by Victoria Lee
“That wasn’t magic. That was just a ritual.”
“What’s the difference? It doesn’t need to be anything dark and terrifying. One of us can cut her finger and you can attempt a healing spell, if you like. But I want to give you a fair chance to prove magic is real before I disprove it for good.”
I don’t have a good argument in response to that. I should, but I don’t. Ellis seems to know that, to taste my surrender like blood in the water, so I nod once and escape before she can think of any other harebrained ideas.
It’s true that I have essay revisions due Monday morning, but after I make it upstairs and sit myself down at my desk to work, I realize I can’t concentrate. The words blur together on my laptop screen and a painful beat pounds in my temple, despite all the pills I gulped down this morning.
I can’t do this. I can’t do magic again. It’s not even about Ellis—I can’t do this to Alex. Even if this ghost is all in my head, it’s…callous, it’s sick to just…
It’s been less than a year since I watched my girlfriend plummet to a watery death. I should be more concerned with Alex’s blood on my hands than the smell of Ellis’s hair.
Magic is what got me in trouble in the first place. Only now, because Ellis has asked it of me, I’m only too willing to give in.
But maybe I am a monster, because now she’s all I can think about.
I drew a card from my deck when I woke up. The Nine of Swords. I replaced it, shuffled, and drew again, and got the Nine of Swords for a second time.
Fear and nightmares.
So even before I see her, I know Alex is coming tonight.
I’ve already written to Wyatt to ask for an extension, and since then I’ve been metaphorically chained to my desk. I keep my hands on the keyboard as if that will force me to use it, but my attention keeps drifting away from my laptop and out my window toward the quick-approaching night. Dusk falls faster now than it did, a curtain dropping over the horizon and trapping us on a darkened stage. The snow brings its own silence.
It’s Sunday. It’s Samhain.
My gaze has drifted from my computer again, past my own face reflected in the window and toward the woods. At first I think it’s a trick of the light, a reflection from my own bedside lamp in the glass—but then it moves.
I slam my laptop shut and lurch across my desk, pressing my nose to the windowpane. Even with the double glazing installed since I left last year, the glass is frigid against my skin.
There. There, in the woods, a figure shifts between the trees.
Even from this distance, I can see Alex’s red hair.
The moonlight reflects off her skin and lends it a strangely iridescent quality, like a white opal dropped underwater. Her movements are inhuman, her incorporeal form like a wisp blown from place to place, flitting between trees and vanishing, only to reappear a moment later farther away.
She’s not real, she’s not real, she’s not real—
She’s real.
I shove back my chair and grab the tartan throw from where I’d tossed it on the foot of my bed, wrapping the wool knit tight around my shoulders as I clatter down the stairs and out the Godwin House back door.
The temperature has plummeted since Ellis and I cut across the quad after fencing practice the other day. My breath clouds in front of my face as I dash across the short field behind Godwin. Already my teeth are chattering; I’m too aware of my bones caught beneath my skin, of my own mortality in the face of Alex’s…of Alex’s…
I don’t know what she is now.
By the time I’m ensconced under the tree cover, I start to wish I’d brought a flashlight, or at least my phone—something I could use to light the way. As it is, branches cut my cheeks, and I trip over unseen roots, stumbling from trunk to trunk and blinded by my own adrenaline.
“Alex?”
My voice doesn’t echo; it’s swallowed by the forest, the silence somehow more complete in the wake of my words than it was before.
The air out here is granite-dry, sucking the moisture from my skin and making my lips feel raw. I twist my hands tighter in the knit throw and slow my pace, too conscious of the way the tree cover consumes the light of the moon, the way the snow muffles every step. If something were to come up behind me, I wouldn’t hear it until it was too late.
The nape of my neck prickles. I whip around, but there’s nothing there, just the blank faces of dying trees and the penetrating dark.
My breath is too loud now. I tug the edge of the tartan blanket up over my mouth, like that could muffle the sound. It only succeeds in making me feel half suffocated by the damp heat of my own air.
“Alex?” This time her name comes out softer, quavering like a baby bird.
I have no reason to think Alex’s ghost is benevolent. She might have drawn me out into the night with any number of motives. She might intend to kill me.
I never should have trusted her absence. I never should have doubted her ghost was real. I knew she was here, knew it in my blood. Why would Alex’s spirit leave me alone if Margery’s curse won’t? Margery claimed Alex the same night she claimed me: the night of my séance.
My fault. All of it—my fault.
I stop in a clearing, turning in slow circles. I can’t watch every angle at once; I can’t guarantee that the moment I turn my back on that tree, this one, her specter won’t slip from between the vines to close cold fingers around my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. If she hears me, she gives no sign of it.
Then I turn on my heel and sprint out of the woods as fast as my feet will carry me. I stumble and trip over rocks and roots, stagger up the steps to Godwin House, and all but collapse in the back hall, dripping melted snow onto the floorboards and shivering in the sudden heat.
I place black tourmaline along my windowsill, a defense against whatever—whoever—I saw. But when I climb into my bed, I can’t sleep.
I’m afraid to close my eyes.
