“Yeah, but is it true?” Claire said, her eyes pleading. Helen sighed and put her arm around Claire, leading her to a walk.
“First of all, Lucas and I never even met before that day in the hallway, let alone slept together. Secondly, I would have told you if I’d even kissed another boy since the disaster with Matt in the closet in seventh grade. Third, and probably most important, I was never as close to Gretchen as I am to you. You’re my best friend, Gig.” Helen squeezed her until Claire gave in and smiled. “I’ve been strange lately, I know it, and I’m really sorry. Some weird stuff is going on with me. I want to tell you everything about it, but I can’t because I don’t understand it yet. So please, please just stay on my side, even if I am angry and miserable all the time.”
“You know I’m always on your side, but do you want me to be completely honest?” Claire stopped again and turned to face Helen. “I know I’m supposed to say that this is nothing, and that it will all work itself out, and feed you all that supportive nonsense, but I can’t. I don’t think this is going to get better on its own, and I’m worried about you.”
After track practice, Helen went to hold down the store. She had offered to give Luis the night off so that his marathon weekend manning the store while Kate and Jerry were in Boston would start on a full night’s rest.
Customers were still looking at her funny as news of her meltdown made its way to every year-rounder on the island, but she had too much to do to get bent out of shape about it. By the time she was done cleaning and setting everything up for Luis in the morning it was after midnight.
There was a moment while she was locking up and walking to the Pig when she was alert and listening for danger, but it passed by the time she was backing out and on her way home. She had been cautious, but that didn’t matter. It was after she had parked in her driveway and was walking toward her house that she got jumped.
The first thing she felt was gratitude. At least the Delos clan had waited until Jerry was safely out of the way before they came to kill her. A wiry arm wrapped around her neck, simultaneously pulling back and pressing down until Helen fell to her knees. Her breath was cut off, and she was bent forward in such a way that she could see nothing of the person behind her. She wondered who had won that whole “she’s mine” argument, Lucas or Hector? White and blue blobs bloomed across her field of vision from lack of oxygen. Then she pictured her dad coming home to find her dead body in the driveway, and she knew that no matter how outnumbered she might be, she had to fight back. She couldn’t let him lose another person he loved. He’d never get over it.
Helen crooked her arm and rammed her elbow into her attacker’s solar plexus with every bit of juice she had in her tank. She heard the person suck wind and then she felt herself get dropped. The heels of her hands scraped against the ground as she stopped her forward momentum. She took two deep breaths before she looked up, surprised that one of the others hadn’t jumped in to secure her.
Lucas stared down at her, his right arm thrown out and gripping Hector by the shirt. Strangely, Hector was looking over his shoulder—away from Helen. She barely had time to register that fact before Lucas spoke. As he did the Furies began wailing behind him. Helen wondered why it had taken this long for them to show up, but she didn’t have a chance to dwell on it.
“Jason! Ariadne! Bring her back alive,” he commanded, stressing the wordaliveas he looked pointedly at Hector. The twins took off in the same direction Hector had been looking. Helen took that moment to jump up and run for her life.
She had never tried to run at full speed before. She’d always known that if she did she would discover every nightmare she had ever had about herself was true.Monster,freak,animal,witch: all of the names she had whispered to herself when she did something impossible would come gushing to the surface if she ever let herself loose. But when she heard Hector snarl her name she didn’t think about what it would mean, or how it would feel, to run as fast as she could. She just did it.
Something led her out onto the moors. The dark, flat lands that stretched out under the color-bleaching light of the moon were somehow safer than the roads and the houses of her community. If she was going to die, it would be alone, with no weak normals sacrificing themselves to save poor Helen Hamilton, their lifelong neighbor and friend.
If she was going to turn and fight, she wanted to be under the broad, low sky of the uninhabited parts of her island and not hemmed in by the quaint shingle-sided whalers. She went west, across the northern side of her island, the calm waters of Nantucket Sound sighing somewhere off to her left, and Lucas and Hector calling her name from behind. They were gaining on her.
Helen crossed Polpis Road, skirting Sesachacha Pond until she saw the true Atlantic, not its calmer cousin, the Nantucket Sound, but the wild water at the end of the continent. She needed to hide, but the land was flat and open and the air was clear and bright. Helen looked out over the dark waves sparkling like inky tinfoil in the moonlight and begged for some kind of mist or haze to come and cover her. That damn ocean owed her for almost taking her life as a child, she thought hysterically, and it should pay. After a few more huge strides, Helen’s plea was miraculously answered. She ran north up the coast, out onto the uninhabited sand spit on the northern tip of the island, into a damp, salty fog.
