Page 15 of Bound By Fury

“Never mind that, child,” the woman says, her bony hand coming to rest against the side of my face. Her left eye is a cloudy, milky blue, but her right is sharp like a blade and the color of liquid silver. The contrast against her deep brown skin is familiar in a way that aches.

I glance over her shoulder and have to choke down the vomit that surges up my throat. Rope, twisted into nooses, dangling from the fists of cloaked men.

“What—”

“Shush!” she says, gripping my jaw between her fingers and forcing my attention away from the gruesome scene.

Her good eye carves across my face, dissecting me piece by piece. “The time has finally come,” she whispers. I can only shake my head between her hands in confusion.

“I never did see your face,” she says cryptically. “I never did know how you was gonna turn up. I only knew to keep watch. I only knew how to sacrifice.”

My head is throbbing, my mind racing, but it’s no use—her words sound like gibberish, and all I want to do is turn my head. All I need to do is save these women somehow.

“We done with the sacrifices, girl. You hear me? We done! You not here to sacrifice, you here to make things right. You here to balance the scales. You gotta take. You gotta take it all back. They not gon’ give it to you. You gotta take it! You hear me?!” She’s nearly shaking me now, my tears flinging this way and that, my head bobbing on my shoulders like a newborn.

“I don’t—I’m not—” I’m sobbing, confused. “I’m sorry!” I shout because I don’t know what else to say. “I don’t know, but I’m so sorry.”

She stops shaking me, frustration screwing up her face, her eyes alight in reds and oranges and searing, atomic white.

When all I can do is stand there and stare back at her, trembling and close to gagging on the putrid smell wafting from the scene before us, she finally rolls her eyes and grips my shoulders.

“You not gon’ get it coming from me, I see. You not ready yet, you ain’t prepared. You not what we was hoping for.” Disappointment clouds her face as she tsks. “But you gon’ get it one way or another. You gon’ heed our warnings.” Her lips twist into a cruel smile, and I gulp down the panic swarming inside me.

“I ain’t want it to come to this,” she says, mumbling a string of curses. “But we done waiting!”

I don’t have time to respond before her palms smack roughly against my shoulders and she sends me crashing straight through the ground.

The world tilts, and suddenly the sun is warming my eyelids. I shield my face with my hand as I take in the old burgundy Victorian, and I’m heartened by the fresh coat of paint, the sturdy, level porch, and the windows gleaming in the light. But the house stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world, which is cast in what appears to be some kind of necrotizing shadow.

Everything is in shades of gray. The coneflowers and irises, the bushes of elderberry, and the thicket of normally red buckeye along the bank of the creek, all wilted and dripping with decomposition. The stream burbles and bubbles like a cartoonish vat of acid, and the smell is nearly enough to make my head go dizzy from holding my breath.

I scramble across the soured yard and stumble through the back door and into the kitchen.

I gulp the sweet-smelling air, stomach gnawing on itself when I spot the flour-dusted island and rows of freshly baked biscuits, tops gleaming with melted butter.

Idly, my fingers drift to grasp the cool metal of the pendant at my throat as I approach the food, a mindless gesture that’s as easy as breathing. The symbol etched into the surface of my necklace is strange, but I find comfort in its image. The top of a triangle with a red dot in the middle.

Behind me someone clears their throat.

I turn, folding at the waist the second I glimpse her face, her apron splashed with biscuit dough, her hands winding through a blue kitchen towel before she flings it to drape over her shoulder.

Gigi.

It takes everything in me not to collapse. I surge forward, holding my trembling body up against the island as a wave of heaving sobs courses through me.

“Now, now, Lightning Bug, we don’t have time for these dramatics. You don’t even want to know what I had to do to make this happen.”

I lift my head, taking her in. Her long, flowing dress beneath the apron; her face, sunlit despite the shadowy dark outside the windows, lined with years of laughter. She opens her arms in invitation, and I clamber into them hungrily.

“How? How is this possible? Where are we? What is this place? It’s all wrong here,” I say, unable to hide the despair in my voice.

She nods against the top of my head, but her words are cryptic. “There’s so much you’ve yet to learn about the world. About yourself.” I hardly care that her words sound like nonsense. All I can do is breathe her in.

Lavender and vanilla and wintergreen like white willow bark rubbed between your fingers.

“But—but—you’re… you’re—”

“Dead?” she finishes.