you know,” her mother told her, standing behind Helen and looking at her in the glass.
“Yeah, I know. I figured out how to do that much on my own, at least,” Helen answered in the stranger’s voice.
Helen’s necklace was the actual girdle of Aphrodite, the protective half that made her impervious to weapons. Daphne’s half was the adornments of Aphrodite, and although she couldn’t stop a blade or a bomb with her skin like Helen could, what she could do was potentially more frightening. Daphne was irresistible to whomever she decided to charm.
“Well, I’m glad. I’ve always worn my half as the heart, and I always hoped you did, too,” Daphne said shyly. “I guess you probably think I’ve got no right to be nostalgic about you. But I am.”
Daphne fingered her heart-shaped charm and opened her mouth to say something else, but she stopped herself and went into the other room to sort through her luggage for the tenth time. A part of Helen wanted to run after her mother and say she had always hoped her necklace was a tie between them, too. But another part of her wanted to rip the thing off her neck and throw it in her mother’s borrowed face.
Helen wasn’t certain how far Daphne’s power of persuasion went just yet. It came from the cestus, so it might be that Daphne was irresistible only in a sexual way, but Helen was painfully aware of how quickly she had agreed to leave her home and the people she loved. She was following a woman she couldn’t remember to a place she had never seen, and she had made the decision to do so in less than an hour. Helen thought through everything she had learned, looking for some clue that she was being controlled, but as she added up all the evidence, she knew that she didn’t need to be brainwashed to want to run away.
After what Daphne had told her, Helen was so disgusted with herself she would have run away, regardless.
“Are you hungry?” Daphne asked. Helen jumped away from the window at the sound and dropped the curtain guiltily. Without even realizing it, she had been looking for Lucas again.
“No,” she replied, unable to look up from the rug.
“Well, you’re still going to have to eat, and we should try out your new face before we get on the ferry,” Daphne said with a grimace. “We’re going out for breakfast before we have to travel over that blasted ocean.”
Helen tried to argue—to point out how silly it would be to test her ability to hold her new shape with so little practice—but Daphne only shrugged and said that it would be easier to test it on land before they ventured out on the water. It seemed that Helen’s fear of the ocean was inherited. Daphne loathed it, and remembering what Hector had told her about how her own dislike of the ocean came from not being able to control it, Helen assumed that her mother must be a huge control freak to hate the ocean so passionately. After a quick check to make sure that neither of them was wearing clothes that might get them recognized, Daphne dragged Helen out onto the street with a promise that it would be “fun.”
The storm had mashed the fallen autumn leaves into a kind of red-brown paste that coated the cobblestone streets and clogged the overwhelmed gutters. The rain was petering out and the wind was dying down, but the bottoms of the clouds were still a smudged-mascara color, and water ran in impromptu rivers down the sidewalks on their way out to sea. Fallen branches lay here and there, the bushy ends denuded of leaves, and the trunk ends, newly ripped from the trees, ended in fresh white splinters that stuck out in all directions like dropped boxes of toothpicks. Helen could smell the tree sap in the air as the few trees that the island had to offer bled out after losing their battle with the wind. With the disturbing image of dead wooden soldiers and giant wooden horses in her mind, the last thing that she wanted to do was eat.
“Nothing’s going to be open,” Helen protested, but she knew she it wasn’t true.
“I used to live here, too, you know. And if there’s one thing I learned . . .” Daphne stomped confidently past the boarded-up windows of the nervous art dealers and down the block, where a line was forming