Chapter Fifteen #4
“Then Cass said she kept seeing flashes of several different women, over and over,” Jason continued.
“She didn’t know why she was having visions about women that she didn’t recognize and that didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other.
It took a while, but Cass finally noticed that they all had exactly the same way of putting their hair behind their ear, like a nervous tic.
Because of that, Cass realized that they were all the same person, and the most persistent vision she kept having was of one of these women waiting for Helen at her house like she lived there. ”
“The woman let herself into Helen’s house with her own key and turned on the TV like she’d done it a million times, so at first Cass didn’t think there was any danger.
Probably a relative Helen never mentioned, right?
” Hector interjected. “It wasn’t until just a few seconds before you walked in the door that she put it all together and knew that she had been seeing Helen’s attacker all day long. We tried to call you. . . .”
“But I had my phone shut off,” Lucas finished for him, adding a foul curse on the end. “What did the woman waiting at Helen’s house look like?” Lucas asked urgently, trying to get a mental image of the threat. “Is she that brunette? Or the old woman who attacked Kate?”
“Neither. Cassandra said she was unbelievably beautiful. Like Helen,” Jason replied.
“Not just beautiful like Helen—you’re telling it wrong, dumb-ass,” Hector interrupted.
He wove through traffic like a madman, blowing through red lights and passing cars illegally.
“Cassie said this woman looked almost exactly like her. But whoever she is, Cass is certain this woman is not on Creon’s side.
He doesn’t even know he’s being followed, which may or may not be good for us. ”
“Why the hell wasn’t someone guarding the house?” Lucas shouted in frustration, too upset to think about what Cassandra’s vision meant yet.
“It’s my fault,” Hector said, and then continued before his little brother could argue. “Shut up, Jase, I’m the one who allowed her to go off on her own after practice. It was my call, and I made it, even though I knew in my gut it was wrong.”
Lucas wanted to rip Hector’s face off for taking the blame when he knew whose fault it really was.
He should have checked his phone, he should have checked the house, he should have paid more attention to Helen’s safety and less attention to her soft hands and warm skin.
He scrubbed his hands over his face and made himself take a series of deep breaths.
He needed to trust Hector to get them there, and then he needed to focus and be ready for whatever they encountered.
If he was going to be at all useful, he was going to have to shut up and calm down.
When they got to Helen’s house, the TV and the lights were off and the front door was locked.
Lucas flew up to Helen’s bedroom window, which he knew she always forgot to latch.
He let himself in and then went downstairs to open the front door for the others.
Nothing was taken and nothing was disturbed in the entire house.
It was as if Helen hadn’t even put up a fight.
“She must have known the woman and gone with her willingly,” Hector said, tossing up his hands. “It’s the only reason this place isn’t melting.”
“Unless whoever kidnapped her is just that good,” Jason added.
“What are you talking about?” Hector said derisively. “Helen’s a full-on monster now with her lightning. I don’t care who this evil twin is, no one is that good.”
“Twin,” Lucas repeated, thinking. “It could be that simple. She’d have the same lightning, the same strength, and a lot more experience.”
The brothers looked at him as he got down on his hands and knees and examined the floor. He reached under an end table and came up with a drained hypodermic needle.
“That rules out Helen going willingly. Whoever she was, she came prepared. And she must have known about the cestus and how it works, or she never would have been able to penetrate Helen’s skin,” Lucas said, his breath catching only slightly when he said her name.
He handed the needle to Jason and dropped back down to examine the floor one last time, in case he missed something.
When he was satisfied, he stood up and looked through his cousins instead of at them, still thinking.
Then he went to the windows by the door and looked out at the raging storm.
Lucas watched mini mudslides slosh down Helen’s driveway and out into the street and knew that any path Helen might have left would be long gone.
“Was there anything else in Cassandra’s vision?” Lucas asked hopefully.
“The last thing she said was that she thought Helen would still be safe tomorrow morning,” Jason replied, shaking his head doubtfully. “Cass had a brief flash of Helen standing in a window that looked like some kind of hotel on Nantucket, but she couldn’t be sure.”
“Maybe Cass has seen something else,” Hector said as optimistically as he could. He opened his phone and tried to dial, but a no signal sign was flashing on his screen. “Check your phones,” he said to his brother and cousin. Neither of them could connect a call, either.
Lucas went into Helen’s kitchen and checked her landline for a dial tone, but it was dead. As he joined his cousins back in the entryway, the power in the house went out. Jason went over to the window and looked at the other houses in the area.
“The whole block is out,” he said. “And massive lightning bolts are headed this way. I guess we’re stuck here for a while.”
“You two stay here in case Helen gets free and makes her way back,” Lucas said as he turned for the door.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Hector demanded, grabbing Lucas by the shoulder and trying to turn him around.
“Don’t,” Lucas warned quietly. They stared at each other until Hector finally backed down and removed his hand from Lucas’s shoulder.
“Just stay out of the sky,” he cautioned. “You’re no good to her dead.”
Lucas strode off into the dark storm without responding.
He was frustrated with not being able to fly and trying to think of where to start.
If he could get airborne he could see around, get his bearings and look for anything suspicious, but the storm had him completely grounded.
