A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

I’ve never felt like this before. The Margery coven was different—constructed for alumnae connections and nepotism, not sisterhood. This…this is real.

But if this is magic, it isn’t the kind the Five practiced. I’m sure of it. For once, the forest is empty of ghosts, the sky clear and glittering. Nothing evil can touch us like this. We’re dryads cavorting in autumn, wood spirits breathing out starlight.

“Curious,” Ellis murmurs, and I can’t help but feel somewhat gratified that I’ve finally said something to throw her off balance. It feels like winning. “Besides, even eighteenth-century bigots knew that it’s not impossible to carry a skinny teenage girl half a mile across land,” I say, “soaking wet or otherwise.”

But I can’t share their levity. A year ago Alex and I left this same party, went back to Godwin with the stolen Margery Skull concealed under my coat. We lit candles and spilled blood and called up the darkness.

The murders Ellis and I are plotting might be hypothetical, but I can’t help thinking that one day, someone will get sick of Clara and push her down the stairs.

The kiss breaks, and the girl touches my lips, our breath shallow and hot between us. “Do you want to go upstairs?” she says. The answer rises to my mouth, but before I can say yes, I spot her: Ellis Haley, a slim figure in a tweed suit, watching us from across the backyard with her cigarette burning down to ashes in one hand.

I kept being lesbian a secret for years. Now I’ve thrown it away to join the rest of the trash littering this house. “Are you drunk?” Hannah asks, a question stupid enough to rival her first. “No,” I say. “I just hate everyone.”

So I do it. I leave. I let her win.

I can’t do this. I can’t do magic again. It’s not even about Ellis—I can’t do this to Alex. Even if this ghost is all in my head, it’s…callous, it’s sick to just… It’s been less than a year since I watched my girlfriend plummet to a watery death. I should be more concerned with Alex’s blood on my hands than the smell of Ellis’s hair. Magic is what got me in trouble in the first place. Only now, because Ellis has asked it of me, I’m only too willing to give in.

But maybe I am a monster, because now she’s all I can think about.

I drew a card from my deck when I woke up. The Nine of Swords. I replaced it, shuffled, and drew again, and got the Nine of Swords for a second time. Fear and nightmares. So even before I see her, I know Alex is coming tonight.

I place black tourmaline along my windowsill, a defense against whatever—whoever—I saw. But when I climb into my bed, I can’t sleep. I’m afraid to close my eyes.

Of course, the vows we all made during initiation weren’t that kind of vow anyway—I’d been so careful to keep magic far away from our earlier rituals, to be good—but it’s an argument that will work on Ellis. That’s all that matters. And if she still wants me to practice magic tonight, to perform for her like a prize horse, she’ll agree.

The Margery coven has held initiation here for twenty-six years. I wonder sometimes if that’s the real force that’s eaten away at the building’s integrity, the irreverent power of reckless rich girls and their pretense at faith corroding the relics of life.

This spell is about more. It’s about me and Ellis. About magic—and whether forces exist too powerful and arcane for us to understand.

I was wrong to think magic was dangerous. Alex might be. The witches might be. But not this. Never this. “Listen,” Ellis murmurs.

My gaze flicks over to Ellis, who has a tiny smile settled about her lips as well, although her smile is harder to read. I can’t tell if she believes me, or if she’s mocking me.

But I wake up the next morning lying on a bed of bracken and melted snow. There’s frost on my lips and crystallized on my lashes. I’m cold enough that I’ve forgotten how to tremble. It’s several seconds, several gulping breaths, before I convince myself I’m not dead. What happened?

I can’t breathe. The air is too thick out here, oxygen-poor and stinging like broken glass. It floods my lungs like cold water. How long can one survive without air? How long until my body collapses in on itself like Alex’s did? Twenty minutes? Thirty? The lake closes overhead. I sink into the dark. The earth swallows me whole.

But that place didn’t ruin me. I was cursed already. The Dalloway witches had carved out my heart and consumed it for heat. I had nothing left to give.

“I’m going to help you through this,” Ellis promises, her hand still stroking my skull. “There’s no ghost, and there’s no magic. I’m going to prove it to you.”

I invent reasons to stay in my room the next day: too much homework, food poisoning, I overslept. The truth is, I can’t bear to face Leonie and Clara now that they’ve seen me in that state.

Two nights after that terrible Night Migration, I lurch awake with sweat plastering my shirt to my spine, my nightmare still sour in my mouth. When I shut my eyes, I see bodies in the water with white fingers and cold lips. It’s Tamsyn Penhaligon, it’s Cordelia Darling, it’s Flora Grayfriar with blood on her throat.

I decide that once I do get my laptop back, I won’t use it. I’ll hide it under my bed to collect dust. I need the physical anchor that my typewriter provides; I need that stability.

“I’m not planning to kill anyone, period,” I argue, and one of Ellis’s brows pops up. She doesn’t say it, but I can still hear those words hovering unspoken in the space between us: Even Alex?

Ellis jerks me sideways, and for one reeling second I think she’s about to break my neck. But it’s only to turn me toward the mirror. We’re both reflected there: me with my face gone scarlet, my throat straining against her makeshift garrote and Ellis’s fists clenched around the twine.

