Page 40 of Bound By Fury

And the wives, sometimes they worse. They hire us, they welcome us, they watch us. All with a smile. “We the same,” they say, but they never mean it.

The elders say we stayed ’cause of all that power. That it’s our job to protect it. That we are of it. But after everything that happened with Lucille and Dorothea, things have started to change. And the power changing, too.

Time has worn away the lines we drew between our kinds. The hunters grow in number by the year.

I ain’t told no one about the dreams I been having. About what I seen through Mama Mae. About her life, and her premonition in the tunnels. But I know it’s true. Something big is coming. Something bad.

Sometimes I think we cursed—us witches crafted in the image of the stars.

All we have is the stories we tell each other.

Mama used to say this all started way back. Back before they put us on boats and brung us here. Back before this fire roared in our veins.

It all started with the Mother. And the Mother has a plan.

We meeting tonight to talk about what we should do. Mama’s been crying all the time. She think I can’t hear her, but the walls are thin.

She ain’t even turn her head when I told her Dorothea is missing.

Third girl to disappear this year.

I’ve tried to talk to Lucille about it, but I think she avoiding me too.

Maybe if they got they revenge for Dory killing that white man, that will be enough.

But I know deep down nothing will ever be enough.

Not so long as we still have something worth taking.

—Nora

FIFTEEN

CHEERS RING OUT FROM THE students around me, and a group of shirtless guys with blue paint slathered all over their chests pop streamer cans that shoot out from the fountain’s edge in streaks of gold and white.

Somehow everyone else seems to have gotten the memo about tonight, and they mingle with their friends, neon glow sticks wrapped around their wrists and hanging from their necks.

I push through the crowd in search of a familiar face.

Thankfully it’s not long before I hear the muffled sound of my name. “Harper?”

Daisy is standing on a bench with her arms up and waving around wildly, Sam grinning beside her.

I squeeze past a group of what looks like freshman girls, their knees bent and heads smushed together for a picture.

“Hey!” I say as I finally stand by their sides. “What the hell is going on?”

Daisy opens her mouth to respond when gentle fingers tickle the back of my neck. “Nice jammies,” someone murmurs from behind me.

I turn and find Lucas eyeing me playfully, his mouth quirked to the side.

Heat spreads across my chest as I look down at myself. I’m wearing an oversized Halloween Horror Nights T-shirt I’ve DIYed into a V-neck and plaid sleep shorts stained with a rainbow of old paint. “Uh, thanks.” I cringe, crossing my arms over my chest.

He frowns. “Hey, I was being serious,” he says. “It’s cute that you didn’t get all dressed up like everyone else. I don’t see the point—we can barely see each other in the dark anyway.”

“I had no idea what was happening,” I admit. “I thought there was a fire or something.”

Daisy grabs my hand. “Don’t worry about it,” she laughs. “You’re not the only one!” She points out a few students who look just as lost and disheveled as I feel. “It’s a tradition, kinda like school-sanctioned hazing, I guess. It’s something we do every year, a remnant of when the school was first founded—you’ll see.”