Starcrossed

want to know who was trying to contact him, but this time he caved and pulled it out to look at the screen. It was his mother. He debated answering for a moment, then finally relented.
    “Where are you?” Mildred asked in a low voice.
    “Hunting,” Creon replied vaguely, sensing his mother was being watched, maybe even listened to. It had happened before.
    “One of the traitors just called me,” she said in an urgent whisper. “She told me about your failure in front of the hotel, and she wants to change sides. She wants her men freed of the cestus. . . .”
    Creon heard the crackling sound of his mother’s phone as it brushed up against fabric, as if it had been shoved into a pocket or under a sweater. A few seconds passed during which all Creon could hear was the rhythmic brushing of clothes against the mouthpiece as his mother walked somewhere else.
    “Are you still there?” she finally asked when she got to relative safety.
    “Yes. Mother, what’s going on?”
    “Sssh. Just listen. The Hundred are starting to doubt you. I can’t let them know we’re in contact,” she whispered urgently. “Where are you? She wants to meet right now, to make a plan.”
    Helen spent fifteen minutes on the phone with her dad, trying to get him to calm down. He had been just about ready to go down to the police station, and he demanded to know where she had been all night. She didn’t have an answer for him. Jerry was as angry as he had ever been with her. He demanded that she come home immediately. He even yelled at her, which he hadn’t done since she was a kid. Helen wasn’t used to disobeying her father, but she found herself telling him that she was safe and that she wasn’t coming home just yet. She hung up on him while he was still sputtering.
    She knew she was being unfair to him, but she didn’t know what else to do. She hadn’t decided if she was going to tell her father about Daphne’s return and then tell him that she was leaving to live with her, or if it was kinder to just disappear. Daphne insisted that a clean break would be better for everyone, including Jerry, but Helen couldn’t quite bring herself to accept that. He might be physically safer, but emotionally he would be destroyed. Helen went through both scenarios in her head, and neither of them felt right. Either way her father, the person who deserved to suffer the least, was the one who would be hurt the most. Eventually, her brooding was interrupted by Noel, who let Helen know that Claire and Jason were awake.
    Helen went upstairs to Jason’s room and pushed the door open a crack. Daphne was sitting on the edge of the bed next to Claire, holding her hand and looking down at her with a fretful tenderness. Daphne had loved Claire when she was a baby, she had explained to Helen the night before, and she had always worried for Claire’s safety growing up alongside a Scion. In the hotel during the storm, Daphne had removed Helen’s curse, and she had also explained that she had left Claire excluded from being able to trigger the cramps, even though it could have exposed Helen, just in case Helen ever needed to protect Claire. Helen had thanked her for that, although there was little else her mother told her that night to make her grateful.
    “Did you sort things out with Lucas?” Daphne asked as Helen entered the room. Helen flinched when she heard his name, nodded hastily, and put the attention back on Claire.
    “Hey, Gig. You really freaked me out,” she said. She came over to stand next to the bed.
    “Freaked myself out,” Claire said, gesturing for her to sit down. Then she noticed Helen’s puffy face. “Are you okay?”
    “Not important,” Helen said as she perched next to her mother. “How are you two?”
    “It was easier than I thought it would be,” Jason replied. “We never went into the rubble, all we did was climb the dry hills.”
    “Good,” Helen said, smiling with relief. “That’s far away from the river.”
    “I know,” Jason said, smiling back at Helen before he looked back down at Claire. “She really is strong.”
    “What river? What rubble?” Daphne interjected, glancing from Jason to Helen, but she was overruled by Claire’s urgency.
    “That was real?” she blurted out, her eyes dark and wide with fear.
    “Yes and no,” Jason said softy, briefly brushing his lips against Claire’s forehead as he sat up painfully and gently pulled her up with him. “It’s a real place, but we only