* * *
—
I’ve planned the third Night Migration, notes written with Ellis’s leaky fountain pen and slid under doors, folded and tied with twine. Kajal finds me the morning after I deliver the notes while I’m making tea in the kitchen, her eyes red-rimmed.
“I can’t come tonight,” she says. “I know we’re not supposed to talk about it, but I didn’t want you to end up waiting for me.”
“Are you sick?” I ask.
Kajal grimaces, an expression that comes across as pained. “Yes. I suppose it’s that time of year, isn’t it? I don’t doubt I’ll infect all the rest of you by the end of the week.”
“Oh no. I’m sorry. Here, let me make you some tea. And don’t worry about tonight, really; you should rest—”
“What’s going on?”
We turn to find Ellis in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, already dressed in a blazer and twill trousers despite the fact it’s not even eight in the morning.
Kajal sneezes into her elbow then scrubs the heels of her hands against her cheeks. “I’m ill. I’m not going to make it tonight, obviously, so I just thought—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ellis interjects. “Of course you’ll make it tonight. It’s just a little bug. We couldn’t have a meeting without you.”
“I really can’t.” Kajal’s hair is usually perfectly coiffed, silky and coaxed into loose waves; today it’s pulled into a messy bun and tied off with a scrunchie. She looks like she needs to be in bed, not tramping through the frigid woods.
But Ellis’s frown deepens, and she pushes off the doorframe, stepping farther into the kitchen. “You have to come. This isn’t optional, Kajal—you made vows during initiation. You’re bound to us now.”
“It’s fine, Ellis,” I say, and I find myself having shifted to put my body between Ellis and Kajal—although I don’t really
remember moving, although I know Ellis wouldn’t hurt her. “Magic isn’t real, remember? So there won’t be any evil spirits rising from the grave to punish Kajal for taking one night off.”
Of course, the vows we all made during initiation weren’t that kind of vow anyway—I’d been so careful to keep magic far away from our earlier rituals, to be good—but it’s an argument that will work on Ellis. That’s all that matters. And if she still wants me to practice magic tonight, to perform for her like a prize horse, she’ll agree.
Ellis’s expression has gone still and smooth as marble, a sculpted neutrality that I don’t know how to interpret. But I stay where I am, my feet rooted into the stone floor, into the uneven foundation of Godwin itself.
At last a slim smile cracks her mouth, and she nods, once. “Fine,” she says, and she says it calmly enough that I almost believe she doesn’t care anymore. “As you like. I hope you recover well, Kajal.”
She turns and goes without another word, and the vacuum of air left by her absence makes it hard to breathe. When I look at Kajal, she’s leaning back against the kitchen counter like she’s been exsanguinated.
“Ellis will get over it,” I tell her, and I offer an arm that I don’t expect her to take. Only she does, leaning her weight in against my side and letting me help her out into the common room to curl up on the sofa. I drape one of our ugly knit blankets over her reed-thin legs and tuck it in around her hips. “Can I get you something? A book? Tea?”
“Tea would be nice,” she admits, and I spend the rest of the morning checking on her, making sure she eats something between bouts of editing my English paper that’s now due at the end of the week.
When night falls I leave without Ellis. I’ve chosen a field farther up in the mountains for tonight’s meeting—far enough away that I have to steal an unlocked bike from Yancey House and pedal my way through the hills. By the time I make it to the right coordinates, I’m sweaty and out of breath. The bike chain catches at my skirt as I dismount, ripping the hem.
“Fantastic,” I mutter, hopping on one foot to examine the damage. The chain has left a smear of grease along the ankle of my tights, too. This isn’t even the final location—I plan to move us somewhere new once the others have arrived—and I’m starting to regret that choice, the same way I’m starting to regret the sacred materials I’ve packed in my satchel. The bag hangs heavy against my thigh, an unignorable reminder of my own foolishness.
As usual, I shouldn’t have let Ellis pressure me into this.
Leonie is already here, crouched down by the start of a little fire and blowing on the embers like she can coax it into existence despite the damp.
“I don’t know why Ellis can’t schedule these indoors,” Leonie says, stabbing at the coals with a stick. She blames Ellis, of course, even though I’m the one who planned tonight’s meeting. “It’s November. It’s absolutely freezing.”
“If we aren’t uncomfortable, we aren’t having the true experience,” I say in my best Ellis impression, which earns me a snort and half a grin from Leonie.
“Well, maybe next time you can be the first one out here,” she says. “Tell Ellis to schedule me last.”
It must have rained up here earlier, then froze after dusk fell. The stones we’re meant to sit on are slick with ice; the grass is crunchy underfoot. I put my satchel on the ground and sit on top of it, feet stretched toward Leonie’s meager fire.
“I’m ready for Thanksgiving break,” Leonie says. “Kajal’s coming back with me, you know.”
“You’re from…?” I know Leonie said, the night I first met her, but I don’t remember. I’d been too busy thinking about myself—and Ellis.
“Newport. So it won’t be any warmer than this, I’m afraid.”
“Are you planning to do anything fun?”
She shrugs; the gesture looks oddly stilted, but that might be because of the cold. “I mean…My grandmother’s sick. Dying, probably. So…not really.”
