Page 36 of Phoenix Academy: Madness

Just like my mother.

Her spirit stands in the circle with me, clear across on the other side. She's wearing the clothes she died in: a hunter's outfit, one with dozens of tiny cuts across the top and pants where the Heretic bled her dry as I watched, helpless. There's dried blood all over her arms and legs, but not her face, which he spared.

I can still hear her screams. And then, the soft, terrible sobbing sounds she made as her voice, and her energy, ran out.

Right before she died.

"Oh, my darling little girl."

She's watching me, a strange, fevered look in her eyes. Though she has the same face she had when she was alive, the expression in it right now is like nothing I've ever seen before. In life she was never that hungry—or that beat down.

Around the lump in my throat, I tell her, "I miss you."

"I miss you too, Little Deer," she says, her voice skipping over her nickname for me from childhood. "I want to be with you again one day. But before that can happen, there's something I need to tell you. The spirits are—"

A howling sound, so violent and terrible that it sends my pulse skyrocketing, interrupts her before she can finish her sentence. It's the voice of a thousand mournful creatures reaching out from the beyond, desperate to break through the finality of death and return to life.

They scream. Oh, how they scream. And gnash their teeth, and scratch their claws against me. I can feel them rip at my clothes and skin and hair, taking little bits of me as they rush past me at a thousand miles an hour.

I try to see my mother through their ghoulish see-through bodies, but there's no sign of her in the endless cacophony. I'm the eye of a hurricane, the middle of a storm, and I'm going to be rent to pieces by it.

Then. A moment of silence, a cessation in the chaos. I can feel my body stitch itself back together, my phoenix powers working overtime to heal cuts and bruises the spirits left on my body. My side aches with each breath, and I'm certain that I fractured a rib.

I should go now, run out of the rune circle while I have the chance, before the spirits get another hankering for blood and tear me in two. I don't even know how many lives I have left as a phoenix—and if they kill me here, in between the mortal realm and the spirit realm, I might just die permanently no matter what.

But my childish, traitorous heart is desperate to see my mother again. To hear her voice one more time. To reach across an impossible divide and drag her back to me, whole and healthy, vibrant and alive.

I wasn't done learning from her. Being loved by her. Protected by her.

I need to see her again. One more moment, one more piece of wisdom, one last I love you—

Stepping towards the other end of the rune circle, I ignore the way the spirits chortle and howl, fingers eager to dig into my flesh and drag me into their realm. Gritting my teeth, I tell myself: one more step. Then another.

You can make it.

There's always a way forward.

So I lift my foot, and swing it forward—

Before I can set it down, before the mad, slobbering horde of ghouls can have a taste of me, I feel my doom.

A set of impossibly strong jaws closes around my ankle.

Blood pricks to the surface where teeth dig in.

There's a break in the spirits, and I see my mother. Just a few feet away. Barely a breath.

I'm dragged back.

Away from her.

I open my mouth to scream, twist my leg to try to loosen the grip, angry and afraid. The strong, familiar jaw is relentless, though. It pulls me out of the circle with a feral shake of the head.

Falling to the ground, I sob in pain and anger as the spirit realm is closed to me.

Beside me is a wolf I know far too well by now.

David.

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