by Victoria Lee
After ten minutes’ walk we emerge into a clearing, and from the soft murmur behind me, I can tell that the others recognize this place—from photographs of the town’s history, if not from real life.
The church has been abandoned for over forty years now; the windows are boarded up, the front door padlocked, although I suspect the police were more concerned about squatters than witches. The white clapboard exterior is stained near black in places, as if with soot, though according to the property records there was never a fire. Even the steeple lists slightly east, the ancient cross that used to crown it toppled over and hanging nearly upside down.
The Margery coven has held initiation here for twenty-six years. I wonder sometimes if that’s the real force that’s eaten away at the building’s integrity, the irreverent power of reckless rich girls and their pretense at faith corroding the relics of life.
“I’m not going in there,” Clara announces, stopping short near the creaking fence that circles the churchyard.
The rest of us exchange looks. Sometimes I think Leonie and Kajal, at least, regret including Clara in our games. She’s younger, impressionable in a way that doesn’t lend itself to creativity. And as much as I know none of them believe in magic like I do, at least the rest of us take the Night Migrations seriously.
“It’s all right,” Leonie says, with surprising gentleness. “It’s just an old building.”
And of course she would have been here before; she knows from experience.
“Nineteenth-century, I think.” Ellis wanders closer, peering up at the shuttered windows and trailing a hand along the clapboards. Even in the moonlight, I can see her fingertips come away dirty. “I wonder why no one bothered to maintain the place; it could have been a historical landmark.”
Clara still looks dubious, but she wanders closer to Ellis all the same.
“It was built in 1853,” Leonie says, and when I turn to look at her she’s gazing at the crooked steeple, her hands in her pockets. “Commissioned by the people who owned Dalloway at the time. It was even briefly used as a sanitarium in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic.”
I stare at her. “How do you even know all that?”
“I’m a historian,” she explains as she moves closer, drawing one hand free to touch the door frame. “I’ve read a lot about Dalloway’s history.”
I’ve never read anything like that in the Dalloway library. Only now do I wonder if Leonie has been going off-campus for her research—if, during all her trips to the city, she found records about Dalloway that I’ve never seen before. Records that, perhaps, Dalloway wishes would stay buried.
I draw the key out of my skirt pocket and open the padlock; we Margery coven girls had cut off and replaced the police’s original lock with one of our own. I suppose whenever the coven decided to excommunicate me, it didn’t occur to them to take my key.
The church door swings open with a whine, and I instantly sneeze. If the Margery coven held another initiation here at the start of the semester, the dust has already returned.
“Come on,” I say, and flick on my flashlight.
The others trail behind me, which is a little ironic considering none of them even believe in ghosts. I cast the glow of my light toward all four corners of the church, counting the usual landmarks: the baptismal font, the pulpit, the pews draped in ancient white blankets. Nothing is out of place. No one else has been here in weeks. No one alive, anyway.
There’s still a splatter of goat’s blood on the floor, presumably where the others drew the chalk pentacle for this year’s initiation—the one I wasn’t invited to. Clara spots it and yelps, lurching back against Ellis’s chest. I can’t help but laugh.
“It’s probably just paint,” I say, even though I know better, and I kneel down over that stain to shrug my satchel off one shoulder and start unloading my materials. I pass around a jar of cloves and instruct the other girls to place the cloves under their tongues and murmur a consecration.
Clara giggles and grimaces as she swallows her clove, like she thinks it’s a silly formality and not sacred liturgy. Leonie discreetly spits hers out.
I suck my clove slowly, luxuriating in the warm, earthy spice of it, the way it makes my tongue feel slightly numb, the perfume that dies when I crunch down. The bitter taste lingers long after I’ve swallowed.
I light two candles—one white, one blue—and set three snow-quartz crystals in a small bowl. Another bowl I fill with rainwater, poured out of a steel thermos I appropriated from Godwin’s kitchen.
