Helen sat in a bathtub of cold water, the lights in the bathroom switched off, and listened to the phone ring over and over. She didn’t know what to say to anyone and every time she thought about attacking Lucas Delos in front of the entire school she groaned out loud in humiliation. She would have to leave the country, or at least Nantucket, because there was no way she could live down the fact that she had tried to strangle the hottest boy on the island.
She groaned again and splashed her face, which was still finding a way to blush even though she was submerged in freezing-cold water. Now that she wasn’t being driven half crazy with rage she could think about Lucas objectively, and she decided that Claire hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. Helen agreed with her. She had been trying to kill him, but she wasn’t blind. Normal boys simply weren’t put together the way he was.
It wasn’t his height or his coloring or his muscles that made him so beautiful, she concluded. It was the way he moved. She had only seen him twice, but she could tell he thought less frequently about his looks than everyone around him did. His eyes, as pretty as they were, looked out, rather than back at himself.
She dunked her head underwater and screamed, just to get it all out without scaring her father. When she came back up she felt a little better, but was still disappointed in herself. One of the terrible side effects of feeling like she somehow already knew Lucas was that she was starting to idealize him, making him more perfect than was humanly possible. Which was uncomfortable because she also still wanted to kill him.
She pulled the rubber plug out with her toes and watched the water creep slowly down the sides of the bathtub until the last of it sucked down the drain. Then she sat naked in the empty tub, staring at her white, wrinkled feet until her butt hurt. Eventually, she knew, she would have to leave the dark bathroom and try to act normal.
She got dressed and went downstairs to check on her dad, finding him just walking through the front door. He had run out to buy ice cream for dinner—and not just any ice cream, but the good stuff from the gelato place that Helen had banned him from when the doctor told him to watch his diet.
“To bring down your core temperature,” he said innocently, shaking the rain out of his hair.
“Is that your story?” she asked him, her hands on her hips.
“Yup. And I’m sticking to it.”
She decided to let it go. There would be plenty of time to worry about his cholesterol in the morning. After so many days with so little food, rich gelato was probably not the best idea, but it did go down easily. They sat on the floor of the living room with their beloved Red Sox on television, passing the pint and spoon back and forth as they cussed out the Yankees. Neither of them answered the phone, which continued ringing periodically, and Jerry didn’t push Helen to explain what had happened. Claire’s mom would never have let her get off this easy. Sometimes there were advantages to being raised by a single dad.
Helen had to change her sheets before she went to bed. The stains from the night before had not disappeared as she had hoped, but tonight she had bigger things to worry about than sleepwalking. For one thing, she could hear someone or something moving around on the widow’s walk. It was different from the sounds she had heard the night before. This time there were actual footsteps directly above her instead of just amorphous whispers coming from all sides. Helen didn’t know what would be worse—going up there and finding a gang of intruding monsters or finding nothing at all. For a moment Helen wondered if she was starting to crack up. She decided not to go up to check. She’d seen enough ghosts already that day.
The next morning, Helen went to see Dr. Cunningham. After a few minutes of flashing a penlight in her eyes and thumping her on the chest, Dr. Cunningham told her father that there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage done. Then he yelled at Helen and told her she was far too fair to be walking around without a hat on. She didn’t know how it had happened, but after one trip to the doctor her meltdown had been brushed off as nothing more than the carelessness of not keeping her head covered. At least the checkup got her out of school for the day.
When she got home, Helen opened her computer and spent a few frustrating hours online trying to find some information on the three women who were plaguing her. Every search she did overwhelmed her with so many possibilities that her task seemed hopeless, and she couldn’t narrow it down because she didn’t have any real context for what it was she had seen. Were they ghosts? Demons? Or just her own personal manifestations of crazy? It was entirely possible that she had hallucinated the whole thing, and now that she didn’t feel so enraged she was almost starting to think maybe she had had heatstroke. Almost.
Claire came over in the afternoon to deliver some bad news. “The whole school thinks you’re on your way to an institution as we speak,” she said as soon as they sat down in the family room. “You should’ve come in today.”
“Why?” Helen asked with a grimace. “It doesn’t matter when I come back, no one’s ever going to forget this.”
“True. It was pretty bad,” Claire said. She paused for a moment before speaking in a rush. “You scared the crap out of me, you know.”
“Sorry,” Helen apologized with a weak smile. “So, was he in school today?” For some reason she felt like she just had to know, but she couldn’t bring herself to say his name out loud.
“Yeah. He asked me about you. Well, he didn’t actually talk to me, but Jason did. He’s a jackass, by the way.” Claire started talking with increasing heat. “Get this. So he comes up to me at lunch, right? And he starts asking me all these questions about you. Like, how long have I known you, where are you from, did I ever meet your mom before she skipped town . . .”
“My mom? That’s weird,” Helen interrupted.
“And I start answering him with my usual flair for clever repartee,” Claire said, a bit too innocently.
“Translation: you insulted him.”
“Whatever. Then that chump had the huevos to call me ‘little girl’! Can you believe it?”
“Imagine. You, described as ‘little,’” Helen said in a droll voice. “So what did you tell him?”
“The truth. That we’ve been friends since birth and neither of us really remembers your mom, and that she didn’t leave any pictures or anything, but that your dad’s always going on about how she was this incredible beauty and how she was so smart and talented and everything, and blah-blah-blah. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that your mom had to be hot. I mean, look at your dad and then look at you,” Claire said with a knowing glint in her eyes.
