surprised to find that they shared similar tastes, and they had a moment of mutual admiration while they discussed one of their favorite painters. Helen was beginning to think that she and Pallas could get along, but after their exchange ended she saw him turn away from her with a deep, distrusting frown.
Helen heard a merry jingling and turned when she felt a touch on her arm.
“You can’t take it to heart,” Pandora said consolingly. “Look, I love all my brothers, but they can be huge jackasses sometimes. Especially Pallas.”
“I just wish I knew what I did,” Helen said, frustrated.
“No, it’s not you! You didn’t do anything. All of this Scion crap has been going on for a lot longer than you know.”
“Since the dawn of time, right?” Helen asked, trying to be humorous even though she was still hurt by Pallas’s reaction.
“Yeah, right. In a literal sense that’s true, but in this family there’s something more specific that I’m referring to. Something that goes back to just before you were born—that’s when everything started going to hell.”
To Helen’s surprise, Pandora took her hand and led her to a corner where they could sit down next to each other and avoid the jumble of the rest of the room. Apparently, whatever Pandora had to tell her was something she wanted to keep between them.
The Delos family was large enough to have cliques, and if Helen had to put their family into high school terms, Pandora was the artsy, mysterious girl that everyone wanted to hang out with, but only a few did on a regular basis.
“Let me start by saying that it’s hardest for Pallas because he’s lost more than most of us,” Pandora said sadly, before she sat up straighter and smiled apologetically. “Don’t get me wrong, my brother is still an ass for treating you like he did, but it might help you understand him a little better if you can flip it, and try to see that your arrival in our lives is just as big a bombshell for us as it is for you. Do you know about the way our looks are handed down?”
Helen felt her face twitch in confusion at what seemed like a one eighty in the conversation.
“Sort of,” she said. “Castor said something about archetypes, and then Cassandra said that we all look like the people who fought in the Trojan War, or something.”
“So we’ve all got these recycled faces, right? And we don’t always look like our parents, or even Scions from our own Houses, but rather like the people from history that the Fates want us to be all over again.”
“Yeah, I get that. The Fates are really into repeats.”
“And since Scions usually tend to fall madly in love with one person they are ‘destined’ to be with, and then they go and have about a billion kids really young, the older generation sometimes has the dubious honor of seeing the faces of people they once knew—and here’s the real bitch—the faces of people they once fought against, in the younger generation. Sometimes, even in their own children or in someone who their children love.”
“Oh. That doesn’t sound good,” Helen said, a strange dread growing in her. “Pallas hated me the first time he saw me. So who do I look like?”
Pandora sighed. The spangles on her wrist shook as she took Helen’s hand.
“This totally sucks,” she said apologetically. “But you look exactly like Daphne Atreus—the woman who killed our brother Ajax twenty-one years ago.”
Helen noticed that Pandora stumbled over his name. For a moment, Helen thought the usually happy Pandora would cry.
“But I didn’t do it! I didn’t kill your brother,” Helen said, shaken to a whisper by the depth of emotion she was seeing. Hearing Helen’s urgency, Pandora snapped out of her sad thoughts and squeezed Helen’s hand.
“I know that!” she exclaimed kindly. “It’s insane to blame you, and most of us don’t. I certainly don’t. We have no way of knowing if you’re even from her House.”
“But Pallas does blame me,” Helen said, finally getting Pallas’s instant dislike of her. Pandora nodded reluctantly.
“When we lost Ajax it’s like we lost the best of us,” Pandora said, her eyes downcast and her lower lip momentarily catching between her teeth. “Ajax was . . . the best. You should have seen him. Actually, you can see him.”
Pandora shook her right wrist out from under the piles of bangles. At the very bottom, clipped tightly to her skin, was a