A Lesson in Vengeance(43)

“That depends,” Ellis says. “It’s Kajal’s turn tonight, right? What did she make?”

I wonder if Leonie can hear my heart beating from all the way across the room. It certainly feels like it’s about to pound its way right out of my chest.

“Coq au vin,” Leonie says. “With a side of hasselback potatoes and salad. She made some kind of vegetarian version of the chicken for you, Ellis.”

Vegetarian coq au vin sounds repulsive to me, but Kajal’s a fantastic cook, so I put aside my notebook and we follow Leonie downstairs. Ellis glances back at me as we descend, her hand trailing along the railing and her scarlet lips quirking, the only acknowledgment of our shared secret.

Once she’s turned away I let my fingertips graze mahogany. I touch the same place she had touched, and it’s like a cord drawn taut between us—as intimate as skin.





Things change in the days following that first Night Migration.

Whether the magic was real or not, something bound us together in those woods. Leonie puts music on the record player, Kajal dances in a red dress. Even Clara seems to be more at ease, her smiles coming quicker when we laugh over dinner. It feels like Godwin again, the way it did before. Like we’re sisters.

That first week is painted in vivid color. I read tarot for the other girls in the common room: Kajal half-drunk making me draw cards for her again and again until she gets the results she wants, Leonie draping a veil over her head like the High Priestess, Ellis curled up on the sofa studying the Magician. Clara plants herbs in window boxes that wilt two days later; she cries about it, even though they’re just plants, and for some reason I feel sorry enough to comfort her.

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 happy. Ellis was right: I’m getting better.

I bury what’s left of my pills in the backyard under Tamsyn Penhaligon’s oak tree, pressing quartz into the soil above them. I don’t need them anymore. I’m not that person anymore. I’m not the girl who saw ghosts in every corner, who feared her mind was host to a darker and more parasitic presence.

I’m going to be all right now.



* * *



—

“We’ll have to learn how to forge handwriting,” Ellis muses as she writes the second set of Night Migration notes in her characteristic sloping script. “Whatever Margery used to lure her victims out into the woods wouldn’t have been written in her own hand.”

It is starting to seem to me as if Ellis has an answer for everything. She wants us to break into a locked building just to find out if we can, to mark the locations of every security camera around Godwin House, to research the best way to remove bloodstains from clothing. I have no idea how much of this, if any, will make it into Ellis’s book.

“I doubt Margery wrote notes at all,” I say, but Ellis shrugs and adds a flourish to Clara’s name on the final envelope.

“Perhaps not. But this way’s more fun, don’t you think?”

Tonight, Ellis chooses the location, one much closer than the clearing I sent us to last time. It’s a brief walk through the forest, dead leaves crunching underfoot and the beams of our flashlights bobbing amid the branches.

Ellis and I get to the meeting place at 11:40, five minutes before Leonie is supposed to arrive, just early enough to try and get a fire started. Ellis is dressed in hues of charcoal gray and black; she all but blends in with the landscape, a shadow among shadows. Next to her, in ivory, I feel like a lantern. This time, we forgo the masks.

“A new moon,” Ellis says, turning her face toward the starless sky. “I don’t know why the myths always pair a full moon with the uncanny. Total darkness is so much more paralyzing.”

“I suppose under a new moon, you’re less likely to die by meeting a ghost than you are tripping over your own feet.”

Ellis laughs. “Or perhaps you’ll be murdered by the two Godwin girls, in the woods, with the garrote.”

Just two weeks ago, I would have flinched. Tonight, I smile with her instead.

I crouch down on the forest floor and pick up a long stick, prod at the weak shambles of our fire. It’s still smoldering coals and flickering twigs—hardly the rapturous bonfire we’d envisioned. I blow on the coals, and sparks spray into the air like fireflies. We’d built a circle of stones to keep from accidentally burning the woods down, but that risk is starting to feel very distant indeed.

“We should meet in a graveyard next time,” Ellis muses. She leans past me to light her cigarette on the flames, which have finally started to ignite the gathered timber.

Leonie arrives soon thereafter, then the other two; they plop themselves down on the ground as if they’ve forgotten to care what happens to their tailored skirts.

Ellis positions herself by the fire, posed such that the flames appear to be licking up the straight legs of her trousers, consuming her. She holds her book in both hands: a reverend presiding over her flock.

“Ex scientia ultio,” she says.

Only the crack and snap of smoldering wood answers her, like gunshots in the empty night. In the half-light we look like ghosts.