Chapter Forty-Nine Nature must obey necessity #2
“Wraiths can control the weather?” I screamed, struggling to stand.
“They can control spaces in the environment in which they passed. For Luke, that’s here. See how only this area is touched by his rage?”
Just as she’d said, farther in the swamp, the trees and the earth and everything else were calm while here in the clearing, a near monsoon was beginning to form.
The wind howled and the clouds churned in violent tremors as rain drenched the clearing, pounding against our bodies like we were more earth than flesh.
It’d been like this in the swamp waters, when Kasem had become his wraith form.
His powers had manifested through sorrow.
But Luke was rage, all-consuming, broken and vengeful.
I crawled to the closest tree for safety while Kasem searched for Luke’s relic, tearing through weeds and digging through the ground, the rain soaking every inch of him too. I closed my eyes, channeling my powers through the tree, searching in time for an answer.
The vision came in flashes, like strobe lights steeped in images.
Luke running through the swamp like the others, and then two crows tackling him, laughing and shrieking as they stripped him of his silver shirt and jeans.
They left him in his boxers and tied Sigma’s silver rope around his wrists and ankles.
Something fell to the ground with a soft thud, and then one of the crows pushed Luke.
Just before Luke’s piercing screams cut through the swamp, there was a sharp crack.
His glasses. When the crow had pushed Luke he’d fallen, and the glasses broke against Luke’s skin, slicing his flesh like an omen of what was to come.
In the present, something sharp and thin pierced my palm. I pulled myself back from my vision and I picked it up: one of the shattered lenses of his glasses.
“I found it!” I screamed. Or at least a piece of his relic.
But the frames were shattered, utterly destroyed. Unrepairable.
“Use your powers,” Angelica urged, fighting to reach Luke, struggling against the onslaught of the wind and the storm and the leaves and the branches.
My nerves were on fire. I trembled as I gathered the muddy shards of Luke’s broken lenses. Vivian was trying to speak to Luke and calm him.
“Don’t forget who you are, Luke. Don’t let your pain and your grief strip you of your humanity.”
But he raged and raged in a violent fury.
Beside me, Kasem watched everything unfold with an empty gaze, his fist clenched, lost in his mind, in the horrors of his own thoughts.
“Help me,” I said to him. “Kasem, I need to rewind time so the lenses are restored.”
He blinked back to reality and relief washed over me.
“What do you need me to do?”
“If I can repair the lenses—”
“Which you can,” he said, the words both a question and a tentative show of encouragement. I appreciated his belief in me, as uncertain as it was. That was more belief than I had that I could fix this.
“It’s going to take a lot of energy for me to do it,” I continued.
“Someone will need to reunite the lenses with Luke’s remains.
” This wasn’t just rewinding time like I had with Kasem’s wound.
This meant unraveling the threads of it so that each shard of the lens found its match and soldered together.
Honey grabbed Angelica, helping her stand as the two approached Luke, getting closer to retrieving his finger. But Kasem was the closest between the two of us.
“Get on my back.”
“What?”
“There are alligators here,” he said. “If you pass out after channeling, I won’t leave you.”
I won’t leave you. As in, it wasn’t a question for him. It was a decision. He wouldn’t try to reunite the relic with Luke’s remains if it meant I would be left exposed and in danger.
I spotted yellow eyes circling us, emerging from the swamp.
Silver scales glistened, and I recognized the creature as the same one that had killed Luke.
But, seeing it now in the light, it was apparent that the rays of sunlight reflected off its skin, not like a human or a ghost. A wraith, just like Honey had said.
“He guards the swamp and kills trespassers.”
“And you knew all about this. You let the others rush knowing a murderous wraith was haunting here?”
Kasem looked guilt-ridden, but defiance was an undercurrent in his voice.
“Sianna, everyone knows the dangers of rush in some way,” he said.
“The board of trustees. The president. The professors, the alumni who pay for the kids to go here. Ivy House. Rose. Sigma. Theta. All of Greek life. Everyone here except the Poppies. Maybe they don’t know the curse exists, but they know there’s something wrong in this school, something twisted and tied to its past. That’s why the Board works so hard to bury it.
To them, appealing to the worst ilk in our society instead of honoring Westfield’s true abolitionist heritage is just collateral damage.