The spell isn’t anything I got out of a book. I invented it. It just feels right, each element of my altar connecting to something real out there in the world, like threads. Sympathetic magic: like tugging on like.
I dip holly berries in the rainwater and then roll them in sugar until their garnet skin is frosted and glittering in the candlelight. At last, with a rain-wet finger, I trace a fractal on the floor—lines and angles splintering off one another in perfect symmetry.
The others watch me work in cautious silence. I’m not sure if Ellis somehow warned them not to speak or if some part of them inherently knows. But when I lift my head, they’re all seated in their semicircle around me: waiting, like students, for an instructor’s command.
I invited them, but for this, their presence is irrelevant. They’re only here because Ellis needs five of us, five to match the five dead Dalloway witches. She doesn’t have five tonight, and that almost ruined everything. But it doesn’t matter.
This spell is about more. It’s about me and Ellis. About magic—and whether forces exist too powerful and arcane for us to understand.
“We’re going to summon snow,” I tell them. “Close your eyes and clear your mind. Try to imagine the way snow feels, tastes, sounds as it blankets the ground. Then repeat after me…We call upon the north wind: greet us with your breath and bless us with your gift.”
It sounds a little silly when I say it out loud, but Ellis closes her eyes and repeats my words, and so the rest of them follow.
A chill sinks into my skin as I turn my gaze down to the holly in my lap, the yellow candlelight dancing on the surface of the rainwater and casting shadows across the backs of my hands. I smile and close my eyes as well, let myself sink into the space that always opens up for me in rituals like this—a quiet space in my chest, a secret space. The only place I ever feel truly calm.
I was wrong to think magic was dangerous. Alex might be. The witches might be. But not this.
Never this.
“Listen,” Ellis murmurs.
For a moment her voice is the only thing echoing in my mind, soft and heavy as the dusk all around us.
And then I hear it: the soft patter of snow falling on the church roof.
Leonie lets out a startled yelp—and when I open my eyes, she’s laughing, face turned up. Beside her Clara has gone still and wide-eyed, arms wrapped around her middle and hugging herself close. If her curves became edges, if her curls were wild and tangled instead of neatly restrained, she might be Alex come back to life.
“It worked,” Leonie exclaims, already on her feet and spinning in place, like a child who just learned that school has been canceled. “Felicity! It’s snowing!”
My gaze flicks over to Ellis, who has a tiny smile settled about her lips as well, although her smile is harder to read. I can’t tell if she believes me, or if she’s mocking me.
Leonie darts across the church to throw open the doors. A flurry of snow scatters in across the floor, and I’m on my feet, too—we all are—abandoning the candles and crystals and holly berries to stand there on the edge of the night with winter stinging at our skin.
For some reason, it doesn’t feel cold anymore. Or maybe that heat is from the flask Leonie presses into my hand, the rhythm of Ellis’s voice steady like a heartbeat when she pulls out a book of poetry and reads to us, o
ur bodies flung on the church floor like discarded dolls.
Leonie’s flask empties, then Ellis’s, and it’s twenty minutes until the feeling hits. But then the euphoria pours over me like cool water, and I’m alive, I’m alight, sliding my fingers through sugar and tasting it on my tongue, snow falling on our faces through a hole in the desecrated roof.
This is better than any Boleyn party, I think, and let my fingers twine together with Ellis’s, my other hand linked with Leonie’s, Ellis’s thumb rubbing heat against my knuckles and the air gone thick like syrup. I’m drunk enough now that the world has gone to watercolor—all shapes and motion without texture.
We end up back in the woods somehow, Clara with a torch held high overhead. I don’t remember where she found such a big stick, or how she managed to ignite it with the wood so damp, but we follow that flame through the darkness, wandering in circles and curving lines with blood searing our veins.
I touch a tree trunk and am amazed by how rough the bark feels, how much I want to press my face against it. Leonie trails her fingers through my hair, and I could kiss her, almost do. Only then we’re moving again, reciting poems in shouts to the shadows and daring the ghosts to come out and play.