Helen winced at the compliment. “Is that it? Lucas didn’t say anything else?” Helen’s hands were curled up into fists. She found it hard to so much as say his name without wanting to punch someone in the head. Obviously, she either still had heatstroke or she really was going out of her mind.
“Hasn’t said a thing. But I did hear a rumor that Zach was talking trash about you and Lucas shut him down hard.”
“Really?” Helen said, perking up. “Shut him down in what way?”
“He wouldn’t let anyone say anything bad about you, is all. You know how Zach and Gretchen are. But Lucas wouldn’t hear it. He kept saying you felt like you had a really bad fever when he . . . did that thing that he did. What would you call that, anyway? A back-assed bear hug?”
Helen groaned and buried her face in her hands.
“It’s all right,” Claire said, patting her back consolingly. “He’s not going around telling everyone you’re monkey-butt crazy, so at least you brutalized a seriously sweet guy.” Helen groaned louder and tried to crawl into the sofa while Claire had a nice, long laugh at her expense.
That night, Helen had another nightmare about the dry land. When she woke she was so tired and sore that for a moment she almost believed that she had been walking for days, just like she had dreamed. She had always been good at ignoring strange things about herself, and she tried to convince herself that this was no different, but her hands shook as she bundled up her dirty sheets and took them to the laundry room.
Helen washed the grit off in the shower and tried to focus on school, though that was no comfort, either. As soon as she walked into Nantucket High, it was going to be open season on the freak, and the freak knew it.
It was still raining out, so she had to get a ride with Claire and her mother. Helen put a hand over her tummy, afraid of a cramp before she even got out of the car. She had never really understood why she got cramps; she just knew that sometimes when she did something that made people stare at her she was seized with a crippling spasm in her stomach that was so intense it made her stop whatever it was that she was doing.
“Relax,” Claire said as they opened their doors to get out. “All you have to do is make it through today and then you have the whole weekend to . . .” she trailed off, thinking. “Nope. Sorry, Len, I tried to be optimistic, but this’ll still suck on Monday.” Claire started laughing, and the sound cheered Helen up a bit—until they got inside the school.
It was worse than she’d imagined. A group of underclassman girls literally gasped and huddled up to gossip as soon as they saw Helen come through the front doors. A senior boy with a leather fetish leered at Helen and called her “hellcat” just as he was passing by. When she turned to stare back at him in astonishment he mouthed the words “call me” before continuing on.
“I don’t think I can do this,” Helen whispered. Claire put a hand on her back and pushed her forward.
Every time someone’s eyes landed on her and widened with recognition she got closer and closer to a panic attack. Was she going to have to suffer through the rest of junior year like this? Helen tried to melt into Claire’s shadow and realized that if it was cover she was after, she was going to have to find some bigger friends.
“Quit stepping on the backs of my feet!” Claire complained. “Why don’t you just go hide out with Hergie while I get your stuff out of your locker?”
Gratefully, Helen ducked into homeroom and tried to blend in with her desk. Mr. Hergeshimer asked if she was feeling better, and then ignored her completely as soon as she answered that she was feeling fine. She could have kissed him for that.
Matt just waved and sat down without a word. Helen guessed correctly that he had been threatened by Claire to act like he’d forgotten the whole thing, but he kept trying to stop himself from glancing over at her, so Helen knew he was still really worried. She caught his eye and smiled warmly, and after that he seemed a little less preoccupied. Zach turned his head and looked out the window as soon as he took his seat, making a big show of not looking at her.
She made it through the rest of the morning without incident, right up until lunch. As she walked to the cafeteria she realized too late that she was going to pass by Lucas’s locker. She was about to turn and go another way, which was ridiculous because that would mean she would have to literally go around the entire school, when she was spotted.
Gretchen and Zach noticed her as she stood wavering indecisively in the middle of the hall. They were at their lockers, which just so happened to be right next to Lucas’s and Jason’s. Some of the fuzz fell off of Helen’s memory and she recalled Gretchen’s and Zach’s petrified faces floating around in the background as she tried to choke Lucas. It made alphabetical sense for their lockers to be together, Brant—B, Clifford—C, Delos—D, but Helen blamed her terrible luck for the fact that all of the most popular people in her grade had been firsthand witnesses to her moment of utter humiliation.
She had no choice—she was just going to have to walk past them. Gretchen and Zach didn’t say a word and their faces didn’t show any expression at all as Helen hurried by with her shoulders practically in her ears. At least Lucas wasn’t there, she thought, ducking into the cafeteria.
“Stand up straight! You’re going to give yourself scoliosis,” Claire scolded when Helen got to their table.
“Sorry. I just had to go by his locker,” Helen explained quietly. Matt made a disgusted sound.
“You can calm down, Lennie,” he snapped. “None of them are here today.”
“Supposedly they all took the day off because the aunt and the eldest Delos kid finally got to the island this morning,” Claire said.
“Oh yeah, great,” Helen mused. “There’s another one.”
“Hector. He’s a senior,” Claire added helpfully, although she could have no idea that saying his name didn’t help Helen at all. In fact, for some inexplicable reason, it ticked her off.