It’s the sinister price they have to pay to court donors.
And you all, and my family too, are the sacrifice.
“You’re completely removed from the history and horrors of Westfield but still want to buy in.
You’re not a legacy, you have roots elsewhere, so you think these four years will be just about graduating with a degree from a prestigious university and that all of the horror and pain will be worth it just for a chance to call yourself a Westfield lily.
You’re what keeps the engines running. Your blood, your sweat, your tears.
I tried to warn you. Even Luke. That night, I told him to leave.
I told him that Sigma was dangerous, and rush could lead to accidents.
Even when the other crows were hazing him, even when I tried to stop them, he told me I was ruining his chances of getting into Sigma.
He fought me off. Me. Not them. So I stood and watched him sacrifice everything to become a Sigma.
And if he’d lived, he’d probably be more welcomed to my so-called brotherhood than I’ve ever been. ”
As Kasem spoke, as I held the fragments of glass, rage sparked within me, spilling into my magic as a vision unfurled in my mind.
But instead of getting sucked into the vision, I channeled all of it, guidng the currents of the past at my fingertips. The cowrie bracelet and my scar gleamed bright, and in my palms, the glass lens rewound, slowly piecing itself together to the moment before being crushed by Luke.
“You’ve done it,” Kasem whispered. He beamed at me.
He hadn’t smiled at me like that since the night in the shed.
Angry tears wet my lashes. He was so hot and cold that it was hard to breathe sometimes.
It took every semblance of my self-control not to drop the lens and run into his arms or shake some sense into him.
I handed it to Kasem. It’d taken nearly all of my energy to reconstruct the relic.
Yet my mind felt clearer than ever. In the span of these weeks, I finally felt progress, like my powers that had unraveled since the night of the stabbing were being pieced back together.
Kasem steadied me as we drew near the worst of the storm.
Luke roared. A gust of wind tore the bark off a tree, and it hurtled in our direction.
Kasem yanked us to the ground as the bark careened over our heads, slamming into a nearby tree with a violent crack, an onslaught of branches and stones ricocheting in our direction. Kasem held me tighter, shielded me from the worst of it.
Inches away, Angelica and Honey trekked toward us, holding Luke’s remains.
When, finally, the relic was reunited with him, Vivian and Angelica started chanting, whispering words that slipped beneath the sound barrier itself.
I channeled my powers too, concentrating on separating the soul trapped in the relic.
“Honey. Kasem,” Angelica said. “Theta and Sigma are tied to his condition. He died because he wanted be a part of your kinship. You will need to help him cross over.”
Honey pulled a strand of her hair from her head and placed it over Luke’s finger. Kasem bit his fingernail, placing the shard in the pile they’d formed at the center of the circle.
Angelica’s and Vivian’s chanting grew louder. Beads of sweat prickled my brow as I channeled the memories between Honey, Kasem, and Luke and Sigma and Theta that night. It was painful channeling all that torment and hate and anger trapped inside Luke’s spirit from that moment.
The storm reached a crescendo and Luke screamed, covering his ears and dropping to the ground. Yet the more they chanted and the more I channeled, the softer the storm became until suddenly, time settled at my fingertips, pooling like water.
I let it wash over the relic and the bonds that tied it, and slowly, the clearing became quiet again.
Luke’s form was no longer corporeal. It was translucent, gleaming in the sun, melding with the rays that streaked into the swamp as if he was made of stardust. Nathan had become this too, when Vivian had emerged with him in the swamp.
While Theta practiced banishing wraiths to the realm of the dead, I realized that the ?nhye were able to restore their connection with the realm of the living.
There was a calmness to everything, a quiet sense of clarity. Luke glanced at Vivian, Angelica, and Kasem, and then to me.
“Thank you,” he whispered. He turned to Honey and Kasem, the anger bright in his eyes but dimmer than before.
“The owner of the weapon resides in the realm of the living. He is a wraith, yet not quite that. As I have no dominion to speak on those on the other side, I cannot answer your question. But can I leave a message?”
“Tell us,” Angelica said.
Honey and Kasem nodded for him to continue.
“Until the true history of Westfield is recognized,” Luke said, “then we will all be victim to the past.”
He pressed his eyes shut, a calmness coming over him. And then slowly, his ghostly form disappeared.