“I can describe him!” squealed a girl in Susan’s posse who had shiny black hair and cinnamon skin. She told the security guard, “He must have been freezing because he was only wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt!”
“He had curly blond hair, and he was really tan. Like a Malibu surfer boy,” a chubby girl with stick-straight, blonde hair blurted out, like she couldn’t contain her exuberance.
“He had really smooth skin, too. Like a dolphin!” tittered the cinnamon girl back to the blonde girl, and the two of them fell in a fit of snickers, drooling over Andy’s almost-rapist.
Andy dropped her face into her hand and rubbed her eyes while she listened to more of the same from the rest of the witnesses—or “groupies” as she was beginning to think of them. She reminded herself that they couldn’t help their response. They were only human.
After spending the next two hours with security, relating the entire experience, and walking the guards to the exact spot where she had been accosted, Andy had gratefully accepted a new fob for her key chain. She had an official stalker, one who had made it onto the campus, without a pass no less, and the guards were not about to let her wander around without taking a few precautions. The fob was a panic button that would bring them to her in an instant. If she even caught sight of the boy again, she was to summon them. Andy wondered if she would really press it and endanger them all, or if she would face him alone.
Although Susan and her gaggle had stepped up and corroborated Andy’s story, they all did so with a touch of confusion. Andy had reported word for word what the boy had said to her, and any one of them would have given her eyeteeth to have the same things said to them by such a hottie.
Andy couldn’t explain that this wasn’t romance. Men had always said things like that to her, but it had nothing to do with love. She went to all-girl Catholic schools her entire life and had run away from every man who’d pursued her, but that didn’t stop them from chasing. She’d run away from the girls who had pursued her, too, and there had been plenty of those. After that horrendous experience in seventh grade when her best friend had tried to kiss her in front of Sister Mary Francis’s history class, she’d never even allowed herself to have girl friends.
Andy stayed away from people as a rule. It was for their own good. Her kind were too dangerous for mortals to be around.
Somehow, after several classes, she managed to get rid of Susan and her entourage. Susan had looked at her with a mixture of worry and longing when Andy made it quite clear that she was ditching them. Andy felt bad about it. Susan was pretty and popular and seemed like a genuinely good person. That was exactly why Andy had to nip this relationship in the bud. She didn’t want to hurt someone as awesome as Susan just so she could have a friend. Susan deserved better than that.
It was after 9:00 p.m. when Andy’s astronomy class ended, and she made her way past Paramecium Pond to her dorm. Her nose itched. She took her hand out of her pocket, letting go of the fob for just a moment, and felt thick, muscular arms grip across her chest from behind.
“Run,” he whispered in her ear. “I love to chase.”
Helen dreamed of dolphins, but this was no happy little dream about visiting SeaWorld. The dolphin Helen saw did not do flips or tricks. The dolphin in the dream was hunting a girl about Helen’s age. The girl tried to swim away from it, but the dolphin kept pushing her down beneath the surface, hitting her with its flippers and tail until she bled.
The girl swam for a buoy, bobbing out in the middle of nowhere, gasping and crying as she struggled through the waves. The dolphin attacked, but this time, instead of flippers, a man’s arms wrapped around the girl and squeezed.
Helen’s eyes snapped open and she gasped for air, feeling like a vise had clamped down on her chest. She awoke to darkness.
How many days had she been fading in and out? she wondered. She remembered her mother cleaning off the worst of the blood and dirt with a wet sponge, Kate spoon-feeding her soup, and Claire dividing an orange between her and a puce-colored Ariadne. She remembered Orion’s scars, and her heart squeezed painfully for him all over again.
Helen remembered other things, too—things that had never happened to her, like tying a toga (Chiton, she remembered. The Greeks wore chitons, and the Romans wore togas) and carding wool. Helen Hamilton was damn sure she’d never tied a chiton or carded wool in her entire life, but she remembered doing both.
Those “visions” of Helen of Troy always felt like memories, and now that she was fully awake, Helen was pretty sure that’s exactly what they were. But how could she remember someone else’s memories? It was impossible. And considering how horrible these borrowed memories were, what Helen really wanted to know was how she could make them stop.
“Lennie?” whispered Claire, somewhere by Helen’s feet.
Helen looked down and saw Claire poking her head up over the back of the fainting couch that Ariadne had at the foot of the bed. Usually, Ariadne just threw her clothes over it, so Helen thought of it more as a place to pile outfits than something to sit on.
“Are you awake for real or just visiting for a sec?” Claire asked. Even in the bleached predawn light coming through the window, Helen could see the worry in Claire’s eyes.
“I’m awake, Gig.” Helen sat up painfully. “How long have I been out?”
“About two days.”
That was it? To Helen, it felt like weeks. She looked over at Ariadne, still sleeping. “Is she going to be okay?” Helen asked.
“Yeah,” Claire answered, sitting all the way up. “She and Jason are going to be fine.”
“Orion? Lucas?”
“They’re all right—beat up, but getting better.” Claire looked away, and her brow furrowed.
“My dad?”
“He’s been awake a couple of times, but only for a few seconds. Ari and Jason are doing their best.”
That wasn’t the
response Helen had been hoping for. She nodded and swallowed the lump in her throat. Her father wasn’t a Scion, and he’d come closer to death than any of them. It was going to take him a lot longer to recover. Helen pushed the thought that he might never fully recover out of her mind and looked at Claire.