Chapter Fourteen #3
Helen didn’t want to laugh. In fact, she was working very hard to give him a penetrating glare, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t keep a straight face.
She made a horrible noise, a huge piggy-sounding snort, and that made Lucas double up and laugh so hard he had to put his hands on his knees to brace himself.
As Helen covered her face and really let herself laugh, she felt Lucas put his arms around her.
They held on to each other, each of them propping the other up. That’s when Helen started to understand how things really worked between her and Lucas. They had to do this together, had to share fifty-fifty the huge burdens that had been placed on them, or they would be crushed.
Lucas turned his lips toward her cheek as he ran his hand up her spine and began to stroke the back of her neck.
She felt the muscles across his shoulders tense and he suddenly pushed a knee between her thighs.
Helen gasped and tried to decide if she should pull him down on top of her like she wanted, or push him away like he wanted, but she didn’t get the chance to do either.
As quickly as he had changed, he switched back.
He pulled away from her with a sad smile, and then jumped into the air.
“You know, you don’t need to run track to get into a good school. You’re going to kill it on your SATs,” he said breezily, but with the faintest bit of a quiver still lingering in his voice.
“That’s what Hergie thinks, too,” Helen said.
She still felt a bit dazed and shaky. She joined him in the sky and continued her thought when she finally had one.
“I just didn’t want to be that girl, you know?
The girl who does whatever her boyfriend tells her to do because she wants someone else to make all the tough decisions for her. ”
“I hate that girl,” Lucas said with a wrinkled nose as they flew back, hand in hand, to his house.
“Everyone hates that girl. That’s why I can’t automatically do whatever you say, even if you are right. I’ve got my pride,” Helen said jokingly as they landed in his yard, but he didn’t laugh. She squeezed his hand. “What is it?”
“Pride is a really dangerous thing for Scions. We’re prone to it, and it’s usually our downfall. I know you were kidding, but be careful, okay?” he said gently.
“Oh, yeah. Hubris. Ancient Greece’s big no-no.” Helen nodded sagely. Lucas gave her a surprised look. “What? I’ve been doing my mythology homework. Actually, I guess it’s my history homework, isn’t it?”
“It is. Family history,” he said, and pulled her close to him.
They walked down to the fight cage with their arms around each other before separating. They changed into workout clothes and met back on the practice mat.
Helen was expecting there to be a little lingering tension between her and Lucas after his “slip” at Great Point, but if anything, that momentary loss of self-control only served to make him more focused on training.
Usually, there was a moment or two when one or the other of them would become conscious of the intimate positions they pressed each other into as Helen tried to grasp the basics of jujitsu, but not that afternoon. Lucas was all business.
“I just realized, we’ve been fighting all day,” Helen said as she tried and failed to break out of his armbar for the tenth time. “And I don’t think I’ve won once.”
“How long has it been?” he asked, suddenly curious about something she didn’t understand right away. He craned his head and looked at the clock on the wall, then back at Helen. “Do you have your bolts back yet?”
Helen connected to that strange sense at the bottom of her belly and felt a spark there. She nodded at Lucas, a bit surprised, and he grabbed her hand, pulling her to her feet.
“Then let’s go try it out,” he said with a grin as he led her out of the gym.
“Wait,” Helen said uncertainly, stopping him with an outstretched hand. “My lightning almost killed you today.”
“Because you don’t know how to control it yet.
” Lucas turned and cupped her shoulders in his hands.
“You have to accept this. I know it freaks you out, but as harsh as it sounds, you’ve just got to get over it.
This is who you are, Helen, and I’m not afraid of you, or your lightning. So you shouldn’t be, either.”
Helen looked up at Lucas. His eyes were so sure, so accepting.
“You know what?” she said, standing up straighter. “I want to learn how to control my lightning.”
“Yeah, you do!” he nearly shouted. When they got outside, they saw Hector’s truck pull up and the rest of the Delos siblings pile out.
“We’re going to test her bolts!” Lucas yelled toward them. Jason and Hector glanced at each other briefly with wide eyes. They both broke into a run.
“How long has it been?” Hector shouted, sprinting toward them, giddy as a schoolgirl.
“About an hour and forty-five minutes,” Lucas said. “She drank two gallons of water.”
“And I still feel a little thirsty,” Helen admitted.
