Goddess Read online

  “Aeneas,” Hector called over his shoulder as he stared down disbelievingly at the bloody mess in Aphrodite’s arms. A carbon copy of Orion, minus the disfiguring scar across his bare chest and back, stepped forward and stood at attention at Hector’s right shoulder. “Go below and wake my brothers.”

  “Hurry, my son,” Aphrodite whispered to Aeneas. “And bring honey.” He nodded respectfully to his mother and strode off, but his gaze stayed on the other Helen as he moved past. His face was drawn with sadness.

  “Water!” Hector barked, and many feet marched off at once to obey him. Half a moment later, Paris ran up from belowdecks, with Jason one step behind. Like the other ancient versions of the men she knew, Jason looked exactly the same, apart from the clothes he wore.

  A strange, choked-off cry burst out of Paris when he realized what he was looking at, and he ran to the other Helen on unsteady legs. His hands shook as he took her from Aphrodite, his face blanching under his deep tan.

  “Troilus,” Hector said to Jason, indicating with his chin for his youngest brother to take the bucket of water that had just arrived. The other Helen pushed weakly at Paris’ chest when he tried to bring water to her lips.

  “What happened, Lady?” Troilus asked Aphrodite when it was clear that Paris wouldn’t, or couldn’t, speak.

  “Menelaus and his city turned on her when they found out about the baby,” the goddess said simply.

  Paris’ head snapped up, his face frozen with disbelief. Hector and Aeneas shared a brief, desperate look and then both glanced down at Paris.

  “Did you know, brother?” Hector asked gently.

  “I hoped,” he admitted, his voice hushed with emotion. “She lied to me.”

  All the men but Paris nodded, like they could understand Helen’s choice.

  “The Tyrant.” Aeneas barely whispered the word, but it was obvious they were all thinking it. “Mother. How did Menelaus find out that Helen was pregnant?”

  Aphrodite tenderly brushed her fingertips across her half sister’s shoulder. “Helen waited for your ship to clear the horizon and then she told Menelaus herself.”

  Paris started shaking all over. “Why?” he asked the other Helen, his voice high with the effort to hold back tears. The other Helen ran her bloody hand across Paris’ chest, trying to soothe him.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and put her hand on her belly. “I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill us myself.”

  Troilus leaned against his brother, propping him up, as they all regarded Helen with a mixture of awe and dismay.

  “Don’t mourn, Paris. Your baby lives,” Aphrodite said. “She will grow to look just like our beautiful Helen, and her daughter will grow to look just like her mother—and so on and so on for as long as the line lasts. I have seen to it, so that even after my half-mortal sister is gone, I may always look upon the face that I love best in this world.”

  The golden glow of the goddess brightened, and she regarded the men of Troy one at a time, her voice taking on the timber of quiet thunder rolling in the distance.

  “You must all swear to me that you will protect my sister and her child. If Helen and her line of daughters die, there will be nothing on Earth for me to love,” she said, her eyes falling apologetically on her son, Aeneas, for a moment before they hardened against him. He dropped his head with a wounded look, and Aphrodite turned to Hector. “As long as my sister and her line of daughters lasts, there will be love in the world. I swear it on the River Styx. But if you let my sister die, Hector of Troy, son of Apollo, I will leave this world and take love itself away with me.”

  Hector’s eyes closed for a moment as the enormity of the goddess’s decree sank in. When he opened them again the look he gave was one of defeat. What choice did they have? He glanced around at his brothers and at Aeneas, all of them silently agreeing that they could not say no, despite the consequences that were sure to follow.

  “We swear it, Lady,” Hector said heavily.

  “No, sister. Don’t. Menelaus and Agamemnon have sworn a pact with the other Greek kings. They will come to Troy with all their armies,” the other Helen moaned urgently.

  “Yes, they will. And we will fight them,” Paris said darkly, as if he were already facing the warships that would inevitably sail to their shores. He lifted her up, and she struggled lamely in his arms.

  “Drop me over the side and let me drown,” she pleaded. “Please. End this before it begins.”

