A Lesson in Vengeance(8)

The Boleyn girls have set up a makeshift bar in their kitchen, their faculty adviser conveniently absent—as all our faculty go conveniently absent whenever we throw parties; our parents don’t pay this school to discipline us after all—and there are more varieties of expensive gin than I know how to parse. I pour myself a glass of what’s closest, then a second glass when that one’s gone.

I don’t even like gin. I doubt that any of the twenty girls who live in Boleyn House like gin; they just like how much this particular gin costs.

No one talks to me. For once, I’m glad. Instead I get to watch them talk to each other, their sidelong glances skirting past me like they’re trying not to be caught looking, conversation dropping low when they realize I’m there.

Everyone knows, then.

I don’t know how they figured it out—or, well, maybe I do. Gossip travels fast in our circles. Even with Ellis Haley at Dalloway School, I am the most interesting person here.

I tip back the rest of my drink. They’ll get over it. Once classes start, someone will invent a worse story to tell around the fireplace than Felicity Morrow, the girl who…

Even in my mind, I can’t say it.

I pour myself another glass.

Every house at Dalloway has its secrets, a relic of the school’s history. As Leonie had so astutely pointed out, Dalloway was founded by Deliverance Lemont, the daughter of a Salem witch and allegedly a practitioner herself. Some secrets are easier: a secret passageway from the kitchen to the common room, a collection of old exam papers. Boleyn’s, like Godwin’s, is darker.

Boleyn’s secret is an old ritual, a nod from the present day to a time when bad women were witches and passed their magic down to their daughters, generation to generation. And if the magic has died by now, diluted by technology and cynicism and too many years, students of certain Dalloway houses still honor our bloody inheritance.

Boleyn House. Befana House. Godwin.

When I was initiated into the Margery coven, I pledged my blood and loyalty to the bones of Deliverance’s daughter, the dead witch Margery Lemont. I might not be part of Boleyn House, but the initiation ritual bound me to five girls each year from these three houses, chosen to carry Margery’s legacy.

More or less, anyway; last year I saw one of the Boleyn initiates drinking tequila out of the Margery Skull’s eye socket like it was a particularly macabre sippy cup.

The Skull is supposed to be here, at the Boleyn House altar. I could drift down the hall with gin running hot in my veins, find the girl in red standing guard by the crypt door, and murmur the password:

Ex scientia ultio.

From knowledge comes vengeance.

I close my eyes, and for a moment I can see it: the single slim table draped in black cloth and bearing thirteen black candles. The thirteenth candle atop the Margery Skull, wax melting over its crown like a dark hand grasping bone.

But the Skull isn’t there anymore, of course. It’s been missing for almost a year.

None of the Boleyn girls seem concerned. Even the girls I recognize from previous visits to the Boleyn crypt are drunk and laughing, liquor sloshing over the rims of their cups. If they worry about a dead witch seeking revenge for her desecrated remains, it doesn’t show.

We’ve all heard the ghost stories. They’re told at Margery coven initiation rites, handed down from older sister to younger like a family heirloom: Tamsyn Penhaligon seen outside a window with her snapped neck, Cordelia Darling with her sodden clothes dripping water on the kitchen floor, Beatrix Walker murmuring arcane words in the darkness.

Tales meant to frighten and entertain—not meant to be believed. And I hadn’t believed. Not at first.

But I still remember the dark figure blooming from the shadows, the guttering candlelight, and Alex’s white, stricken face.

I turn and stalk down that hall toward the crypt. The girl in red is there, but she isn’t the somber, stoic figure she ought to be. She’s on her phone, tapping away at the screen, which lights her face in an eerie bluish glow, smirking at something she’s just read.

“Remember me?” I say.

She looks up. The grin drops from her face between one heartbeat and the next, a new expression stealing its place: something flat and guarded and hard to read. “Felicity Morrow.”

“That’s right. I’ve been enjoying the party.”

Her weight shifts to the other foot, and her arms rise to hug around her waist, fingertips pressing in against that red cardigan. “I heard you were back at school this year.”

She’s afraid of me.

I shouldn’t blame her for it, but I do. I hate her, all at once. I hate that she is the one standing in scarlet to guard the crypt, I hate the invisible threads that tie her to the other girls in our coven, the knots between her and Bridget Crenshaw and Fatima Alaoui and the rest of them, tethers I used to think were unbreakable.

I hate that I don’t even remember her name.

“I haven’t received a note yet,” I say.

She shakes her head very slightly. “You won’t be getting one. Not this year.”

I knew it. I guessed it when none of them wrote to me while I was gone, despite all those flowers they sent to Alex’s mother for the funeral, their figures like a murder of crows huddled at Alex’s grave site even though none of them knew her. None of them really knew her, not like I did.

Suddenly I’m coldly, brutally sober. I set my empty glass aside on the nearest table and look at this girl with her scarlet Isabel Marant sweater and expensive manicure, her lipsticked mouth that would have whispered about Alex when she thought Alex couldn’t hear: scholarship, rustic, aspirant.