A Lesson in Vengeance(55)

“Shh. Just breathe.”

I can’t.

“Breathe.”

I’m crying now, the tears sliding down my cheeks. It’s not cold enough for them to turn to ice, not yet.

I didn’t kill her. I don’t have the capacity for something like that. I’m just…I’m losing my mind. I’m—

Margery. It’s Margery coiled like a viper in my heart, making me think these things.

“Felicity. Can you look at me?” Someone brushes the tears away, their touch skimming my face as if to map its topography. “Look at me.”

I look.

Ellis is close enough that for a moment all I can see are her eyes, cloud gray and steady. Her hands are on my cheeks. Her lips are flushed.

“You’re all right,” Ellis says again, and strokes my hair like a mother with her infant, and that’s when I realize the others are awake now: Clara and Leonie both standing there staring at me, Leonie’s hand over her mouth, Clara’s gaze wide and hungry.

I can still hear Leonie’s voice echoing in my skull: It’s so silly, isn’t it?

Ellis exhales softly; I feel the heat of it on my skin. Finally, her touch drops from my face down to my shoulders; she rubs my arms hard.

“You’re soaked,” she murmurs. “Come on. We should get you home.”

I don’t remember the walk back to the truck. When I try to envision it, I see four bedraggled girls with numb noses staggering over fallen logs and lurching past pools of snowmelt. Ellis’s arm around my waist keeps me upright, Clara trailing behind like a watchful shadow.

Ellis bundles me into the front seat and drapes a blanket over my lap. I twist my hands up in the wool and stare out the window as we trundle over uneven ground and back out to the one-lane gravel road.

It’s only five minutes back to Dalloway. I don’t know why it felt like we’d gone miles that night, thousands of miles, like we’d traversed the globe a dozen times over.

Kajal’s asleep when we return, and Clara is too timid for confrontation, which means there’s no one to fight me for the third-floor shower. I turn the water as hot as it will go and sit on the floor underneath the spray. My mind is a blank sheet of ice, a still lake that stretches far toward the horizon. I contain nothing. Everything inside me is cold and dead.

I remember this feeling; I felt this way in the hospital—like my very soul was constructed of laminate floors and fluorescent light. Sterile. The first several nights I cried for my mother. A mistake, because she never came. And even if she had, I probably would have regretted it.

But that place didn’t ruin me. I was cursed already. The Dalloway witches had carved out my heart and consumed it for heat. I had nothing left to give.

I get out of the shower only when the water has gone lukewarm, then stand there in front of the mirror, dragging a brush through my hair over and over until my hand shakes. I get dressed in dry clothes and lie down on my bedroom floor.

Ellis finds me like that sometime later. I don’t get up even when I hear her knock, or when my bedroom door opens.

She settles in next to me and rests her hand on my brow. After a few seconds I shift and let her tug my head into her lap, her fingers combing through my hair.

“It’s the comedown,” she tells me with surprising gentleness. “Nights like that can leave you feeling terrible. This happens sometimes.”

It doesn’t feel like a comedown. It feels like the world is fracturing and falling apart.

I’ll never drink again, I tell myself. I want to believe it this time, but I’m no better than my mother.

I open my eyes and gaze up at Ellis. She looks less familiar when seen from upside down, her features gone alien and surreal. “I forgot the bike,” I say.

“We can go back and get it later.”

“It wasn’t even my bike. I stole it.”

A soft breath bursts from her lips, and I recognize it a beat too late: a laugh. “In that case, we might as well not bother. I don’t know if a bike would fit in my truck anyway.”

“I could ride it home.”

“You could,” she agrees.

Ellis is close enough that I can feel her breathing; her stomach shifts against the back of my head every time she inhales. Some part of me feels, bizarrely, like we all died out there in the snow. I cling to this small evidence that she’s alive. That we both are.

“It snowed,” I murmur. “I knew it would. Believe me now?”

Ellis twists a lock of my hair around her finger. “It’s November, Felicity. It would have snowed regardless.”

I sigh and don’t bother arguing. Ellis was the one who wanted me to prove magic to her, after all; if she doesn’t want to believe me, that’s her prerogative.

I think about her breathing, and the rug beneath me, the wax still burned into the silk fibers from when I knocked over the candles the week Ellis and I met.

“I’m going to help you through this,” Ellis promises, her hand still stroking my skull. “There’s no ghost, and there’s no magic. I’m going to prove it to you.”





I invent reasons to stay in my room the next day: too much homework, food poisoning, I overslept. The truth is, I can’t bear to face Leonie and Clara now that they’ve seen me in that state.

“It was the whiskey, Felicity. Everyone understands that,” Ellis says with a note of impatience to her tone. It doesn’t matter. I saw the way they looked at me. I know what they’re thinking.