  Paris didn’t answer her. Holding her up high in his arms to keep her close, he carried her belowdecks to his bunk. The other Helen finally lost consciousness, and Helen’s visit to this terrible dream or vision or whatever it was ended abruptly as she fell back into a natural sleep.

  TWO

  Andy glared at the metronome on top of the organ she was playing and willed it to explode. It didn’t. She took a deep breath, waited a measure, and dove back into Bach. Ten swings of the metronome’s pendulum later and she was growling through her gritted teeth and shaking her fists in the air rather than pounding them on the keys. Abusing instruments was an unforgivable offense in Andy’s mind. But metronomes, on the other hand . . .

  “You’re lucky you’re an antique,” she told it, just to let it know how close it had come to a splintery end. She emptied her mind and started again.

  This time she let Bach do the work, and for several measures she found the art inside the complicated math of the fugue.

  Bliss. Right up until she was interrupted by the ding of an egg timer. Andy’s fingers slid off the keys with the deafeningly loud blarting noise that only a giant, hundred-year-old organ could muster.

  “Really?” Andy said to the heavenly glow of the Tiffany window that reached high above her head. Even the beauty of the patchwork colors, warming her face like a bright quilt made out of light, was not enough to calm her. Just when she was getting it, she had to stop.

  She repressed the urge to swear in church and looked at her watch. It was 8:00 a.m. already. Drat. Her rehearsal time was over, and she had to hoof it in order to make it to her first class.

  It was freezing cold. Outside, the sun was just starting to peek up over the far edge of campus. Andy hunkered down into the boxy layers of flannel and wool she used to conceal her stunning figure and made her way through the frost-stiffened scrub of her “shortcut.” Truth be told, it was a long cut. What mattered was that it was off the path and farthest away from everyone else. Andy wasn’t looking for friends at school. She liked her solitude. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. She hated her solitude, but she trusted it more than she trusted people.

  “I saw you playing,” said a young man with a musical voice.

  Andy screamed and whirled around. She saw a tall, beautiful youth crowned with golden curls. The edges of him twinkled in the thin sunlight of the chilly November morning.

  “What are you doing here?” Andy said calmly. She blinked her sun-dazzled eyes and glanced around for another person. Wellesley College was an all-girls’ school in the most blue-blooded, upper-crusty, and thoroughly traditional area of Massachusetts. Unless this boy was a professor or a security guard, he was not allowed this deep into the campus without a visitor’s badge.

  “You’re very talented,” he said, moving toward her.

  “You said you saw me, huh?” Andy took a step back, not liking this situation. “How could you see me in the chapel? I was alone.”

  He laughed, his voice dancing around the notes like a wind chime. “I wasn’t in the chapel, of course. I saw you through that big window.”

  “You saw me through a stained-glass window? How’d you pull that off?”

  “I could find someone as beautiful as you no matter where you hide. You’re so radiant, I bet you even glow in the dark.”

  The way he said it didn’t sound phony. He wasn’t leering or rude in any way, but he was still moving toward her, even though she obviously didn’t want him to. When he got closer, Andy saw something wrong in his eyes—so
mething distinctly animal and not human at all. She remembered the sunlight hitting her face through the stained-glass window and figured out how he’d seen her. She knew who, or rather, what, she was dealing with now. Andy backed away quickly, her breath starting to rasp with real fear.

  “Are you going to run from me?” the youth asked poignantly, like this had happened to him many times before.

  “Would you chase me?” she asked, adding to her voice the seductive, hypnotic edge that could drive mortal men to their death. She needed to stall for time, maybe get him to follow her back to the path. There was sure to be someone up there to help her.

  “Of course I would,” he said, his eyes smoldering and his voice low. He was aroused, but not hypnotized—unfortunately for Andy. “Only the ones who run are worth catching.”

  Doesn’t it figure? she thought with that desperate hilarity that only happens in the most hopeless circumstances. I spend my whole life deathly afraid of tempting a boy, and I end up getting jumped by one at an all-girls’ school.

