“Nope,” she said evenly.
Helen’s hands were shaking, but she stirred some cream into her mug and took a drink, anyway. In the state she was in, she figured it might actually steady her. She felt like her whole body was hot and cold at the same time.
“Helen? Are you feeling ill?” Noel asked with narrowed eyes.
Helen shook her head uncertainly. It was impossible for a Scion to come down with a mortal sickness, yet when she ran a hand across her forehead, it came back wet with sweat. Still staring at her hand, Helen heard an electric car cruise quietly up to the house and stop.
“Lennie! Get your butt out here and help us with these books!” Claire yelled from the driveway.
Helen turned to look out the window behind her and saw Claire and Matt getting out of Claire’s car. Grateful for the interruption, Helen scurried out from under Noel’s piercing look to help them.
“We hear you have an ant problem,” Claire said through a grin, and started stacking books on Helen’s outstretched arms.
“Because that’s exactly what I need, right?” Helen laughed ruefully. “More problems.”
“Don’t worry, Len. We’ll split up into groups and tackle this in shifts. We’ll figure it out.” Matt sounded so certain. He shouldered a backpack full of books, closed the trunk, and put an arm over Helen’s shoulders as they walked together toward the house. “Claire and I didn’t join PETA’s most wanted list for nothing, you know.”
As Helen, Claire, and Matt were just about to go back inside, they heard Castor and Pallas saying their good-byes and decided to let the Delos family have a moment alone. From what Helen could gather, Conclave was a big deal, like a Supreme Court trial and an international summit meeting combined. Once it started, no one was allowed to leave unt
il a course of action was decided upon, so sometimes these meetings could take weeks.
Helen tried not to listen in too much while they hugged and said their good-byes, but she couldn’t help herself when she overheard Castor privately pulling Noel aside to ask if Lucas was coming or not.
“I don’t know where he went. He could be in Tibet by now,” Noel replied, sounding like she was on her last nerve. “I was hoping he’d go with you to New York for a few weeks. Get him out of here and give him a chance to . . .”
“A chance to what?” Castor asked sadly when Noel ran out of things to say. “Just leave him be.”
“I have left him be, and it’s obviously not helping!” Noel said. “He’s so angry all the time now, Caz, and I think it’s getting worse—not better.”
“I know. He’s changed, Noel, and I think we’re going to have to accept that it might be permanent. I was hoping he’d just hate me, but it seems like he hates the whole world,” Castor said heavily. “And I honestly don’t blame him. Could you imagine if someone had separated us like I separated them?”
“You had no choice. They’re cousins. That’s not something that’s going to change,” Noel said emphatically. “Still, if your father did to us what you did to Lucas—”
“I don’t know what I would have done to him,” Castor said as if he couldn’t even think about it. Helen heard them kiss and immediately switched off her Scion hearing.
“Let’s go to the library and get to work!” she suggested loudly to Claire and Matt, and started walking around the house to use another entrance. Her mind was racing.
Had Castor really separated her and Lucas, and if so, how? Helen thought back over the outburst at dinner, and realized that Lucas had been just as angry with Castor as he was with her—maybe more. Had Lucas hurt her because his father had ordered him to?
“Len? You know I love you, but you really need to stop spacing,” Claire said with a cute grimace. Helen looked around and realized that she had paused in the middle of the hallway on the way to the library, like her legs had just quit or something.
“Sorry!” she said, and rushed to keep up with her friends.
Lucas circled the Getty Museum, a gleaming white building elegantly perched on top of one of Los Angeles’s more scruffy hills. The white stone structure capping the dry, rocky hill was strikingly similar to the Parthenon. The Parthenon was originally a treasury, so Lucas felt it was fitting that he was coming to the Getty to make a withdrawal of coins.
He was searching for a spot that would hide him for the one moment of his landing when he would have to slow down enough that he could be seen. Lucas moved in faster than a human could see, settling too lightly on the ground to leave any footprints. The instant he touched down, Lucas half ran, half flew to the door so quickly that all a security camera picked up would be a faint blur. Stopping right next to the door, Lucas froze and disappeared.
In the last few weeks, he had learned that if he didn’t move around too much he could scatter light so that the surface of his body looked like whatever was behind it. In the beginning, before he had perfected his invisibility cloak, it was still possible for a Scion to make out a faint fracture between the picture he created and his surroundings. Luckily, only one Scion had ever noticed it, and that had been Lucas’s own damn fault.
After a half an hour wait, a maintenance man finally came out the door with a rake in one hand and his early morning thermos of coffee in the other. Lucas simply slipped around him and walked in without tripping a single alarm. He could have ripped the door off its hinges, but he didn’t want to attract too much attention to himself. Lucas didn’t know whether his plan would work, but he didn’t want his family to get suspicious and interfere.
He’d always been taught that museums were sacred places because they housed so many Scion relics, but he never imagined that one day he’d be pushed to a point where he’d consider breaking into one. Now he was desperate. He had to do something to help Helen.
His father had been wrong. All it took was one look at Helen—her clothes torn and covered in that black mud from the Underworld—and Lucas knew for sure that he wasn’t Helen’s problem. He had done as his father had ordered, but she was still suffering. Staying away from her was not enough.
Lucas knew Helen was strong, and he trusted her to make good decisions even when he disagreed with her. She had insisted that Orion was helping her, so no matter how much it ate him up inside to think of the two of them alone together, Lucas had stepped back.
He’d promised himself after the night Pandora died as he watched the dawn break from Helen’s widow’s walk that he would suffer anything as long as Helen moved on and lived a full and meaningful life. He’d turned himself into something twisted in an attempt to break things off between them. Yet that morning she’d looked sicker than she had before Lucas had pushed her away.