Bound - The Primori Academy

Him Again

It wasn't a reflection.

The curtains were still drawn across the bedroom window, softening the afternoon sunlight until only thin ribbons of gold slipped around the edges of the fabric. The room lay wrapped in gentle shadow, far too dim for the polished steel to catch the light on its own.

Yet the dagger glowed.

At first the shimmer was so faint Catalina wondered if exhaustion was playing tricks on her eyes. She blinked once, expecting the illusion to disappear, but instead the light strengthened, flowing beneath the surface of the blade as though it had always belonged there.

Colors drifted through the steel with quiet elegance, melting into one another in ways she had never seen before. They weren't the bright, familiar colors of a rainbow. They were deeper than that, richer somehow, each shade carrying an almost impossible brilliance that seemed to exist beyond ordinary light.

The sight stole the breath from her lungs.

It was the same light.

The light that had poured from her hands in the parking lot.

The light that had driven the creature back.

The light that had erased wounds no human body should have survived.

Before she could pull away, the dagger pulsed beneath her fingers.

Once.

Then again.

The rhythm was slow and deliberate, less like an object reacting to her touch than a heartbeat answering another heartbeat. Warmth spread through the leather-wrapped hilt into her palm, climbing steadily along her wrist until it settled in the exact place where the creature's claws had torn into her arm only three nights before.

The quiet hum beneath her skin answered immediately.

Catalina drew in a slow breath.

For the first time, she realized they weren't separate sensations at all. The warmth inside her arm and the warmth inside the dagger recognized one another, vibrating together with perfect harmony, as though two halves of the same song had finally been reunited after years apart.

She should have dropped it.

Every rational thought told her to let the weapon fall onto the bed and back away.

Instead, her fingers tightened.

The warmth wasn't painful.

If anything, it felt comforting.

Familiar.

Like hearing a melody she hadn't realized she'd spent her entire life trying to remember.

The glow gradually faded until only a gentle warmth remained beneath Catalina's fingertips. The blade no longer shimmered with impossible color, but it hadn't returned to being ordinary either. It rested quietly in her hands like embers buried beneath ash, waiting patiently for the right moment to burn again.

She laid it carefully across her bed before looking around her room.

The sketchbook still rested open on the desk where she'd left it the night before.

Seven faces looked back at her.

For years they'd been little more than sketches she'd never been able to explain, familiar strangers who appeared beneath her pencil almost without thought. Now she knew at least one of them wasn't a stranger at all.

He was real.

She rubbed absentmindedly at the smooth skin covering her forearm. There wasn't the faintest trace of the wounds the creature had left behind, yet the quiet vibration beneath her skin remained as constant as her own heartbeat. Perhaps it had always been there. Perhaps she'd spent eighteen years mistaking it for nervous energy or imagination because she'd never had a reason to question it.

Now she questioned everything.

Outside her bedroom window, the mountains rested beneath their usual blue haze while birds drifted lazily between the trees. Somewhere down the street a lawn mower hummed through the warm afternoon air, and a dog barked once before falling silent again. The neighborhood looked exactly as it always had.

Only Catalina had changed.

The ordinary life she'd believed she was living no longer felt like something waiting for her to return. Looking back, it seemed less like a life and more like a carefully painted door she'd never realized was standing in front of her. The last few days hadn't created a new world.

They had simply opened her eyes to the one that had always existed.

She slipped the dagger into the top drawer of her nightstand.

The next three days passed in a blur of hospital hallways, sleepless nights, and conversations that never seemed to say anything at all.

Every morning began beneath the harsh glow of fluorescent lights. Every afternoon ended beside Mary's bed in Room 214, listening to the quiet rhythm of heart monitors while doctors repeated the same carefully practiced reassurances.

"She's stable."

"Her vitals look good."

"We're encouraged by what we're seeing."

The words changed slightly each day, but they all meant the same thing.

They didn't know why Mary hadn't woken up.

Catalina spent hours sitting beside the bed, talking even when there was no response. She told Mary about the weather, about the flowers someone had left in the room, about the crossword puzzle she'd almost finished before giving up halfway through. Sometimes she caught herself apologizing for things that weren't her fault.

Sometimes she simply sat in silence, holding Mary's hand while the machines filled the room with sounds neither of them could escape.

Waiting became its own routine.

Without realizing it, Catalina memorized the hospital. She learned which hallway always smelled faintly of burnt coffee, which elevator took the longest to arrive, and which volunteer pushed the library cart through the halls every afternoon just before two o'clock. Nurses came and went in steady shifts, greeting her with sympathetic smiles that grew more familiar with each passing day.

The familiarity should have been comforting.

Instead, it made everything feel frighteningly permanent.

Whenever exhaustion finally closed her eyes, the same memories returned.

The creature.

The impossible light.

The stranger with golden eyes.

She tried over and over to remember exactly what she'd done in that parking lot, hoping she could somehow recreate the light if she focused hard enough. Every attempt ended the same way. The memory remained vivid, yet somehow unreachable, like trying to recall the final moments of a dream that dissolved the instant she reached for it.

