A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  This year, Samhain itself doesn’t fall until later in the week. But I can feel it approaching, the veil between this world and the next stretching ever thinner.

  What might cross over when that veil splits?

  I wish Ellis was here now, her arm looped through my elbow and her lips grazing my ear as she murmurs secrets. It’s easier to forget my ghosts when I have her.

  The event is well under way by the time we arrive. We’re greeted by a girl wearing a top hat and a sour expression; clearly she drew the short straw for door duty tonight. The girl takes our coats and our bags and ushers us into the house proper, watching impatiently as we shuck off our shoes.

  I regret that part soon enough. The floor is already sticky with spilled beer, red plastic cups are stacked on nearly every flat surface, and a few students dance with themselves in the living room where someone’s pushed all the furniture up to the walls.

  “It’s a good thing Ellis didn’t come,” Kajal says, and Leonie neatly sidesteps an intoxicated girl who almost stumbles into her on her way to the drinks table.

  She says it because she thinks Ellis wouldn’t like this kind of party, but I’m not sure I agree. I could see Ellis perfectly at home here; even with her dress shirts and suspenders, even in shiny bespoke shoes, she would inhabit this space the same way she does every other: like she belongs.

  “I’m going to get a drink,” I say, and shoulder my way past a knot of rowdy Claremont House students to peruse the libations on offer. Almost every bottle left contains tequila.

  This party is nothing like the Boleyn House fête at the start of the year, but I’m reminded of that night all the same. Clara is talking to Leonie about something inane, using gesture as punctuation, like she thinks everyone in this room ought to stop and listen to what she has to say, like she thinks she’s more important and more interesting than anyone else here. The murders Ellis and I are plotting might be hypothetical, but I can’t help thinking that one day, someone will get sick of Clara and push her down the stairs.

  The tequila sloshes over my fingers when I pour it into a cup. Cheap clear liquor, the kind that burns on the way down and on the way back up, but erases the memory of everything that happens in between. I start drinking, and once I start, I find it hard to stop.

  Just like your mother, a voice murmurs in the back of my mind. It should be enough to inspire sobriety, but thinking of my mother only makes me drink more.

  The party slides into a blur of faces and bodies. I’m with the Godwin girls for most of the beginning; I remember that much. But then somehow I end up in the Lemont backyard under glittering market lights, slow jazz playing on vinyl, swaying with my hands reaching toward the sky. I find a beautiful girl who has eyes like night and skin cool as water. I tell the girl that, as I slide my touch along her cheek. A serial killer sort of thing to say—I love your skin—but she smiles at me.

  “So forgiving,” I murmur. Her hand has caught my dress, thumb pushing a button free at its collar.

  She looks nothing like Alex. Her hair is brown, not red. Her complexion is dark, not pale. But when I kiss her, I see Alex all the same.

  Possession, I think, just for a moment. But is it really such a strange possibility as to be impossible? This girl’s hands are Alex’s hands, her tongue Alex’s tongue. I want to lace our souls together and make her forgive me.

  The kiss breaks, and the girl touches my lips, our breath shallow and hot between us. “Do you want to go upstairs?” she says.

  The answer rises to my mouth, but before I can say yes, I spot her: Ellis Haley, a slim figure in a tweed suit, watching us from across the backyard with her cigarette burning down to ashes in one hand.

  “What is it?” asks the girl who isn’t Alex. When I look at her, she has her brows knit together and uncertainty written all over her face.

  I take it back. This girl isn’t possessed. Alex has never been uncertain about anything in her life.

  My gaze flicks back over her shoulder. Ellis is already gone.

  “I have to go.” I extract myself from her arms and chase after the spot where Ellis had stood. The air still smells like her cigarette smoke, but the crowd has swallowed her up; I spin around, but all I see are strangers.

  It’s freezing out here. How had I not noticed how cold it is?

  Everyone out in the backyard exists in their own little world; I have to shove my way through with sharp elbows to get back inside. But inside is worse. Bass thumps through the floor, the windows sweating with the humidity of so many bodies; I trip over someone’s discarded shoes and hit the ground hard enough that it sends shock waves ricocheting up from my knees.

  “Are you okay?”

  It’s Hannah Stratford, of all people. She crouches down next to me, her mouth in a little pink O of affected concern.

  “Fine,” I say.

  She has her hands on my arm anyway, helping me up. I wonder if she saw me kissing the ghost in the backyard. I wonder who else saw, how many whispers are passing from lip to ear: I saw Felicity Morrow…

  Ellis watching me, her cigarette an ember in the dark.

  I kept being lesbian a secret for years. Now I’ve thrown it away to join the rest of the trash littering this house.

  “Are you drunk?” Hannah asks, a question stupid enough to rival her first.

  “No,” I say. “I just hate everyone.”

  It’s not what she expects to hear. She frowns, her mind working overtime to square that with the Felicity Morrow that exists in her imagination.

  “You’re drunk,” she decides at last, and settles my arm around her shoulders even though I’m mostly steady on my feet. “Maybe we should get you home….”

  “I can walk, thank you.” I shift out of her grasp and reach up to grab my hair, pulling it into a ponytail. For some reason that makes me feel more sober. “I’ll see you around, Hannah,” I say.