I flinch and wish I could take the question back. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She tosses the stick into the flames, abandoning her attempt. “She’s getting old. It was going to happen sooner or later.”
“Even so.”
Leonie sighs and sits on one of the frigid rocks, gloved hands planted in the grass. “She was the first Black student at Dalloway, you know. Desegregation of schools had just passed in the Supreme Court, and Dalloway wanted to look progressive—so they had to find an appropriately bright, appropriately wealthy young Black girl to play the role. My great-grandmother was rich, an inventor, and my grandmother really was a genius. The Schuylers have attended Dalloway ever since.”
My brows rise despite myself. “I didn’t know that.” I suppose there always has to be a first, but it never occurred to me how utilitarian it all was, how Leonie’s grandmother might have felt less like a welcomed admission and far more like a weapon.
Leonie nods, twisting her signet ring around her pinkie. “She’s why I’m here. Thomasin and Penelope, too, I suppose.”
It takes a moment for me to place the names: Thomasin is a sophomore, Penelope a junior. They’re both Black.
“There’s just three of you,” I say, surprised, and then immediately flush. “Sorry. That was a silly thing to say.”
“Not really.” Leonie stops fidgeting with her ring and places her hands flat on the rocks beneath us, leaning her weight back so she can tilt her face toward the starry sky. “You’re right. Three of us. My grandmother was so proud to be an alumna.”
“I’m sorry she’s ill. I can’t imagine.” Which is true; I never knew my grandparents. My mother didn’t speak about them, and they didn’t bother to get in touch.
Leonie glances toward me. The light reflects off her dark eyes like a million fractured diamonds. “I found out that my grandmother knew all the great Harlem Renaissance writers, back in the day. Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Spencer…She never mentioned them. Not until she was dying. And now it might be too late.”
She chews on her lower lip. I wish I knew her well enough to reach over and take her hand, but most of our interactions have been under Ellis’s watch. I only know the parts of Leonie that Ellis wants to see.
I need to figure out a way to change that.
“Anyway,” Leonie says eventually, “I’m going to record her stories while I’m home. Kajal’s helping. I feel like there ought to be some kind of archive, you know?”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea.” I smile when I say it, and I genuinely do admire Leonie for that. And I envy her. No one in my family cares about literature at all. My mother views my love of reading with the same vague bafflement with which she viewed my former interest in running—a hobby one might reference in polite conversation, but ultimately unnecessary.
If she knew I want to study English in college, that I hope to be a literature professor one day, my mother would die from sheer disgrace. A society woman doesn’t need to work, and in fact, ought not.
“I’m glad we decided to start doing these,” I say after a few long moments. “The Night Migrations. Ellis thinks it will help with her book, so…”
Leonie laughs. “Oh. Right, yes. It’s so silly, isn’t it? The rituals, the theatrics of it all. Even worse with the Margery coven—it took me ages to get the smell of dead goat out of those robes. But it’s fun. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”
Yes. It is.
Maybe it’s all right to love this. Maybe it’s okay to find comfort in the darkness, as long as I don’t let myself take it too far.
And I can’t help myself. I have to know; I have to know if Leonie knows. I wet my lips and start: “Listen, Leonie, about the Margery coven—”
But Leonie shushes me, grabbing my wrist and pointing across the clearing. “Look.”
A light has appeared in the woods, bobbing between the trees; eve
ntually the forest releases Clara onto the horizon. She’s bundled up in what looks to be two cloaks, her flashlight beam shaking with how bad she’s shivering.
“Did you walk?” I say, horrified.
“How else was I supposed to get here?”
“Bike,” Leonie and I say in unison, then exchange glances.
Clara makes a face and comes to stand at the other side of the fire, rubbing her hands together and apparently refusing to sit in the wet grass.
Eventually a pair of headlights curve around from the far end of the field—there must be a road over there that I missed on the map. The vehicle lumbers over the hill and comes to a stop twenty feet away, the engine running for another solid ten, fifteen seconds before it shuts off. I’d be worried about who might have driven up here in the middle of the night if I wasn’t equally confident that the likelihood of some stranger finding us here, at the random coordinates I chose in the middle of the woods, is next to zero.
I don’t recognize Ellis’s truck until she emerges from the driver’s side wearing riding boots and a shearling coat. She tramps across the dead ground without a flashlight; when she’s close enough, I realize she’s not even wearing gloves.
Ellis doesn’t say a word about Kajal, or about anything else for that matter. When she comes to a stop between me and Clara, she’s at such an angle to the fire that the light casts her features half into shadow.
“Who are we reading this time?” Clara asks. “Sylvia Plath?”
Ellis shakes her head. “Felicity’s in charge for this one. I think she had her own idea. Didn’t you, Felicity?”
I nod and rise to my feet at last, dusting off the bark and bracken that cling to my skirt. “It’s a bit of a hike,” I tell them, kicking damp leaves over the fire. “Come on.”
I lead them through the forest, down the slope of the hill, occasionally pulling out my phone to check the coordinates. It occurs to me only now that I have no idea how the others have been locating the Night Migration spots—none of them have mobile phones.
Surely they don’t use compasses?