“No news on him yet. Zach will probably call me with an update this weekend,” Matt said with a shrug. “He always knows where everyone is and what they’re doing.”
The rest of the day dragged by, although there was some relief in knowing that she wasn’t going to bump into the Delos kids or the wraiths that seemed to appear whenever they did. She even started to enjoy herself during track practice as she ran through the fog and splashed in muddy puddles with Claire. Coach Tar didn’t say a thing about Helen’s pathetically slow run time when she came in, although Helen knew she wouldn’t be able to get away with that for much longer. She had an athletic scholarship to win, and Coach Tar was not about to forget it.
Dodging her way through the day, Helen made it to work that evening with something like relief, until she realized that a lot of kids from her school were coming in to buy a single piece of candy or one can of soda.
“Why don’t you go to the back and do some stocking for me?” Kate asked, giving Helen a gentle pat on the arm. “They’ll stop coming in to gawk if they think you’ve left for the day.”
“Don’t they have anything else to do on a Friday night?” Helen asked hopelessly.
“What island did you grow up on?” Kate replied sarcastically. Helen rested her forehead briefly on Kate’s shoulder, stealing a second of comfort before she straightened up. “You may as well do the inventory, too. And take as long as you want,” Kate added as Helen headed toward the back.
Inventory was not usually Helen’s favorite job, but it was that night. She was so occupied counting every object in the store that before she knew it, they were locking the front and going through the ritual of closing down.
“So. What really happened between you and that Lucas kid?” Kate asked without looking up from the stacks of bills she was sorting.
“I wish I knew.” Helen sighed as she rested on her broom handle.
“Everyone’s talking about you two. And not just the kids,” Kate said with a half smile. “So what’s up?”
“Look, if I had an explanation, believe me, I’d be shouting it in the streets. I don’t know why I attacked him,” Helen said. “And the worst thing is that the attack isn’t the worst thing.”
“Oh, you’re going to have to explain that,” Kate said. She put aside the money. “Come on. Tell me. What’s the worst thing?”
Helen shook her head and started pushing the broom around.
There had always been a voice in her head that would whisper possible explanations for her strangeness, words like freak or monster or even witch. No matter how deftly Helen silenced that voice, it always came back eventually.
The absolute worst thing that Helen could think of would be to find out that she really was one of those things.
“It’s nothing,” Helen said, unable to look up.
“It isn’t just going to go away because you don’t talk about it, you know,” Kate pressed. Helen knew she was right, and she also knew she could trust Kate. Besides, she needed to talk to someone about it or she’d go crazy.
“I’m having nightmares. Actually, it’s the same nightmare that I keep having over and over, and it feels so real. Like I’m going someplace while I’m sleeping.”
“Where do you go?” Kate asked gently. She came out from behind the counter and made Helen stop sweeping and focus.
Helen pictured the barren, hopeless world she had been forced to visit the last few nights.
“It’s a dry place. Everything is bleached and colorless. I can hear running water in the distance, like there’s a river somewhere, but I just can’t reach it. It’s like I’m trying to find something, I think.”
“A dry land, huh? You know that’s pretty common in dream imagery,” Kate assured her. “It comes up in every dream book, in every country I’ve ever been to.”
Helen swallowed her frustration and nodded. “Yeah, but I wake up in the morning and my feet . . .” She stopped herself, hearing how crazy she sounded. Kate studied Helen for a moment.
“Are you sleepwalking, honey? Is that it?” Kate took Helen’s shoulders, encouraging Helen to look her in the eyes. Helen threw up her hands and shook her head.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m so tired, Kate,” she said. A few exhausted tears slipped out. “Even if I manage to fall asleep, I wake up and I feel like I’ve been running and running. I think I’m going crazy.” She let out a nervous laugh. Kate pulled Helen into one of her pastry-scented hugs.
“It’s okay. We’ll figure it out,” Kate said soothingly. “Have you talked to your father yet?”
“No. And I don’t want you to, either,” Helen insisted, drawing back to look directly at Kate. Kate gave her a searching look, and Helen continued. “Next week, if I’m still crazy, I’ll tell him, but I think we’ve both had enough drama for one week.”
Kate nodded. “You decide when you’re ready to talk about it with your dad, and I’ll be there. My little loca,” she teased smilingly. Helen smiled back, grateful that she had Kate, who could listen to her seriously when she needed it, and then stop being serious at just the right time.
“I think we can leave the rest.” Kate gave Helen one final squeeze. “Ready to go?” she called over her shoulder as she went behind the counter and put the money in the safe.
Helen stowed her broom and made her way to the back door. Switching off the lights, Helen turned to lock up as Kate headed across the alley toward her car, keys in hand.
Neither of them heard a thing. There was a blur and a faint flash of blue light in the corner of Helen’s eye, and a smell. It was a nauseating yet hauntingly familiar odor of sizzling hair mixed with stale ozone. Then Kate dropped to the ground like a puppet with her strings cut. Helen instinctively bolted forward, holding out her arms to try to break Kate’s fall, but the attacker took the opportunity to put a bag over Helen’s head from behind.
She was too startled to scream. As she was pulled backward against a soft chest, it suddenly registered in Helen’s head that her attacker was a woman.
