Starcrossed (9 page)

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

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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

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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

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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 were 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

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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 definitely 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.

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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.

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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 serious 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