I don’t know how long the high lasts. It could have been all night; it could have been an hour.
But I wake up the next morning lying on a bed of bracken and melted snow. There’s frost on my lips and crystallized on my lashes. I’m cold enough that I’ve forgotten how to tremble.
It’s several seconds, several gulping breaths, before I convince myself I’m not dead.
What happened?
I’ve been drunk before, but it was never like this. Did I really have that much? I can’t remember how many times the flask was passed into my hand, how many times its mouth met my lips.
The forest is quiet as the interior of a mausoleum. Whatever protection last night’s spell had given me is gone now, melted like ice.
Last night didn’t summon snow.
Last night summoned death.
I stare into the trees, waiting for her to reappear: The spirit with white eyes and poisoned fingertips. Alex with her tangled hair and lake-drenched dress. I know she’s there, because I can feel her watching me; every shift of wind through the pines is her voice whispering.
I need to leave. I can’t be here. I need to leave.
I stagger to my feet and almost trip over the body.
“Shit!”
It’s Leonie, her dark skin silvery beneath the light dust of snow that covers it. She’s still, so still—a corpse in bespoke—and we never should have come here, never should have let ourselves fall asleep.
Only then she moves, curling her fingers into a fist, mouth twisting with discomfort. I glance away, and that’s when I realize we’re all here: Ellis huddled under a tree with her coat tugged in tight, Clara asleep in a pile of leaves with her cheeks gone pale and damp.
Her red hair in the snow is bright as spilled blood.
I gag and whip away. Don’t think about Alex. Don’t. Don’t think about—
There’s movement in the trees. Oh god—I see it. I see her. Barely more than a shadow, but I’d recognize her anywhere. I press my hand over my eyes so I don’t have to see. Only then memory is painted across the black velvet space behind my eyelids: Alex on that cliff, hair knotting in the bitter wind, her cheeks flushed in anger—and she was shouting at me, she wouldn’t stop shouting, and so I reached out and I pushed—
“Felicity?”
That’s Ellis’s voice. And so it must be Ellis’s touch that finds my shoulder, turning me away from Clara, from the bodies scattered on the forest floor like discarded trash.
“Felicity,” she says again, and cold fingers slide up the nape of my neck to grasp my skull. “It’s okay. It’s all right. We fell asleep. But everyone’s fine.”
I can’t breathe. The air is too thick out here, oxygen-poor and stinging like broken glass. It floods my lungs like cold water. How long can one survive without air? How long until my body collapses in on itself like Alex’s did? Twenty minutes? Thirty? The lake closes overhead. I sink into the dark. The earth swallows me whole.
“Shh. Just breathe.”
I can’t.
“Breathe.”
I’m crying now, the tears sliding down my cheeks. It’s not cold enough for them to turn to ice, not yet.
I didn’t kill her. I don’t have the capacity for something like that. I’m just…I’m losing my mind. I’m—
Margery. It’s Margery coiled like a viper in my heart, making me think these things.
“Felicity. Can you look at me?” Someone brushes the tears away, their touch skimming my face as if to map its topography. “Look at me.”
I look.
Ellis is close enough that for a moment all I can see are her eyes, cloud gray and steady. Her hands are on my cheeks. Her lips are flushed.
“You’re all right,” Ellis says again, and strokes my hair like a mother with her infant, and that’s when I realize the others are awake now: Clara and Leonie both standing there staring at me, Leonie’s hand over her mouth, Clara’s gaze wide and hungry.
I can still hear Leonie’s voice echoing in my skull: It’s so silly, isn’t it?
Ellis exhales softly; I feel the heat of it on my skin. Finally, her touch drops from my face down to my shoulders; she rubs my arms hard.
“You’re soaked,” she murmurs. “Come on. We should get you home.”
