out of speaker mode, put her phone to her ear, and repeated Helen’s name a few times.
“That wasn’t her,” Lucas insisted, shaking his head repeatedly. He felt something was off, like there was a lie lurking somewhere. Helen wasn’t supposed to leave him. Ever. “She’d never call me a ‘Falsefinder’ like that.”
“Lucas, it was her,” Claire insisted, finally meeting Lucas’s eyes and giving him a sad look as she did so. “I know she sounded really weird, but it was Helen. You know that.”
“Was she lying?” Castor asked Lucas.
“No,” Lucas answered hoarsely, as though his voice couldn’t entirely commit to something that the rest of him knew was so wrong. “She told no lies.”
“So Daphne is alive,” Pallas breathed, his eyes wide and blank with shock.
“We still don’t know if ‘Daphne’ is Daphne Atreus,” Castor said, blocking his brother from leaving the room.
“Enough, Castor. Just stop it,” Pallas said, a note of weariness weighing his voice down. “I thought Helen was that Atreus whore when I first saw her!”
“And Hector is a dead ringer for Ajax, and Lucas looks like one of Poseidon’s children from the House of Athens!” Castor shouted, losing his patience. “More often than not the way we look is about fate, not our Houses. You know that as well as anyone! Helen’s mother could be any one of the five different Daphnes we heard were killed in the slaughter eighteen-plus years ago.”
“You’d do anything to keep the peace, wouldn’t you? Even let that woman get away,” Pallas said, pushing past Castor and throwing Hector’s restraining hand off his shoulder.
Lucas took an automatic step forward to get his cousin’s back. Hector could easily overpower his father if he had to, but Lucas didn’t want them to fight at all. A fight would delay him from finding Helen, and he had to see her. They weren’t supposed to be separated, and Lucas couldn’t shake the overwhelming sensation that something very wrong was happening.
“Where are you going, Dad?” Hector asked wearily, backing off from a physical fight.
“To find the woman who murdered my brother,” Pallas said through gritted teeth as he strode toward the door.
“You will not go,” Cassandra said.
Everyone in the room froze at the sound of her voice. There was a chiming tone to it, as if more than one person was speaking at the same time. The voices coming out of her were old and young and everything in between, all speaking in harmony. Lucas saw Claire take an instinctive step back toward Jason in terror. Cassandra’s mouth was glowing, and her hair was writhing around her head like snakes.
“Lucas, son of the sun, is the only one who can see the face he seeks,” she continued to prophesy. “He will find the daughters of Zeus, they who are beloved by Aphrodite, and give them shelter in the Royal House of Thebes. Oh! Caution! Betrayal . . .” She broke off uncertainly. The light left her, and she began to shake. She looked frightened, but not even Lucas wanted to go near her.
“Are you okay?” Lucas asked her quietly from across the room, breaking the unnatural silence. She nodded and rubbed her hands over her shoulders and upper arms, suddenly looking much smaller than she was.
“You’re going to need to take Hector and the twins with you,” she warned. “I think there’s going to be a fight.”
“I’ll go, too,” Castor said, but Cassandra shook her head.
“If Daphne sees you or Pallas, she’ll run,” she said with an apologetic shrug.
“So our children are to go face her alone? No. Daphne is too dangerous. We can’t let them anywhere near her,” Pallas objected as his anger gave way to fear. “She seduced Ajax and murdered him!”
“We don’t know that!” Castor yelled out in frustration.
For a moment it looked like Castor was going to hit his brother, but Hector insinuated himself in between them. Lucas nearly screamed with frustration, wondering how Scions had ever survived this long. They were always at each other’s throats, and none of this infighting got him any closer to Helen.
“Everyone calm down! Uncle. Father,” Hector said, turning from one to the other, and assuring both of them. “We can handle this.”
There was a gasping laugh, a bitter sound that caught everyone’s attention. When Lucas looked over, Pandora had a hand over her mouth and her eyes were filling up with tears. She looked tenderly at Hector, and spoke to him from behind her hand.
“You sound just like him, you know,” she said with an