Helen had always known she was strong—and not just strong for a girl. Strong for a bear. She bent her knees and braced the balls of her feet against the pavement, ready to give her would-be abductor the shock of her life. She flexed her back and tried to break out of her attacker’s arms, and was surprised to realize that she couldn’t. The unseen woman was just as impossibly strong as Helen. But Helen had more to lose.
The soles of her sneakers shredded under the pressure of her feet as she pushed off. She took one step, and then another, walking right out of her ruined shoes as she dragged the woman along with her. Then Helen heard a thump, a gasp, and she pitched forward violently as she was released.
Struggling to get the black velvet bag off of her head, Helen heard a rapid succession of slaps, thuds, and the quick huffs of stunned breaths. There was a draft of air and the staccato sound of someone sprinting away just as she yanked the hood off and pushed her hair out of the way.
Lucas Delos stood over her, his body tense, his eyes scanning the distance for something that Helen couldn’t see from her position on the ground.
“Are you injured?” he asked in a low, unsteady voice, still looking out over her head. There was blood on his lip and his shirt was torn. Helen had a bare moment to say she was fine before she heard the sobbing sisters start to whisper.
He looked down at her, and when his icy blue eyes met her warm brown ones, a thrill ran down her legs. Helen jumped up into a fighting crouch. The whispers turned to wails and Helen saw the bent heads and shivering white bodies of the three sisters blink in and out of her field of vision. She backed up and scrunched her eyes shut by force of will alone. The anger was so intense she felt as if her organs had caught fire.
“Please go away, Lucas,” she begged. “You just helped me, and I’m grateful. But I still really, really want to kill you.”
There was a short pause, and Helen heard his breath catch.
“This is hard for me, too, you know,” he replied in a choked voice.
A skipping, scuffing sound from where he stood, a rush of wind, and then Helen dared to open her eyes. He was gone, and thankfully the miserable poltergeists had gone with him.
Helen crouched next to Kate, trying to see if she was bleeding anywhere. She got down on her hands and knees to inspect every visible inch, but strangely there were no cuts, bruises, or scrapes of any kind. Kate was breathing evenly but she was still unconscious. Helen risked picking her up and hoped she was doing the right thing by moving her. She gently laid Kate down in the back of the car, and then ran around to the driver’s seat as she dialed her dad’s cell number. She started up Kate’s car as the phone rang.
“Dad! Meet me at the hospital,” she blurted as soon as he answered.
“What happened? Are you—” he began in a panicked voice.
“It’s not me, it’s Kate. I’m on my way to the emergency room now and I can’t talk and drive. Just meet me,” she said, pushing end call and tossing the phone onto the passenger seat without waiting for a response.
Now she had to think up a really good lie, and quick, because the hospital was only a few minutes away.
She called the police as she pulled to a stop at the emergency room entrance, saying nothing more than that her friend had been attacked and that they were at the hospital. Then she dithered around in the driveway for a second, not knowing how to get Kate into the actual emergency room. Helen didn’t want to leave her, but she couldn’t very well pick Kate up and reveal her freakish strength in front of so many people, so she finally went inside alone.
“Help?” she mumbled timidly to the admitting nurse. That didn’t work, so she raised her voice and hopped up and down. “Help! My friend is outside, and she’s unconscious!” That got people running.
Once her dad got there and they both knew that Kate was going to be fine, Helen made a statement to the police. She told them that a woman she’d never had the chance to see had made Kate pass out with a blue flashy thing. When Helen saw Kate fall, she went out into the alley and that must have scared the woman off because she ran away. Of course, Helen didn’t mention anything about the near abduction, the wrestling match, or the fact that Lucas Delos had appeared out of nowhere to fight the superstrong woman off. The last thing she needed was to complicate this situation any more or tie Lucas Delos to herself in any way. What was he doing there, anyway?
“What happened to your shoes?” the police officer asked. Helen’s heart started pounding. How could she have overlooked the fact that she was barefoot?
“I didn’t have them on from before,” she stated in a rush, and then continued haltingly. “Before, earlier, they had torn . . . while I was stocking in the back. And I had taken them off. When I saw that Kate was hurt I just dropped them, and came straight here.” Worst lie ever, Helen thought. But the officer nodded.
“We found a pair of ripped sneakers in the alley,” he said as if Helen had told him exactly what he expected. He went on to explain that Kate had been Tasered, and that since the assailant had used up the charge on Kate, she was forced to run off when she saw another person arrive.
“One more thing,” the officer said, just before turning away. “How did you lift her into the car all by yourself?” Both the officer and her father stared at her for a moment with puzzled looks on their faces.
“Willpower?” Helen said lamely, hoping they bought it.
“She was lucky to have you there. That was very brave of you.” The officer gave her an approving smile. Helen couldn’t handle being praised for lying. She looked down at her bare feet, and they reminded her of how dumb she had been not to take care of that detail from the start. She was going to have to learn to be more careful.
When the police were done questioning Kate, Helen and Jerry went in to check on her. Unlike Helen, Kate had gotten a quick look at the woman before she got zapped.
“She was older—in her late fifties at least. Short salt-and-pepper hair. She looked totally harmless, but I guess she wasn’t,” Kate said ruefully. “What the hell? Since when did little old ladies go around Tasering people?” She was trying to make a joke out of it, but Helen could tell she was really shaken up. Kate’s face was pale and her eyes were big and shiny.