  I can’t find my coat at the door, so I stagger home without one, teeth chattering by the time I’m climbing the hill to Godwin House.

  The door all but slams shut behind me.

  “Ellis?” I call her name from the foyer.

  No one answers. It’s late; even the light beneath Housemistress MacDonald’s door is dark.

  I drag a plaid throw blanket off the sofa and wrap it around myself. Godwin House is old and badly insulated; it’s not much warmer than outside.

  There are other reasons it might be cold, Alex’s voice murmurs in the back of my mind. I shunt her aside.

  I climb the stairs to the second floor. Unlike MacDonald’s room, Ellis’s light is still on.

  I knock.

  There is no response.

  “Ellis? It’s me.” A beat. “Felicity.”

  Still no reply. But I can hear the creak of a floorboard as she—what? Shifts in her chair? Moves across the room?

  Ellis is in there. She’s just ignoring me.

  I hover in the hall a moment longer, staring at the strip of yellow light under her door, hoping to see a shadow cross the floor and betray Ellis’s position. But nothing else moves. I imagine her sitting at her desk, watching the door the same way I watch the door. Waiting me out.

  So I do it. I leave.

  I let her win.

  The girl became a crow, the crow became bones, bones became dust. I wonder now if such curses are bestowed only upon the wicked.

  —Ellis Haley, Night Bird

  Patient is emotionally labile, with increasingly erratic mood swings and heightened environmental reactivity. Positive symptoms observed: fixed delusions and auditory-visual hallucinations that are refractory to therapeutic intervention. Will recommend and discuss antipsychotic treatment regimen with pt’s parent.

  —Medical record note, Silver Lake Recovery Center

  The Devil has my consent, & goes & hurts them.

&nbs
p; —Abigail Hobbs, confessed witch, The Examination of Abigail Hobbs at Salem Village,

  April 19, 1692

  When I wake up next morning—late, with a pounding headache and the taste of old socks in my mouth—Ellis has already left Godwin House.

  I drink her leftover cold coffee in the kitchen and swallow as many acetaminophen as I can handle on an empty stomach. Then I make myself take a shower and get dressed and apply my makeup with a tight jaw and a steady hand. I’m not going to be that girl. I’m not the kind of girl you ignore.

  “Where’s Ellis?” I ask Housemistress MacDonald, standing in the doorway of her office.

  “You look very pretty today, Felicity.”

  “Thank you. Have you seen Ellis?”

  MacDonald gives me a look that suggests she’s surprised I don’t already know the answer to that question.

  “It’s Saturday, dear. She’s at fencing practice.”

  Of course she is.

  I find out where practice is held by looking up the fencing team’s website on my phone, then set off across the quad with a coffee thermos clutched in one hand and the sofa throw wrapped around my shoulders; that coat I lost was the only one I had.

  I haven’t been in the athletic complex yet this year. Before, I used to go all the time: tennis, treadmill, the climbing wall with Alex. Now I’m an interloper in foreign territory.

  The building where the gym is located used to be a hospital—Saint Agatha’s Sanitarium—or so I’d read once, from an old property record buried deep in the Dalloway library archives. The interior still bears relics of that history. The training room used to be a morgue; the drain on the floor would have carried away blood and fluids during autopsies. The erstwhile surgery is now the locker room, but the observation balcony still circles overhead, empty seats gathering dust, ghosts watching us undress from above.

  Patients at Saint Agatha’s used to have to pay a fee when they were admitted. The money was intended to cover burial costs.

  The fencing practice suites are on the fourth floor. I let myself in and stand against the wall, watching identical women in masks jab and slash at each other. There’s something elegant about it—something that reminds me of dance. The swords are slim steel cutting through space, long limbs that move to a rhythm only the dancers hear.

  Even though all the fencers are in the same white uniform, wearing the same mesh masks, I spot Ellis almost immediately. No one else is so tall, so slim-shouldered and narrow-hipped; no one else would move so decisively.

  If the rest of them dance, Ellis preys.

  She spots me a few seconds in, falling into a backstep as her faceless mask turns toward me; her opponent lunges, and the blade snaps against Ellis’s chest.

  I smile.

  Ellis tugs off her helmet and stalks across the floor toward me. Her hair has frayed free from her bun, wisps plastered to her sweaty forehead, and her cheeks have gone red. “You distracted me.”

  “You ignored me last night.”

  She braces the tip of her épée against the tile, a conquistadora. “Is this supposed to make us even?”

  It’s the same game we’d played before the start of the semester. This time, I won’t lose.

  “Why didn’t you answer your door when I knocked?”

  “I was writing, Felicity. I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Really. Because I’d assumed you were done writing for the night, considering you came to the party after all.”

  She stares at me for a long moment, one bead of sweat cutting a path down past the bridge of her nose. Her mouth is a flat line. “Perhaps I found myself reinspired.”

  My lips quirk up. And, at last, Ellis is the first to look away.

  “Come on,” she says, grabbing my elbow and steering me toward the door. “I’m done practicing anyway.”

