“Ah, I see what’s going on. You have hormones now, Meg. This is a little new to you. Hormones can’t think straight.” She runs her hand over my hair, and the sensation of that, the way it sends a shiver straight to my stomach, my legs, my everything, makes me think about Brendon again. “Your hormones have given you a crush. A crush blinds you. You feel compassion when compassion isn’t deserved.”
She leans in even closer, and I get a strong whiff of her perfume, the soil and mint. I think she’s angry, but the edge suddenly leaves her voice, turning it unusually soft and understanding. She pats my hand. “You don’t have to take my word for that, Megaera. Come to think of it, it’s actually better if you learn about these things firsthand. That will be a more powerful, lasting lesson that will serve us well.”
A lesson about what? Serve us well how? I don’t get a chance to ask because she changes the subject.
“A party,” she says abruptly. “I’ll throw a little gathering. Halloween is coming up, the perfect occasion to bring everyone together. We should all be there for this fling.”
Ms. Pallas has been making the rounds of the project groups, and she’s gotten to us. Stephanie fake coughs and bounces her finger on her lips in warning. I figure we’re done talking about parties and crushes. To my embarrassment, though, with Ms. Pallas towering over us, Ambrosia returns to the subject of me. “Meg, a crush puts your best instincts to sleep. It keeps you from seeing how manipulative humans can be.”
Only then does Ambrosia look up at our teacher. Her smile is a big, fake flash, quickly gone. “The Furies. I was explaining to Meg how people try to elude them. She needs to understand why a little taste of guilt doesn’t make a dent in most people. Human nature doesn’t change that easily.”
Ms. Pallas’s eyes widen. The blue is so deep and steely it’s hard not to feel sucked into them. “What
does
make a dent? What is enough?”
“When justice is done,” Ambrosia answers. “When there’s true satisfaction.”
“And when is that? When does payback finally stop?”
Ambrosia does a counting motion with her fingers, mimes like she’s thinking hard and adding up all the considerations. Her hands clap. “Never. For some crimes, no punishment is ever enough.”
“There must be compassion,” Ms. Pallas insists. “And forgiveness.”
Ambrosia scoffs, turns to Alix for reinforcement. “What has forgiving ever gotten you?”
Then to Stephanie. “Has compassion for your enemies brought you satisfaction?”
Ms. Pallas moves until she’s standing right behind me, and I feel her hand firmly cup the dome of my shoulder. The pressure makes me feel very small and powerless under its grip, and I don’t like the sensation. I don’t like it at all. Reflexively I knock the hand from my shoulder, and Ambrosia laughs so hard that everyone in class looks our way.
“It’s so tempting to hold on to self-righteous anger and never let go,” Ms. Pallas says, her braid tight, her lips just as tight. “That brand of justice can taste so good!”
“Scrumptious,” Ambrosia agrees.
“Without forgiveness, it gets stuck in your throat. Justice becomes revenge—endless, hateful, spiteful, soul-rotting revenge.” She starts to say more, but changes her mind and settles on a single word: “Raymond.”
He’s been so quiet and un-Raymond-like that I’ve almost forgotten about him. I think that he also lost track of where he is, because he looks up startled, ripped away from another time and place. Something unspoken passes between him and Ms. Pallas. What was
that
about? He gathers the pictures of the Furies and slides them across the desk, spreads them out especially for me so I can take in all the images.
I let myself float off into the world of the pictures. There’s a black-and-white etching of three naked, sexy, winged women hovering in the atmosphere. A carving on an ancient vase of a trio of hags with long, matted hair and limbs intertwined, a real nightmare. A photo from a theater production of an Aeschylus play: masked, bloodstained figures, a different nightmare.
And in every picture there’s also a man, a young man not any older than I am. In the etching, his hands cover his ears as he pleads in anguish. In the carving, he’s bent over, huddled in misery, defeated, as the creatures hiss in his ears. In the third, I look hard but see only a foot sticking out from the mound of wings and hair.
