly to Helen, breaking everyone

  out of their tortured thoughts. “I’m the only one who can bear

  to be near Hector now, and I want to see my nephew. He’ll need

  me.”

  Helen nodded and pulled out her cell phone. It was the same

  phone Hector had given her with bloody knuckles and a toothless

  grin after Lucas had beat the stuffing out of him, but she buried

  that memory and dialed her mother’s number. As her phone connected,

  she stood up to leave the kitchen and wandered toward the

  front of the house, which was usually quieter.

  She heard two rings at the same time, one in her ear and one

  somewhere inside the house. Helen looked around and found her

  mother’s bag hanging on a hook in the front entryway. She chided

  herself for not being more aware. Daphne had been kidnapped; of

  course she had left her things behind. Helen hit END and heard the

  phone in the bag cease ringing. She stared at her mother’s purse,

  and was overcome with an irresistible urge. Just as Helen reached

  for it, there was a knock at the front door a few feet away from her.

  Helen hastily opened her mother’s bag and took out the cell

  phone. She quickly scrolled down the list of latest calls as footsteps

  approached from the kitchen. Concentrating on the glowing

  screen, Helen saw a few incoming unlisted numbers and a single

  outgoing call to someone named Daedalus before she had to shove

  the phone back in the bag.

  Ariadne appeared in the entryway to answer the door, and a moment

  later Castor and Pallas appeared behind her. They were tense

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  and probably expecting either the police or a member of the Hundred

  Cousins. After the briefest of pauses they nodded to Ariadne,

  signaling that it was okay for her to open the door. When she did,

  Daphne was standing on the doorstep.

  “I call for a meeting between the House of Atreus and the House

  of Thebes,” Daphne announced as she crossed her arms in an X

  over her breast and tilted her upper body forward, giving the suggestion

  of a bow.

  Castor and Pallas looked at each other. Whatever hatred they carried

  toward Daphne needed to be put down now, and they both

  knew it. Pallas swallowed hard and finally nodded.

  “You are welcome in this House and you have our hospitality,”

  Castor offered formally as he bowed, stepped aside, and let Daphne

  over the threshold as his sacred guest.

  The official meeting between the Houses took place in the library,

  with everyone arranged around Cassandra’s chair. Helen took her

  place next to her mother on the couch, and tried not to look at Lucas

  even though he was sitting directly opposite her.

  “First of all, I would like to make amends for the violation of your

  safety while you were a guest in my House,” Castor began humbly,

  but Daphne cut him off before he finished his thought.

  “Pandora was distraught. She and Ajax had a special bond, and

  because of that I could never hold a grudge against her for trying to

  avenge him, especially not now that she’s lost to us,” she said, waving

  a hand through air as if to banish the thought. “As far as I’m

  concerned the laws of hospitality were not violated.”

  As she said those last words, Helen noticed Lucas’s eyes snap

  over to Daphne, and she knew that he had sensed a lie, but decided

  to overlook it for the greater good.

  “I called this meeting to address two very important matters that

  concern both our Houses,” Daphne continued in a smooth voice.

  “The first is Hector and his future, and the second is my daughter

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  and her part in the prophecy.” Helen’s head spun around to face

  her mother.

  “My what?” she asked, completely at a loss.

  Helen wasn’t the only one in the room who didn’t understand.

  Castor and Pallas looked around, confused, and even Cassandra

  shrugged as if to admit she had no idea what Daphne meant.

  Jason stood up and took a stiff step forward.

  “Helen is the Descender that the Oracle mentioned in their

  prophecy—the prophecy that says that the Descender will free the

  Houses from the cycle of revenge,” he said from his place behind

  his father’s seat. “I only realized it this afternoon, when Helen described

  the dry lands so perfectly that I knew she’d seen them. That

  puzzled me at first because I know she isn’t a Healer. Then she told

  me that she would come down and drag both Claire and me out if I

  wasn’t strong enough to make the journey on my own. From her

  confidence, I knew she meant what she said, and I also suspected

  that she had physically been there more than once.”