It suddenly occurred to him that if he had just drugged a girl who was known on sight by most of the locals of a tiny island, he would want to get off that island as soon as possible, and if Lucas was grounded, all air travel was almost certainly canceled as well.
The only way to get Helen off island would be by boat, and even that was a long shot.
Going out on the water would be suicide.
He ran to the dock, where he learned that the last ferry had left over an hour earlier and that the coast guard had officially suspended all travel in and out of the marina and airport while the storm lasted.
New England was going to get pummeled with a good old-fashioned nor’easter that night, and the impassable weather would probably last into the next day.
Lucas relaxed a little when he heard that.
He’d left Helen less than an hour earlier, after the last ferry had already departed, so the chances were high that she was still on island.
Hopefully, she was in a hotel, and relatively safe.
He wasted a few more hours wandering in and out of every motel and bed-and-breakfast near the ferry, asking if two women had checked in that evening.
Unfortunately, although there were a lot of people stranded on the island and filling up the hotels due to the storm, there were none that fit Helen’s description.
Lucas knew it was futile. No Scion would be stupid enough to walk into a hotel with an unconscious girl slung over her shoulder and ask for a room.
Whoever had taken Helen may have broken in someplace, or even bribed someone at the desk, but either way, Lucas knew they weren’t going to announce themselves.
He was chasing his own tail, but still, he couldn’t give up.
He checked back at home, found out what Cassandra had seen in her next vision while he’d been gone, and then ran back into the storm before his father could even start to argue.
The wind was so strong it was tearing down trees and taking apart the stoic Nantucket architecture.
Even Lucas, as strong as he was, had to switch over into his supermassive state to stay anchored to the ground as bits and pieces of people’s houses tumbled down the streets around him.
His bare face was getting lashed by the swirling debris in the air, and the sideways rain was clawing at his eyes.
All night he wandered around outside every hotel, inn, and bed-and-breakfast he could think of, looking in the windows with eyes that could see in even the dimmest of light, hoping for a glimpse of Helen.
He knew he wouldn’t get it. Cassandra had told him that Helen would be standing in a hotel window the next morning, but he still couldn’t make himself stop.
He wouldn’t stop, because if by some miracle he did find her, take her out of that hotel, and bring her back to her family, he could prove Cassandra wrong.
All he needed was to beat Fate once and he would know that he was the master of himself—not just a prewritten story that gets reread every now and again to amuse the cosmos—but a truly blank slate that he would be allowed to fill with whatever future he decided to write for himself.
If he could just find Helen that night and bring her home, then he knew that someday they would beat Fate, and that they could be together.
He walked all night.
Helen’s head was pounding and there was a sour, chalky taste in the back of her mouth, like she had chewed an aspirin and didn’t rinse afterward.
Her eyes felt swollen and puffy, and the skin on her face felt clammy and hot, but she didn’t feel as dehydrated as she usually did when she visited the dry lands.
This was different. She’d been drugged, she suddenly remembered, by a woman.
A woman that looked just like her, but older.
“Take a sip,” said a voice as Helen felt a straw being pressed to her lips. Her eyes flipped open and she saw the woman again, leaning over her and holding a glass of water.
“Who are you?” Helen asked, her voice crackling.
She jerked her mouth away from the suspicious glass of liquid and felt her arms strain against bonds.
She was tied to a bed. Still unbearably weak from whatever drug she had been given, Helen knew it would be a while before she was strong enough to break free.
She looked around frantically. She was in a hotel room that was lit by candles.
It was still night, and she could hear wind and rain battering the window behind the closed curtain.
“Look at me, Helen! Who do you think I am?” the woman asked so forcefully it momentarily stopped Helen from panicking. “Here, I know you’ll need proof. I would.”
The woman took out an envelope full of pictures.
They were pictures of herself, when she was in her late teens.
In one picture she was holding a tiny baby.
In another she was sitting and talking to a young Mrs. Aoki while two baby girls, one blonde, one black-haired, played together on the floor.
In yet another she was kissing Jerry over her swollen, pregnant belly.
“Beth,” Helen whispered, her eyes darting over the pictures that she had spent a hefty portion of her childhood searching for.
“My real name is Daphne. Daphne Atreus. I guess it would be too much to ask for you to call me ‘Mom,’ huh?” Daphne said with a wry smile.
Helen gestured to her bound wrists. “You guessed right,” she replied, starting to get angry. “You want to tell me why you knocked me out and tied me up?”
“Because we are out of time, and if I were you I would hate me so much I wouldn’t even give me a second to explain,” Daphne replied with a loving look on her face. “Unless I had been knocked out and tied down first.”
Helen glared at her, furious and still groggy from the drug. “What do you want from me?”
Daphne’s face and body began to shift, not just changed in mood, but in shape.
One moment Helen was looking at an older version of herself, and the next moment she was looking at a woman in her sixties with salt-and-pepper hair.
Before Helen could even gasp, the dowdy woman disappeared and was replaced by a brunette in her late thirties.
Then that woman disappeared and Helen was looking at her mother again.
She held up Helen’s heart-shaped necklace in one hand and touched her own identical necklace with the other.
“There are a lot of things I need to tell you about who you are and where you come from. Things that are going to hurt you,” Daphne said in a direct, almost brutal way. “But I don’t have any choice. Creon is on this island right now, and he is coming for you.”