Only the quiet hum beneath her skin remained.

It never disappeared.

Some days she felt it beneath the healed skin of her forearm. Other times it settled at the base of her neck or somewhere deep beneath her ribs, as though whatever had awakened inside her was slowly learning the shape of its new home.

By the third afternoon, one of the nurses finally folded her arms and gave Catalina the same patient look Mary always wore whenever she'd already made up her mind about something.

"You need some fresh air," she said kindly. "Go for a walk. Eat something besides vending machine snacks. We'll call immediately if anything changes."

Catalina glanced toward Mary's room.

"I don't want to leave her."

The nurse smiled.

"You aren't leaving her. You're taking an hour to take care of yourself."

For the first time in days, Catalina didn't argue.

The hospital doors slid open with a quiet hiss, and warm summer air rushed toward her. Catalina paused just outside the entrance, closing her eyes for a moment as she drew in a slow breath. The scent of hot pavement mingled with fresh-cut grass and the distant sweetness of the mountains, reminding her that the world beyond the hospital walls had continued turning while hers had ground to a halt.

For the first time in three days, there were no machines beeping in the background.

No whispered conversations between nurses.

No doctors delivering careful answers that explained nothing. Only the ordinary sounds of a summer afternoon. She started walking without deciding where she was going.

Downtown Asheville unfolded around her in familiar pieces she’d seen a thousand times before but never quite like this. People lingered outside cafés beneath colorful umbrellas, laughing over late lunches while servers hurried between tables balancing drinks and baskets of food. A street musician sat outside a corner bakery with an open guitar case at his feet, his music drifting lazily through the afternoon air. Tourists wandered from shop to shop carrying paper bags and maps, pausing every few steps to admire murals or take photographs of buildings Catalina had long ago stopped noticing.

Everything looked painfully normal.

She couldn’t understand how the world had the nerve to keep moving. Monsters were freaking real.

Only three days earlier, a creature she’d never believed could exist had nearly killed her in a restaurant parking lot. Light had poured from her own hands. A stranger she had dreamed about for years had appeared out of nowhere, spoken her name as though he’d always known it, and vanished just as quickly.

Her grandmother lay unconscious in a hospital room because she’d recognized something in hef words Catalina still couldn’t begin to understand.

Yet people laughed.

Children chased pigeons through the square.

Traffic crawled patiently through green lights.

No one else seemed to realize the world had changed.

Maybe it hadn’t.

Maybe only hers had.

She wandered aimlessly through streets she’d known since childhood, passing the used bookstore where Mary had spent entire Saturday afternoons browsing mystery novels while Catalina disappeared into the fantasy section. She smiled faintly at the memory, surprised by how vividly she could still picture herself sitting cross-legged between the shelves with a stack of books balanced beside her. Maybe deep down she always suspected there were things outside of humanity. She figured maybe that's why she wasn't as freaked out.

A few blocks later she passed the little coffee shop where she’d spent rainy afternoons studying with Daniel during high school. They’d claimed the same table near the front window almost every week, making plans that had once felt permanent.

The memory barely hurt anymore.

That realization caught her off guard.

Just days ago she would have sworn Daniel breaking up with her was the worst thing that had ever happened. Now it felt strangely small, overshadowed by questions far larger than either of them had ever imagined.

Daniel belonged to the life she’d had before. The life where monsters didn’t exist. Where impossible monster hurting light didn’t pour from her hands.

Where mysterious men with golden eyes stayed inside sketchbooks instead of stepping into reality. That girl already felt impossibly far away.

Lost in thought, Catalina stopped at the corner of Patton Avenue and Lexington Avenue while the crosswalk signal counted down.

She barely noticed the traffic.

Her attention drifted across the street toward the weathered brick storefront of an old bookstore, its faded sign hanging slightly crooked above the entrance. Someone stood beneath it.

Her breath caught.

Tall.

Broad shoulders.

Dark red hair catching the afternoon sunlight.

He leaned casually against the brick wall with his hands tucked into the pockets of a dark coat that looked far too warm for late summer. To anyone else he might have appeared to be simply waiting for someone.

But he wasn’t looking at the passing cars. He wasn’t watching the pedestrians crossing the street. He was watching her. Even from across the intersection, Catalina could feel it.

Those impossible golden eyes met hers without hesitation, calm and unwavering, carrying that same unsettling sense of recognition she’d seen in the parking lot.

He looked exactly as she remembered. Exactly as she’d drawn him. Exactly as he’d appeared in dreams she hadn’t even realized were memories waiting to surface.

For a heartbeat neither of them moved.

The noise of the city seemed to fade into the background until all Catalina could hear was the steady rhythm of her own heartbeat.

Questions crowded her mind faster than she could make sense of them.

Who was he?

How had he found her?

Had he been searching for her…

Or had he known exactly where she would be all along?

The crosswalk signal chimed.

People stepped around her, flowing into the street without noticing the stranger standing on the opposite sidewalk.

He didn't away.

Neither did she.