A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  The recorded rabbit screeches, a terrible sound that tightens something in my gut like a twisting wire. The sound goes on and on and on, until that’s all I can hear. Not even my own breath, not even my heartbeat.

  Then I see it.

  The coyote creeps in slow, padding across the fallen leaves in unnatural silence. Every couple of feet it pauses and glances around. At least twice I swear it sees us, those yellow eyes glinting through the shallow light and fixing right at the hollow of our tree.

  Next to me Ellis doesn’t move, barely seems to breathe. Her finger is steady on the trigger.

  I’m not the one who has to shoot the creature, but my hands are sweaty all the same. I stare through the shadow at the coyote as it sniffs at something on the ground: innocent, oblivious.

  All at once I don’t want her to do it. I can’t let her.

  “Ellis—”

  She glances sidelong at me, one brow lifted. I extend my hand, and she hesitates, then gives me the gun.

  It’s heavy against my shoulder, heavier than I expect. The grip of it is polished wood, chilly on my cheek as I brace the rifle and put the coyote in my crosshairs.

  The creature still hasn’t noticed we’re here; it nudges its nose at a pile of leaves near the call, searching for its prey. I wet my lips and curl my finger around the trigger.

  Ellis’s hand touches my shoulder, so lightly, a barely-there presence that nevertheless sends a shudder down my spine.

  I shoot.

  The crack of my gunshot ricochets off the watching woods, a flock of birds exploding from a nearby bush and scattering toward the sky. I startle and fall back against the tree trunk, the gun dropping into my lap as the coyote drops to the ground. Ellis loses her grip on me when I fall, but a grin sharpens her mouth—and in a moment she’s gone, moving forward across the decaying leaves. I’m frozen in place for several long seconds, the rifle’s kick still quaking through me—or so it feels like, at least. But then I force myself to my feet and clamber along behind her.

  I won’t be weak. I can’t be afraid anymore.

  The coyote’s still alive when we get to it. Its torso shudders with every breath, a black spot blooming quick on its fur. The eyes roll in their sockets, as if the beast thinks it can find escape from some quarter, might still have a chance at living.

  Ellis braces her gun over one shoulder and inspects it critically. “That’s a kill shot,” she states at last. “It won’t live much longer.”

  Up close, the coyote isn’t nearly as threatening as my imagination had made it out to be. It’s smaller than I expected, about the same size as Alex’s shepherd-husky mix and similar in features. Its black nose is almost delicate somehow, whiskers quivering as its breath starts to slow.

  Ellis quivers too—a very slight tremor to her hands, detectable only because I notice everything about her. It’s so easy for Ellis to pretend disaffection, as if our childhood traumas don’t trickle like rainwater through the bricks of our lives. As if she doesn’t care.

  But I know Ellis better than that now.

  She crouches down next to the body and swipes her gloved fingers through the bloody mess at its chest. “Come here.”

  I obey. What else is there to do but obey? And Ellis rises, one hand tipping my face toward the light as the other paints the coyote’s blood in a quick line across my cheek.

  “It’s an old English tradition,” she says as I take in shallow breaths and fight the abrupt urge to touch my face. “For those new to the hunt.”

  I grimace and wipe the blood off my cheek as soon as Ellis’s hand falls away. She laughs.

  “What?” Ellis says. “Isn’t this the Dalloway way—all weird and bloody?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  She gives me a conspiratorial grin and tugs off one glove to lick her thumb. “You missed a spot.”

  Her damp finger scrubs away the last of the blood, lingers perhaps a beat too long. I still feel her touch even after she moves away to examine the coyote again. Its eyes track her approach, half-lidded and half-alert. But already its pupils are clouding, its fangs matte and dull instead of slick with spit.

  Nausea roils up in the back of my throat, and I turn away, retreating a safe distance to huddle down at the root of a sugar maple. I don’t know what Ellis is doing with the coyote’s body, and I don’t care. The gun lies discarded in the leaves, two feet to my left; overhead, the sky beyond the cover of trees is starry and vast. My world is a globe forty feet in diameter, spinning and spinning and spinning.

