A Lesson in Vengeance(53)

“It’s all right,” Leonie says, with surprising gentleness. “It’s just an old building.”

And of course she would have been here before; she knows from experience.

“Nineteenth-century, I think.” Ellis wanders closer, peering up at the shuttered windows and trailing a hand along the clapboards. Even in the moonlight, I can see her fingertips come away dirty. “I wonder why no one bothered to maintain the place; it could have been a historical landmark.”

Clara still looks dubious, but she wanders closer to Ellis all the same.

“It was built in 1853,” Leonie says, and when I turn to look at her she’s gazing at the crooked steeple, her hands in her pockets. “Commissioned by the people who owned Dalloway at the time. It was even briefly used as a sanitarium in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic.”

I stare at her. “How do you even know all that?”

“I’m a historian,” she explains as she moves closer, drawing one hand free to touch the door frame. “I’ve read a lot about Dalloway’s history.”

I’ve never read anything like that in the Dalloway library. Only now do I wonder if Leonie has been going off-campus for her research—if, during all her trips to the city, she found records about Dalloway that I’ve never seen before. Records that, perhaps, Dalloway wishes would stay buried.

I draw the key out of my skirt pocket and open the padlock; we Margery coven girls had cut off and replaced the police’s original lock with one of our own. I suppose whenever the coven decided to excommunicate me, it didn’t occur to them to take my key.

The church door swings open with a whine, and I instantly sneeze. If the Margery coven held another initiation here at the start of the semester, the dust has already returned.

“Come on,” I say, and flick on my flashlight.

The others trail behind me, which is a little ironic considering none of them even believe in ghosts. I cast the glow of my light toward all four corners of the church, counting the usual landmarks: the baptismal font, the pulpit, the pews draped in ancient white blankets. Nothing is out of place. No one else has been here in weeks. No one alive, anyway.

There’s still a splatter of goat’s blood on the floor, presumably where the others drew the chalk pentacle for this year’s initiation—the one I wasn’t invited to. Clara spots it and yelps, lurching back against Ellis’s chest. I can’t help but laugh.

“It’s probably just paint,” I say, even though I know better, and I kneel down over that stain to shrug my satchel off one shoulder and start unloading my materials. I pass around a jar of cloves and instruct the other girls to place the cloves under their tongues and murmur a consecration.

Clara giggles and grimaces as she swallows her clove, like she thinks it’s a silly formality and not sacred liturgy. Leonie discreetly spits hers out.

I suck my clove slowly, luxuriating in the warm, earthy spice of it, the way it makes my tongue feel slightly numb, the perfume that dies when I crunch down. The bitter taste lingers long after I’ve swallowed.

I light two candles—one white, one blue—and set three snow-quartz crystals in a small bowl. Another bowl I fill with rainwater, poured out of a steel thermos I appropriated from Godwin’s kitchen.

The spell isn’t anything I got out of a book. I invented it. It just feels right, each element of my altar connecting to something real out there in the world, like threads. Sympathetic magic: like tugging on like.

I dip holly berries in the rainwater and then roll them in sugar until their garnet skin is frosted and glittering in the candlelight. At last, with a rain-wet finger, I trace a fractal on the floor—lines and angles splintering off one another in perfect symmetry.

The others watch me work in cautious silence. I’m not sure if Ellis somehow warned them not to speak or if some part of them inherently knows. But when I lift my head, they’re all seated in their semicircle around me: waiting, like students, for an instructor’s command.

I invited them, but for this, their presence is irrelevant. They’re only here because Ellis needs five of us, five to match the five dead Dalloway witches. She doesn’t have five tonight, and that almost ruined everything. But it doesn’t matter.

This spell is about more. It’s about me and Ellis. About magic—and whether forces exist too powerful and arcane for us to understand.

“We’re going to summon snow,” I tell them. “Close your eyes and clear your mind. Try to imagine the way snow feels, tastes, sounds as it blankets the ground. Then repeat after me…We call upon the north wind: greet us with your breath and bless us with your gift.”

It sounds a little silly when I say it out loud, but Ellis closes her eyes and repeats my words, and so the rest of them follow.

A chill sinks into my skin as I turn my gaze down to the holly in my lap, the yellow candlelight dancing on the surface of the rainwater and casting shadows across the backs of my hands. I smile and close my eyes as well, let myself sink into the space that always opens up for me in rituals like this—a quiet space in my chest, a secret space. The only place I ever feel truly calm.

I was wrong to think magic was dangerous. Alex might be. The witches might be. But not this.

Never this.

“Listen,” Ellis murmurs.

For a moment her voice is the only thing echoing in my mind, soft and heavy as the dusk all around us.