  I wait outside the locker room while she showers and changes out of her lamé. It’s a cold walk back to Godwin House, Ellis’s wet hair frosting over as we tramp across the quad, then melting all over the floor as soon as we’re inside. I go straight to the fireplace in the common room, my hand shaking as I strike a match three, four times before it lights.

  “Shit,” Ellis murmurs, breathing into her cupped palms. She’s still trembling as she comes to sit down on the floor with me, both of us huddled together and waiting for the flames to catch. Her hair drips onto my shoulder; I feel the ice all the way down in my bones.

  “It’s only October twenty-ninth,” I say. “It’s going to get worse.”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  We sit there for a while without speaking, the silence punctuated only by the crackle of wood as it alights. Ellis’s fingertips are whiter than the rest of her hands, as if that part of her body has died.

  I wonder how long it took Alex’s body to turn that color. I imagine the cold winter preserving her flesh, her corpse broken but beautiful as a winter doll.

  “Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” Ellis asks eventually.

  I shake my head. “My mother’s in Paris until the new year. I think she forgot there’s a holiday.”

  “I’m not, either,” Ellis says. “I already have to go back for winter break. That’s quite long enough for me.”

  I’m dying to ask Ellis about her family. She never mentions them, and I have no idea if her parents are still together, if she had a happy childhood, whether her family supported her dream of being a writer. Maybe a normal person would ask. But only people with loving families like talking about them; when people ask about my mother, I always lie.

  “There’s nothing back in Savannah for me, anyway,” Ellis says, and I glance over, not entirely able to hide my surprise.

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighs and shifts back onto her elbows, reclining against the rugs and stretching her feet toward the hearth. “We lived out in the middle of nowhere—not really the city proper. My moms have an estate on hundreds of acres; the nearest neighbor is miles away.”

  “Don’t you have school friends?”

  “I didn’t go to school,” she says. “My parents were the kind of rich people who felt that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a small army of private tutors was a better investment than Emma Willard. Of course, that meant Quinn was my only friend—and they started at Yale when I was eight. That left the tutors. And the dogs, naturally.”

  I assume Quinn is Ellis’s sibling; clearly the Haley parents have a fondness for surnames as first names.

  After a moment I lie back as well, settling in close enough that I can feel Ellis’s chest rising and falling with every breath, my head nestled in the crook of her shoulder. “Is that why you started writing? Because you were bored?”

  “Maybe. Probably.” She drapes a hand over her eyes. “Yes.”

  I turn my face toward her and inhale; her hair’s still wet, but it smells like lemon.

  “My mother’s crazy,” I confess. It’s easier to say when Ellis can’t see me. “Better now, perhaps; or perhaps she’s traveling so often I don’t notice anymore. But when I was younger…you never knew which version of her you would get. Maybe today she thinks you’re the best person in the world, or maybe not. Maybe her life is falling apart and it’s all your fault.”

  Or maybe she’s drowned herself in another bottle of vintage Clicquot and needs you to rescue her again.

  Ellis doesn’t say anything. I’m grateful for that—I don’t know that there’s anything she could say that would be better than silence. Her hand falls from her face to drape across my knee instead, the two of us like twin corpses side by side. Her eyes are still shut.

  “She never saw herself as the problem, though,” I go on. “First it was my anxiety that was the culprit. Then, after Alex, it was that. She was so humiliated by the idea that she’d produced me. Like it was the wors
t sin in society, to parent a child who…who had to be institutionalized. All I want is to be better than her.”

  The confession falls out of me like a stone. And once the words are spoken, I can’t take them back.

  I half expect Ellis to laugh and tell me how I’ve failed, that my mother was right to be ashamed.

  But instead Ellis lets out a heavy breath. “Well. My parents were never around, but I have to admit…maybe I lucked out on that front.” She looks at me now, turning her head so that our noses all but brush. Her breath is warm against my lips, her face so close I can see every delicate pore.

  All of a sudden my heart beats a little faster. I can’t stop thinking about the way Ellis moved with that sword in her hand, sweat-slick and intentional.

  I sit up too abruptly, digging my nails into the rug beneath us. “I have to go,” I say. “I just remembered I owe Wyatt revisions by Monday.”

  Ellis pushes herself up more slowly, but she doesn’t get off the floor when I stand. “All right. Will we be seeing you for dinner?”

  “Oh. I don’t…maybe. We’ll see.”

  “Felicity, wait.” Ellis stops me when I’m already halfway out of the room. I pause and look back over my shoulder; she’s still sitting on the floor, firelight flickering off the wet gleam of her hair. “I was thinking…”

  For a moment she almost looks her age, the set of her features softer somehow, lips parted. But then the effect passes and she’s Ellis again.

  “The next Night Migration…perhaps you should take the lead again. Half the point of this project is my proving magic doesn’t exist. So why don’t you teach us some magic?”

  My breath has stopped moving in my chest; my blood has gone still in my veins. I blink. And in that split second I see her again—Margery Lemont—her pale face rising behind Alex’s frame.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  Ellis tilts her head. “Why not?”

  “I shouldn’t be doing magic. Not anymore.”

  “You’ve done magic already. You initiated me into the Godwin coven, didn’t you?”