A Lesson in Vengeance(40)

Clara and Leonie arrive over the next fifteen minutes, Leonie appearing perfectly coiffed and all but presidential, as if she were somehow transported to the middle of the woods by hired car rather than by traipsing over twig and stone. Clara looks rather worse for wear, but she doesn’t complain. Perhaps she’s pleased to have been invited at all.

Ellis stands at my side, her fingers pressing against the back of my elbow: careful, steadying. I doubt she knows how much I need that anchor right now.

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?

“Ellis,” Leonie says slowly, carefully, “what is that?”

Ellis, who had resumed wearing the mask after she finished her cigarette, tips it away from her face again. “It’s a mask, Schuyler. What does it look like?”

“Where did you get it?”

“From me,” I interject. “She got it from me. I was part of…Well.” I can’t say it out loud; even though I’ve been excommunicated from the Margery coven, it feels like their rules still bind me. Leonie’s dark gaze holds mine, steady and knowing. “I gave it to her,” I say.

“I thought we could play a little game,” Ellis says, finally discarding the mask altogether and smiling at us, her acolytes, gathered for her homily. “You’ve heard of the Dalloway Five, I presume.”

Nods all around.

“Your book is about them,” Clara ventures. “The witches.”

“That’s right. And you know my style—I’m a method writer. They say the Dalloway girls were witches, or at least that they had séances and cast spells. So I must as well.”

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.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” I say at last, because it’s clear these two aren’t convinced but are too nervous to contradict Ellis to her face.

“Me too,” Clara adds.

Kajal twists a lock of black hair around her finger. “I suppose it could be fun….”

One left. Ellis turns her gaze toward Leonie, and Leonie sighs, then nods. Our pact is sealed.

“We need a name,” Clara says. Her tone is too bright for the setting, at odds with the heavy tree cover and the treacherous vines snaking underfoot.

A name. It feels irreverent somehow to name what we’re doing. Then again, to Clara this is a game. She doesn’t understand how magic can pull you in, pull you under. Every spell is a pomegranate seed on your tongue, binding you to the underworld.

Maybe not for everyone. But it is for people like me.


the red berries of the mountain ash

and in the dark sky

the birds’ night migrations



“What did you say?” Leonie is looking at me strangely; I must have spoken aloud.

I swallow. “?‘The Night Migrations,’?” I say. “You know, the Louise Glück poem.”

Blank stares answer me. My discomfort aches inside me like a swallowed rock.

“From Averno,” Ellis says after a moment, and when I turn to her, she’s smiling. “In which the poet writes of Persephone and her marriage to the underworld. The poems circle the same question: how one’s soul could possibly endure when life’s beauty vanishes from reach.”

“Yes,” I whisper.

Alex wrote an essay on those poems. Her copy of Averno probably still resides on the Godwin House shelves.

Ellis nods once, as if a decision has been made.

“Welcome,” she says, “to the Night Migrations.”

The silence that follows stretches out like a long ribbon, silky-smooth; we are all like changeling children hanging on to Ellis’s every word.

“There are rules,” Ellis continues. “First: no talking about the Night Migrations. Not unless we’re here in the woods, or at any other meeting location.”

“This isn’t Fight Club,” Kajal says.

“No, but it’s more fun this way,” Ellis answers. “Second: Felicity and I choose when and where. There will be no argument or discussion on this point. Third, you will know the week’s meeting time and place from a note we slide under your door. Since you won’t be discussing the Night Migrations with anyone else, you won’t know what time the others are told to arrive. But I will tell you that the arrival times are staggered. The journey to our meeting location is part of the experience. As in life, every woman must make her journey alone.”

Ellis’s gaze flicks toward me then, and I think I catch a glint of something like amusement in her gray eyes—although that might just be the candlelight. 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.

“And what is that?” Kajal says distastefully, pointing at the circle I’ve constructed, then at the assortment of mouse skulls lined up along the rock. All of them collected last year, all found in Godwin House. I hadn’t thought them uncanny until later, after Alex died.