Page 114 of Bound By Fury

A couple others stood as well. And soon the room turned to chaos.

“We can’t!” Mr. Ezechiel Clark yelled over everyone else. “When my granddaddy come to this land, it was to give us freedom so we could live our lives with the power bestowed upon our people by the Mother’s sacrifice. It became our duty to protect the lines here from wickedness. To see through the prophecy. But we can’t do that if we give it all up. That’s not how we gon’ get this done.

“Until recently, we ain’t have much problems. There was peace between our kinds even if it was fragile. They got their power from other covens, and the killings wasn’t so often. They got their licks in, we got ours back. But the scales have tipped. They ain’t playing by the old rules no more.”

“There has to be a reason,” another woman called. “The trees tell me they searching for something. Gotta be looking for the Cusp.”

In the back of my mind I could practically feel her. Mama Mae, huffing and puffing. Mad at the Mother, mad at me, mad at the stars for leading us here.

“Wait! Wait!” Sylvia Montgomery-Walker said, pulling to stand in a chair beside Ms. Lois. “We gotta think about this, y’all. Let Ms. Lois speak!”

Ms. Lois straightened out her shoulders, and I looked down at my belly. I patted it gently. I wondered if my baby could hear all this. What she was thinking about it all.

“The visions have come, just as the ancestors said they would.” Ms. Lois pointed at me. “She carries the way of the water!”

The sound of their gasps made me flinch. I backed up until I was against the wall, no care for the stains that would surely mark my dress.

“We have heard it, in the stories passed down from our mamas and our mamas’ mamas’ mamas… Never thought I’d live to see the day of the calling. Live to know of a future where balance is restored. But it’s coming. If we let it. This is a sacrifice; it is a burden; it is a bargain we cannot take lightly. But it is what we must do to save the future of our people. It is the only way!”

By the time she finished talking, she was shaking with power and sorrow and passion.

Nearly a dozen of us are already marked by the hunters. The sacrifice is coming whether we want it to or not. Nearly a dozen doomed to bloom pointed fruit, to sour on the tongues of monsters.

But not anymore.

It happened slow at first, and then all at once. The change. The way our shoulders dropped. Because we knew what she said was true.

Still, there were a few who remained defiant.

Lucille shot to her feet, face redder than I ever seen it before. She pointed a shaking finger at me, her teeth bared as she spoke.

“Liar!” She threw the word like a spear at my chest.

Behind her Odette Jones hugged herself real tight, her eyes bouncing between us.

It’d been a fortnight since she’d started to feel the sparks. Since she’d been marked, though she didn’t know who by. They rarely did.

Lucille had come knocking on our door not long after, first time she’d spoken to me since that day at the market.

“We gotta find who done it,” she cried. “And then we gotta kill him.”

But I’d known even then that we couldn’t. Odette would face the same fate as the others.

“We can’t kill him, Lucy,” I admonished, “You know that.”

“What’s another dead man?” she shouted. “I’ve done it once, I can do it again. I’d do anything to save Odie.” Lucille’s eyes darkened. “Anything.”

I was too stunned to speak.

All that time I’d thought Dorothea had been the one to kill that man, but I was wrong.

“But… what about Dory?” I’d whispered.

Lucille lifted her chin, shame trembling her lip. “It’s too late now.”

When I turned her away, when I told her we couldn’t find the hunter who marked Odette, when I refused to help her kill another man, she spat at my feet.

In the tunnels she looked like she’d do much worse to me if given the chance.