“Like this, see? Even with you fighting back…you’ll be unconscious in thirty seconds. Within another minute, you’d be dead. Just like Tamsyn Penhaligon.” She’s going to kill me. The thought flares in my mind, red and lethal. Tears leak from my eyes, hot on my cheeks. I taste copper. Only then Ellis lets go. Color blooms back into the world, and I stagger. I would fall to my knees if not for the way Ellis catches me with an arm around my waist.

Something complicated passes over Ellis’s face, and she lurches forward, grasping my shoulders with both hands. Her fingertips dig in hard enough it nearly hurts. “I would never kill you,” she vows, her eyes gone wide. “Felicity, I swear to you, I’ll never let anything happen to you. I’d rather die.”

But when I follow them that evening, they don’t lead to a copse in the woods or the peak of a black hill; they take me to a dingy rental car agency a mile down the road. Ellis stands out front under the flickering yellow lights, smoking a clove cigarette like a character from a noir film.

We stand at the foot of her grave. alexandra irene haywood, beloved daughter. She died six days before her eighteenth birthday. “The coffin’s empty,” I say. “They never found her body. Well, not empty. We all left something for her. A favorite necklace, a square of lace sprayed with her perfume…”

I can practically hear her voice: I don’t have to understand anything. “It was the séance. Margery Lemont cursed us, because we trapped her in our world.” Saying it aloud here, to Alex, it sounds insane.

Not like me. I’m the spoiled rich girl who lurked at the fringes of Alex’s halo, stealing her light.

But it never comes. Alex’s ghost, if it exists, doesn’t care about noise. The only thing down there, I tell myself, is Ellis Haley. And Ellis Haley can go fuck herself.

I stay silent. Another gust of wind, loud through the speaker. “So how have you been, honey?” My mother has never in her life used pet names. “Fine. Everything’s fine.”

Ellis fixes me with a narrowed gaze. “I mean it. You’re right, I shouldn’t have pressured you the other night. It was a strange request. I know that now.” A strange request. It’s as if Ellis thinks we all live in books. At least then it would be easy enough to delete what happened in the cemetery, make me forget, and start over.

It’s a lie, of course. I have no intention of being happy, for Ellis or otherwise. But what else am I going to say? Ellis sees me. I need to be seen.

I shift over her, straddling her middle, and brace one hand against her sternum. My hair has fallen forward, long pale strands tickling the skin at Ellis’s throat. “But she’d be struggling,” I point out. I add pressure to my hand, holding Ellis in place. “And screaming.” Ellis gazes up at me, eyes steady and unafraid. “Not if she was dead first.”

yikes

The Secret Garden. It’s the same copy Ellis gave me in the graveyard, the same copy I left leaning against Alex’s headstone, with its old pages and embossed gold foil. I’m sick to the blood, sick in a way that makes me certain I shouldn’t touch that book. I should leave, should burn this place to the ground.

Pressed between chapters three and four is a sprig of hellebore.

The room is empty, but it’s not empty. I feel her. She’s here. She’s in every corner, every shadow. She’s above me, inside me. She’s black ice in my veins.

“The…the book,” I say, after taking a few unsteady breaths. “The one we left at her grave.” “The Secret Garden,” Ellis provides. I nod. “It’s…It’s in…It showed up in my room. The same…the same copy.” Ellis’s gaze sharpens. “The same? You’re sure?”

“Then explain the book,” I demand. “If the ghost isn’t real, explain that to me!” She shakes her head very slowly. “I can’t. I…I’m going to have to think about it. I’m sure there’s a normal reason behind all this.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Ellis says, firm and confident, as usual. More confident, I note, than she’d sounded last night. I push open my bedroom door and step inside, and the duvet falls from my arms. The book is gone.

i knew that was gonna happen, ugh lol

Dr. Ortega once described psychotic depression as being like a gun: my genetics loaded the chamber with bullets, my mother passed the weapon into my hand, but Alex’s death pulled the trigger.

I know from Ellis’s use of gender-neutral pronouns that Quinn is nonbinary. And I can tell by looking that, aside from their basic appearance, they have a lot of other things in common with their sister—at least if the blazer and flamboyant gold cravat are anything to go by.

Not that it needs to be clarified; my mother’s flight from the East Coast, unmarried and pregnant by a stranger, had been what passed for a scandal back in the aughts. Everyone knew all the nasty little details, no matter how fiercely my grandmother had tried to obscure them.

In the firelight, Ellis’s eyes glitter like polished pewter. “I’m glad you stayed with me,” she murmurs, her voice as low and soft as the velvet sofa beneath us. “I would have been lonely if you hadn’t.”

Good lord, does anyone in this family do anything besides drink all the time?

probably not

“Depends who you ask, I suppose. I survived just fine. Ellis, though…” I’m still trapped in the thick gauzy space of intoxication, but something about the way Quinn says it injects a shot of adrenaline into my blood. And suddenly I’m a little more awake, a little more alert. “What do you mean?”

It’s not hard to imagine a young Ellis—in my mind, wearing a miniature version of the adult Ellis’s knife-crease slacks and glen check blazers—hungry for knowledge, for more, and bursting with fury when that need was denied.