A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

Here is the truth. What happened to Alex was no accident. Not just because she fell, because we’d fought, or because I cut the rope—but because of what happened last October.

They were real: there was historical evidence for their lives, for their deaths. And I imagined their magic stitched like a thread across time, passed from mother to daughter, a glittering link from the founder to Margery Lemont to me. That had felt like a comfort once. After Halloween, it felt more like a curse.

After all, Flora was the first death, but she wasn’t the last. Following her, every one of the Dalloway witches died in ways that were impossible to explain. All of their bodies were found on the Godwin House grounds, like the house itself was determined to keep them. It was almost as if they were cursed, as if they’d raised a spirit that was determined to see them all dead.

They had found their way inside me, like fungal spores inhaled and taken root.

I ignored her and closed my eyes. I’d stolen the Margery Skull; it sat at the head of our altar, close enough that I could have touched it. A part of me wanted to. The urge was almost overpowering. Maybe if I did…Maybe that’s what this ritual needed.

“We have to make a sacrifice,” I told Alex abruptly. “Like the original Dalloway Five did in their séance, with the frog. If the Dalloway Five really were witches, they were powerful. Why should they speak to us if we don’t give them something in return?” Alex’s mouth twisted, skeptical. “Well, I forgot to bring along my handy-dandy sacrificial goat, so…” But I already knew what Margery wanted.

It’s all right, I wanted to tell her, but my tongue was a dead thing in my mouth, heavy and ill tasting. As if I’d swallowed grave dirt. Margery Lemont had been buried alive.

“What does it say?” Alex urged after I’d been silent for several seconds. “It says…” I shook my head, swallowed; my throat had gone dry. “It says, ‘I am going to kill you.’ ”

uh oh

But I could still sense her: Margery Lemont’s spirit had its talons dug deep in my heart, my blood turned to poison in my veins.

How did the poem go? And then the spirit, moving from her place, Touched there a shoulder, whispered in each ear,… But no one heeded her, or seemed to hear.

I’d prepared for this possibility: a tiny bowl of ground anise and clove to be ignited over a charcoal briquette—enough to protect against the cruelest spirit, or so I’d been assured by the library’s copy of Profane Magick. Alex scattered the spices across the floor, rendering them useless.

oh shit

didn’t tell her how I couldn’t stop dreaming about Margery after that night, or how I slept with anise and clove under my pillow to keep her away. A few months later Alex was dead, and now… Now I can’t hide from the truth.

The fact that I’d been gone last semester was no secret. I’d spent four months at a private residential facility tucked away near the Cascades, listening to people with rows of degree certificates on their walls explain to me that it wasn’t my fault, that I’d had no choice, that just because I took my knife and sawed through that rope and killed my best friend, that didn’t make me a psychopath. As if I didn’t know that already.

“Don’t you ever wish you could go back?” Ellis murmurs, gaze turned up toward the chandeliers; their light glitters off the lenses of her glasses. My gaze snaps away from the kettle, back to her. “To some other time,” she says, “when things were a little wilder. When the rules were a little less clear.” It’s the opposite of the usual line. A simpler time. A time when a lady was a lady.

“Just their daughters?” Ellis glances back. She’s taken off the pince-nez; the frames dangle from one idle hand. “It takes one to know one.” It isn’t an accusation. It isn’t anything. It’s…a statement. Of fact.

I didn’t want her to die. I never wanted her to die. But I’m not innocent, either. That’s the thing the doctors kept missing at Silver Lake, with their trauma therapy and white pills and cloying pity: That I’m the reason she died. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t walked into Alex Haywood’s life, she’d still be alive.

I know I’m not a murderer, but the difference between murderer and killer seems insubstantial sometimes. I was responsible for her death.

“She was screaming,” I whisper. “The whole time. She was screaming for me to pull her back up.” The confession drops into the space between us like a lit fuse. And there it is: the nasty truth.

Ellis’s hand tightens on my arm, and she moves back into my line of sight until I have no choice but to look at her. “I don’t understand,” she says again. “Alex didn’t die on a mountain. She died here, at school. She drowned.”

I remember. I remember standing in the foyer of Godwin House, the cold night at my back and muddy dress clinging to my legs. Ice water pooled on the floor. I remember MacDonald calling the police. I remember them picking Alex’s red hair from where it had caught, tangled, around my fingers. Oh god. It was an accident. I had just kept saying that, over and over, a litany. Where is Alex, Felicity? What happened to Alex?

I can’t escape the memories rising in me like a briny tide. Alex, her cheeks pink with anger. Alex, shouting.

“She was, you know…gesturing a lot. She did that when she talked. Especially when she was angry. And I guess she…lost balance. And she…stumbled. She…” “None of that is your fault. You didn’t force her to drink; that was her choice. You didn’t make her fall.”

Write me a story, the doctor had said. Write Alex’s death as it might have happened in another universe, without the fight.

I would have preferred the wildwood explanation, but I suspect the spirit who left this mark lives closer to home.

