A Lesson in Vengeance(17)

The next card: “The Hermit. This one’s me.” Cloaked and bearing a staff, my free hand extended to hold a lamp. The light cuts through the dark landscape around me, a star held in my palm. “I should prepare for a journey of self-discovery and introspection. Not everything will be clear at once; I’ll only ever be able to see a few steps ahead. I have to trust myself and my own intuition.”

I glance up at Ellis again. She has leaned forward slightly, her elbows braced against her knees and her gaze fixed on the cards: the twin pale faces of the Hermit and the Knight, the botanical design etched into the back of the third card still facedown.

“And the last one? Us together?”

I turn it over. It’s the card from before, the same one that had so fascinated Ellis when she first looked at the deck.

Death rides a pale horse, the light of the setting sun glinting off the blade of her scythe. Peasants and queens alike are slain by her passing. In her wake, a white rose blooms.

“That doesn’t look good,” Ellis says dryly.

“Death isn’t as fatal as you might think,” I tell her, trailing my fingertips over the card’s linen face. “It can mean change or upheaval of any kind. Something vital will come to an end. But”—I touch the five-petaled rose—“something new grows in its place.”

There’s an odd look on Ellis’s face when our eyes meet again. A crack in the mask, something once hidden shifting behind the lacquered facade.

Ellis sweeps the cards into her hand and leafs through them one after the other. She lingers on the last again, skimming her thumb over Death’s face. “Did you draw cards for her, too?”

For a moment I consider pretending I don’t know what she means. But I do, and Ellis knows it. It’s somewhat of a relief that she’s finally brought her up after dancing around the subject for so long.

“Yes. A few times.”

“Did you ever draw Death?”

My tongue flicks out to wet my lower lip; suddenly everything inside me feels brittle as leached clay. “No. Never.”

She hands the cards back to me, and I shuffle them into the deck, then shut all the cards away in their box, where I don’t have to look at them again.

Ellis never said Alex’s name, but Alex’s presence hangs like perfume in the air between us.

Even after Ellis has gone, the stench lingers. I can’t erase the suspicion that this is why Ellis is speaking to me in the first place. She’s the only one of them who has; she followed me back after the Boleyn party. Then again, that was two weeks ago. She’s ignored me ever since, at least until she tracked me upstairs today and had me read her future. What has changed?

It’s too easy to imagine Clara whispering in Ellis’s ear again, old and rotten tales about missing girls and desolate mountain cliffs, how Felicity Morrow claimed it was an accident, but no one else was there to say for sure.

Maybe it’s not the old murders at Dalloway that intrigue Ellis after all. Maybe it’s me. I’m the key, that lived experience she so badly wants to exploit for her book.

I trace the lines on my palms and wonder if Ellis sees my hands drenched in red.

Ellis’s absence has snapped whatever fragile nets had been holding the shadows at bay. Night fell hours ago, but it seems to deepen now, darkness creeping out from the corners and threatening to consume the house from the inside.

For a long time I lie in bed with my eyes squeezed shut and my heart pounding. My mind won’t stop—it tumbles from one image to the next, like I’m being forced to watch a gruesome film. I see bones rotting in unmarked graves, crawling with maggots; Cordelia Darling’s bloated body floating in the lake, hair a bloody halo around her face; a shadow figure with starlit eyes and skeleton fingers. Ellis’s face peers out from the darkness, a pale mask that fractures to reveal the sunken features of Margery Lemont’s corpse. Margery’s mouth opens wide, wider, a gaping chasm, her tongue like a black snake swollen between her teeth—

I turn on my bedside lamp. Its soft glow is barely enough to illuminate this corner of my bed. Anything could lurk in the hidden spaces outside its orbit.

I light candles on all the windowsills until the shadows vanish, then crawl back into bed with my tarot cards clutched to my chest. I don’t read them—it just makes me feel better having them near. I wish I held my crystals instead, black obsidian and staurolite heavy over my heart, their power like a golden field around me that no spirit could breach.

I can’t, of course. I know I can’t. Magic is dangerous for me. Maybe some people can toy with it, but me…

God. Just last week the party line was how magic isn’t real. And yet it is; I know it is. The question isn’t whether magic is real. It’s whether I can touch it without being consumed by it.

I tighten my grip on my tarot deck, shut my eyes, and think about light in the darkness, my feet steady on whatever path is laid for me, protected not by magic but by my own will. Your mind is powerful, Felicity, Dr. Ortega had said. You can summon terrible things. You also have the ability to banish them.

But as I lie under the covers with the duvet drawn over my head, the tree branch outside once again tap-tapping against my window like bone fingers scratching for entry, I’m more certain than ever that even the Hermit’s light won’t be enough to keep the ghosts in their graves.