Furious - By Jill Wolfson Page 0,98

movie where there’s no popcorn and I’m tied to the seat and the screen is huge and my eyelids are propped open and the sound is blasted high.

Ambrosia arches her back. “Of course I didn’t forget to invite you. I knew you’d follow if we dangled your little teacher’s pet. You need your devotees. I picked this setting especially and lured you here. A mountaintop should be familiar to you, give you a little advantage, even. Isn’t that considerate of me? But enough dilly-dallying. Enough of your getting in my way. It’s time to end this forever. Here, now.”

“No more calling them awake,” Athena orders.

“No more putting them to sleep.”

“You know it isn’t up to us anymore. We’ve picked our weapons in the human realm. They must battle it out.” Athena points her baton at Raymond, and from a heap on the ground he floats several inches into the air before being set upright on his feet.

Ambrosia in a snide huff: “Ah yes, Pallas’s little kiss-up. All devotion. The living, breathing representative of all that’s good and merciful in mankind.”

“I’m not—” Raymond tries to protest, but Athena silences him with a smack of her baton against the rock. It thunders. “But you are. You must be all that! I say it is so.”

“I won’t!”

“You will! Finish the job!”

Ambrosia turns her attention to us, her voice, in contrast, steady and cool. “Girls, are you taking it all in? I sense a rift between our enemies.” She wags her finger, a miniature windshield wiper in the air. “No falling asleep on the job, right?”

“Question!” I shout. “This weapon you’re talking about? If he’s all that’s good in mankind, we must be—”

Athena sets another bush on fire, just for the light show. “You are all that’s bad!”

I feel both confused and hurt. “But aren’t we the good ones? Righting wrongs? Punishing the guilty?”

Ambrosia laughs again, tinkling like shattering glass, the moonlight shining off of her eerie, hairless face. “I understand your confusion, Megaera. I despise this good-bad distinction. It misses the whole point and the subtlety of the situation. I prefer to think of you Furies as the living, breathing, wailing, reprimanding embodiment of all that’s natural in mankind. Tisiphone, for instance. What do you do best?”

Stephanie extends her right leg in front, dips forward in a dancer’s curtsy. “I punish the guilty. Especially if they hurt Mother. Mother Earth.”

“Exactly! And you never stop punishing! You must be right all the time. You never let anyone off the hook. Isn’t that the essence of human desire? To be judge, jury, and executioner of anyone who disagrees and gets in your way?”

“Off with their heads,” Stephanie says in a strangely mechanical way.

“How about you, my invincible Alecto?”

Alix is hanging off the side of a crag with only two fingers in a hole. She bends her elbow and, as if she weighs nothing, her entire body moves straight up like she’s in an elevator. “Anyone hurts a family member, I pay them back. You can count on it.” She jumps down, stands by Stephanie, and performs a deep formal bow. “At your service.”

“My precious powder keg of vengeance,” Ambrosia says with admiration. “History is made up of revenge. It’s the stuff of world wars, ethnic cleansing, neighborhood spats, and fights between former best friends. If it’s so commonplace, how can it be wrong or bad? It’s what is. This is mankind au naturel.”

Her attention turns to me. “And Megaera. So damaged and distrusting—”

“You’re not!” Raymond shouts.

“So bitter about your past and envious of what you have been denied.”

“Don’t listen to her!”

But I hear myself say simply, with acceptance, “I am all that.” One of my legs slides behind the other. My fingertips hold out the edges of a nonexistent skirt and my knees bend in a curtsy.

“No!” Raymond shouts again.

I feel pressure in the small of my back, like a firm hand of wind that moves me away from him and ushers me to where I belong. With them. With the Furies. With my true self. With my others. If Stephanie is unforgiving, it’s because people are unforgiving. If Alix is cruel, it’s because human nature is cruel. If I am bitter and envious, so be it! Who made me that way?

The three of us hook arms, lean in, and clink together at our foreheads like magnetic kissing dolls. Our powers come together as one.

“The world is corrupt and evil,” Ambrosia reminds us. “You three speak its language of greed, hate, and delusion.”

“Don’t be her