Starcrossed

screamed, lost in her grief as she struggled with Creon. “He would have despised her just like I do, I know it!”
    Pandora strained against Creon’s strong arms, but Creon followed every motion of her desperate attempt to break free. Daphne couldn’t have asked for a better distraction.
    “Don’t let her confuse you, cousin! She is one of Aphrodite’s chosen, and you don’t have to be a man to feel her influence. She can twist anyone’s heart with a look,” he said as he finally managed to drag Pandora away.
    He led her down the beach and away from the valuable capture, talking to her the entire time. They moved just far enough away that Daphne could be sure they didn’t see her make the full transformation, as she adopted Pandora’s shape. Then she hit herself in the eye and the mouth and started groaning.
    “Creon!” Daphne-as-Pandora yelled out hoarsely. “What are you doing? Get away from her. That’s Daphne! She tricked us! Don’t listen to her!”
    Daphne screamed and howled until she saw Creon waver and then grab Pandora harshly by the arm and haul her back to where Daphne was staked to the ground.
    “When we were rolling around on the ground!” Daphne sobbed, pointing a finger at Pandora and using the influence of the cestus. “She got out of the shackles and put me in them. She’s so strong—I had no idea!”
    “She’s lying,” Pandora stammered. She tried to pull her wrist out of Creon’s grasp, but he didn’t let go. She glanced from Creon to Daphne, so shocked she didn’t know what to do.
    “Don’t believe a word she says!” Daphne said, her eyes locking with Creon’s as she folded up his will like a piece of tissue paper and tucked it into one of the back pockets of his mind. “She wants to be taken to your father, but she wants to be taken to him as Pandora so she can get close enough to kill him! She’s been planning this from the start and I played right into her hands! I’m so sorry, cousin. I had no idea how cunning she was!”
    Creon stared at Pandora with perfect hate. He wrenched her arm in its socket and she fell to her knees, screaming. With blank eyes he drew a small bronze blade from his belt and slit Pandora’s neck so deeply he nearly cut off her head. She was dead before her blood had a chance to soak into the sand.
    Helen flew about fifty feet over Hector as he ran out the front door of the Delos compound and began a circuit around the edge of the island. It was dark, unbelievably dark, especially since most of the island didn’t have power back yet. It was also cold. Everyone on the island would be inside, huddling around fires, or turning on their emergency generators. The rest of the Delos family was certain that Creon would take advantage of the fact that the streets were deserted to move her mother off island. Cassandra was exhausted and drawing a blank, so they were forced to guess as to how that would be done. After a long discussion, the family was convinced that Creon would leave by helicopter or private plane. Lucas was to fly over Castor and Pallas while they covered the airport on the west side of the island, and Ariadne was to watch the ferry landing in the northwest, just in case Creon tried to sneak Daphne off by boat. Hector did something unexpected. He chose to run around the dark, deserted east-northeast shoreline, apparently on a fool’s errand.
    Of course, Helen immediately volunteered to fly over him. If there was one thing she had learned in her few short weeks of training, it was that Hector could get inside his opponent’s head and figure out exactly what he or she would do next. No matter how logical the Delos family’s strategy was, Helen would bank on Hector’s gut instincts about Creon over any carefully laid plan. There had been a heated argument about whether or not Helen should be allowed outside the compound at all, but in the end, no one from the House of Thebes could deny the Heir the right to look for her mother, the Head of the House of Atreus. It also helped that everyone thought Helen would just end up flying around in the pitch-black over Hector, safe and useless and on the wrong side of the island.
    Below her, Helen watched Hector plow into the waves a few times. She stared at him, perplexed. Each time he would pause, fan his hands out as he ran them through the water, and then bound out again, looking thwarted. She knew he had a Scion talent that had to do with the water, and from the way he seemed to be