Starcrossed (Starcrossed 1)

Her heart told her that somewhere close there was a river, so she

walked and walked and walked.

Helen woke a few hours later with heavy limbs, a headache, and

dirty feet. She flopped out of bed, rinsed off the increasingly familiar

nocturnal grime, and threw on a sundress. Then she sat down at

her computer to look up the Furies.

The first website she clicked on gave her chills. As soon as she

opened it she saw a simple line drawing on the side of a pot. It was

a perfect depiction of the three horrors that had been haunting her

for days.

As she read the text under the illustration it gave a nearly

exact physical description of her sobbing sisters, but the rest confused

her. In classical Greek mythology there were three Erinyes,

or Furies, and they wept blood just as they did in Helen?s visions.

But according to her research, the Furies? job was to pursue and

punish evildoers. They were the physical manifestation of the anger

of the dead. Helen knew she wasn?t perfect, but she had never

done anything really wrong, certainly not anything that would have

earned her a visit from three mythological figures of vengeance.

As she read on, she learned that the Furies first appeared in the

Oresteia, a cycle of plays by Aeschylus. After two solid hours of untangling

what had to have been the first?and bloodiest?soap opera

in history, Helen finally got her head around the plot.

The gist of it was that this poor kid named Orestes was forced to

kill his mother because his mother had killed his father, Agamemnon.

But the mother killed the father because the father killed their

daughter, Orestes? beloved sister Iphigenia. To make it even more

complicated, the father had killed the daughter because that?s what

the gods asked for as a sacrifice to make the winds blow so the

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