Chapter Ten #7
“What the hell are you wearing?” Jerry said as soon as he saw her. Helen burst out laughing, partly because her dad had said exactly what she was thinking, but mostly because of the dumb-ass look on his face.
“It’s a loaner. My track uniform was all sweaty. Hey, they’re huge, but at least they’re clean,” Helen said, gesturing down to the gigantic T-shirt and the rolled-up sweatpants.
“Oh. Well, you look . . . comfortable?” he said suspiciously.
“Next time I’ll wear a ball gown,” Helen promised. Still laughing with her dad, she turned and noticed that half the Delos family was watching them, apparently amused.
“I see what you mean,” Castor said to Lucas, and the two of them shared a look that Helen didn’t understand before he turned to Jerry and smiled warmly.
“It’s nice to see you again, Jerry,” Castor said, coming forward with his hand extended for Jerry to shake.
“And you, Castor. I intended to be the first to suggest we all sit down to a meal together, but your wife seems to be a step ahead of me,” Jerry said graciously.
“Welcome to my world,” Castor replied with a laconic smile, the two men already enjoying each other’s company.
The introductions were as brief as possible, considering they included so many people, and Jerry handled them like a pro.
He’d run a local store for almost twenty years and he was accustomed to remembering people’s names and adjusting to even the most eccentric of personalities.
Helen watched him respond in just the right way to make one person smile, another laugh, and yet another stop and think.
She was proud of her dad, not just because he was clever and funny, but because he knew when not to be.
It also helped that Lucas’s family had similar tastes, both in conversation and in food.
Jerry ate up a storm and gently leaned on Noel until she confessed that she had been a chef in her pre-mom life, years ago, when she lived in France.
Noel even admitted that she had made a few stealth trips to the News Store.
She generously declared Kate’s sea salt, rosemary, and créme fra?che croissants to be a work of crazy genius.
Jerry beamed with pride, as if Kate was the buried treasure that he had been lucky enough to dig up. Helen elbowed him.
“I see you blushing,” she whispered to her dad.
“Yeah, and you’re not. Why is that?” he asked back.
“No reason to,” she said, a traitorous glow starting to grow on her cheeks.
“Uh-huh,” he said, not buying it. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to be the concerned parent and demand that you tell me exactly what’s going on between you and Mr. Superfantastic over there?”
“No. This is the part where you mind your own business and eat your dinner,” Helen said, sounding exactly like a mom.
“Good! Another bullet dodged,” he said with a smile, and asked for seconds of Noel’s potatoes au gratin.
The rest of the evening went along as well as Helen could have hoped, until the end.
Helen chatted with Jason, joked around with Ariadne, and even spoke briefly with Pallas about his job as a museum curator.
Up to that point, Pallas had seemed cold, even hostile toward her, but as soon as they started discussing painting, he seemed to open up a bit.
Helen was no expert, but she knew enough about art to keep the conversation interesting.
They were both surprised to find that they shared similar tastes, and they had a moment of mutual admiration while they discussed one of their favorite painters.
Helen was beginning to think that she and Pallas could get along, but after their exchange ended she saw him turn away from her with a deep, distrusting frown.
Helen heard a merry jingling and turned when she felt a touch on her arm.
“You can’t take it to heart,” Pandora said consolingly. “Look, I love all my brothers, but they can be huge jackasses sometimes. Especially Pallas.”
“I just wish I knew what I did,” Helen said, frustrated.
“No, it’s not you! You didn’t do anything. All of this Scion crap has been going on for a lot longer than you know.”
“Since the dawn of time, right?” Helen asked, trying to be humorous even though she was still hurt by Pallas’s reaction.
“Yeah, right. In a literal sense that’s true, but in this family there’s something more specific that I’m referring to. Something that goes back to just before you were born—that’s when everything started going to hell.”
To Helen’s surprise, Pandora took her hand and led her to a corner where they could sit down next to each other and avoid the jumble of the rest of the room. Apparently, whatever Pandora had to tell her was something she wanted to keep between them.