I don’t remember the walk back to the truck. When I try to envision it, I see four bedraggled girls with numb noses staggering over fallen logs and lurching past pools of snowmelt. Ellis’s arm around my waist keeps me upright, Clara trailing behind like a watchful shadow.
Ellis bundles me into the front seat and drapes a blanket over my lap. I twist my hands up in the wool and stare out the window as we trundle over uneven ground and back out to the one-lane gravel road.
It’s only five minutes back to Dalloway. I don’t know why it felt like we’d gone miles that night, thousands of miles, like we’d traversed the globe a dozen times over.
Kajal’s asleep when we return, and Clara is too timid for confrontation, which means there’s no one to fight me for the third-floor shower. I turn the water as hot as it will go and sit on the floor underneath the spray. My mind is a blank sheet of ice, a still lake that stretches far toward the horizon. I contain nothing. Everything inside me is cold and dead.
I remember this feeling; I felt this way in the hospital—like my very soul was constructed of laminate floors and fluorescent light. Sterile. The first several nights I cried for my mother. A mistake, because she never came. And even if she had, I probably would have regretted it.
But that place didn’t ruin me. I was cursed already. The Dalloway witches had carved out my heart and consumed it for heat. I had nothing left to give.
I get out of the shower only when the water has gone lukewarm, then stand there in front of the mirror, dragging a brush through my hair over and over until my hand shakes. I get dressed in dry clothes and lie down on my bedroom floor.
Ellis finds me like that sometime later. I don’t get up even when I hear her knock, or when my bedroom door opens.
She settles in next to me and rests her hand on my brow. After a few seconds I shift and let her tug my head into her lap, her fingers combing through my hair.
“It’s the comedown,” she tells me with surprising gentleness. “Nights like that can leave you feeling terrible. This happens sometimes.”
It doesn’t feel like a comedown. It feels like the world is fracturing and falling apart.
I’ll never drink again, I tell myself. I want to believe it this time, but I’m no better than my mother.
I open my eyes and gaze up at Ellis. She looks less familiar when seen from upside down, her features
gone alien and surreal. “I forgot the bike,” I say.
“We can go back and get it later.”
“It wasn’t even my bike. I stole it.”
A soft breath bursts from her lips, and I recognize it a beat too late: a laugh. “In that case, we might as well not bother. I don’t know if a bike would fit in my truck anyway.”
“I could ride it home.”
“You could,” she agrees.
Ellis is close enough that I can feel her breathing; her stomach shifts against the back of my head every time she inhales. Some part of me feels, bizarrely, like we all died out there in the snow. I cling to this small evidence that she’s alive. That we both are.
“It snowed,” I murmur. “I knew it would. Believe me now?”
Ellis twists a lock of my hair around her finger. “It’s November, Felicity. It would have snowed regardless.”
I sigh and don’t bother arguing. Ellis was the one who wanted me to prove magic to her, after all; if she doesn’t want to believe me, that’s her prerogative.
I think about her breathing, and the rug beneath me, the wax still burned into the silk fibers from when I knocked over the candles the week Ellis and I met.
“I’m going to help you through this,” Ellis promises, her hand still stroking my skull. “There’s no ghost, and there’s no magic. I’m going to prove it to you.”
I invent reasons to stay in my room the next day: too much homework, food poisoning, I overslept. The truth is, I can’t bear to face Leonie and Clara now that they’ve seen me in that state.
“It was the whiskey, Felicity. Everyone understands that,” Ellis says with a note of impatience to her tone. It doesn’t matter. I saw the way they looked at me. I know what they’re thinking.
But Kajal wasn’t there, so I find myself spending time with her instead. She’s also a Wyatt student, and it’s easy to commiserate over Wyatt’s ridiculous standards and share French pressed coffee as we read through our assignments. “First she wanted me to talk more about the rhetoric of silence in late Victorian literature, and now she wants me to delete everything,” Kajal bemoans.