On The Bound

025. Nothing I can do / A total eclipse of the heart

Misty ignores that. "Lottie, your team needs you-"

"When will you understand that you're useless, Misty?" Sade interrupts, her voice sharp and glinting like a rusted wire. She steps closer, her boots creaking against the wood. "You could die tonight and everyone would be fine. No one needs you, so you try to help Lottie and Coach Ben to find purpose."

If Sade had a choice, Shauna or Misty would have been the ones gutted inside of a brewing stew. Better meat. More muscle. Less memory. Things would be cleaner if they were gone.

"I'll make sure that she finishes." She purses her lips and pushes the blonde away, her fingers leaving faint crescent moons in Misty's ivory arm. "Fuck off, or I'll really push you down the stairs this time and make sure you don't get up."

The teenager gives them a faux smile, one full of mirth and venom, a serpent chewing on tinsel. Then she vanishes down the ladder, disappearing into the house's throat. Once she's officially gone, Sade replaces Misty's seat beside Lottie, her hands interlacing with the injured girl's, like twigs desperate to root in winter.

"This place—it's not shelter, Charlotte." Her voice is dislocated from her brain. A strange calmness fills her lungs. "You had a bad feeling ever since we came."

"What do we do?" Lottie asks. her pupils seem to dissolve into something holier. Emptier.

A single idea shadows Sade's skull. It wears antlers made of lightning and a jaw stitched shut by rosary beads. Outside, the trees moan like choirboys dragged into confession. The sky, a bruised cloth, swells with snow and silence. Somewhere deep beneath them, past the insulation, the dirt, the old foundations of this house—something is listening. Always hungry. Something that doesn't care about God.

"I can ask It. Guide them. We have to make them see, Lottie."

The shadows bend beneath her breath. The idea, or place of It—a nameless something they all refused to define—had once been a foreign. But now, even the wind in the rafters sounds like prayer.

"I can ask It," Sade repeats, her voice curling like smoke from an unseen incense. "What it wants. Who."

Lottie nods, small, like a cathedral crumbling brick by brick under snowfall. She trusts her girlfriend. This is what needs to be done. In the dark, something shifts. The shadows twitch at their feet—ink bleeding in reverse. Her hand tightens around Lottie's, and her bones are so cold she feels like glass filled with ocean water.

"Show us who you want. Provide us with light." She chants into the darkness. The air in the attic curdles like sour milke. Smells and colors come rushing.

Sade closes her eyes and imagines the woods outside: tall black trees like apostles, frozen in supplication. Jasmine flowers. Shauna? The snow, once pure, now clotted with antlers and antiphons. A deer half-sunk in the lake—its ribs a chorus of broken hallelujahs. God, maybe, is a thing with claws. Maybe He speaks in gnawed marrow and shaking branches. Lottie?

Sound turns tactile. The cold of the attic walls begins to taste like the sun. Laura Lee? It has her, already. She opens her mouth and begins to speak. Maybe He's never left this place. Not words, not really. Grief wrapped in liturgy. A shrieking silver that tastes like burnt sugar and snow. Taissa? Her voice is a jaw unhinged for communion.

The next smell is the stench of gunpowder. Natalie? Her breath hums in her ears like the opening of a requiem. Violent brown that crackles like winter fire. Wet and gurgling. Shauna? The name tastes like copper in her mouth. It paints the air in shades of burnt ochre, rust, molasses.

The Wilderness stains the floor with ink. A clear response. Sade feels her heart lurch.

Shauna? A scream she doesn't remember making drips down her spine. It feels like hail against her skin. They strike like ash-embossed crosses.