I study these Furies and their victim, and sense something and someone very familiar.
“Look at their victim, Meg,” Ms. Pallas says. “Look at
them
! They start out beautiful, but turn as hideous and as dangerous as poison gas.”
18
MURDERER ON PAROLE
MURDERS AGAIN
KILLER WALKS FREE
When you hear news like this, doesn’t your blood boil?
I place the blame squarely where it belongs. On Athena, the goddess of light and justice, aka Minerva, aka the Virgin Goddess, protector of so-called civilized ways. And here at Hunter High in her newest incarnation of authority figure, color guard advisor, and teacher of third-period Western Civ.
One look at her clothes and you know she’s the original goddess of weaving. She may have been born right out of her father Zeus’s skull, but she’s our splitting headache now. Blame Pallas Athena for bogging down the world with courts, judges, lawyers, hearings, appeals, bail posts, and probation departments. Blame her for all these abominations.
I’m an old-fashioned girl longing for justice, old-school style—the simple, satisfying acts of revenge and retribution, the eternal locking together of victim and perpetrator with blood spilling everywhere.
No jury of anyone’s peers.
No compassion for anyone’s so-called sad childhood.
No extenuating circumstances.
I actually heard of someone hugging someone who once did them wrong. Please. What’s up with that?
That someone needs to take a tip from the Old Testament—eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—but without the wimpy backpedaling section about showing mercy. I aim for a different ratio: ten thousand eyes for an eye, revenge with daily compounding interest.
Here’s my story. It starts back in ancient days when things were so much simpler. Someone killed someone, so someone in his family killed that someone, and so on and on until it got to me.
Someone killed my father, and I had to avenge that murder. It was a given. Poison worked nicely. Poison was very popular in those days.
But then someone was obliged to kill me. The duty fell to a certain prince, a deceptive young man who lured me—so luscious and desirable, a princess in her prime—into his arms. He was smooth all right, but I should have stayed on guard.
For my naïveté I got a knife in the back, along with a quick taste of his lusty lips. While dying a slow and torturous death, my only solace was knowing that someone—a bloodthirsty uncle, perhaps—would avenge me in the old way.
But no!
Athena came down from her mountain on her high horse and read them the riot act: No more vengeance. Let’s all join hands and sing the ancient version of “Kumbaya.” Let’s have peace among enemies, invite lions to lie down with lambs.
So because of Athena’s meddling, no one picked up a vial of poison on my behalf. Both sides buried the hatchet—right into my eternal rest.
With no one to avenge me, I wandered alone in a hot, stuffy, miserable netherworld humming the same song over and over. I kept at it until they finally heard me. One hundred and eight notes until they could no longer ignore my misery. My righteous need for vengeance woke them out of their deep sleep.
They came and licked at my wounds, fed themselves on the injustice, and drank up the unfairness of my unavenged, unmourned, unsanctified death. They drove my princely killer stark, raving mad.
Only my killer had a son, and as soon as that spawn of my enemy hit puberty he lost his baby fat and got the same princely profile and curly hair—the spitting image in killer smile and killer instinct of his father.
I could not get him out of my head. The knowledge that he breathed robbed me of my long-deserved peace. I summoned up my next batch of Furies and sent them off to work.
I was dead and deadly.
Only then came a son of this son, followed by a son of that son and soon a son of a son of a son—each of them a son of a bitch with thick hair and great cheekbones. All these grandsons and uncles and cousins many times removed, all of them good-looking, popular princes.
I dispatch them now whenever I can, whenever the stars and human suffering allow my Furies free rein.
I set aside a section of my book for a history of these joyous events that ease my rage, at least temporarily. My successes cluster around certain historical eras. I need the worst of times to spark the awakening of the Furies.
Now is such a time. There’s so much anger, fear, hostility, greed, wars, corruption, racism, genocide, fraud, assassinations, vice in the highest and lowest places, oil spills turning the oceans into slippery graveyards. Just driving on a crowded freeway and listening to the hostility of blaring horns sends my spirits soaring.
