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“Ah . . . safe,” Helen said, unsure of how much she should share.
“Where did you take my son?” Noel demanded, striding angrily down the hallway toward Helen. Her face was swollen and her eyes were bright red from crying all night. Helen realized that Noel blamed her. She looked around at everyone’s faces. She saw doubt, distrust, and in the best cases, confusion. She was used to Pallas looking at her like he didn’t trust her any farther than he could throw her, but not Castor and Noel. Or Claire.
“Lucas and I call it Everyland.” Helen threw up her hands and just said it. “But you all know it as Atlantis.”
TWELVE
Helen finished explaining and a long silence followed. Looks got traded around the Delos kitchen table, where they all sat.
“How many Worldbuilders have there been?” Castor asked finally calm.
“Not many. Hades, Morpheus, Zeus, and the Furies all have their own lands. Other Scions in history have had the talent, but I can only remember two.”
“Remember? How can you remember the other Worldbuilders if they lived long ago?” Orion asked.
“Well, you know how I touched a few drops of water from that river?” Helen smiled at him and Orion nodded, smiling with her at the mention of their adventure on Halloween. At least Orion was still on her side. “When I got my memory back, I got more than just my memories. I got other women’s memories, too. One of them was Helen of Troy’s.”
Hector muttered a colorful swear word.
“Her life sucked, by the way.” Helen looked at Castor. “You were Priam, king of Troy. Your brother, Tantalus? Totally Menelaus. And you were Agamemnon,” she told Pallas.
Hector and Orion looked at each other and started laughing.
“You were the great Hector, and you were Aeneas, his best friend and general,” Helen said, shrugging as she looked at them. “But you guys already knew that.”
“Yeah, we kinda did,” Orion admitted with a grin.
“Wait,” Claire said, holding up a hand. “Wasn’t Helen of Troy the one who betrayed the city that was protecting her and let the Greeks slaughter her friends and family?”
The weak laugh Claire added on the end did not make her question funny. Helen couldn’t believe the accusation in Claire’s voice and glanced down at her heart. It was full of fear.
“This is terrible. You built a world,” Cassandra gasped, surfacing from her own thoughts to rejoin the conversation a few minutes late. “Zeus will fight you. He must fight you or risk being overthrown. That’s what the Fates have wanted all along. They want the children to overthrow the parents.”
“Yes,” Helen admitted. “And until the Scions overthrow the gods we’ll be stuck in this same cycle, repeating our ancestors’ mistakes with every new generation until the Fates get what they want.”
“Apollo said something similar,” Hector said, nodding in agreement. “And after spending a few thousand years cooped up on Olympus, he looks ready for a fight.”
Several people asked Helen questions at once, but as they began debating the virtues of fighting and avoiding a fight, Helen felt Lucas wake up in Everyland, and she happily turned her attention to him. He was worried about her. She made a note appear on the pillow next to him, explaining where she was and what she was telling the family.
“Wait—one thing?” he asked out loud before reading the note.
Strangely, Helen didn’t hear him say it. She felt the words appear in her head attached to some sort of essence that she understood as Lucas. It was like a freaky second sense, much more subtle than actual hearing, and she knew she could tune it out if she had to. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to spend as much time as she could, feeling Lucas inside her world, inside her mind, like this.
“Anything,” Helen replied, placing the word gently in his thoughts so he wouldn’t be frightened by some booming voice in the sky or anything too Old Testament.
“Can you make it, like, a lot warmer? What is it with you New England girls and snow, anyway? I grew up in Cádiz. I like sun.”
Helen laughed out loud and imagined a warm place for Lucas.
“Helen?” Orion asked, touching her arm to bring her thoughts back down to Earth. She looked at him and saw that her strange behavior had startled him. He was scared of her. They all were—especially Claire. Right now, Claire was looking at Helen like she’d just run over someone’s dog. Helen knew that she needed to sit down and have a chat with Claire, but she didn’t want to take the time to explain herself just yet. She was too eager to get back to Lucas and their own personal paradise.
“I have to leave,” she said, shrugging apologetically. She turned to Orion and pointed at him. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
“I’ll be right here,” Orion said.
She stood up from the table and moved away so that she didn’t freeze everyone when she opened a portal. She looked at Noel. “I’ll be back with Lucas soon. Promise.”
Then she vanished.
