Starcrossed

of packaging peanuts.
    Helen went to her room and switched gravity off and on, alternately floating up and thumping down until she figured out how to swing her legs under her and land on the balls of her feet instead of all over the damn place. She worked a bit with the air currents, but she couldn’t do anything more than finesse her position as she floated or she risked blowing her room to pieces. After a few hours, the constantly ringing phone drove her out of doors. The Delos family wanted to know why she wasn’t at their house yet for practice, and they wouldn’t stop calling until she answered.
    Helen had been thinking. She just couldn’t see the point of learning how to swing a sword if she couldn’t be wounded by weapons, and she didn’t need to fight if she could simply fly away. She knew that eventually Hector or Jason would come looking for her at home, so she wandered outside with no clear destination, hoping that a little speed would help clear her head. She was in jeans and a sweater, not exactly running gear, but it didn’t matter. As soon as she was out of the town center she went off Polpis Road, heading east. She didn’t care where she ended up, as long as it was away from people. As she ran she realized that she had come this way once before, and although she didn’t want to think about her first flight and everything that came after it, she knew it was the perfect place to find the solitude she was after.
    The sun was going down and she was grateful to be numb enough to experience something beautiful without her depressing thoughts barging in and ruining it. Looking around, she saw a familiar lighthouse. She glanced down at the sand under her feet and wondered if it was the same sand that had cradled her and Lucas when they were in so much pain. When they had died for a moment, she realized.
    As soon as the thought occurred to her, she knew it was true. They had done more than just suffer terrible injury that night, they had started to cross over. Or at least Lucas had. And she had followed him down to stop him. And there was a river . . . Wait, what river?
    “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hector shouted.
    He was furious. He stalked up the beach, his legs eating up far more distance than a human’s could as he came toward her.
    “How did you find me?” Helen sputtered.
    “Your moves aren’t so hard to anticipate,” he sneered. “Now get your ass to my house.”
    “I don’t want to practice anymore. It’s pointless,” Helen called over her shoulder as she turned on her heel to walk away. “I just want to be left alone.”
    “You want to be left alone, huh, Princess? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way,” he said as he grabbed her shoulders and spun her around. That did it for her. She gave one hysterical laugh—it was either that or start crying—and shoved Hector away from her. Hard.
    “What are you going to do? What? Are you going to beat me to death? You can’t! You’re not strong enough,” Helen said as she hit him repeatedly on the shoulders, trying to instigate a fight. “So go get a sword. Go ahead. Oh, wait, I forgot. That doesn’t hurt me, either. So what are you going to do, you big bully? What do you have to teach me?”
    “Humility,” he said quietly. He moved fast, but he was also bending the light funny the way Lucas did. While she was still trying to focus her eyes, pissed that she hadn’t even considered that Hector could have this talent as well, Hector grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and started walking toward the water.
    Enraged, Helen used her full strength against him for the first time. She didn’t care how much she hurt him. She pushed until she unlocked herself from Hector’s grip. She heard his arm break as she physically separated herself from him. Then she changed states to fly away. As she summoned a wind to take her away, he grabbed her with his other hand. His more dominant hand. Helen realized, a bit too late, that Hector had allowed her to break his left arm so that she would chose weightlessness—weightlessness and momentary weakness. Before she could digest what he was doing and shift back to the gravity-state to get enough purchase to push him off, he dragged her easily into the water where her weight mattered not at all.
    Hector walked right into the water and trudged down, down, down until they were both completely submerged under what seemed to Helen like fathoms of dark water. She struggled