Less than a mile from the Feiffers’ house, JD parked on the side of the road. When he pulled out his phone, his hands were shaking. Within a couple seconds of online research, he was quickly able to nail down two solid pieces of information:
1. The Furies were mythological goddesses of vengeance.
2. They usually appeared in groups of three—and their names were a mouthful: Tisephone, Alecto, and Megaera.
Ty, ?Ali, Meg.
His stomach rolled and he kept scrolling through webpages, hunting for information. What he read about the Furies put a bad taste in his mouth.
JD’s unsettling interactions with Ty, Lucy, and Mr. Feiffer only served to heighten his unease, not to mention the snake charm he’d found. It was difficult to separate the truth from the madness—it seemed like crazy stories and wild behavior were becoming the norm around here.
But what was he supposed to believe? That three storybook characters had leaped from the pages of Greek scrolls to the streets of Ascension? And that Ty was one of them, along with her cousins?
Meg, Ty, even Ali—all of them were pretty, but off. JD was reminded of the open casket funerals he had been to, and how the bodies looked after they’d been drained, stuffed, and powdered. That’s how these girls were: perfect on the outside but empty and rotten on the inside. You could sense it.
It was definitely weird that the mystery women who had recently entered his life had names that were remarkably similar—just a little more pronounceable—to the mythological goddesses’. And that Lucy and Mr. Feiffer had both dropped hints that connected the Furies with recent happenings in Ascension. But coincidences were not evidence.
And then there was the possibility Em was somehow entangled in this mess. After all, the first time he’d ever heard of the Furies was in the book on her bed. . . . Sweat prickled his forehead. He punched down the window, taking deep breaths of cool air. The wind whispered through the trees outside, as though passing along its secrets.
I can’t believe you’re even considering this, he chastised himself.
JD had always liked order. Gears, circuits, electrical flow: stuff you could categorize, understand, process. But more and more, he felt as though he was entangled in something he couldn’t understand—plagued that he had somehow placed himself in danger. ?And that other people were in danger.
Three people—four, including Sasha Bowlder—had already mysteriously died this winter. And Ty seemed to be connected to at least two of them.
Could that be a coincidence?
Driving home, he found himself compulsively checking his rearview mirror and craning his neck to see around every bend. He felt jumpy, electric, like he used to as a kid playing hide-and-seek—as though at any second someone might pop up and grab him.
And when he got out of his car, he practically sprinted for the front door, making doubly sure to lock it behind him.
Moments later, he settled onto the living room couch with his laptop, but it was impossible to concentrate.
“Can you turn that down?” JD asked Melissa. She glared at him, but turned down the volume on whatever reality TV show she was currently watching.
As Melissa punched the remote control, JD noticed her nails were literally neon green. Why were girls so weird?
“Is that color called I Fell Into a Nuclear Reactor?” he asked.
“Bright colors are in right now, idiot,” Melissa said. “Ali put the same color on her toes.”
JD tried to stifle the alarm bells that began ringing in his head. “So? Then her toes are radioactive too. And when did you see Ali?”
“This afternoon,” Melissa said, plunging her hands into a bag of popcorn and eating the kernels one by one. “She picked me up while you were out with Ned and we did mani-pedis at her house.”
“I’m glad stranger-danger really made an impression on you, Mel,” he said, trying to keep his tone light.
She rolled her eyes, tucking a strand of strawberry-blond hair behind one ear. “Ali isn’t a stranger, dummy. She’s a friend. Remember?” She looked genuinely disappointed.
He reminded himself not to overreact—there were no facts on the table, only insane theories. “I know, I know,” he relented. “But we just don’t know her very well, and with everything that’s been happening around here—I guess I’m just feeling a little overprotective.”
“Well, don’t be. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“Says the girl who almost broke her ankle last week,” he said.
“Almost.” Melissa smiled. “Anyway, all we did was go to her house—which is incredible, by the way—and do girly stuff. Ty was there too. They say I’m practically like family.”
“Oh, yeah?” JD shook his head when Mel held out the bag of popcorn. “So what’s the rest of their family like? Moms? Dads? Sisters?”
Melissa shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly. They don’t talk much about that kind of stuff. It seems like, I don’t know, maybe something bad happened in their family that they don’t like to think about.”