A Lesson in Vengeance(91)

“Don’t move,” Ellis snaps.

This time, I obey.

The tip of Ellis’s sword trembles. The edge of it is stained red.

“I can’t trust you,” she murmurs, but she isn’t speaking to me. Her voice is low, tight. It’s not a statement; it’s a realization. “Sooner or later, you’ll betray me. Next time—”

The slam of the front door cracks the tension like thin ice. I startle, and for a moment Ellis is frozen in place, épée grazing my throat.

Then Kajal’s voice calls up the stairs: “Is anyone home?”

Ellis’s sword falls away, dangling from one limp hand. We stare at each other, Ellis’s eyes pale and wide, her throat shifting as she swallows.

I tilt my chin up. “I suppose you’ll have to kill me some other day.”

I edge past her, shoulders brushing the wall in my effort to keep distance between us. Ellis’s gaze follows me until I’ve left and shut the door behind me, another barrier between me and her.

For however long that lasts.





Ellis and I circle each other in that house like twin vultures over dying prey.

If I am in a room, she is sure to follow. She stalks at my heels, silent and watching, as Leonie ropes me into a game of checkers, as Kajal asks me to help pin her too-large skirt. Such casual activities, and yet they’re frayed, fraught. Leonie’s hand shakes when she moves the checker pieces. Kajal flinches when my fingers graze her spine.

We are all ghosts in this house, waiting to hear the death knell.

I don’t sleep that night, or the next. Even with my desk chair lodged under the doorknob, I flinch at every creak of the floorboards outside, every scrape of branches against my window. I light candles for protection. But if those couldn’t frighten off my own phantoms, they won’t do anything against Ellis.

My world reduces to sensation. The lights are too bright, sounds overloud. People speak to me, and although I hear them and respond, two minutes later I can’t remember what they said or what it meant. Ellis and I exist on opposing planes. We scratch at that veil between us. Eventually, one of us will sweep it aside and move in. Eventually, one of us will lose.

Alex hasn’t left. Even knowing that so much of her presence was Ellis’s machination does very little to erase her from my mind. I still see her in the shadows. I still watch her flit between the forest trees. Her voice wakes me in the night. Her memory stains my soul.

Maybe I’m being unfair to Ellis. Maybe some nightmares are real.

My mother appears at Dalloway on Friday night, an apparition trailing expensive perfume. For a moment I almost don’t recognize her, standing in my doorway with her hair spun in careful curls and her pink Isabel Marant dress. She got thin in Nice.

“What are you doing here?” I demand.

“Miss MacDonald called. She said your friend had gone missing.” My mother looks as if she doesn’t know what to do with herself in this place, her gaze darting from the books on my shelves to the candles on my desk to, at last, the tarot cards scattered across my floor. “Felicity, what’s all this?”

“Nothing. You shouldn’t have come.”

Surely Cecelia Morrow had better things to concern herself with—better vintages—than her mad daughter and the dead bodies that seem to fall in her wake like cut flowers.

My mother drifts forward and kneels to stare at my spread. It was a bad spread, full of dark omens; I’d drawn the Hanged One and thought of Tamsyn Penhaligon swinging from that tree, strangled to death. I’d burned anise and clove over the cards to ward off her curse.

Now my mother trails a finger through the ground spices and then rubs it against her thumb, a faint grimace passing over her lipsticked mouth. “I thought you were past this,” she says.

“It’s for my thesis.”

“Felicity…”

I know what she’s going to say. She’s been talking to Dr. Ortega, who has filled her ears with stories about my paranoia, my obsession with the Dalloway Five. It was no use explaining how all academic passions veer toward obsession. She wouldn’t understand that magic can be a metaphor, like Ellis said. That magic doesn’t have to be magic for it to mean something. That sometimes magic is a salve over a burn, and it’s the only way you can heal.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “You can go home. Go back to Aspen, or Paris, or wherever. Don’t worry about me.” I laugh. “You never do.”

“I do worry about you. Felicity…darling…are you still taking your medication?”

“Yes.”

“Can you show me the bottle?”

My next breath is too sharp, hissing through my teeth on the inhale. “Why is it any of your business? Why are you here, pretending I’m the one who’s crazy—I’m not the one who’s crazy! I’m not the one who spends every hour of every goddamn day with her head in a wine bottle. I’m not devouring Xanax and ripping up priceless artwork and then telling everyone I’m perfectly happy.”

I can’t tell if I’ve hit my mark. My mother’s face is as expressionless as the surface of an icy lake. Perhaps even now her emotions are drowned in six glasses of C?tes du Rh?ne red.

“I think,” she says eventually, rising to her feet and dusting the spices from her hand, “you should take another leave of absence. Dr. Ortega said they can have a bed ready for you as early as next Friday.”