“You look pale,” she says, taps beneath one eye. “Dark circles. Are you sick?” I don’t know why she’s asking, after yesterday. She knows why I’m upset. Maybe this is Ellis’s way of showing concern without letting that concern bleed into pity.

Three o’clock. The same hour I woke up last night. The hour Alex first slipped into my nightmares here at Godwin House and the grandmother clock stopped working. I’d calculated it after that: three was also the time it had been when Alex and I left that party, when she chased me onto the cliffs.

But I know what everyone else does. I see it written in the surreptitious glances, the whispers behind cupped hands. I remember Clara’s fingers miming scissors at the Boleyn party. Before, in my muddled mind, I’d thought they’d blamed me for cutting the rope. Now I know they don’t believe my story of what happened at all.

“Why?” I say. “Because you think I know something about murdering people?” I did lie to her, after all. I lied, and the memory of it still hangs like smoke in the air between us, poisoning our lungs. There’s too much I managed to forget about that night with Alex, and Ellis knows it now.

“I need to access the occult collection. Felicity Morrow.” The librarian examines the slip and then scans my card. She shakes her head. “I’m afraid your permission to view this collection has been revoked,” she says, passing my ID back across the desk.

well then.

But the Dalloway occult collection is the only place in the country where I might find the information I need: how to unravel the curse Alex and I brought down upon ourselves, how to close the ritual a year too late.

Some say she haunts the school along with the rest of the Dalloway Five—Godwin House, in particular. That legend isn’t true, of course; or it wasn’t until Alex and I made it so.

Flora Grayfriar was found exsanguinated in the woods, says this particular record, her sternum split and her white dress soaked red. She was the last body in a series of smaller corpses to be found: a slaughtered rabbit, a bloodless sheep. The trial makes no mention of a musket wound, although the account of the herbs and flowers strewn about her body is repeated here.

I want to interrogate the concept of the psychopath, Ellis had said. Maybe she believes Margery is responsible.

I flip over my notebook and uncap my pen again. My own calligraphy is shaky—blotches welling at the tail of each letter, jagged cross-strokes—as I copy down a spell for banishing evil spirits. But Ellis might want it.

I might have been expelled from the Margery coven, but Ellis hasn’t.

And so help me, I don’t care what Dr. Ortega says anymore. The legend is real.

I wanted Ellis to join the Margery coven. I wanted her to wrap herself up in the shroud of their dark games—not drag me down with her. The Margery coven felt safe. They didn’t practice real magic—their craft was all about aesthetics and pretension, the foolish games of wealthy girls who wanted to feel powerful, who wanted to touch the hem of night’s cloak but nothing further, nothing real.

I think that once we’re out there in the forest, under the moonlight, she’ll see things differently. Who knows what lurks in the woods, which beings rule the cold space beneath the trees?

Leonie recognizes Ellis’s mask. I can tell from the way she hesitates but doesn’t flinch when she sees it—the goat’s skull is less horrifying if you’ve seen it before. Perhaps she’s one of the Margery coven’s newest members, inducted while I was rotting away in a hospital bed. Does she know, then, that I was once a sister too? That I was excommunicated?

Clara gazes adoringly at Ellis as if Ellis had just offered her true and everlasting friendship for the low price of her eternal soul. Leonie and Kajal exchange looks.

the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds’ night migrations

Ellis nods once, as if a decision has been made. “Welcome,” she says, “to the Night Migrations.”

If our game were real, the journey of the Night Migrations would play out as it does in the real world: born alone, die alone. Now, one of the Averno poems reads, her whole life is beginning—unfortunately, it’s going to be a short life.

My fingers were still on her skin, wet and scarlet, as she murmured my name. Whatever else the others felt, I knew what I saw in Ellis’s eyes last night. Euphoria.

I drag my gaze away from the cards and back to Ellis’s face. A small smile has caught about her lips, a smile that feels genuine not because it splits across her face or crinkles the corners of her eyes but because of the softness to it—and the way her gaze lingers on mine. I hold out the deck of cards, and she chooses one from the middle, then flips it over to show the Magician. “Whatever it is you’re trying to do,” I interpret, “you will succeed. All the power you need is in your hands.”

“Oh, yes,” Ellis says, and kicks out one foot to knock the sharp toe of her oxford against my shin. “Witchcraft is just a metaphor for female grief and anger. I told you that.”

It seems…Romantic, with the capital R, conjuring visions of dashing heroines and vicious assassins, of hazy London streets and the click of horse hooves on stone, gas lamps burning, the flick of a cloak in the dark.

It feels like Godwin again, the way it did before. Like we’re sisters.

It takes that whole week for me to define what’s happening, to say I’m happy, in those words. But I say it, a declaration made while standing on the coffee table with my arms outspread, a declaration that earns whoops and applause from the rest of them, Ellis helping me down with one black-gloved hand.

I’m going to be all right now.

we are not even halfway through the book...