Starcrossed

smile.
    “I didn’t,” he said, kissing her. He looked up at the brightly lit house, and they both listened briefly to an emergency weather report blaring away on the TV. “Your dad’s waiting for you. You’d better go in.”
    “Yeah. Kate made me a cake,” Helen said. She grimaced, guilty over how she’d treated her family this past week.
    “Tomorrow, first thing, I’ll be back to get you,” Lucas promised as he brushed his mouth lightly against hers. “Then we’ll go to my house and tell my family. Together.”
    “Right. We still have to plead our case,” Helen said. Wrapped around each other, they kissed for a few more moments, stalling for time that the storm wouldn’t give them. Finally, Lucas pulled away. Glancing around at every shadow suspiciously, he told her to hurry into the house. It was dark out and he was unwilling to leave her unguarded for even a moment. Helen ran inside and closed the front door behind her, peering out the window in time to see Lucas fly away. She called out for her father as she walked into the family room.
    “Jerry isn’t here, Helen,” said a woman’s voice behind her. Helen spun around, already calling up a bolt, but the woman grabbed her tightly by the wrists and shook her head.
    “That won’t work on me,” she said. Electricity danced across her flawless face, making her long, blonde hair crackle and fluff, and circling the pupils of her warm brown eyes.
    “Oh my god,” Helen said, looking at the heart-shaped charm that fell neatly into the groove at the base of her attacker’s throat.
    The woman ripped off Helen’s identical necklace with one hand and jabbed a needle into her neck with the other. Helen felt her muscles go limp and refuse to follow her commands. The world faded into a pale gray haze, and even though she kept trying to see, her eyes could only chase the bright squiggles that tracked across the backs of her eyelids. She was losing consciousness so fast, Helen knew that she had to have been given a powerful drug, maybe even a lethal one. The last thing Helen felt was her attacker tenderly supporting her body as it swooned to the floor. Helen couldn’t see, couldn’t move, but for just one moment longer she could still hear.
    “My sweet little girl,” the woman whispered, and then Helen experienced nothing, not even nightmares.
    Lucas was only halfway home when the wind tried to throw him down to the ground and the sky started to flash with the first bolts of lightning. He landed immediately, and had to go the rest of the way on foot rather than get electrocuted or crushed. He wondered if Helen could fly through the lightning and if she would be able to control it so that he could fly with her in a storm if the situation ever arose. That would be beautiful, he thought as he walked through the garage and into the kitchen, flying through lightning-bright clouds.
    As soon as he opened the door, he stopped, sensing something wrong.
    “Didn’t you bring Helen with you?” Cassandra asked nervously as he stood in the doorway. “I could have sworn I saw you together today.”
    Lucas looked around the room and saw Jerry and Kate, the promised cake bristling with unlit candles, and Claire sitting wide-eyed next to Jason.
    “I just left her at home to be with you two,” he said gesturing to Jerry and Kate. Panic washed down his legs, nearly making his knees buckle.
    Lucas ran out the kitchen door, past the cars in the garage, and ripped the outside door off its hinges as he leapt up into the apoplectic sky. Jumping up twenty feet, Jason tackled him out of the air and dragged him back down, pinning Lucas’s weightless body to the ground.
    “Sorry, brother, but the storm is too big. We drive tonight,” Jason said.
    “There was someone waiting for her inside her house!” Lucas yelled, taking on mass and throwing Jason off of him.
    “We know, you idiot! This afternoon, while you had your phone shut off, Cassie saw that Creon came back to the island,” Jason said, latching on to Lucas to make sure he didn’t change states again and fly off. “But Creon isn’t the one at her house!”
    “Then who is it?” Lucas asked, visibly calming down. He and Jason stood up and waited for Hector to pull his truck out.
    “Cassandra was getting little images all day long, but she didn’t understand them. One of the things she saw was a woman tailing Creon as he came back to the island. She had this habit of tucking her hair behind her ear with