Goddess (Starcrossed)

have a hard enough time dealing with my own emotions. What the heck am I supposed to do with everybody else’s?”
    “You get used to it,” he replied with a little shrug. Helen gave him a dubious look and he chuckled. “Okay, you don’t get used to it,” he admitted. “But you do get better at blocking it out.”
    “You know what? This sucks . I was just getting the hang of all the other things I can do,” she said, throwing up her hands. “And it’s like I woke up the other day with this whole new bunch of magic tricks to deal with, but no instructions for getting the blasted rabbit back in the hat.”
    “What do you mean? What else is going on in there?” Orion asked, tapping Helen lightly on the tip of her nose with his pointer finger.
    “I don’t know,” Helen said with a frustrated sigh. “Honestly? I’m so confused right now I don’t know whether to spit or go sailing.”
    Orion smiled and leaned back against the wall, letting his gaze drift down in thought. Helen stared at him for a few moments, just enjoying his company and the fact that he was there with her. No. Better than that. He was there for her.
    Orion had saved her butt so many times now, listened to her whine when she couldn’t figure something out. He’d followed her to hell and back, and he still didn’t seem fed up with her. The gratitude she felt toward him, and toward whatever force put him in her life, was overwhelming. He sensed her flood of feeling and looked up, startled.
    “There’s something I need to show you,” Orion said quietly.
    “Sure,” Helen responded, concerned. The half-sad, half-afraid look on his face worried her.
    Even more confusing than the look he gave her were the colors she saw boiling inside of him. They twisted and changed before Helen could define them. He was hiding his feelings from her, she realized with a jolt.
    She knew Orion had been through a lot in his life, and sometimes Helen had to run through the whole mess in her head just to keep it straight. Orion was a Rogue Scion. His parents were the Heads of two opposing Houses, the House of Rome and the House of Athens. He’d been claimed by the House of Athens when he was born, so the House of Rome hated him and wanted him dead, even though he had inherited the title of Head of the House of Rome. The House of Athens hated him as well, because he was born with the talent to cause earthquakes. Earthshakers were supposed to be left to die at birth, but Orion’s father had gone against this rule.
    When other members of the House of Athens found out that Orion was still alive, they had tried to kill him when he was still just a little boy. To defend his son, Orion’s father—Daedalus—had killed one of his family members and became an Outcast, which meant that for years before the Furies were finally dealt with, Orion couldn’t be anywhere near Daedalus without feeling the Furies’ influence and wanting to kill his own father. And his father wanting to kill him.
    As if this weren’t bad enough, everyone was terrified Orion was going to turn into the über-bad guy, the Tyrant. The prophecy said that the Tyrant would come if the blood of the Houses mixed, and Orion was the son of two different Houses. The Tyrant was also supposed to be able to reduce all mortal cities to rubble. As an Earthshaker, Orion fit that description, too.
    All the Scions had feared the Tyrant before the Trojan War. As Helen remembered it, the Trojan War had started, not because of an unfaithful wife with a pretty face who ran off with a handsome prince, but because the rest of the world believed that Helen and Paris had created the Tyrant. The Scions would stop at nothing to kill the Tyrant, then and now. The only reason Orion was still alive was because they didn’t know for sure that he really was the Tyrant.
    And that’s what bothered Helen the most. The Fates were cruel to Scions in general, but Orion had been hunted, neglected, shunned, and feared since he was a small boy and he had never done anything to anyone. It was like the moment he was born, he drew the short straw and the Fates had turned the whole world against him. That amount of adversity struck Helen as unnatural, even for a Scion. What did he ever do to deserve the torture he’d lived through? And Helen was pretty sure Orion had been literally tortured. She pictured the horrific scars on his otherwise gorgeous body, and her heart broke all over again.
    Orion looked down at Helen’s chest