Starcrossed

Castor said in a brittle voice. “Go get Lucas. Helen, can you walk?”
    “No,” she admitted, shaking her head.
    “People will be coming,” Castor said as he picked Helen up and started to carry her off, but he stopped when he noticed his brother wasn’t following. “Pallas! We need to go!”
    “My son,” Pallas whispered, unable to move.
    “Dad, come on! You have to take Creon’s body!” Ariadne hissed from the stairs of the Atheneum. She had Lucas draped over her shoulders and she was glancing around frantically to see if there were any witnesses.
    The sound of his daughter’s voice managed to distract Pallas enough to get him to pick up Creon and follow Castor out of the town center and out into the moors.

Chapter Nineteen
    H elen stared at the glass of water in front of her as it sweated condensed moisture onto the kitchen table. She’d already drunk what seemed like a bathtub full of water and she wasn’t thirsty anymore, but she held on to this last glass to give herself something else to look at besides the bereft faces around her.
    “His whole life is this family. This House,” Ariadne said. Her eyes were wide, red, and staring, like someone who had been stuck in too many different airports in too many different time zones for too long. They all looked like that—like they’d woken up to find themselves on the wrong side of the planet. “How can Hector be Outcast from the House of Thebes?”
    “I could have stopped him,” Jason said with grim certainty.
    “You can barely sit up straight in your chair right now, Jase,” Ariadne said, shaking her head. Jason had yet to recover from healing Claire, and his twin wouldn’t let him take responsibility for something that he hadn’t even seen. “I was there. I should have stopped it.”
    “You weren’t on India Street when Hector killed Creon, Ari,” Helen said, still staring at her water glass. “I was.”
    “Stop it, Helen,” Lucas said. “You and your mother saved this family, or at least, you saved what’s left of it.”
    Lucas’s words brought fresh tears for Pandora. After several minutes of quiet crying, the family lapsed back into silence. Everyone was thinking the same thought, that if each of them had done one thing differently that day they could have staved off the pain that they were all suffering. Cassandra had told everyone they couldn’t have known what was going to happen, but in saying that she seemed to take the burden of guilt onto herself. She seemed locked in her own head, unable to let go of the fact that she, of all people, should have been able to protect her family.
    “Call your mother,” Noel said suddenly to Helen, breaking everyone out of their tortured thoughts. “I’m the only one who can bear to be near Hector now, and I want to see my nephew. He’ll need me.”
    Helen nodded and pulled out her cell phone. It was the same phone Hector had given her with bloody knuckles and a toothless grin after Lucas had beat the stuffing out of him, but she buried that memory and dialed her mother’s number. As her phone connected, she stood up to leave the kitchen and wandered toward the front of the house, which was usually quieter.
    She heard two rings at the same time, one in her ear and one somewhere inside the house. Helen looked around and found her mother’s bag hanging on a hook in the front entryway. She chided herself for not being more aware. Daphne had been kidnapped; of course she had left her things behind. Helen hit END and heard the phone in the bag cease ringing. She stared at her mother’s purse, and was overcome with an irresistible urge. Just as Helen reached for it, there was a knock at the front door a few feet away from her.
    Helen hastily opened her mother’s bag and took out the cell phone. She quickly scrolled down the list of latest calls as footsteps approached from the kitchen. Concentrating on the glowing screen, Helen saw a few incoming unlisted numbers and a single outgoing call to someone named Daedalus before she had to shove the phone back in the bag.
    Ariadne appeared in the entryway to answer the door, and a moment later Castor and Pallas appeared behind her. They were tense and probably expecting either the police or a member of the Hundred Cousins. After the briefest of pauses they nodded to Ariadne, signaling that it was okay for her to open the door. When she did, Daphne was standing on the doorstep.
    “I call for a meeting between the House of Atreus and the