Page 92 of Bound By Fury

Behind the figure, movement catches my eye, the edges of my vision nearly black.

A savior?

Finally, finally, the stars have answered me?

But no, when the image comes into focus, I’m certain.

There is no savior here.

Dotted among the bushes—skirts that brush the ground. Faces of sinew and tattered tendon. Bones where flesh and blood should be. Twelve corpse-like ghouls peering at me from half-corporeal forms, flickering in and out.

From them flows an ether, shimmering like oil slick through the air, coating me and the space that gaps my body and my attacker.

“I’m sorry,” the cloak growls.

And then there’s a sharp slash against my arm.

I buck from the pain, my shoulder blades scraping against the ground. Something wet pools in my hand.

My thoughts are impossible to grasp. My arms have gone limp at my sides.

How long has it been? Merely seconds? Minutes? Time stretches like putty, malleable. Unstable.

Curious, these apparitions. It seems they want me dead.

Lightning flashes against the night sky, clouds rippling in a way that defies what’s natural. Bizarre, I think, as I realize that my clothes, my face, my hair are all damp, the fog around us thickening, gathering in slithering tendrils, wetting us down to the bone, the monster’s cloak clinging to their skin.

“I don’t understand,” they mutter from above me. They’re twisting a lid onto a long vial filled with ruby liquid.

This whole time I’ve thought that my connection to the Lee Valley Witches was familial. In the depths of me I considered it an honor to descend from them. I felt a duty to uncover the truth about what happened to the burned school.

But that’s the thing about people. About love and duty and obligation. It’s a lesson I should have learned twelve years ago.

You can’t trust anyone. Not even your own family. Because they always leave. Always.

And it turns out there might be something worse than leaving.

Leaving me to die.

I don’t know how they’re doing it, but these dead witches are suppressing my magic. Whatever power is tingeing the air with the sharp scent of a freshly struck match, it doesn’t belong to me. At least, not quite.

Stars explode like fireworks in my mind. I can feel my power—whatever little bit of it still simmering at my core—slipping away.

When the world finally fades, I hear my name from a distance.

The pressure leaves my chest.

A choked gasp, and the echo of retreating feet.

In the end, I am all alone. There is no light. No tunnel. No warm embrace of peace.

Only sorrow. Regret. And the still-simmering rage, stoked by the fact that wherever I am, Gigi isn’t here to welcome me.

Like I said.

Everybody leaves.

OCTOBER 26, 1926