In pencil I’ve added my newest target. This scion of a scion of a scion, dark-haired and handsome, and as despicable to me as all the others.
This prince. This Brendon. This Prince of the Plagues.
Arise, my furious ones. Don’t let Athena and her teacher’s pet with the fiddle seduce you. Ignore their offers of a warm bed and a cool head. Cast off all of their tempting poppies of Hypnos.
Stay awake!
THIRD STASIMON,
THE BOOK OF FURIOUS
19
“Are you sure
I won’t kill myself?”
“Naw. This is the beginner’s break.”
“But I’m a wimp. And a klutz.”
Alix spreads her arms, throws back her head, and makes a dramatic motion of appreciation to the sky, which is cloudless and blue, an increasingly rare sight lately.
“Perfect conditions today. Warm. Actual sun. Surf’s as smooth as glass. So don’t sweat it. No fear when the Big Kahuna Alecto has got your back.”
What was I thinking? Why did I confess to Alix that I envy her fearlessness in the water? Why did I tell her that I stand on the cliff and fantasize about riding waves? Why did I let her talk me into taking my first surfing lesson?
We’re standing by a set of steps that lead down to the ocean. As I gnaw nervously on my upper lip, I taste the thick layer of coconut sunscreen that I smeared everywhere. Two of Alix’s surfboards are propped against the railing. This isn’t the famous surf spot with the terrifying walls of water. That’s about a quarter mile up the coast. We’re taking on a far easier break known for its gentle and uniform waves, the place in town where everyone first learns to surf.
I peer over the railing, relieved to see that the waves are hardly cresting above the waist and there’s plenty of slack time between them. Even so, an obvious newbie loses control and I cringe as a wave clobbers him on his head and his board goes airborne before landing with a smack right where the wave took him under. I don’t like the panicked look on the surfer-wannabe’s face when he breaks back to the surface, coughing. Even beginner waves pack tremendous power.
Plus I’m dreading the temperature. I’ve dipped my toes into the surf on sunny summer days, and it’s cold even then. What’s it going to be like now? This time of year, it never gets above the fifties. And there are the sharks to worry about, the ocean’s ruthless, deadly eating machines. I will not think about the sharks. You don’t actually see them, but everyone knows that they’re lurking beneath the surface. I won’t think about the sharks. People call this section of the coast the Bloody Triangle, and even to me all these flailing people in sleek, black wet suits—what real surfers call kooks—look like sick, slow seals. They must look like an all-you-can-eat buffet to a nearsighted shark.
“Trust me. You’re gonna love it,” Alix promises. “Makes you feel like a million bucks. I’m a big fan of salt water. The ocean, breaking a sweat—salt water is the cure for whatever’s bothering you.”
“Tears, too,” I add quickly. “That’s salt water. I can just stay on land and cry.”
“Never thought of that. I’m not much of a crier, though, but I hear it works for some people. Surfing’s a lot more fun.”
“Promise?”
She motions for me to spin around so she can zip up my wet suit, which closes around my throat like a set of thick, rough hands. “I’m choking. This is misery. I can’t even stand a turtleneck sweater.” I pull at the neck.
“Stop that! It’s supposed to be tight. How do you think it keeps the water out?” She swats my hands away. “Actually, this suit is too tight on you. I thought you told me your size.”
“I did. I guess I put on some weight recently.”
“I’ll say. And it’s all in the right places. You have hips all of a sudden, and a waist.”
I’m normally horribly self-conscious and would squirm over any mention of my weight or body. This time, though, I don’t scramble to change the subject because I’ve noticed what Alix has noticed. It’s not just wishful thinking. I put my hands on my hips and run them along the sides of my torso. This has nothing to do with the tension of the wet suit. Something has changed not only
in
me, but
on
me. There’s a deep indentation, a curve where there wasn’t a curve before.