Page 149 of Bound By Fury

“Didn’t you love me? Didn’t you care if I would be okay?” I roar at her ash-turned body buried beneath the roots of the tree.

My thoughts are not rational, and my words come out broken, slivered by my wheezing breaths. “You can’t abandon me like this! How am I supposed to do this without you? I never wanted this!” My throat is raw and burning.

“You left me! You left me here to suffer! You left me to deal with this all alone!” I don’t stop the words before they come tumbling out of me. “I hate you!”

Drooping forward, I press my forehead against the wet ground.

It doesn’t matter if she thought we had more time. It doesn’t matter if her death was some cruel twist of fate, some unfortunate coincidence destined to damn me. There’s no grace left in the shattered remains of my heart.

I shake uncontrollably against the storm that rages within and outside of me, flooding me until I’m choking and dizzy and gasping for breath. When I have nothing left to give, the rain slows, and my eyes close against my will, complete and total exhaustion overcoming me.

Minutes or hours later, the sound of birds singing rouses me from my sleep. I am filled with an everlasting cold. Like a switch has flipped. Like a peg has slotted into place.

When I raise my hands to shield my eyes from the rising sun, I find that I am bereft of feeling. For once my mind is quiet. My eyes drift to the nearby sycamore. Four red birds tilt their heads in unison.

Four generations.

Four Cardinals.

Gone is the insecurity of yesterday, the flood of emotion that threatened to end me. In its place stands something real. Something solid for me to hold on to. In the darkness of my sleep one thing rang true, a single shred of light puncturing the oblivion of my mind.

Tomorrow is the Centennial Night of Remembrance.

One hundred years since the new Twelve buried our magic beneath the soil of what is now Lee Chapel.

I will not let their deaths go to waste.

My lips pull back against my teeth.

I will protect the Celestial Cusp and the lines of power running beneath Black Mountain.

I will save us from the rot slowly taking over the land.

I will right the imbalance. Just as the Daughter foresaw.

I don’t care what he said, or that he told me to run, or that there’s countless summers and an ocean of unresolved feelings between us. Malachi Matsoukas has been created to kill me.

But he isn’t going to kill me.

Because I’m going to kill him first.

FIFTY-ONE

FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS WE have been hunted. Both witches and Black women alike. For hundreds of years we have made sacrifice after sacrifice. Sacrifices of dignity, of strength, of love. Of blood—to a ravening river.

Too many years ago to count, the Mother saved our people with a sacrifice.

One hundred years ago, the new Twelve did the same.

Tomorrow I will make a sacrifice of my own.

A sacrifice that will have to justify every sacrifice that has come before me.

If I am the Cardinal, if I am to bring power back to the Lee Valley Witches, if I am to restore the celestial balance—whatever that means—then Malachi must die. Because there is no world in which his hunter instincts don’t track me to the ends of the earth. And besides, I know now that I’ve run out of time. If I don’t reach my catalyst by night’s end, one hundred years after twelve witches took their own lives for this exact moment, then everything they’ve done, every pain I’ve felt and caused over the last few months, will have been for nothing.

And though I have no proof, something tells me that watching the light fade from those evergreen eyes will be the thing that finally pushes me over the edge. It will be the thing that tips the scales of my magic. It will free our power from the bargain the new Twelve made and bring forth the rest of the Daughter’s vision.

The four Cardinals and the Great War.