Page 25 of Bound By Fury

Is this what those witches felt when they were chanting into the fire?

I don’t know what to do with my hands. I want to wrap them around myself, but I don’t want to seem weak. I want to curl them into fists, but I don’t want to be taken as a threat. I want to sink into the ground and disappear. I want to scream until my throat bleeds, until the force of it rips me from the inside, my guts spilling out onto the floor.

The pink light streaming in from the large, paneled windows begins to dim. In the distance the gentle first murmuring of thunder vibrates through the room.

“Aggressive?” I whisper, cutting my eyes to the girl on the side. “Are your white-woman tears supposed to do something here?”

“Don’t tone police her!” the blond girl’s other friend yells.

“Seriously, Brit?” The milk carton girl hisses at the same time a deeper-than-I-remembered voice says, “Whoa,” and a firm hand lands on my shoulder.

The sound of his voice is a lit match against the gasoline pooling in my chest. Suddenly I am rage incarnate. I am nothing and no one. I am merely a feeling, a flare against an ever-black night.

The blonde turns to her friend and sneers. “You can’t keep saying shit like that!”

I refuse to look at him. I can’t look at him. Because whatever this—this power is building in my core, I can’t stop it. I’m afraid I’m going to combust and take everyone and everything with me.

A flash of lighting, and then thunder booms, eliciting shrieks from startled students.

This storm is moving impossibly fast.

My eyes are drawn to a figure at the back of the room, scarlet hair inching toward the door. My breathing is coming faster now. My thoughts are getting fuzzy. The sparks no longer tingle but stab—the pain is excruciating, begging me to release something. But I don’t know what it wants. I don’t know how to satiate it.

“Harper?” Lucas sounds a million miles away.

“Is she—are you okay?” the blonde asks, squinting at me like I might be feral or diseased. And maybe I am. Behind her, her two friends look afraid of me, even though I haven’t done anything.

The blonde keeps talking, but her voice fades as my vision tunnels.

The sparks stinging my arms grow, slithering through me. Bone deep, infiltrating my organs, filling me with the chaotic buzzing of a kicked hornet’s nest. It’s all too much. Too much static, too much pressure, too much grief, pain, and fury boiling in the very core of me.

Before that day outside Dawson’s, before my birthday, I was living my normal life, laid out by the river and minding my own business. It wasn’t amazing, but it was mine. Now I don’t know who or what I am. But that old me? She’s long gone.

Another flash of lightning floods the room so brightly, everything goes white before it goes dark, and I realize I am falling.

Down.

Down.

Down.

ELEVEN

ONE MINUTE THERE’S NOTHING, AND the next I’m staring into crystal-blue eyes framed by lashes the color of midnight.

“Ack!” I screech, scrambling back. “What the—”

His curly black hair fans out around his ears, and his lips pull across perfectly straight, blindingly white teeth, dimples tucked into either side of his light brown face. Details that I know as well as I know my own reflection despite the fact that he’s all shadow and the room has been plunged into darkness. “It’s good to see you too, Harps.”

Memories flash of hands soft against my hips, hesitant and questioning. Of lips barely brushing before being torn apart. Of blood splashed across my face like rain, and guilt thick enough to choke on.

“Where—why—how did you—” I stammer, my chest fluttering as I look at him, torn between relief and anger and the residual, gentle pangs of something sweeter than that.

“I think what you’re looking for is, ‘Hi, Lucas, so glad to see you again. Sorry I ghosted you all year and then enrolled in your school without telling you.’ ” There it is. That glittering light bouncing behind his eyes. His voice rumbles, the words curving at the end from a lifetime in Appalachia.

In a school full of Northern transplants, he sounds like home.

Still, my first feeling is indignation. I am not the one who ghosted them, they ghosted me. The second feeling is that I hate that I can’t help the smile that pulls at my lips. How am I supposed to stay mad at him when he looks at me like that?