  The light sparked off him again, catching his edges and making him look more real than real, like he existed in 4-D. Andy knew this was no trick of the rising autumn sun. She also knew this was no boy. Her mother had warned her of the possibility of something like this, but Andy had never thought it would come to pass.

  “Hey, Andy!” called an intensely chipper girl Andy had met over a month ago at freshman orientation and avoided ever since. She eyed Andy and the boy uncertainly. The noisy cluster of girls behind her went silent when they saw that Andy was with a boy. “Are you coming to class?”

  “Hi . . . Susan!” Andy yelled back frantically, remembering the girl’s name at the last moment. “I want to go with you!”

  The beautiful youth smiled sadly at Andy as the chattering knot of young women moved closer to collect her. Then he turned and ran off toward Lake Waban.

  “Where did your friend go?” Susan asked, perplexed.

  “He’s not my friend,” Andy said, grasping at Susan’s mitten-covered hand with relief. “We need to go to campus security right now.”

  “I can describe him!” squealed a girl in Susan’s posse who had shiny black hair and cinnamon skin. She told the security guard, “He must have been freezing because he was only wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt!”

  “He had curly blond hair, and he was really tan. Like a Malibu surfer boy,” a chubby girl with stick-straight, blonde hair blurted out, like she couldn’t contain her exuberance.

  “He had really smooth skin, too. Like a dolphin!” tittered the cinnamon girl back to the blonde girl, and the two of them fell in a fit of snickers, drooling over Andy’s almost-rapist.

  Andy dropped her face into her hand and rubbed her eyes while she listened to more of the same from the rest of the witnesses—or “groupies” as she was beginning to think of them. She reminded herself that they couldn’t help their response. They were only human.

  After spending the next two hours with security, relating the entire experience, and walking the guards to the exact spot where she had been accosted, Andy had gratefully accepted a new fob for her key chain. She had an official stalker, one who had made it onto the campus, without a pass no less, and the guards were not about to let her wander around without taking a few precautions. The fob was a panic button that would bring them to her in an instant. If she even caught sight of the boy again, she was to summon them. Andy wondered if she would really press it and endanger them all, or if she would face him alone.

  Although Susan and her gaggle had stepped up and corroborated Andy’s story, they all did so with a touch of confusion. Andy had reported word for word what the boy had said to her, and any one of them would have given her eyeteeth to have the same things said to them by such a hottie.

  Andy couldn’t explain that this wasn’t romance. Men had always said things like that to her, but it had nothing to do with love. She went to all-girl Catholic schools her entire life and had run away from every man who’d pursued her, but that didn’t stop them from chasing. She’d run away from the girls who had pursued her, too, and there had been plenty of those. After that horrendous experience in seventh grade when her best friend had tried to kiss her in front of Sister Mary Francis’s history class, she’d never even allowed herself to have girl friends.

  Andy stayed away from people as a rule. It was for their own good. Her kind were too dangerous for mortals to be around.

  Somehow, after several classes, she managed to get rid of Susan and her entourage. Susan had looked at her with a mixture of worry and longing when Andy made it quite clear that she was ditching them. Andy felt bad about it. Susan was pretty and popular and seemed like a genuinely good person. That was exactly why Andy had to nip this relationship in the bud. She didn’t want to hurt someone as awesome as Susan just so she could have a friend. Susan deserved better than that.

  It was after 9:00 p.m. when Andy’s astronomy class ended, and she made her way past Paramecium Pond to her dorm. Her nose itched. She took her hand out of her pocket, letting go of the fob for just a moment, and felt thick, muscular arms grip across her chest from behind.

  “Run,” he whispered in her ear. “I love to chase.”

  Helen dreamed of dolphins, but this was no happy little dream about visiting SeaWorld. The dolphin Helen saw did not do flips or tricks. The dolphin in the dream was hunting a girl about Helen’s age. The girl tried to swim away from it, but the dolphin kept pushing her down beneath the surface, hitting her with its flippers and tail until she bled.

