about the Trojan horse. But you said someone betrayed Troy, and I don’t think it was by mistake.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t pick that up,” Ariadne said, looking like she was mentally kicking herself. “There was no wooden horse. It’s a nice fairy tale, but that’s all it is. Odysseus was involved, that’s true, but all he did was convince Helen to use her beauty to charm the guards into opening the gates at night. That’s really all it took. It’s why we Scions never name our children after her. For us, naming your daughter Helen is like a Christian naming their child Judas.”
Helen ran past her dad and upstairs when she got home, claiming she wanted to turn in early. She did her homework and then made herself lie down, but she couldn’t sleep. Her brain kept sifting through everything Ariadne had told her that afternoon, like how much her mother must have hated her to give her such a cursed name, but mostly she thought about the cult of the Hundred Cousins. To distract herself from reflecting on just how many people would want her dead so that they could live forever, she got out of bed and attempted to fly.
She tried to think lighter, then higher. She even tried to sneak up on it by pretending to trip, but all she succeeding in doing was jumping up and down until her father yelled up the stairs for her to stop clowning around.
Hoping a little ancient history would put her to sleep, she picked up the copy of the Iliad that Cassandra had given her and read as much as she could. It seemed like every page was filled with the gods meddling in the world of men. Helen could see why her ancestors had eventually decided that praying for divine intervention wasn’t such a good idea. Another she noticed was how much she disliked Helen of Troy. Helen of Nantucket couldn’t understand why she didn’t just go back to her husband. People were dying. Helen promised herself she would never make the same choices her namesake did.
She was up to the part where Achilles, who struck Helen as the world’s most celebrated psychopath, started sulking in his tent over a girl when she heard a definite footstep overhead. And then another. Relying on the extrasensory hearing she’d always known she had but only recently begun to let herself use, she zeroed in on her father, listening to his rib cage moving against his chair as he breathed in and out. He was watching the late news on the TV downstairs and he sounded perfectly normal to Helen. The widow’s walk above her, however, was now suspiciously silent.
Helen slipped out of bed and grabbed the old baseball bat she kept in her closet. Holding her slugger at the ready she walked sideways, foot over foot, out her bedroom door and to the steps that led to the widow’s walk. She paused for a moment on the landing between the stairs that led down to the first floor and the stairs that led up to the roof, listening again for her father. After a few moments of tense indecision, she heard him cluck his tongue at the antics of some camera-greedy congresswoman on TV and she relaxed. He was still okay, so she knew that whatever she had heard had not made it downstairs yet. With the intention of keeping it that way, she ascended the stairs to the widow’s walk.
As soon as she stepped outside, Helen felt the cool fall air soak through the thin cotton of her nightshirt, rendering it useless against the elements. A flickering shadow in the starlight caught the corner of her eye and she swung at it, but the top of her bat was stopped before it came around in a full arc. She heard the chunky slap of wood on skin.
“Damn it, it’s me!” Hector whispered harshly. Helen saw him hiding in the shadows, shaking out his right hand like it stung.
“What the hell? Hector, is that you?” Helen hissed back. He came closer so she could see him better, avoiding a dark lump on the ground. Helen looked at the lump more carefully and noticed it was her sleeping bag, the one she kept in the waterproof chest her father had given her. “What are you doing?!”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” he responded peevishly, still trying to shake the feeling back into his hand.