A Lesson in Vengeance(71)

“Of course not,” I whisper, so softly I barely even hear myself say it.

“I’m sorry,” Quinn is saying, already on their feet, swaying slightly, their face gone green. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Ellis…”

Ellis’s lips press into a sharp smile. “It’s all right, Quinn. Felicity understands. Everyone has a backstory.”

Our eyes meet across the room. I feel like I’m seeing Ellis Haley for the first time, turning over memories like fresh stones: When I told Ellis about Alex, she never said it wasn’t my fault. She’d said, You didn’t have malevolent intent. There was a difference, which Ellis—Ellis the writer, Ellis alone in the dead of winter—understood better than anyone.

“I was coming down to tell Felicity I’m going to bed,” Ellis says. She toys with the corner of the nearest accent table, as if caressing the grain of the wood. Or as if she has more to say, something she’s holding back.

I discover what that something is an hour later, when I go up to bed myself and find a folded square of paper on my floor, tied shut with a length of black ribbon: coordinates and time, signed with Ellis’s name.

Another Night Migration.





The coordinates take me back to the church an hour before nightfall the following day. The setting sun casts a yellowish hue over the clapboards, the shadow of that upside-down cross stretching long and black across the dirt—nearly to the forest’s edge.

Ellis leans against the wall by the door. Beside her is a gun.

I stop at the tree line, staring at her from twenty feet away. Although of course that distance would mean nothing to someone with a finger on the trigger. “What is that for? Where did it come from? You—”

“Don’t worry,” Ellis says, pushing herself to standing. “It’s nothing sinister. Quinn keeps this rifle in their car for self-protection—it’s a southern thing.”

A southern thing. My throat is still so dry I have to swallow against it several times before I’m even able to speak again. “I’m not asking why Quinn has it. I’m asking why you have it.”

“For the Night Migration,” Ellis says slowly, as if I’m perhaps a little bit stupid. “Flora Grayfriar’s death. It’s one of the last loose ends we need to tie up: we need to reframe how she died. How Margery killed her, rather.”

I shake my head. “There are too many versions of that story. Which one are you claiming is real?”

Ellis picks up the gun and props it against her shoulder. I feel like my head is full of marbles, all of them rolling over each other, bumping against the walls of my skull, too many to count. I can’t think straight with that thing in Ellis’s hands.

“I still don’t understand why you need a gun.”

“The hunting explanation,” Ellis says. “Remember? One version of the story says that Flora was found shot in the stomach. It could have been a hunting accident, or one of the townspeople, but my money’s on Margery. Someone heard her confess, after all. Why confess to something that isn’t true?”

“I don’t—”

“Just a coyote, Felicity,” Ellis says with a little laugh. “There are dozens of them out in these woods. Obviously we aren’t going to shoot each other.”

I move closer to her now, although what I really want to do is drop onto the ground and sit there in the dirt. I don’t know how to argue with Ellis about this. It’s like trying to convince someone the grass is green when they insist that anyone could clearly see the grass is blue.

“Okay.” I press my hands to my face and exhale heavily. “So you want to go hunting. Is that it?”

“I want to see if an unskilled girl would be able to shoot something in near darkness and actually hit her target. And I want you to see that, too: No altar, no ritual. Just a girl who shot another girl in the woods. No spirits or sorcery necessary.”

“The body was found on an altar. None of the accounts dispute that fact.”

Ellis shrugs. “Sure. But that doesn’t mean the magic was real. Just that Margery wanted to make it look like it was real.”

The explanation feels half-baked to me. I can’t put my finger on why at first, but then: “We’ve gotten to the part of your method writing where you need to kill something?”

But Ellis just smiles and shakes her head. “Not remotely. You already heard I killed that rabbit, after all. This is for you, Felicity. This is the central part of the Dalloway story, as close to the heart of the so-called witches as you can get. But you don’t have to perform a ritual to pull a trigger.”

“I know that,” I snap.

“Knowing isn’t the same thing as knowing. You know up here.” Ellis taps her temple with one finger. “But you don’t know in here.” She presses that same hand over her chest. “You’ve tied those girls to magic so closely in your head that the knots will never unravel on their own. That’s why we’re doing this, Felicity—that’s the whole point of the Night Migrations. You need to walk in their shoes without magic. You need to see them as humans: as fallible and impulsive and mundane as anybody else.”

Maybe she’s right. She’s been right about enough so far. So much of this has been in my head, the product of fear and some kind of chemical imbalance in my brain. I’m not sure I want to see the Dalloway witches as human, though. I want them to be like me.