“Well, get her some more water, Lucas!” Cassandra ordered as she and Ariadne caught up. “How is she supposed to make lightning bolts without hydrogen?”
“Right,” Lucas said distractedly. Jumping into the air, he flew to the house and back in about twenty seconds. “Why didn’t you tell me you were thirsty?” he asked Helen, handing her a large bottle still cold from the fridge.
“I didn’t know. I guess I should start paying better attention to that,” Helen mumbled to herself sheepishly.
“You have to pay attention to everything that makes you more powerful. And your bolts make you very powerful,” Hector said, a feline grin spreading across his face. Helen tipped the bottle back and drank deeply.
“That door was insane!” Jason exclaimed. Recalling it, he rubbed a hand across his face in that Delos gesture that Helen always noticed. “It was like you had taken an industrial-strength welder to it.”
“How many volts do you think you have stored right now?” Cassandra asked. They all entered the arena.
“No idea.” Helen shrugged. She felt for the charge and tried to gauge it, but she couldn’t describe it. “It’s a feeling, not a digital readout, Cass.”
“Oh, then wait!” Cassandra said, holding up her hands. “Maybe I can devise a way to measure it.”
“Cassie, geek out later! We’re all dying to see this right now,” Hector whined.
“All right, fine! Sorry, Helen. Whenever you’re ready,” she reluctantly allowed.
The Delos family moved behind Helen, giving her plenty of room to aim her bolt out across the nonconductive sand of the arena.
She held up her right hand. That was the hand she wrote with, but it didn’t feel like the best fit, so she switched to her left.
Then she summoned her bolt—deliberately for the first time.
Lightning shot out of her hand. Not static, not some pathetic splinter of a spark, but actual lightning.
It arced forward in a bright, branching blur, and it made a huge cracking sound, like an orchestra of leather bullwhips snapping simultaneously.
One second the air was full of blinding icy blue light, and the next second half of the arena was coated in a thick sheet of smoking amber-colored glass.
No one said anything for a second.
“Unbefrickinglievable,” Hector cussed quietly into the silence.
Helen smacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and stumbled toward the water bottle that Lucas automatically held out for her. She finished an entire liter in five gulps.
“Maybe that was a bit much,” she said as she leaned against Lucas.
“You could have fried about fifty people,” Ariadne murmured distractedly, looking from Helen to the irregular sheet of glass.
“I don’t want to fry fifty people. Fifty French fries, sure. Who wouldn’t want fifty French fries? Delicious,” Helen said. She felt herself give a goofy grin.
“The electricity makes her a little confused,” Lucas explained to his siblings in an embarrassed tone. “I hope it isn’t bad for her.”
“It’s not the voltage, Lucas. It’s severe dehydration!” Cassandra chastised. “Her body is built to handle electricity. It’s the drain of the fluids out of her tissues that makes her seem like an airhead. And that isn’t permanent or damaging, so stop worrying.”
In the kitchen, Helen put her lips under the faucet.
Everyone waited patiently for Helen to drink her fill while they stared at one another behind her back.
She could feel their fear. It was exactly why she had suppressed her power to begin with.
That power was so intense, so destructive, it was impossible for anyone to trust it.
Helen shut off the tap and turned to face them. “Did I just freak everyone out?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Lucas said, his face a mask. Helen’s throat closed and her whole body went still. She kept her eyes on Lucas, but she was waiting for any one of them to condemn her for going too far. Lucas looked at Helen and smiled at her. He smiled like he was proud of her.
“But that’s our problem, not yours,” he said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong with what you can do. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Plus, I bet you’re real good at making s’mores,” Ariadne added.
“But the real question is, can she do it without liquefying the chocolate?” Jason asked, like he was some kind of s’mores guru. Helen looked from face to face, her heart aching a bit with gratitude to find nothing but acceptance and compassion wherever her eyes landed.
After all the talk of French fries and s’mores, everyone had junk food on the brain, so they headed to a local mom-and-pop burger shack by the beach. When Helen and Lucas got up to the counter, the cashier reached out to touch Helen’s necklace.
“It’s a sea horse! I love sea horses,” the woman enthused, raising her hand to touch it, and dropping it again in embarrassment.
Helen thanked her—because she would have felt rude if she didn’t—put in her order with Lucas and then they sat down in one of the booths, where they looked at each other, confused.