Furious - By Jill Wolfson Page 0,26

the pollution.

“Ambrosia! She can’t say the stuff she said and not explain.”

Stephanie turns back to the pipe. “That’s disgusting. Criminal!”

Alix pulls off her neoprene surf hood and shakes her head. Her saltwater-caked hair spikes out like underwater snake creatures, their hungry mouths probing the air in search of food for their insatiable appetites. “I’m with you on that. Think what it’s like surfing out there, getting a mouthful of that crap every day.”

Stephanie, her jaw clenched: “The people responsible? They should be forced to drink it.”

From behind us then, a disembodied voice: “Wanting revenge but being helpless in the face of injustice. I know the unbearable ache of that.”

We see her now, Ambrosia, a figure in the fog in a black raincoat, her hair hidden in a man’s-style hat. She’s standing at the surfer statue and runs her fingernails along the bare metal feet. I notice that one of them, the pointer finger on her right hand, is painted black while the others are red.

No hello, no small talk, just:

“You three want to know what you are? I’ll be direct. I’ll say what I know. And if you look into your hearts, you already know it, too.”

Something shifts in the light. I can’t see the ball of the sun, but the rays must be bending through the nasty-looking clump of clouds to produce so many sparks of gold, orange, pink. The Prince of the Waves takes on a sickly greenish glow. If this were a disaster movie and the ocean and sky looked like this, everyone would be yelling and crawling over each to get to high ground fast.

Ambrosia rubs her hands together like sticks for making a fire. She shows us the palms. In the unnatural light, those hands appear to have no love lines, no life lines, few lines at all. Her words seem to emerge from some bottomless pit: “O Furies, born of sky, ocean, earth, and blood, mothered on foul human emotions, nursed on the tainted milk of greed, hate, and delusion, nourished with an appetite for ancient, twisted karma. Those Who Walk in Darkness, ceaselessly hunting and haunting those who have gone unpunished. Ferocious, powerful, unstoppable.”

Alix’s legs start vibrating and she drums her hands against the thighs of her wet suit. She’s either freezing or unnerved. I know I am. Both. Her lips drain of their ordinary color, turning blue.

Ambrosia addresses her directly: “Alecto the Unceasing. Restless, endless maker of grief who revels in war and quarrels.”

She faces Stephanie: “Tisiphone the Avenger. The retaliator who punishes those who harm the guiltless, the vulnerable, the innocent.”

She swivels and her eyes lock onto mine like suction cups.

“And Megaera the Envious…”

Not me.

“Angry, untrusting, resentful. The undisputed master of holding a grudge.”

Everything on the periphery of my vision—the pelicans overhead, the crashing waves, a hunched-over man walking his dog, the surfer statue—disappears into even thicker fog. I feel light-headed, like the time I guzzled wine on an empty stomach. This is a dream. I’ll wait until I wake up, I tell myself. Only, a dream has a certain quality to it, and it’s not like this. This is real. This is happening.

Overhead, the strangled cry of a gull. Within me, something peeks out of its dark hole and demands to be acknowledged.

Angry, resentful. Yes. Underneath, that’s what I am.

Ferocious, powerful, unstoppable. That’s what I want to be. I’d give anything to be that.

Ambrosia breaks eye contact. The world returns. A seabird drops like a dagger to snag an unlucky fish.

“There you have it, ladies. Ring a bell?”

11

What are you supposed to do with information like that?

Alix, Stephanie, and I explode in laughter. Ambrosia just told us that we aren’t ordinary human teenage girls with massive social problems and some of the worst frizzed-out hair at Hunter High. We are straight out of mythology, goddesses who avenge, retaliate, punish, haunt, hunt, and don’t stand around being victims, but make things happen. We are kegs of untapped, unstoppable power. What else did she say? We walk in the dark, or something insanely insane like that.

It’s so ridiculous that I start pogoing around the surfer statue. I don’t believe a word of it.

But at the same time that I don’t believe it, I do believe it. I want to believe it. It explains not just about He-Cat and all the strange things at school but something even more important. It means that everything I want to believe about myself, what I hope for and pray for, is true. I am blossoming. There’s