Jerry decided to stay the night with Kate and bring her to her house when she was discharged. The doctors told Kate she probably shouldn’t drive for a few days, so Helen offered to take Kate’s car and bring it over to her on Sunday. Kate thanked Helen for the favor, but Helen had her own reasons for wanting Kate’s car. There was one more detail she had to take care of before she headed home.
She had just enough time to get scared as she drove across the island on Milestone Road to the Delos compound in Siasconset. The closer she got, the more she found herself shaking, but she had no choice. She had to make sure Lucas kept his mouth shut about the attack or she could get into serious trouble. She didn’t think he would tell anyone. The Delos family worked very hard to appear normal when Helen knew they were anything but. No one of regular human strength could have stopped Helen from strangling him if she set her mind to it. Lucas was like her.
The thought made her stomach heave. How could she be anything like someone she hated so desperately? First, she had to make sure he never mentioned his involvement to the police, but after that she was determined to hate him from as far a distance as she could without falling into the ocean.
Helen had to concentrate to see through the fog. In the dim predawn light, way the heck out on private property, she wasn’t sure where the turn onto the long driveway started. She pulled the car over and got out, heading on foot toward the sound of the ocean. She had only seen this particular compound from the beach, and she was trying to scour her memory for any landmark she could recognize from the opposite direction. Then she heard a stumbling, thudding sound behind her. She spun on her heel and saw Lucas walking steadily toward her with long, forceful strides.
“What are you doing here?” he half barked, half whispered. Helen took a couple of steps back and then made herself stop and hold her ground. In the gray light she could see the white bodies of the three sisters dragging themselves through the sandy grass, crawling up the soft rises, shivering with sobs.
“How did you get behind me? Were you following me?” she asked in an accusing voice.
“Yeah, I was,” he spat out, still coming toward her. “What the hell are you doing on my family’s land?”
Too late Helen realized that by coming to his house she had crossed some line. Where there had been hatred, Helen could now see violence. It distorted his features and added menace to his stance. He was still graceful, but almost too cruel to look at. Good, she thought. Let’s do this.
She lowered her shoulder and closed the distance between them, barreling into his chest and tumbling onto the ground with him under her. She reared up to drive her fist into his face, but he grabbed her arms. She was on top and should have had the upper hand, but she had never hit anything and she could tell from the way he never wasted a movement that he had been fighting his entire life. Helen felt him do something with his hips and then he was on top. Her arms were pinned above her head and her heels were left to scrape uselessly at the ground. She tried to bite his face, but he jerked his head away.
“Lie still or I will kill you,” Lucas warned through gritted teeth. He was panting, not because he was winded, but because he was trying to control himself.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, almost begging.
Helen stopped struggling and looked into his infuriating face. He had his eyes closed. He was trying the trick she had used in the alley, she realized. She shut her eyes as well, and felt a tiny bit better.
“I lied to the police. I didn’t tell them you were there tonight,” Helen grunted, the unbelievable weight of him pressing the air out of her. “You’re crushing me!”
“Good,” he said, but he shifted his weight, seeming to get lighter somehow so she could fill her lungs. “Do you have your eyes closed, too?” he asked, sounding more curious than angry.
“Yeah. It helps a little,” she replied quietly. “You see them, too, don’t you? The three women?”
“Of course I do,” he replied in a baffled voice.
“What are they?”
“The Erinyes. The Furies. You really don’t understand. . . .” He stopped abruptly when a woman’s voice called his name from what Helen assumed was his house. “Damn it. They can’t find you here or you’re dead. Go!” he ordered. He rolled off of her and jumped up into a run.
As soon as she was free, Helen bolted and didn’t look back. She could almost feel the three sisters reaching out with their clammy white arms and bloody fingertips to touch the back of her neck. She ran in a panic for Kate’s car, dove behind the wheel, and drove away as fast as she dared.
After half a mile she had to pull over and take a few deep breaths, and as she did, she noticed that she could smell Lucas on her clothes. Disgusted, she took her shirt off and drove home in her bra. No one would see her, and if they did they would just think she was out for a dawn swim. At first she left her shirt on the passenger seat, but the scent of him kept wafting up, smelling of cut grass, baking bread, and snow. In a fit of frustration she screamed at the steering wheel and tossed her shirt out the window.
She was exhausted to the point of collapse when she got home, but she couldn’t lie down in her bed without taking a shower. She had to scrub Lucas off or his scent would chase her around in her dreams. She was filthy. Her elbows and back had grass stains on them and her feet were a black mess.
As she watched the dirt melt off her shins and ankles under the water she thought of the three sisters and their perpetual suffering. Lucas had called them the Furies, and no name could have suited them better. She vaguely recalled hearing Hergie saying the word at some point, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what story they were in. For some reason Helen was picturing armor and togas, but she couldn’t be sure.
She picked up a pumice stone and rubbed off every last speck of dirt before shutting off the taps. Afterward, she stayed in the steam to put on sweet-smelling lotion, letting it soak in, obliterating every last trace of Lucas. When she finally tumbled into bed, still wrapped in a damp towel, the sun was long up.
