A Lesson in Vengeance(38)

Will I ever forget the way Alex looked that night? They’d positioned us facing one another, the two new initiates of Godwin House. Alex was in flannels and a tank top that exposed her slim collarbones and muscular shoulders. She’d looked so out of place surrounded by the elder girls in their black robes and skull masks.

They lit candles and burned herbs. They chanted in Latin and Greek and Aramaic—a bizarre and meaningless mix of languages, it strikes me now, but at the time it felt like the shadows grew taller and wilder, shifting with our occult power. The night was endless and magnificent; it could have lasted three hours or three days. When they smeared the goat’s blood on my brow, it was still fresh, cutting down my face and catching in my eyelashes. With my hands bound, I couldn’t wipe it away; I could only sit there as scarlet tears streamed down my cheeks.

That was the night I felt like I had finally become one of them—a girl of Dalloway, a girl of Godwin—heiress to the witches who planted the stones on which we stood.

That was the night I first wished magic were real.

I shut the spellcraft book and put it back where I found it. I feel as if the darkness breathes out a sigh behind me as I leave the library: as if the spirits there had been watching, waiting for me to go.

It’s a silent and solitary trip back to Godwin House, especially once I’ve left the quad and must tread through the woods up the hill. The windows of Godwin are black and shuttered; I’m left with the strange impression that its soul has been sucked out through the cracks beneath uneven doors.

I don’t go in. Instead I slip around back, shoulder open the rickety door to the gardening shed. The small stone structure is steeped in shadow, a gloom somehow more complete than pitch.

I find the masks where we always kept them—even if I spent a year away, even if the sisters who initiated me have graduated, some things never change. I crouch on the pounded-earth floor of the gardening shed and stroke a finger around a mask’s hollow mouth; shears and trowels, which had concealed the memento mori of our craft, litter the floor around me.

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

Ellis is in the kitchen when I return to the house, her typewriter set up on the table overlooking the forest behind Godwin, face and page both lit only by a single flickering candle. She twists round to look at me when I come in, and the light shifts in shadows across her face like panes of stained glass.

“I have an idea,” I tell her.

If Ellis wants to understand the Dalloway witches, if she wants to prove that magic isn’t real, she has to become one of us first.





“This is perfect,” Ellis says once I’ve explained the Margery coven. I told her of the sanitized version of a coven that exists between the other houses, of course—but also about the Dalloway Five dancing nude and worshipping old goddesses around towering bonfires, taking arcane herbs. Stories of their magic have survived at the school even throughout the most austere administrations.

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

At the very least, Ellis should know about the Margery coven. She should see if she can be initiated.

“It’s magic,” I tell her. “Or the Dalloway Five believed it was. Doesn’t that run contra your entire thesis?”

But Ellis is still pacing the narrow kitchen, the soles of her Italian leather shoes clicking against the stone floor. “Not at all. It’s no different than the spiritualist séances of the Victorian era—people went wild over the idea of mediums who could commune beyond the grave. It was occult as entertainment, nothing truly paranormal. Who says the Dalloway girls couldn’t have enjoyed the same kind of fun?”

“This was 1711, not 1870,” I say. “That kind of fun would get you killed.”

She stops pacing and turns to smile at me, a scant foot away from where I stand. She lifts a hand and trails it along my temple, tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. I barely remember to breathe.

“No, this is perfect,” Ellis says a second time. “I promise. But who cares about those posh modern girls and their party coven. Let’s make our own.”

My air comes back all at once; I choke on it. Ellis pats my back as I cough until my throat is raw.

“I beg your pardon?” I croak at last.

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.

“Real magic is something different. Real magic has risks.”

Ellis lifts one shoulder and drops it. “Let’s make our own coven. Why not? If I’m to do this properly, like a real method writer, I should explore the same pastimes the Five explored. Even if they didn’t die by magic, some still believed they practiced it.”

My palms are clammy as I press them to my face and suck in several hot, recycled breaths. I’m well aware of my own hypocrisy: I try to get her to join a coven, and then I balk at the very idea. But Ellis doesn’t understand—even if she can flirt with devils, I can’t. I can’t.

“Some things shouldn’t be toyed with, Ellis. Magic is dangerous.”