Page 59 of Bound By Fury

My fingers graze the edges, and I yank it out, unfolding it against my lap, running my hands along the seams to flatten it.

There she is, in a black-and-white photo of her own, staring right at me.

I trace the bold letters of her name with my nail.

Two or three missing or dead girls isn’t a pattern, but it’s not not a pattern either.

It looks like I’m not the only one with a mysterious connection to the history of Earnest and Black Mountain Academy.

I pull up the picture I took of Gigi protesting in the yearbook.

Fiona Beaumont has got some explaining to do.

Wherever she is.

TWENTY-ONE

THE DAYS AT BLACK MOUNTAIN Academy are enchanted with the ability to pass like molasses during class but like lightning the rest of the time. At night I wander the halls of my dorm like a ghost, the creaking floors and freezing draft the only company for my insomnia. I don’t acknowledge the darkening bags under my eyes or the cracks forming at the corners of my lips. I ignore the ever-more present static, the buzzing, the unintelligible whispers in my head.

Sometimes I think I see something out of the corner of my eye. A flash of white that disappears the second I turn my head. Perhaps she is following me, that ghoul from the woods. But if she is, I have no idea what she wants. So I smile when I should smile and laugh when my friends laugh and never, not for a single second, stop thinking about my purpose here. About Fiona and Gigi and the witches. About Malachi and Lucas and secrets, and how all this feels connected, yet I have no way of proving it.

In the afternoons I sit in the corner booth at Beantown, the campus café tucked into the side of the student center, a million tabs open on my laptop. But no amount of research is yielding anything worthwhile.

I read and reread my birth chart, I map out the moon phases for the next two years, and I reserve a time slot to use the observation deck on the roof of Maxwell, hoping to see some answers among the stars. I fall down a rabbit hole of online communities of “witches,” which are mainly full of middle-aged white women who claim to have some vague “indigenous princess warrior” ancestry with crystal shopping addictions.

But really, I’m looking for Fiona.

She’s not on any of the usual sites, which is odd given, well, reality, so I scour the lists of followers for the cheerleaders and football team, and when that doesn’t work, I click over to the school’s Tumblr account which hasn’t been updated in several years. I’m absently scrolling their following list, my vision going blurry from boredom and too much blue light, when something catches my eye.

A curious-sounding username with a default avatar.

Moonshine.n.magic is a faceless, seemingly anon blog with a deep purple background and stars that float down the screen like rain. The last post is from October of last year, right before Fiona went missing.

sometimes it’s like the stars are talking to me. i feel crazy ’cause it’s clear i’m the only one who can hear them. i’m paranoid, too, the longer i’m here. the bell tolls every hour, and every hour i nearly jump out of my skin. it’s hard to keep it all in, but i know it’s not safe to say anything.

they’re watching me.

i can feel their eyes like needles on my skin, stabbing until i’m all broken flesh and bloody.

the shadows, they follow me too.

i’ve never missed my mama, not even a little bit, but now i wonder if she felt this all like i do.

i went into town the other day and heard some rumblings of a coven downriver. i’m thinking i might try to make contact. prove to myself i’m not the only one like this.

prove that the voices in my head are real.

someone is calling for me. i just gotta figure out how to answer.

I scroll down, and there’s post after post of similar musings.

before mama left, she’d do something she called ’lachian magic. she’d settle a bowl of water in a ring of herbs and berries and tap the sides. she’d read futures in the ripples and reflections. she’d brew up tonics and claim they would cure a cold, grind up poultices for our wounds, whisper incantations into charms and stuff them in our pockets…

but she was wrong. she wasn’t doing magic. at least not the kind of magic i feel tearing me apart.

My thoughts whir a thousand miles per second, my eyes scanning faster than my mind can process. Whoever this poster is, I can’t ignore the similarities between their story and my own. But it’s not until I find a post that causes my whole body to go numb that I’m certain.

my mama used to tell me stories about this lady called the Mother—