Goddess (Starcrossed)

assured her that he had no injuries left for them to heal—but for some reason Jerry just wasn’t able to stay conscious. It was as if he were very tired. It might be that he only needed to rest, they said, but if that were the case, it didn’t make sense to Helen that her father wasn’t physically able to stay awake for more than a few moments at a time.
    Helen tried to pin down what she was feeling, but when she asked herself how she felt about the fact that her father was still in such bad shape, and that no one knew what to do about it, her mind started to wander.
    Distracting thoughts kept popping up—like how Luis and his kids were doing after being hurt by Automedon, how the store had held up since the riot, and whether or not anyone had checked on her father’s house to make sure it wasn’t vandalized. All of these thoughts were logical enough, but they were not the things she should be thinking when her father was barely clinging to life.
    She sat down in the armchair that was pulled up to the side of her father’s bed and wondered what was wrong with her. How could she be so distracted at a time like this? She noticed her leg was bouncing up and down and put a hand on her knee to keep it still, but it didn’t work. About to jump out of her skin, Helen stood up and started pacing.
    “A few more steps and you’ll wear a hole in the floor,” Lucas said softly from the doorway. Helen spun and faced him, clenching her fists. She wasn’t in the mood for an emotional encounter, and for once Helen wished Lucas would just go away.
    Leaning against the frame, Lucas’s eyes skipped over her. He gave her a half smile, gesturing over his shoulder with his head.
    “Come on,” he said, his voice clipped.
    “Where?” Helen challenged. She crossed her arms and glared at him.
    “Down to the cage,” he fired back, not at all intimidated by the look she gave him. Lucas pushed himself off the door frame and crossed to Helen slowly. When he got to her, he took her wrists, unwound her tight arms, and parted them. He stepped closer, until he was nearly up against her. “You need to hit something.”
    Helen opened her mouth to argue and immediately shut it again. Lucas was right. Seeing her father so ill made her feel helpless and useless. She had gotten accustomed to being the one who had to fight all the tough fights, but she wasn’t the one caught up in this battle. Her father was, and there was nothing she could do to help him.
    She needed to pummel something or someone—anything to release the infuriating tension she felt sitting on the sidelines while her father struggled. And Lucas knew that because he knew her. Helen let her arms relax. Her hips swayed slightly toward him, like a challenge.
    “Let’s go,” she said, her voice humming deep in her chest.
    A muscle in his jaw pumped as Lucas clenched his teeth. Heat rolled off his skin like his blood was boiling. Helen could smell him—baking bread and new snow, hot and cold, sunshine and darkness—all opposites that should cancel each other out, but that somehow managed to live next to each other inside Lucas. Helen shut her eyes and breathed him in shamelessly.
    Lucas pulled away. He yanked hard on her arm and snapped her out of the spell. It really ticked her off when he bossed her around like that, and she had no doubt he knew it, too. She wrenched her wrist out of his grip and shoved him toward the stairs. His back stiff in front of her, Helen stormed after Lucas as he led her through the house and down to the fight cage.
    As soon as they reached the steps to the basement level, they started stripping off clothes. No shoes, no jewelry, no belts, no hard or sharp objects of any kind were allowed in the cage, but they couldn’t be bothered to put on softer gear to replace what they shucked off so frantically. Every time Helen removed another article of clothing, all she could think about was how much she wanted to tear into him.
    The jumble of “other” Helens inside her head made it worse. In most of her memories, he’d been forbidden to her, dangling just out of her reach over and over again . She was so frustrated, she didn’t need the Furies to want to kill him anymore. And she could tell by the sound of ripping fabric as he wrenched his shirt off, and the slap of leather as he yanked his belt from the loops on his jeans, that Lucas was just as fed up with their impossible situation as she was.
    By the time they got to the ring, they