as he towed her back to shore. He hauled her out of the water by an ankle and swung her over his head and down onto the sand like a mallet, hard enough to dislodge the liquid from her lungs. She puked burning salt water and coughed until her inner ears stung and she could hear the blood thumping in her head.
“If you had been training with me today, you would have known that you can use your bolts underwater,” he said, yanking on his broken arm to straighten out the bones with a sickening crack. He screamed and fell to his knees, panting for a moment before continuing through gritted teeth. “But you didn’t show up for practice.”
They sat next to each other on the sand for a while, both of them too injured to move. As they healed, the setting sun seemed to give up on the day and jump headlong into the water. The sky grew dark.
“I thought you were descended from Apollo,” Helen rasped.
Her vocal cords were still damaged, but she didn’t need to say anything more, anyway. Hector didn’t come off like the smartest member of the Delos clan, but Helen was starting to suspect that even if he didn’t spend as much time reading books as Cassandra did, he was every bit as clever as the rest of his family.
“A minor sea goddess called a Nereid mixed with our House somewhere along the way. There are a lot of minor gods and spirits of the water or the woods still running around here and there, and things happen over thousands of years. None of the House lines are purely descended from one god or another anymore, and all the younger generation of Scions have more talents than their parents,” he answered.
“Why is that?”
“Cassandra thinks it has something to do with the Fates wanting the Scions to acquire more talents and become more powerful so they can rule Atlantis, but personally I just think it’s because we’re all mutts. My great-great-grandfather sleeps with a nymph, and I get to walk underwater. You don’t need the Fates to explain that one.”
“Is that how you knew I can drown? Because you have power over water?”
“That was common sense. And I don’t have power over water, I’m just at home in it,” he said. He turned to look her in the eye. When he continued speaking it was in a tone that was excruciatingly similar to the voice Lucas used when he’d taught her to fly, and it tugged at Helen. “You don’t think like a fighter yet. You have all these amazing talents—talents most Scions would trade half the years of their lives for—but you can’t use them because you don’t think tactically. Just stop and use your head for a second. The ocean isn’t a weapon, but it can kill. The air isn’t a weapon, but if I were to deprive you of it, you would die. The earth isn’t a weapon . . .” he began.
“But if I were to slam into it hard enough . . . I get it,” she finished for him, swallowing hard and staring out at the unforgiving waves.
“Water is your Achilles’ heel. It’s the one element you fear because you have no control over it.”
Helen didn’t know how he had figured that out, but she knew he was right. Somehow, even when she had been ignorant of her abilities, she had known deep down on an unconscious level that she had less to fear from three of the four elements. She could command the air and summon winds, she could manipulate the gravity of the earth, and she could easily tolerate the heat of fire because in order for her to create lightning she had to be able to withstand temperatures that were hotter than any flame. But water was the one element that rendered her completely helpless. Finally, she understood her own fear, even if she wasn’t any closer to conquering it.
“How could you have known that about me?” Helen asked, slightly awed.
“Because I’ve been trained to think tactically and find my opponent’s weaknesses since the day I was born. You haven’t. There are so many ways to kill a person, Helen. You think you’re safe because you passed Cassandra’s test with the sword, but you’re not,” Hector said, his voice thick with frustration and worry. “I know you’re still in shock, but I don’t have time to wait for you to get comfortable with what you are.