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 word alive as 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
I t was nighttime in the dry lands. Helen was surprised that there was such a thing as time here. It confused