The Delos family was large enough to have cliques, and if Helen had to put their family into high school terms, Pandora was the artsy, mysterious girl that everyone wanted to hang out with, but only a few did on a regular basis.
“Let me start by saying that it’s hardest for Pallas because he’s lost more than most of us,” Pandora said sadly, before she sat up straighter and smiled apologetically.
“Don’t get me wrong, my brother is still an ass for treating you like he did, but it might help you understand him a little better if you can flip it, and try to see that your arrival in our lives is just as big a bombshell for us as it is for you.
Do you know about the way our looks are handed down? ”
Helen felt her face twitch in confusion at what seemed like a one eighty in the conversation.
“Sort of,” she said. “Castor said something about archetypes, and then Cassandra said that we all look like the people who fought in the Trojan War, or something.”
“So we’ve all got these recycled faces, right? And we don’t always look like our parents, or even Scions from our own Houses, but rather like the people from history that the Fates want us to be all over again.”
“Yeah, I get that. The Fates are really into repeats.”
“And since Scions usually tend to fall madly in love with one person they are ‘destined’ to be with, and then they go and have about a billion kids really young, the older generation sometimes has the dubious honor of seeing the faces of people they once knew—and here’s the real bitch—the faces of people they once fought against, in the younger generation.
Sometimes, even in their own children or in someone who their children love. ”
“Oh. That doesn’t sound good,” Helen said, a strange dread growing in her. “Pallas hated me the first time he saw me. So who do I look like?”
Pandora sighed. The spangles on her wrist shook as she took Helen’s hand.
“This totally sucks,” she said apologetically. “But you look exactly like Daphne Atreus—the woman who killed our brother Ajax twenty-one years ago.”
Helen noticed that Pandora stumbled over his name. For a moment, Helen thought the usually happy Pandora would cry.
“But I didn’t do it! I didn’t kill your brother,” Helen said, shaken to a whisper by the depth of emotion she was seeing. Hearing Helen’s urgency, Pandora snapped out of her sad thoughts and squeezed Helen’s hand.
“I know that!” she exclaimed kindly. “It’s insane to blame you, and most of us don’t. I certainly don’t. We have no way of knowing if you’re even from her House.”
“But Pallas does blame me,” Helen said, finally getting Pallas’s instant dislike of her. Pandora nodded reluctantly.
“When we lost Ajax it’s like we lost the best of us,” Pandora said, her eyes downcast and her lower lip momentarily catching between her teeth. “Ajax was . . . the best. You should have seen him. Actually, you can see him.”
Pandora shook her right wrist out from under the piles of bangles.
At the very bottom, clipped tightly to her skin, was a cuff.
Pandora opened the oval face to reveal that the cuff was actually a wrist-locket, something Helen had never seen before.
Inside was a picture of what Helen first thought was Hector, tickling the daylights out of a little girl with short dark hair.
“My brother Ajax,” Pandora said wistfully.
“He always had time for me, which is a big deal when you’re in a family as large as ours.
It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle, especially when you’re the littlest. I used to follow him around everywhere he went, begging him to give me jobs to do.
He started calling me ‘Squire’ and I loved it. ”
Helen looked at the joyful little girl squirming under the giant hand of her big brother, and then up at Pandora’s glistening eyes. “Even just looking at this picture I can tell he loved you very much.”
“He did, and I loved him. I used to pretend he was a glorious knight and I was his only trusted sidekick, and he played along. He was so patient. He used to send me on dangerous quests to find his car keys or summon the elevator. I was seven when he died. I wasn’t supposed to be following him that night, but I was. I was there when he was murdered.”
Helen was about to speak, to say something comforting if she could, but Pandora changed abruptly, and continued.
“He was like Apollo himself,” she said with a bright, although slightly forced, smile.
“Like Hector in a lot of ways . . . only sweet, and not a cranky wiseass. Don’t get me wrong, I love my nephew, but damn!
He can be a such a grouch.” They both broke into a much-needed laugh at Hector’s expense.
“I wish I’d met him. Your brother, I mean,” Helen said, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. Ajax must have been truly special to inspire such enduring love in his younger sister.
