A Lesson in Vengeance(49)

“She never saw herself as the problem, though,” I go on. “First it was my anxiety that was the culprit. Then, after Alex, it was that. She was so humiliated by the idea that she’d produced me. Like it was the worst sin in society, to parent a child who…who had to be institutionalized. All I want is to be better than her.”

The confession falls out of me like a stone. And once the words are spoken, I can’t take them back.

I half expect Ellis to laugh and tell me how I’ve failed, that my mother was right to be ashamed.

But instead Ellis lets out a heavy breath. “Well. My parents were never around, but I have to admit…maybe I lucked out on that front.” She looks at me now, turning her head so that our noses all but brush. Her breath is warm against my lips, her face so close I can see every delicate pore.

All of a sudden my heart beats a little faster. I can’t stop thinking about the way Ellis moved with that sword in her hand, sweat-slick and intentional.

I sit up too abruptly, digging my nails into the rug beneath us. “I have to go,” I say. “I just remembered I owe Wyatt revisions by Monday.”

Ellis pushes herself up more slowly, but she doesn’t get off the floor when I stand. “All right. Will we be seeing you for dinner?”

“Oh. I don’t…maybe. We’ll see.”

“Felicity, wait.” Ellis stops me when I’m already halfway out of the room. I pause and look back over my shoulder; she’s still sitting on the floor, firelight flickering off the wet gleam of her hair. “I was thinking…”

For a moment she almost looks her age, the set of her features softer somehow, lips parted. But then the effect passes and she’s Ellis again.

“The next Night Migration…perhaps you should take the lead again. Half the point of this project is my proving magic doesn’t exist. So why don’t you teach us some magic?”

My breath has stopped moving in my chest; my blood has gone still in my veins. I blink. And in that split second I see her again—Margery Lemont—her pale face rising behind Alex’s frame.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

Ellis tilts her head. “Why not?”

“I shouldn’t be doing magic. Not anymore.”

“You’ve done magic already. You initiated me into the Godwin coven, didn’t you?”

“That wasn’t magic. That was just a ritual.”

“What’s the difference? It doesn’t need to be anything dark and terrifying. One of us can cut her finger and you can attempt a healing spell, if you like. But I want to give you a fair chance to prove magic is real before I disprove it for good.”

I don’t have a good argument in response to that. I should, but I don’t. Ellis seems to know that, to taste my surrender like blood in the water, so I nod once and escape before she can think of any other harebrained ideas.

It’s true that I have essay revisions due Monday morning, but after I make it upstairs and sit myself down at my desk to work, I realize I can’t concentrate. The words blur together on my laptop screen and a painful beat pounds in my temple, despite all the pills I gulped down this morning.

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’ve already written to Wyatt to ask for an extension, and since then I’ve been metaphorically chained to my desk. I keep my hands on the keyboard as if that will force me to use it, but my attention keeps drifting away from my laptop and out my window toward the quick-approaching night. Dusk falls faster now than it did, a curtain dropping over the horizon and trapping us on a darkened stage. The snow brings its own silence.

It’s Sunday. It’s Samhain.

My gaze has drifted from my computer again, past my own face reflected in the window and toward the woods. At first I think it’s a trick of the light, a reflection from my own bedside lamp in the glass—but then it moves.

I slam my laptop shut and lurch across my desk, pressing my nose to the windowpane. Even with the double glazing installed since I left last year, the glass is frigid against my skin.

There. There, in the woods, a figure shifts between the trees.

Even from this distance, I can see Alex’s red hair.

The moonlight reflects off her skin and lends it a strangely iridescent quality, like a white opal dropped underwater. Her movements are inhuman, her incorporeal form like a wisp blown from place to place, flitting between trees and vanishing, only to reappear a moment later farther away.

She’s not real, she’s not real, she’s not real—