Page 16 of Bound By Fury

I hiccup between sobs, and she smiles softly, holding me at arm’s length, her thumbs wiping away the deluge of tears.

“I am dead, but I’m not gone, not yet anyway. There’s too much I still gotta do first.” She pulls me to her chest again. “Besides, women like us, we’re impossible to get rid of.”

When she pulls back to look at my face, I try to return her smile, but it’s wobbly.

“Anyhoo, let’s get down to business.” Her lips pull into a serious, flat line. “I’ve thought a lot about what to say to you because there’s so much I simply can’t. The other side doesn’t play when it comes to messing with the hands of fate. But listen to me, bug. You are something special. Made from the stars, you know that. There is no one like you, and there are people who see your light and want to snuff it out. But you can’t let ’em.”

I want to ask what she means by that, but she holds up her hand, silencing me.

“Listen to me, you must find the fated heir. I know I told you not to go to Black Mountain Academy. I know that I told you it’s a dangerous place, but shocking as it may seem, I wasn’t always right about things while I was alive.”

I chuckle despite my tears.

“There are things I know now… things that—” she sighs, wiping her hand down her face in frustration. “I can’t—I don’t know how to do this.”

“Do what?” I ask, grabbing her hands, still weathered with age and adorned with silver rings on nearly every finger.

“Be a ghost to you,” she whispers, and my heart sinks, another hiccup shaking my chest. “I’m always with you, even when you can’t feel it. There’s a whole other world out there beyond the veil. But it’s a world with its own rules. I wish—”

She drops my hands, squares her shoulders, looks me in the eye. “There are so many things I could never tell you, not the way I wanted to. Your mother wouldn’t let me, you know that. And I don’t blame her. I don’t blame her one bit, and you shouldn’t either. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. The core of everything you need to know is already inside you.

“But the rest of the truth, it’s everywhere. Woven into the estate, into the walls and the floors and the garden. It’s buried beneath us now, this whole place hewn from the traces of it. The truth is a part of you, as it was me. The truth is merely waiting for you to go out and find it.

“The beginning is right where I left it. Alongside this.” She points to my chest, her nail pinging off the tip of the gold pendant.

My mind is turning this information over at warp speed, and nothing she’s saying makes any sense.

“Our history, it’s buried in this town. You are this town. Find yourself. Find the truth. Feel it. Feel it all. I know sometimes you think your emotions are your weakness, but you’re wrong. They’re your greatest strength.

“But hear me when I say this: Don’t tell your mama ’bout none of this stuff, she can’t handle it. Not since they took my baby. She ain’t made for this world.” She places her hands on either side of my face. “But you, you are the world—you are the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the lightning in the night sky. I love you, bug, more than anything. Just know that it was all for you. All of it. You are the key. You are fated.”

I sniffle, tears streaming down my face and over her shaking hands. She’s blurring at the edges, and I reach out, grabbing at her apron, holding on to her for as long as possible. She places a kiss on the bridge of my nose between my eyes.

“This ain’t gonna be easy. I wish more than anything I could help you. But it’s too late for me now. I thought we had more time. I never meant for it to happen this way. So I’m giving you permission. Because now that I’m gone, there ain’t no other way to cut it. Go to Black Mountain Academy. Follow your heart. Your gut. Be brave. But more than anything, be careful.”

The shadows from outside are beginning to bleed into the corners of the room. They stretch and reach, gobbling up every ounce of color. Cracks and mold spreading in their wake.

“Oh dear,” she whispers. “This is too soon, I ain’t ready yet…”

“No no no no no no—” I say, backing up and trying to take her with me, gripping her sleeves.

Faster now, the shadows devour the room. They snake up her legs, everywhere they touch spoiling, melting into a toxic ooze. She’s nearly all bones before she’s nothing at all, merely a whisper in my ear, a final, parting message: “Your destiny knows you by heart and soul,” so soft now I can barely hear it, “but it lies and has teeth. Beware the hun—”

I sit up gasping in bed, a single, lonely tear swimming down my face and darkening a spot on my nightgown.

Despite the intense confusion the dream leaves me with, there’s a part of me that feels a modicum of peace, perhaps a by-product of seeing my grandmother after I was convinced she would be gone forever. But the peace is marred by the fact that, like the cardinal during the funeral flitting back to the trees, dream-Gigi couldn’t stay.

And somehow complicating it all further, I want to believe it was really her giving me a message from the other side. That it was Gigi confirming what I’ve known all along. I have to go to Black Mountain Academy, even though I always promised I wouldn’t.

But the other stuff—the witches, the old lady with overly keen eyes and bruising fingers, the cloaked men with their seemingly sentient shadows consuming everything in their wake… Shaking, I lean over and snatch the brochure for Black Mountain Academy off my bedside table.

The photo of the front gates is printed in full color. And there it is, woven in wrought iron and bronze, in the eyes of each Mountain Wolf: a calling, or a warning.

The symbol from my dream. From the necklace gifted by my grandmother. A triangle top devoid of a bottom. A red gem tucked in the middle. I’ve known what it is from the moment I laid eyes on it.

It’s the astrological symbol for the cardinal zodiac signs—Aries, Libra, Capricorn, and my own sign, Cancer.

But beyond that, how it connects to me, to the school—well, I’ve got no idea. Gigi always said the stars have all the answers, that they guide us, push us toward our fate whether we want them to or not.