In the wet air, Helen could hear her pursuers even more clearly, and she knew they could hear her better, too. Panicked and exhausted, she blindly tossed herself into the fog and asked her body to go even faster. On the edge of collapse, she felt her body grow light and her labored breathing unexpectedly eased up. The jarring impact on her joints and spine from her gargantuan strides ended abruptly. She was still moving, but she no longer felt anything except the cold and the wind that spun her hair into whips. She burst through the edge of the fog and saw nothing but darkness and stars around her. There were stars everywhere. She looked down.
Below her were twinkling lights outlining the edges of a familiar sideways comma in the middle of the ocean. Looking around for the airplane that would normally be housing her body at this altitude, Helen saw her limbs floating in the air, buoyant and sinuous as if they were submerged in water. She looked down again and realized that the twinkling comma was her beautiful little island home. Her vision contracted into a narrowing tube of blackness. Without a sound, she fainted and fell out of the sky that had so recently claimed her.
Chapter Six
It was nighttime in the dry lands. Helen was surprised that there was such a thing as time here. It confused her so much that she glanced around, uncertain as to where she was. After a few moments she decided that, yes, she was in the dry lands, but this time the hilly terrain was flatter and more open. The dark, empty sky seemed lower and heavier somehow. Then she looked over her shoulder. It took her a few moments to understand what she was seeing.
Miles away, there was a line across the land and sky, where the flat nightscape turned back into the more familiar, hillier dayscape. The different time zones sat next to each other like two paintings in an artist’s studio—unmoving, unchanging, and both equally as real. Here, time was a place and it never moved. Somehow that made sense.
Helen walked. It was cold in the night version of the dry lands, and her teeth chattered uselessly. In the dayscape, there was no relief from the heat, so Helen knew that in the nightscape there would be no warmth no matter how much she rubbed her arms and shivered. She saw someone up ahead. He was panicking.
She hurried forward until she could see that it was Lucas. He was on his hands and knees, feeling around as if he were blind—grabbing at the sharp stones, cutting his hands on their edges. He was very afraid. She called out to him, but he couldn’t hear her. She knelt down next to him and took his face in her hands. He flinched away from her at first and then reached out blindly with relief. He mouthed her name, but no sound came out. In her arms, he felt very light. She made him stand up even though he was so frightened he hunched over on shaking legs. He cried silently, and Helen knew he was begging her to leave him behind. He was too frightened to move, but Helen knew she couldn’t heed him or he would never leave this dark, dry land.
Even though he screamed, she forced him to get up and walk.
Helen was in terrible pain. She wanted to groan but she didn’t have the strength to make any noise. She could hear the ocean close by, but she couldn’t move or open her eyes to see where it was. She felt her head bob gently up and down, as if she were lying, stomach down, on a lumpy raft, and her lips twitched in the faintest of grateful smiles. Something had broken her fall and was gently supporting her. She concentrated on that bit of good fortune as she divided her pain up into manageable little bits, one heartbeat at a time. After ten heartbeats she counted to twenty. At twenty she asked herself to get to forty, and so on. She heard another steady rhythm under her, and after a short time her heart was in sync with the sound coming from her life raft. They beat together, each encouraging the other. She kept very, very still.
After what seemed like hours Helen was still immobile, but she could finally open her eyes and focus them. All she could see in the sweeping, blinding flashes sent out from some distant lighthouse were walls of sand. Under her right cheek was a warm T-shirt. After a few moments she realized there was a person in it. She was lying on top of a man. The lumpiness under her head was his chest and the bobbing sensation was him breathing. She gasped. The Delos boys had caught her.
“Helen?” Lucas asked, his voice faint and breathy. “Make sound. If alive,” he barely managed to say. He didn’t sound like he was going to kill her so she answered.
“Alive. Can’t move,” she whispered back. Every syllable sent threads of pain radiating out from her diaphragm.
“Wait. Listen to waves. Calm,” he said, struggling with every word as her body weight tried to press the air out of him.
Helen knew she couldn’t so much as raise her arm, so she relaxed like he told her to and just watched as the world swayed up and then back down with every breath he took. They waited in the intermittent light and dark of the lighthouse signal, listening to the surf fizzing in the sand.
As the agony began to lessen into something semiendurable, Helen was able to notice more things about her body. From what she could see, her outward shape seemed mostly normal, but her insides felt gooey and soft, as if she were a freshly microwaved chocolate chip cookie. Her bones were barely supporting the muscles and tissue they were supposed to, and there was an itchy heat in her marrow. She recognized that sensation as being similar to the one she’d experienced once when she was learning to ride a scooter and accidentally flipped the thing. Some part of her knew at the time that she had broken her arm, but by the time she got it X-rayed it was as good as new. The itch meant she was healing.
Somehow, she had fallen out of the sky and survived. She really was a monster. A freak. Maybe even a witch. She started to cry.
