Starcrossed

replied.
    Lucas felt his cousins fall in behind him as he turned and headed for the door.
    “Wait! I’m going with you,” Claire insisted as she scurried to catch up with the fast-moving Scions. “Lennie needs me.”
    “You really are insane, you know that?” Jason said scornfully, but Lucas could hear admiration behind his false anger. “You’re staying here.”
    “But I can talk to her! She’ll listen to me,” Claire reasoned, holding up her hands and pressing against Jason’s chest to keep him from walking past her. She looked at Lucas, begging him to agree with her, but he couldn’t do that.
    “You’re not going, Five-Two,” Hector said, ending the argument. “If there’s a fight you’d be a target, and I don’t want anyone getting hurt trying to protect you.” He glanced at his brother meaningfully.
    “Don’t worry, I’ll bring her back,” Lucas assured Claire. He followed his cousins and jumped into the truck. “Just please stay here, and stay safe.”
    “Of course,” Claire replied in her most deferential tone. Lucas didn’t need to be a Falsefinder to know she was lying.
    He hoped she wouldn’t do anything too stupid, but he couldn’t stop to find out what she was scheming. Helen was about to leave the island. Lucas didn’t know if he had a touch of his little sister’s talent or not, but he just knew that if Helen left him then, he might lose her forever.

Chapter Seventeen
    C reon stood along the side of the compound, entirely cloaked in shadows, and waited until his cousins sped off in their black SUV before he ran after them. He could easily keep pace with the moving car, and as long as he stayed inside a cloud of darkness, he could depend on the dreary weather to keep him perfectly hidden. No other Scion for hundreds of years had Creon’s control over light, and on a cloudy day not even another Son of Apollo could see him.
    Creon had followed Hector and Jason back to the compound from Helen’s place that morning. Having nothing else to go on, he decided the best thing to do would be to eavesdrop on his estranged family. His father had told him about the shape-shifting qualities of the cestus, and he knew that he had no other choice but to wait for his quarry to reveal herself. He guessed that eventually she would make contact with the traitors, and he had been right. Now all he had to do was follow them and trust that eventually his cousins would lead him right to her.
    Helen looked out the window of the hotel, searching the nearly empty street below, but she didn’t see Lucas anywhere. She’d hoped to see him one last time before she left, even if he didn’t see her. It was little enough to hope for, but apparently, little was still too much. Lucas was gone, the storm was ending, and soon she and her mother would be on the first ferry off island.
    “Helen,” Daphne called from behind her. “You’re wearing your own face. You have to be consistent or we’ll be discovered.”
    Helen turned around and concentrated on projecting the image of the cute brunette she and her mother had decided Helen would become when they ran away.
    “Much better,” Daphne said with a pleased nod. “I still can’t believe you never stumbled on to this power by yourself.”
    Helen didn’t have an answer for that. She was too disturbed by her newfound power and her newfound mother to decide whether she was being complimented or insulted. She walked over to the vanity in the bedroom to look at the stranger in the mirror. The cestus could make her look like any woman in the world, but she’d only had a few hours to practice with it. Her mother had promised to teach her how to become any age, any race, any gender in the future, but although she’d kept her disguise simple for now, she was still unrecognizable, as long as she remembered to keep up the illusion.
    “You don’t have to keep your half of the cestus as the heart necklace, you know,” her mother told her, standing behind Helen and looking at her in the glass.
    “Yeah, I know. I figured out how to do that much on my own, at least,” Helen answered in the stranger’s voice.
    Helen’s necklace was the actual girdle of Aphrodite, the protective half that made her impervious to weapons. Daphne’s half was the adornments of Aphrodite, and although she couldn’t stop a blade or a bomb with her skin like Helen could, what she could do was potentially more frightening. Daphne was irresistible to whomever she decided to