“Disgusting,” Orion said under his breath. He made a choked sound and his hands tensed, as if he wanted to strangle his cousin. That was enough for Phaon.
Helen saw Phaon reach for the blade strapped across his back under his clothes. It was the same kind of sheath that Orion habitually wore, except Orion wasn’t wearing it then. No weapons were allowed at House meetings, and Helen knew that Orion was defenseless. She also sensed that despite his reluctance to meet Hector in a fair fight, in a dirty fight Phaon had had more experience and would probably win. Orion could be hurt, or even killed.
Helen felt like all her insides suddenly sprouted wings and tried to fly out of her mouth. She didn’t think about what she should or shouldn’t do, about the sacred rules of hospitality, or about the “cease-fire” they had all agreed upon. All she thought about was the bare blade in Phaon’s hand.
She called to the metal. It was similar to how she summoned bolts, only this time instead of a bright splinter of electricity, Helen took the same force and widened it into a field. It was like taking a single coin and learning the simple trick of flipping it over to discover an entirely different face. She used this field to reach out and snatch the stiletto out of Phaon’s grasp.
“How dare you!” she roared, her voice booming out of her like thunder.
The hilt of Phaon’s weapon smacked into the palm of her hand, and she stormed forward, raising the blade high above her head to slash down and cut out Phaon’s twisted little heart. The insides of her thighs burned, and Helen felt the ground rock violently underneath her. She saw Phaon tumble to the ground and grovel in front of her.
“Helen! No!” Lucas pleaded in her ear, his body convulsing against hers. “P-Please, s-stop,” he stammered, his jaw shaking uncontrollably.
She looked around, confused, like she was waking from a dream. Lucas had her by the waist, and he was pulling her back. She glanced down and saw that her skin was glowing pearly pink and blue with ball lightning. Lucas held on to her, even though in that moment she was hotter than the surface of the sun.
She switched off the current immediately, and he fell down with a scream. Furniture was toppled over, and everyone else in the room had fallen from the earthquake she had created. The floor under her was a large disk of black charcoal that still smoldered around the edges like a ring of fire. Everyone stared up at her, terrified.
Except for Lucas. His hands, chest, and cheek were black and bloody, burned down to the bone by the ball lightning she had created. He writhed on the ground in agony.
“Oh, no!” Helen cried, crouching down over Lucas. “No-no-no,” she chanted hysterically.
Lucas moaned when she touched him. His crispy skin flaked off and drifted in the air like burnt paper. He was so terribly injured and in so much pain Helen knew that there was no place in the world she could take him that could ease his suffering.
She needed a new world.
It’s not that Helen forgot Hades’ promise that the Fates would bring her to this. Nor did she forget his warning that as soon as she created her own world, the gods would challenge her for it. She just didn’t care. She’d build a whole new universe from scratch and send all of Olympus to Tartarus if she had to—anything, anything at all, to fix Lucas.
Helen gathered Lucas up in her arms. As his heartbeat stopped and his eyes closed, she created a portal to her new world and took him there.
TEN
Daphne touched her hand to the spiky crust of ice that had formed over the charcoal.
Insanity was swirling over her head while she stared at the burned-out basin that used to be a living room floor, and the snowflake-like ice that had grown over it, smothering the fire, when her daughter disappeared with Lucas. How could she use this? Daphne wondered.
Daphne had never expected this meeting to be successful, but the bickering that had ensued as soon as Helen had made her dramatic exit was rising to a fever pitch. Before everyone started hacking each other to bits, Daphne needed to take control. She didn’t plan to lose this opportunity.
“Did you make that earthquake?” she yelled up at Orion, interrupting the chaos.
&nb
sp; “No,” he said. When he got shot several disbelieving looks, he sighed and continued reluctantly. “Helen did it. She got the Earthshaker talent from me when we became blood brothers.”
“And how did she take the blade away from Phaon?” Daedalus asked.
“Electromagnetism,” Pallas replied. “Although I’ve never heard of any Bolt-thrower having enough voltage to create a magnetic field like that.”
“She’s too powerful,” Tantalus said quietly to Pallas. “She could kill us all.”
Pallas nodded in agreement, as did Daedalus.
The room fell into stunned silence as they all contemplated this. Daphne couldn’t let them get distracted by that detail right now.
She grabbed the Bough of Aeneas, disguised as a gold cuff on Orion’s wrist as she stood. “Did you open a portal with this and push Helen and Lucas through it?”
“No. I can only open standing portals, not create them,” he answered. “Only Helen can make her own portals wherever she wants.”
“The ice?” Daphne asked, inviting him to explain it. She needed to get everyone thinking in the right direction.