  “The dust on your feet!” Ariadne exclaimed as she recalled

  Helen’s dirty feet and the mystery of the un-rung jingle bells.

  “What about it?” Helen asked, looking around at everyone’s immobile

  faces.

  “The Descender doesn’t just dream about the Underworld, the

  Descender literally goes down into it in his or her body,” Ariadne

  answered with a shocked face. “You physically went into hell every

  night?”

  “Your nightmares,” Lucas said, looking at Helen as he began to

  understand.

  “You were with me in one of them,” Helen said back to him in a

  confused voice. “The night we fell, before we woke up on the beach,

  I went down to get you, remember? You were lost and blind and I

  made you to stand up and walk. I made you follow me out. . . .”

  Here, Helen had to stop. Forcing Lucas to walk through the

  Underworld had been like doing surgery on an animal without

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  painkillers. He didn’t understand that what she was doing was for

  his own good, he only knew that she was hurting him.

  “That was real?” Lucas whispered.

  Helen nodded and reached out to take his hand, needing to touch

  him to reassure herself that he wasn’t afraid of her now, but

  Daphne stopped her hand in midair and pulled it back, shaking her

  head in disapproval.

  “You knew,” Lucas said, turning to Daphne.

  “Like Jason, I discovered Helen’s talent this afternoon,” Daphne

  replied. “That’s one of the reasons I asked for this meeting.”

  “And what are the rest of your reasons?” Cassandra asked coldly

  as flashes of the Oracle aura began to brighten the outline of her

  face. Daphne bowed her head reverently to the multiple presences

  that had begun to grace Cassandra.

  “Like Aeneas, my daughter will need Sibyl’s help in the Underworld,”

  Daphne said in a formal tone. “I ask that the House of

  Thebes care for their cousin, Helen, Heir to the House of Atreus,

  while she fulfills her destiny in the Underworld. In exchange, I,

/>   Daphne, Head of the House of Atreus, will grant refuge and protection

  to Hector Delos, Outcast of the House of Thebes.”

  Everyone shot each other looks, stunned by both the request and

  the offer that Daphne had made. The room hung in silence as expectations

  recalibrated.

  “Why would you do this for my son?” Pallas asked as he partially

  rose from his seat, torn between thanks and indignation.

  “Because he is one of the strongest Scions I’ve ever seen, but he’s

  also one of the proudest. The loss of his place in this House is going

  to change him, and without guidance he could become a danger to

  us all. I’ve seen it before,” Daphne said evenly. Then she turned to

  Lucas and looked him in the eye to ensure that what she said was

  proved true by him. “We are all family, and it’s time we started acting

  like it.”

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  “There are no falsehoods in anything she says,” Lucas said, looking

  over at Pallas who nodded with relief. Lucas, however, looked

  devastated. He had heard the truth from Daphne herself—Helen

  was a member of his family.

  Castor and Pallas looked at each other, already in agreement,

  then glanced over at Cassandra for final approval. She nodded her

  head once, and then stood up and left the room without another

  word.

  “One last thing,” Daphne continued, tactfully ignoring Cassandra’s

  rude exit. “Hector wants to know what’s to happen to

  Creon’s body.”

  “We’ll be contacting Mildred to come and retrieve her son,”

  Castor said, looking down at his hands. “She’ll want to bring him

  back to his father for the funeral.”

  “Of course,” Daphne said sadly. “Will you let me know when

  she’ll be here? Hector mentioned something about facing her to

  ask for forgiveness . . . ” she trailed off uncertainly, as if she wasn’t

  sure Hector should do that.

  “I’ll call you,” Pallas promised stiffly, and then hurried out of the

  room.

  Daphne stayed for a bit longer and reassured the rest of the family

  that physically Hector was going to be fine; but she was blunt

  about the fact that he wasn’t doing well emotionally. After letting

  them all know that she would convey their love to him, she departed

  hastily, saying that she had left Hector alone for as long as she

  dared. Helen walked her to the door.

  “Did Hector see you in Pandora’s shape on the beach tonight?”

  she asked her mother quietly when they got to the front door.