Starcrossed

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,