Helen was walking through the dry lands, hearing the dead grass crackle with each step she took. Little clouds of dust puffed up around her bare feet and clung to the moisture running down her legs, as if the dirt she walked on was so desperate for water it was trying to jump up off the ground to drink her sweat. Even the air was gritty. There were no insects buzzing around in the scrub, no animals of any kind. The sky was blazingly bright with a tinny blue light, but there was no sun. There was no wind and no clouds—just a rocky, blasted landscape as far as Helen could see. Her heart told her that somewhere close there was a river, so she walked and walked and walked.
Helen woke a few hours later with heavy limbs, a headache, and dirty feet. She flopped out of bed, rinsed off the increasingly familiar nocturnal grime, and threw on a sundress. Then she sat down at her computer to look up the Furies.
The first website she clicked on gave her chills. As soon as she opened it she saw a simple line drawing on the side of a pot. It was a perfect depiction of the three horrors that had been haunting her for days. As she read the text under the illustration it gave a nearly exact physical description of her sobbing sisters, but the rest confused her. In classical Greek mythology there were three Erinyes, or Furies, and they wept blood just as they did in Helen’s visions. But according to her research, the Furies’ job was to pursue and punish evildoers. They were the physical manifestation of the anger of the dead. Helen knew she wasn’t perfect, but she had never done anything really wrong, certainly not anything that would have earned her a visit from three mythological figures of vengeance.
As she read on, she learned that the Furies first appeared in the Oresteia, a cycle of plays by Aeschylus. After two solid hours of untangling what had to have been the first—and bloodiest—soap opera in history, Helen finally got her head around the plot.
The gist of it was that this poor kid named Orestes was forced to kill his mother because his mother had killed his father, Agamemnon. But the mother killed the father because the father killed their daughter, Orestes’ beloved sister Iphigenia. To make it even more complicated, the father had killed the daughter because that’s what the gods asked for as a sacrifice to make the winds blow so the Greeks could get to Troy to fight the Trojan War. Poor Orestes was bound by the laws of justice to kill his mother, which he did, and for that sin he got chased halfway across the earth by the Furies until he was nearly insane. The irony was that he never had a choice. Right from the start he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
After Helen got the tragedy straight, she still had no idea how it could relate to her own circumstances. The Furies wanted her to kill Lucas, that was clear, but if she did would they then chase her for having committed murder? It seemed to her that the Furies had no idea what justice was if they both demanded you commit murder and then punished you for doing it. It was a vicious cycle that didn’t seem to have any end, and Helen didn’t know how or why it had all started. The Furies had simply appeared in her life one day as if they’d moved to Nantucket with the Delos family.
She felt a shot of adrenaline rush into her bloodstream. Was it possible that the Deloses were murderers? Something in her didn’t quite buy it. Lucas had had several opportunities to kill her, but he hadn’t. He’d even fought someone else to save her. Helen had no doubt he wanted to kill her, but the fact remained that he’d never even raised his hand to her. If he’d hurt her at all, it was because he had been defending himself from her abuse.
Helen switched off her computer and went downstairs to look for her dad. When she couldn’t find him she went out to the car and grabbed her cell phone off the passenger seat. Jerry had left her a text saying that he was still at Kate’s. Helen looked at the time—it was 3:00 p.m. What could he possibly still be doing? A fantastic, although slightly nauseating, idea occurred to Helen.
It would make sense for the two of them to hook up, she reasoned. They made each other laugh, they worked well together, and they obviously cared about each other. Kate was a few years younger and could probably get any guy she wanted, but Helen didn’t think she’d ever find a better man than her father. And Jerry definitely deserved a fresh start. He’d been treated horribly by Helen’s mother and he’d never gotten over her, which ticked Helen off to no end.
She rubbed the charm on her necklace. For the hundredth time she considered taking the wretched thing off, but she knew she wouldn’t. Every time she’d tried to go without wearing it she obsessed over it, unable to stop picturing it in her head. Eventually, she’d give in and put it back on in order to regain some mental peace and quiet. She realized that this probably meant she had some serious mommy issues, but compared to all the other things that were wrong with her, that was the least of her problems. An image of Lucas’s face hovering over hers in the dark, his eyes scrunched tight, popped into her head. She had to think up a task to distract herself before she started throwing things, so she decided to go grocery shopping.
Helen’s official term as kitchen slave—a system of alternating weeks that had started as soon as she was old enough to cook—began on Sunday morning, but there was nothing in the house for them to eat that night. She made a list, took the housekeeping cash out of the cookie-less cookie jar, and drove Kate’s car to the market. In the parking lot she saw a gigantic luxury SUV and shook her head disapprovingly at it. There were a lot of disgustingly rich people on the island who drove vehicles that were too big for the old cobblestone streets, but this SUV was especially annoying for some reason. It was a hybrid, so she couldn’t really get too wound up about the environment, but she felt herself getting irritated, anyway.
Helen pulled a shopping cart out of the stand and wheeled it into the store. As she waved at a few kids from school who worked at the registers, she started to hear the Furies whispering. She debated running out . . . but everyone at school already thought she was crazy. If she ran out of the grocery store now like she had seen a ghost, there would be even more gossip.
She made herself push the cart on, keeping her head down to avoid seeing the Furies—but there was nothing she could do to block out their voices. She would just have to move fast and get it over with as quickly as possible. She allowed herself a moment of self-pity for the injustice of her situation. She didn’t deserve to be haunted like this. It wasn’t fair. Helen walked briskly through the store, picking only the few things she would need to get through a day or two of cooking. Her frantic thoughts were interrupted by voices, real voices, coming from the next aisle over.
