chapter 18
MURDERER ON PAROLE MURDERS AGAIN
KILLER WALKS FREE
When you hear news like this, doesn’t your blood boil?
I place the blame squarely where it belongs. On Athena, the goddess of light and justice, aka Minerva, aka the Virgin Goddess, protector of so-called civilized ways. And here at Hunter High in her newest incarnation of authority figure, color guard advisor, and teacher of third-period Western Civ.
One look at her clothes and you know she’s the original goddess of weaving. She may have been born right out of her father Zeus’s skull, but she’s our splitting headache now. Blame Pallas Athena for bogging down the world with courts, judges, lawyers, hearings, appeals, bail posts, and probation departments. Blame her for all these abominations.
I’m an old-fashioned girl longing for justice, old-school style—the simple, satisfying acts of revenge and retribution, the eternal locking together of victim and perpetrator with blood spilling everywhere.
No jury of anyone’s peers.
No compassion for anyone’s so-called sad childhood.
No extenuating circumstances.
I actually heard of someone hugging someone who once did them wrong. Please. What’s up with that?
That someone needs to take a tip from the Old Testament—eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—but without the wimpy backpedaling section about showing mercy. I aim for a different ratio: ten thousand eyes for an eye, revenge with daily compounding interest.
Here’s my story. It starts back in ancient days when things were so much simpler. Someone killed someone, so someone in his family killed that someone, and so on and on until it got to me.
Someone killed my father, and I had to avenge that murder. It was a given. Poison worked nicely. Poison was very popular in those days.
But then someone was obliged to kill me. The duty fell to a certain prince, a deceptive young man who lured me—so luscious and desirable, a princess in her prime—into his arms. He was smooth all right, but I should have stayed on guard.
For my naïveté I got a knife in the back, along with a quick taste of his lusty lips. While dying a slow and torturous death, my only solace was knowing that someone—a bloodthirsty uncle, perhaps—would avenge me in the old way.
But no!
Athena came down from her mountain on her high horse and read them the riot act: No more vengeance. Let’s all join hands and sing the ancient version of “Kumbaya.” Let’s have peace among enemies, invite lions to lie down with lambs.
So because of Athena’s meddling, no one picked up a vial of poison on my behalf. Both sides buried the hatchet—right into my eternal rest.
With no one to avenge me, I wandered alone in a hot, stuffy, miserable netherworld humming the same song over and over. I kept at it until they finally heard me. One hundred and eight notes until they could no longer ignore my misery. My righteous need for vengeance woke them out of their deep sleep.
They came and licked at my wounds, fed themselves on the injustice, and drank up the unfairness of my unavenged, unmourned, unsanctified death. They drove my princely killer stark, raving mad.
Only my killer had a son, and as soon as that spawn of my enemy hit puberty he lost his baby fat and got the same princely profile and curly hair—the spitting image in killer smile and killer instinct of his father.
I could not get him out of my head. The knowledge that he breathed robbed me of my long-deserved peace. I summoned up my next batch of Furies and sent them off to work.
I was dead and deadly.
Only then came a son of this son, followed by a son of that son and soon a son of a son of a son—each of them a son of a bitch with thick hair and great cheekbones. All these grandsons and uncles and cousins many times removed, all of them good-looking, popular princes.
I dispatch them now whenever I can, whenever the stars and human suffering allow my Furies free rein.
I set aside a section of my book for a history of these joyous events that ease my rage, at least temporarily. My successes cluster around certain historical eras. I need the worst of times to spark the awakening of the Furies.
Now is such a time. There’s so much anger, fear, hostility, greed, wars, corruption, racism, genocide, fraud, assassinations, vice in the highest and lowest places, oil spills turning the oceans into slippery graveyards. Just driving on a crowded freeway and listening to the hostility of blaring horns sends my spirits soaring.
In pencil I’ve added my newest target. This scion of a scion of a scion, dark-haired and handsome, and as despicable to me as all the others.
This prince. This Brendon. This Prince of the Plagues.
Arise, my furious ones. Don’t let Athena and her teacher’s pet with the fiddle seduce you. Ignore their offers of a warm bed and a cool head. Cast off all of their tempting poppies of Hypnos.
Stay awake!
THIRD STASIMON, THE BOOK OF FURIOUS