A Lesson in Vengeance(79)

The clock on my desk ticks past eleven, closer and closer to midnight. I ought to sleep. It’s Tuesday, but if I get in the habit of sleeping in too late it’s going to be hell getting myself out of bed for Art History. Eight on Tuesday morning is an ungodly time for a class, but at least I only have to do this for a few more months.

Then summer. Then, I hope, college. The city. A new life.

I’ve sworn off sleeping pills, but after half an hour of lying in bed and feeling equally as awake as I’d been at dinner, I flip my lamp back on and wander over to my bookshelf. I love Virginia Woolf, but to be completely frank, Mrs. Dalloway always puts me right to sleep.

I trail my fingers along the spines, past Oryx and Crake and The Secret Garden—

No.

Time goes still—this moment, this room existing outside the rest of the universe—as I jerk my hand back to my chest and clutch it there, not breathing. The old book is nestled there on my shelf, the cloth binding slowly peeling back from the spine and the lettering of the title faded to gray.

It’s not possible. It’s…I’d finished this, the nightmare was over. I blink, almost expecting the book to vanish when I open my eyes again, like a trick of the light. But no. Nothing has changed.

I tug the book free with shaking hands.

A black dust tumbles from between the pages, scattering to the floor at my feet. I press my fingertips to the cover, and they come away dark.

Grave dirt.

My mind is full of static, a roaring sound that drowns out all else. I open the book, half expecting to find another wilted hellebore bloom.

And there on the title page, in Alex’s handwriting, an inscription:

I never told you that I love you, but it’s true. It was always true.

Those words….they’re my words, from the letter I wrote Alex a week after she died.

The letter that was buried in her empty casket.

I slam the book shut and grip it between both hands, as if that will erase what I saw. My gaze flits back out the window, past the colored marbles—I should never have blown out those candles, should never have let down my guard—and out into the thick night.

The first time I found this book in my room, I’d thought it must be Ellis playing a prank. But she wouldn’t have any way of knowing what I wrote to Alex.

Then I’d thought I might have hallucinated the book.

I’m not hallucinating now.

I open the book again and reread the inscription. Alex’s handwriting is…There’s no mistaking it. Even so, I dig out the old letters she sent me and crouch down on the floor, comparing the swoop of Alex’s s in the book to her calligraphy from when she was still alive—the spiky peaks of her n’s, the way she always forgot to add punctuation and just began the next sentence with a capital letter.

Alex wrote this inscription. Resuming my medication hasn’t chased her away, and she didn’t vanish in the face of what Ellis and I built together. She’s here. She’s always been here, her ghost called back by the legacy of magic sunk deep into the bones of this school, the dark curse that infected me the night I spilled my blood on the Margery Skull.

Enough.

I can’t live like this.

It’s time to face Alex.

It’s time to pay for my crimes.





Sympathetic magic, must mirror a curse to undo it.

—A note, in Felicity Morrow’s handwriting, appended to her thesis materials Margery was a silhouette against the trees, but the way the mob’s firelight caught on the whites of her eyes made her look crazed. Demonic.

“I did it,” she whispered. “And I would do it again.”

—From a manuscript by Ellis Haley





The graveyard is in Kingston; it’s too far away to walk.

I steal Kajal’s bike and ride it into town and rent a car at the same place as last time with the false ID my mother gave me as a misguided sixteenth birthday present; the last thing I want right now is to sit in the back of a stranger’s cab for an hour, fielding questions about what I’m studying at school, why I’m out so late, why I look like I’ve seen a ghost.

Blanketed under snow, the cemetery looks nothing at all like it did when Ellis and I last visited. The tombstones rise out of the gloom like onlooking specters, black and silent. It’s four in the morning by the time I arrive, the night as dark as it will ever get and the cold reaching down into my bones as I step out of the car and let myself in through the iron gate.

The snow has fallen ankle-deep; it’s a slow trudge past the mausoleum and toward the silent oak tree that stands watch over Alex’s grave. The hellebore has been buried under that weight, and as I approach, the grave looks unmarked. Undisturbed.

It’s only once I kneel down by Alex’s headstone that I realize the snow there has been shifted. It’s not the pure faultless blanket that covers the other graves; the snow here has been freshly shoveled back into place, someone’s meager attempt to hide what they’ve done.

I twist around, expecting to find a shadowy figure standing behind me, but the cemetery is empty of all but the dead.

Alex never died in that lake. We didn’t find a body because there was no body to find.

While I ran down from the cliff to find her body, Alex pulled herself out of that black water and staggered into the woods, vanishing without a trace.