  The girl swam for a buoy, bobbing out in the middle of nowhere, gasping and crying as she struggled through the waves. The dolphin attacked, but this time, instead of flippers, a man’s arms wrapped around the girl and squeezed.

  Helen’s eyes snapped open and she gasped for air, feeling like a vise had clamped down on her chest. She awoke to darkness.

  How many days had she been fading in and out? she wondered. She remembered her mother cleaning off the worst of the blood and dirt with a wet sponge, Kate spoon-feeding her soup, and Claire dividing an orange between her and a puce-colored Ariadne. She remembered Orion’s scars, and her heart squeezed painfully for him all over again.

  Helen remembered other things, too—things that had never happened to her, like tying a toga (Chiton, she remembered. The Greeks wore chitons, and the Romans wore togas) and carding wool. Helen Hamilton was damn sure she’d never tied a chiton or carded wool in her entire life, but she remembered doing both.

  Those “visions” of Helen of Troy always felt like memories, and now that she was fully awake, Helen was pretty sure that’s exactly what they were. But how could she remember someone else’s memories? It was impossible. And considering how horrible these borrowed memories were, what Helen really wanted to know was how she could make them stop.

  “Lennie?” whispered Claire, somewhere by Helen’s feet.

  Helen looked down and saw Claire poking her head up over the back of the fainting couch that Ariadne had at the foot of the bed. Usually, Ariadne just threw her clothes over it, so Helen thought of it more as a place to pile outfits than something to sit on.

  “Are you awake for real or just visiting for a sec?” Claire asked. Even in the bleached predawn light coming through the window, Helen could see the worry in Claire’s eyes.

  “I’m awake, Gig.” Helen sat up painfully. “How long have I been out?”

  “About two days.”

  That was it? To Helen, it felt like weeks. She looked over at Ariadne, still sleeping. “Is she going to be okay?” Helen asked.

  “Yeah,” Claire answered, sitting all the way up. “She and Jason are going to be fine.”

  “Orion? Lucas?”

  “They’re all right—beat up, but getting better.” Claire looked away, and her brow furrowed.

  “My dad?”

  “He’s been awake a couple of times, but only for a few seconds. Ari and Jason are doing their best.”

  That wasn’t the
response Helen had been hoping for. She nodded and swallowed the lump in her throat. Her father wasn’t a Scion, and he’d come closer to death than any of them. It was going to take him a lot longer to recover. Helen pushed the thought that he might never fully recover out of her mind and looked at Claire.

  “How are you?” Helen asked, seeing the sad look on her best friend’s face.

  “Wicked tired. You?”

  “Starving.” Helen swung her legs out of bed, and Claire got up to help her. The two friends wobbled downstairs together to raid the refrigerator. Even though Helen knew she had to eat as much as she could shove down in order to help her body rebuild itself while she healed, she couldn’t take her eyes off Claire.

  “What is it, Gig?” Helen asked quietly after swallowing only a bite or two of chicken noodle soup. “Is it Jason?”

  “It’s all of you. Everyone got hurt this time. And I know that this isn’t the end of it,” Claire answered, still uncharacteristically sad. “There’s a war coming, isn’t there?”

  Helen put her spoon down. “I don’t know, but the gods are free to leave Olympus and come to Earth again. Because of me.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Claire began defensively. “You got tricked.”

  “So? Tricked or not, I failed,” Helen said in a matter-of-fact way. “I let Ares corner me, even though I’d been warned that something was going to happen.”

  She felt horrible, but she knew she couldn’t allow herself to wallow in guilt, so she kept the self-pity out of her voice. The Underworld had taught her that indulging in negativity, no matter how justified, would never solve any of her problems. She filed that revelation away for some other conversation with Hades and got back on topic. “Have the gods appeared anywhere yet? Have they done anything?”

  The image of a big, beautiful stallion running down a beach flashed in Helen’s head. There was blood on his forelegs. The image made her shudder with revulsion.

  “We haven’t heard anything,” Claire said with a shrug. “At least, no wrath-of-the-gods stuff.”