Page 64 of Bound By Fury

Lucas bumps his shoulder with mine. “Not surprised at all to see that you still believe in that kind of thing, though!” he laughs. “You guys should have seen Harper growing up! She and Kai, they had all these crazy ideas about magic and dragons and stuff. Harper was always telling us these stories her grandmother used to tell her…,” he trails off, his face taking on a sort of reverence that makes my stomach knot.

My fingers graze the edge of my golden pendant. “Yeah.” I force a chuckle. “It’s a lot easier to believe in that kind of thing as a kid. But still… don’t you want magic to be real, even just a little? Don’t you want anything to be possible?”

Lucas cocks his head as he considers me, his eyes searching mine for something, and I search his back, trying to parse out the expression on his face. He doesn’t say anything, just reaches over to wrap my hand in his.

He turns to Sam. “Can you believe these two?” He gestures to Daisy and me, shaking his head conspiratorially before turning back to me.

“You know what, I take it back. I do hope magic is real. I mean, who wouldn’t want a piece of that?” The smile on his face is soft and genuine, the scar above his lip shining in the beam of sunlight that floats over our table.

Daisy and Sam clear their throats dramatically, ripping us from each other’s eyes.

Lucas turns back to the group. “Anyway.” He shifts in his seat. “I came over here to ask y’all if you were planning on coming to my party down at Hanging Rock? Banks, my campaign manager, is throwing it in honor of my presidential inauguration after the homecoming game.” He clarifies for me, “I was elected at the end of last year.”

Sam asks, “When’s the game?” At the same time, I say, “Hanging Rock…”

“Two weeks. Homecoming is always the first Friday of October,” Lucas answers Sam.

“Hanging Rock is this beautiful spot down past the chapel and into the forest. It has amazing views, and the teachers never bother to trek all the way out there to catch us,” Daisy says.

“I mean, they have to know we party out there. But they obviously don’t care,” Sam adds.

I nod. “I remember it from when I was a kid. Got in trouble once for trying to climb the rock.” I laugh at their concerned faces. “It’s not like I was by myself!” I say, holding up my hands. “Kai was there too! I made him help me.”

Lucas shakes his head. “Oh yeah! That was the summer we met, right? Wait, that’s kind of crazy.”

Daisy, who had seemed to be feeling much better a few moments ago, now looks a little drained, like she’s ready to take a nap. Rubbing her eyes as she takes a couple swigs of ginger-lemon Olipop to perk herself up, she says, “We should totally go!”

I push down my nostalgia and lean in to the voice of reason. I think about what happened to Fiona. “I don’t know…”

Sam shrugs, mouth full of cold fries. “We’ve gone to Hanging Rock plenty of times and never had any issues.”

“What do you say?” Lucas asks, sliding his arm around my shoulders.

I roll my eyes. “I guess we could go for a little bit.”

His teeth graze his bottom lip, his mouth quirking to the side. “Good.”

Turning my face away from his, I press my fingers to the corner of my twitching mouth as I try to hide the warmth in my cheeks. Daisy pretends to gag.

Lucas’s hand slides down my back as his lips hover at the shell of my ear. “It’ll be just like old times.”

TWENTY-THREE

DEATH. DEATH. DEATH.

I can’t get the image of the last tarot card out of my head. Or the way Daisy’s face paled when she pulled it. I don’t care if she needs more practice or if she claims that it wasn’t accurate, the entire weekend I’ve felt like something dark has been hovering over me. That increasingly incessant voice always mumbling unintelligibly. I wonder sometimes if it’s the stars finally calling to me.

That night I went back to the chapel, this time making sure no one was following me. I used bobby pins according to the wikiHow article, and after some trial and error, the door creaked open slowly, an overwhelming but strangely familiar plume of rotting, mildewy stench hitting me in the face.

Past the threshold of the door was a set of stairs. But when I leaned over the railing, the light from my phone illuminating the dark, I peered down into the depths of the stairwell only to find a seemingly endless spiral of steps. It was a void like an optical illusion.

I’m not an idiot. Every horror movie ever tells me that going down there is exactly how I die. That, or it’s how I find out this school is run by some ancient cult sacrificing students to an eldritch beast… and then I die.

But when I left the chapel, I swear I saw the reflection of eyes in the distance. Heard the shuffle of a second set of feet as I walked. Now I’m in the café, waiting on Missy to show for once. She’s ghosted our last three attempts at meeting up.

In history class Dr. Rogers has assigned our midterm: a research paper dissecting historical events specific to Western North Carolina. I flip through the pages of a few nonfiction books I borrowed from the library while I wait, but mostly my eyes just glaze over as my mind drifts to the night before, when I finally visited the observation deck on the roof of Maxwell.

It was eerie being up there all alone, my view of the mountain unobstructed. When I tilted the telescope toward the sky, I found myself breathless at the enormity of the universe. The stars glittering and luminous against the boundless dark.