“She shouldn’t be here,” said a young but strangely seri-ous voice. Helen guessed it was Cassandra’s.
“I know,” said a male voice, possibly Jason’s? “We have to find a way to get to her soon. I don’t think Luke can take it much longer.”
Helen froze. What did they mean, “get to her”? She stood there thinking in slow motion until she realized they were coming around the end of the aisle. Trying to back up, she plowed into someone standing right behind her. The wailing of the Furies grew so loud it was painful.
She spun around and had to tilt her head almost all the way back to find the face above the enormous male chest that confronted her. Under golden curls, bright blue eyes drilled down into Helen’s. It crossed her mind that he looked like a blond version of Michelangelo’s Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, newly released from plaster and walking around in three gigantic dimensions. Helen had never been so afraid of anyone in her entire life.
She took an automatic step back and ran into her shopping cart. Her breath hitched painfully in the back of her throat as she stumbled to the side, her hands and feet clumsy with fear. There was a bright, momentary glimmer, and he twitched away from her, his body convulsing spasmodically.
Helen smelled the nauseating combination of singed hair and ozone that always made her think that she had done something wrong. A brief thought of the Nantucket ferry flashed through her mind as she studied the blond monster in front of her, trying to figure out what had happened. After a stunned second, he collected himself and leaned closer to Helen with an evil grin on his angelic face. He was near enough that Helen could feel the heat coming off his body.
“Hector!” commanded a familiar voice. Helen had only a moment to register that it was Lucas before she felt him grab her arm and pull her away from the Goliath that was his cousin. Instantly furious instead of frightened, Helen rounded on Lucas and threw off his arm.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed. She felt light-headed. “Why can’t you just stay away from me?”
“Why can’t you just stay at home?” he shot back at her. “Didn’t you have enough fun last night in the alley?”
“I have errands to run! It’s not like I can hide in my bedroom for the rest of my life just because some woman . . .” Helen realized she was starting to yell. She stopped herself and lowered her voice. A thought occurred to her. “Are you still following me?”
“You’re lucky that’s all I’m doing. Now go home,” he growled, and grabbed her arm again.
“Careful, Luke,” Hector warned, but Lucas just smiled.
“She can’t control it yet,” he replied.
“Can’t control what?” Helen choked out furiously, her patience pushed past the limit.
“Not here. Not now,” said Jason in a low, clipped voice. Lucas nodded in agreement and started pulling Helen toward the door.
Helen ripped her arm out of Lucas’s grasp again. Undeterred, he just grabbed her by the hand and held it hard. Helen had two choices. She could put up a fight in front of the entire store, or she could go quietly holding the hand of the most despicable boy in the free world. She was so frustrated she could feel a repressed scream squeezing her lungs shut, but she had no choice.
Lucas frog-marched her past a chestnut-haired beauty that Helen guessed was the other cousin, Ariadne. She tried to smile at Helen compassionately even though she was clearly just as inflamed by the Furies as everyone else was. For a second, Helen considered smiling back, but she didn’t possess Ariadne’s self-control. She was too angry to manage it. Fleetingly, she thought that Ariadne had to be the nicest person in the world if she could attempt to be kind in that moment.
“Don’t even look at my sister,” Lucas growled through gritted teeth, jerking brutally on Helen’s hand as they walked past tiny Cassandra. Cassandra opened her mouth to say something to her brother and quickly shut it, turning away.
“I have no food in the house. What am I supposed to do for dinner?” Helen growled through her closed-off throat.
“Do I look like I care?” he replied, dragging her out of the store.
“You can’t treat me like this,” she said. He was leading her across the lot. “We hate each other. Fine. Why don’t we just stay away from each other then?”
“And how has that worked out so far?” Lucas asked, sounding frustrated rather than sarcastic. “Do you always come to this same store at this same time every Saturday, or did you come today on a whim?”
“No, never. It’s the busiest day of the week. But I needed groceries,” Helen sputtered. He laughed incredulously and squeezed her arm even harder.
Helen suddenly realized how many random events and raw impulses had driven her decisions these last few days. When she thought about it, it was as if she had stopped choosing for herself days ago.
“The Furies won’t allow us to avoid each other,” he said in a dead voice.
“Then we can make a schedule or something . . .” Helen began, but she knew it was a lame suggestion and trailed off before he had a chance to shoot it down. An ancient, supernatural force was compelling her to kill Lucas. It probably wasn’t going to be deterred by something as prosaic as a time-share.
“My family hasn’t decided what we want to do about this, about you—yet. But we’ll be in touch,” Lucas said. They got to her car. He shoved her against the driver’s door, as if he couldn’t stop himself from trying to hurt her one last time. “Now go home and stay there,” he ordered again, and stood over her while she fumbled with the keys.
For a moment as she backed out of her parking space she considered gunning the engine and hitting him with the car, but she didn’t want to mess up Kate’s paint job. Angry tears started pouring down her face as soon as she was out of the parking lot, and they didn’t stop until she was at home, splashing cold water on her face in the kitchen sink.