“In a lot of ways none of us have gotten over losing him,” Pandora said, shrugging as though she had run out of explanations for Helen. “But my brother Pallas is the only one who can’t look at you and accept that you’re a different person, even though he knows it’s got nothing to do with you.”
“I get it,” Helen conceded. “It’s not fair, and I still think he’s mean, but I get why Pallas hates me.”
“Don’t worry, eventually he’ll get over it. Deep down he knows you didn’t choose your face. The Fates did,” she said. She gave Helen a cheeky smile. “And damn, girl! But you got a nice one!”
“So did you!” Helen insisted, and she meant the compliment she gave.
“Whatever,” Pandora said, rolling her eyes and shaking her tinkling wrists. “I’m probably one in a hundred who gets some stupid handmaiden’s face, or a vestal virgin’s from Troy, considering my luck with men!”
Even while she laughed, Helen couldn’t quite shake a strange doubt. Finally, she gave into it and asked, “So who from Troy do I look like?”
“Hell, no!” Pandora said, standing up. “I promised—we all did. You need to talk to Lucas about that one, Helen. Sorry, but I’ve already given you enough to think about for one night.”
And with a considerable amount of jangling and sparkling, Pandora announced that she needed a glass of wine and disappeared in the mix of her family.
Helen grimaced after her. She knew that Pandora had really opened up and entrusted her with an emotionally dense bit of information, but Helen still felt dissatisfied.
She wanted to know what role the Fates intended for her to play.
She was going to ask Lucas the second she got him alone.
She looked over at him. All night she had felt him watching her, and the weight of his eyes had been like an encouraging hand on the small of her back.
She didn’t have to slouch or pretend to be weak or less of a geek than she was.
She simply fit in. She realized that this new ease with herself was partly due to the fact that for the first time in her life she was around people who were just as odd as she was .
. . but it was mostly because of Lucas. He never stood next to her, but she could feel they were still tied to each other by the trust they had built during their flight.
His gaze had such a positive impact on her that she felt unbalanced as soon as his eyes abandoned her.
She looked around to see what had caught his attention and spotted him talking privately with Pallas.
Helen did not approve of using Scion hearing to violate another person’s privacy—she and Hector had already had an argument about just that when she accused him of eavesdropping on her and Jerry from the widow’s walk, but now she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
When she heard Pallas say her name, she had to know what they were saying about her.
“I’m not going to lie to you. Helen caught my eye,” Lucas was saying in a low voice. “But nothing’s going on.”
“So everyone keeps telling me,” Pallas replied.
Helen saw him rub his lower lip in thought before continuing.
“I’m not so worried about that right now, but what I am worried about is a month or two down the road when the two of you are flying off every direction together. Alone. It can’t happen, Luke.”
“It won’t,” Lucas replied coldly. “I’m teaching her to fly and I’m making sure she doesn’t get killed, but there’s no way I’d ever touch her. Give me some credit.”
They continued talking, but Helen had stopped listening. She felt sick. Stumbling in her borrowed shoes, she went over to her dad. She stood right next to him as he talked to Pandora, and stared at his profile until he took the hint and looked at her.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked sarcastically at first, until he took a good look at her and became concerned. “You okay, Len?”
“Can we go? I have so much stuff to do. Homework and chores. And I’m so tired,” she said, making up random excuses until he responded. She was causing a bit of a scene, which she hated, but she simply couldn’t stand there and suck it up for one second longer.
Jerry glanced down at his watch. “Sure, yeah. I guess it’s getting kind of late. Was that supposed to be my line?” he asked with a guilty grimace.
“No, you’re good. It’s still early. I’m just . . . I’ve got stuff,” Helen said before she launched immediately into the thank you, good-bye, and see-you-tomorrow crap that she wished she could just skip.
Ariadne shot Helen a worried look, but Helen didn’t care about anything anymore, not anyone’s feelings or whether or not they all thought she was rude or crazy or both.
None of it mattered. She just needed to get out of that house before she saw Lucas again or she was going to lose her mind.
It was rude and awkward, but Helen managed to drag her dad out the front door before Lucas and Pallas had even looked up from their conversation in the corner.