to blame Cassandra for Lucas’s actions. “She had a vision of herself swinging a sword at me and she thought she was going to kill me. She thought she had to kill me. Would you have told anyone if you were in her shoes?”
Pandora looked at Helen questioningly as if to ask if she was okay. Helen gave her an uncertain smile in response, relieved that Pandora had been sensitive enough to keep this exchange silent. Then they both turned their attention back to Lucas, who was still shell-shocked.
“If you were scared, why didn’t you tell me, Cassie? You know you can always come to me,” Lucas said firmly, but she shook her head.
“None of you are qualified to be my confidants anymore. I’m the only one who can decide what to reveal or keep hidden,” she said gently. Cassandra stepped away from Helen’s side and stood up straighter. It was as if she was throwing off her support system with one painful gesture. She took a wistful breath and turned back to Helen.
“Standing there, waiting for me to cut your head off?” said the newer, older, and slightly more melancholic Cassandra. “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
That’s because you couldn’t see yourself, Helen thought.
Cassandra looked down at Lucas, who was still in shock over what he’d done. She put a hand on his shoulder and shook it until he looked up at her.
“Let’s go inside and check on Hector,” she said as she helped her brother off his knees.
Helen still felt shaky with adrenaline. Walking back to the house next to Lucas, she wished he would take her hand like he used to, but then scolded herself for even thinking that. She sped up and walked in front of him so she wouldn’t be tempted to feel sorry for herself.
All of them sat down at the kitchen table to hash out the new discovery, but no one had any answers. They asked Helen if she could ever remember a time when she had been wounded by a knife, but Helen’s childhood was remarkably violence free, especially for a Scion. She couldn’t remember ever getting anything bigger than a paper cut. That sparked a philosophical debate on what qualified as a weapon—if paper could cut her but a spear couldn’t, could you make a spear out of paper and kill her?
“Is a fork a weapon?” Jason asked, gesturing to one sitting on the counter. Ariadne shrugged and stabbed Helen in the shoulder with it, and it squished up like a soggy ice-cream cone on contact.
“Guess so,” said Ariadne. “Maybe a spoon?” She turned to find one.
“Could you stop that, please?” Lucas said with a wince. “Eventually, we’re going to find something that actually can hurt her. Maybe even kill her. I think we should hold off on the experiments until we figure out why she’s like this.”
“I agree with Lucas,” Castor said carefully. “And the sooner we find out how she got like this, the better.”
“It can’t be something she inherited or we would have seen it in another Scion before,” Pallas said, staring at Helen like she was a fancy, new bug he’d found under a log. “Dipped in the River Styx?” He threw it out there, like it was the most logical explanation. “She doesn’t seem like a zombie, but maybe Achilles didn’t, either.”
“No. I would bet anything she still has her soul,” Castor said, shaking his head.
“And how would she have gotten to the River Styx? There hasn’t been a Descender in millennia,” Cassandra added doubtfully.
Descender? Helen wondered.
“What about something more basic, like a gun?” Jason asked. He was still trying to wrap his head around Helen’s unbelievable talent.
“Since when were bullets ever fast enough to hit a Scion? That’s why we still use swords, dummy,” Ariadne said with a smirk. “We’re the only things that can move fast enough to kill us.”
“Yeah, but what if we had her just stand there and take a few bullets? Technically, we can be killed by them, if we’re hit enough times,” he said logically.
“It doesn’t matter how many times she gets shot. You could drop a bomb on her and she’d be fine, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Cassandra said with tired frustration.
“There has to be a reason behind it. It isn’t a talent, so she must have some form of protection we don’t know about. I’ll start doing some research and put together a list of possibilities,” Pallas interjected, still staring at Helen.