She felt humiliated in a dozen different ways. Some of that humiliation she had brought on herself by attacking Lucas at school, but he seemed determined to belittle her. She wasn’t even allowed to go grocery shopping now. How was she going to explain that to her father?
The thought of Jerry derailed any nascent plan of escape. She was hopelessly outnumbered, and unless she was willing to leave her father behind to fend for himself she had to wait until the Delos boys were done deciding how to handle her. She leaned against the kitchen sink and stared at the block of knives on the counter. If she had Lucas cornered the way he did her, she would have already picked out which knife to use. What she didn’t know was why. Why did they hate each other so much? What purpose could all that anger possibly serve?
She suddenly thought about Hector, about the way he had smiled at her, and a carpet of goose bumps unrolled down her arms. If she was ever alone with him, she knew he would kill her. Not just bully her like Lucas did, but actually, joyfully, kill her.
She was still leaning up against the sink half an hour later when her dad finally made it home. He froze midstep and looked around the kitchen, giving the entire room a fast once-over.
“Did I do something wrong again?” he asked, his eyes wide.
“Why do you keep asking me that?” Helen huffed.
“Because the past few days every time I come home you look at me like I’ve forgotten your birthday or something equally unforgivable.”
“Well, have you?”
“No! I haven’t done anything! Nothing wrong,” he said with a straight face, but the red flush rising up his neck gave him away.
“Should I ask about you and Kate or would I be too grossed out?”
“Hey. There’s nothing going on there. We’re just going to be friends,” he said, his expression grim. Helen could tell there was a lot of backstory behind that decision, but she didn’t really want to hear it at the moment.
“Your loss,” Helen responded with a disinterested shrug. Jerry’s head jerked up quickly, stunned by the bitterness in her voice.
“You didn’t used to be so mean, Helen.”
She crossed her arms and looked off to her left at absolutely nothing, too ashamed of herself to meet her father’s sad gaze. She could handle the fear of being pursued by vengeful spirits from Hades, but not if turned her into a bitch. Whatever the Delos family decided, she hoped they would do it quickly. She started to mumble an apology, but was saved from having to explain herself by a knock at the door. Jerry went to answer it and after a few moments he called out to Helen to come and join him.
“What is it?” she asked, coming out of the kitchen. There was a delivery boy at the door with bags and bags of groceries.
“He says these are for you,” Jerry said, holding out a note with Helen’s name on it.
“I didn’t order these,” Helen said to the delivery boy.
“The order was made by a Mrs. Noel Delos to be delivered to a Miss Helen Hamilton. It’s all paid for,” he replied, anxious to be on his way.
Jerry tipped the kid and took the groceries into the kitchen while Helen read the note.
Miss Hamilton,
I am so sorry for my son’s appalling behavior toward you at the market today, and I ask that you accept these few things I’ve sent, even if you are unable to accept an apology. I understand what it is to try to put dinner on the table with no groceries, although apparently my Lucas does not.
Noel Delos
Helen stared at the page for far longer than it took to read it. She was touched by the gesture. It was a ridiculously decent thing to do. Helen got the impression that there was something different about Noel Delos, but she had no idea what it was.
“What does she mean, ‘appalling behavior,’ Lennie?” Jerry asked, reading over her shoulder. Helen could see outrage beginning to build in him. “What did that Lucas kid do to you now?”
“No, Dad, it’s okay. She’s exaggerating,” Helen said, trying to make as little of it as possible.
“Then we can’t accept these. This is over a hundred dollars’ worth of groceries,” he argued.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Helen moaned at the ceiling. She took a deep breath and launched into an explanation. “Okay, you win. Lucas and I had another fight today at the market, but it was a small one. In comparison, at least. Anyway, the point is that he started it and I couldn’t go shopping like I needed to and one of the other Delos kids must have told his mom that I didn’t do my shopping and she took it the wrong way and sent all these groceries because she’s obviously a really nice woman but I don’t want you to say anything to her and can we please, please, drop it?”
“What the hell is it with you and this Lucas kid?” Jerry said after a moment, completely flabbergasted. Then a thought occurred to him. “Are you two dating?” he asked in a terrified voice. Helen burst out laughing.
“No, we’re not dating. What we’re doing is trying to not kill each other. And that isn’t working out too well,” she responded, trusting that the absolute truth would be so inconceivable he would think it was a joke. She was right.
He got a pained look. “You’ve never had a boyfriend. Is it time for us to have that talk about what men and women do when they love each other?”
“Absolutely not,” Helen replied firmly.
“Good,” he said, relieved. They stood in awkward silence for a moment. “So . . . we can eat the groceries, right?”
“Heck, yeah,” she said as she turned on her heel and made for the kitchen while Jerry practically ran to the living room and the dependable comfort of SportsCenter.
As she put together some bruschetta with the amazing bufala mozzarella, fresh tomato, basil, and crazy-good Spanish olive oil Mrs. Delos had sent, she thought about her father and how oblivious he was to the forces pulling her life apart in hunks. With all that was happening to her, she knew she might not have many more nights of dinner and baseball to look forward to, but the thought didn’t bother her as much as it would have a week ago. If the Delos family wanted her, they could try and take her. She was sick of being angry all the time. Fight and kill or fight and die, she really didn’t care. As long as she could keep her father out of all of this Greek tragedy nonsense, she would deal with whatever came her way.