  One would have thought Alex would have died on impact, after she fell from that cliff. But she didn’t. I stood there frozen for a long moment, watching her struggle, black lake water sluicing over her face and filling her mouth. And by the time I made it to the shore, she was already gone, her body sinking into the low current, her lungs heavy with fluid and dragging her down.

  I know she died. But…

  What if she hadn’t? What if she’d survived—half-drowned in the cold air, her bones shattered. Could she have dragged herself out of the water and away from the rocks, into the woods, still drunk? Would she have wandered through the dark, living off mushrooms and tree bark? Would she have stayed there, watching me, waiting for the chance at revenge?

  Maybe what I think is her ghost isn’t that at all, but is instead some arcane shade of what Alex might have been, a zombie crawling through its half-life and seeking its creator.

  “The coyote is dead,” Ellis says.

  I look up. I hadn’t heard her coming back, but she’s here now, crouched on the ground in front of me. My whole body feels stiff and weak, as if I haven’t moved in years.

  Ellis’s lips curve into a frown. “Are you all right?” she says, a softer edge rounding her tone. Her gloved hand tilts my chin up so that I have to meet her gaze. “Felicity. Tell me you’re okay.”

  The darkness around us is now absolute. I can barely make out Ellis’s features, can’t even tell the color of her eyes. They’re pale like glass but alive, flickering with light. Or maybe I’m just dizzy, exhausted, half-frozen. She cups my cheek.

  I exhale. My breath shudders out of me to cloud in the wintry air. “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod. Ellis’s teeth catch her lower lip for a moment, but then she stands, offering a hand to pull me up. She tugs me away from the coyote’s carcass and into a streak of moonlight that filters through the forest canopy.

  I must be mad, truly mad—as if killing that coyote knocked my brain off-kilter—because I find myself deliriously thinking how beautiful Ellis is. Her skin is pewter in this light, all her color reduced to myriad shades of gray, like a black-and-white photo given life.

  “I can’t believe I killed it,” I say.

  “I can’t believe you killed it, either,” Ellis admits. Her hand is on my waist, steadying me as I stagger over fallen branches. “You didn’t have to.”

  “I had to.” I don’t know how to explain it to her, not fully. I don’t even know how to explain it to myself. But I couldn’t…After everything, after the story Quinn told me about Ellis and her rabbit…I couldn’t let her pull the trigger. I couldn’t make her do that again.

  Or maybe I just needed to know if I was capable of it. If I had that dark streak inside me, running black and cold enough to take a life.

  It turns out I do.

  “Come on,” Ellis says. She laces her fingers together with mine. “Let’s go back.”

  I don’t remember much of the trip out of the woods and up to the house.

  What I do remember is Ellis’s hand gripping mine the entire time, the taste of sweat on my lips. The common room light is on when we ascend from the garden up to the house proper, but we evade Quinn entirely. Instead Ellis takes the steps two at a time; I go behind like a pale shadow, my bared hand cold as
it trails along the banister.

  She goes to her room, and I follow.

  I kick the door closed behind me and Ellis pulls off her gloves finger by finger, watching me with this wary look, like she still expects me to bolt.

  “I told you I’m fine,” I say. It comes out more persuasively now, my voice steadier away from the dark.

  “I know what you said.”

  “And you know I’d tell you if I wasn’t fine.” I offer her a small and wavering smile. “Shame has never stopped me from falling apart on you before.”

  She laughs and the taut thread tied between us eases a little. Eases, but doesn’t unravel.

  Ellis presses her bared hand to my sternum, right above my heart. I wonder if she can feel it beating against her palm—too fast now.

  “You’re brave, Felicity,” she says. “You’re the bravest person I know.”

  And then she kisses me.

  The dizzy feeling doesn’t abate. Instead of swaying on my feet, I cling to her with both hands, my head spinning and her tongue in my mouth. Ellis’s body is hard and firm, and I can’t stop touching it; she presses me back against the shut door as her open mouth skims my cheek. I arch closer as she peppers kisses along my jaw, my throat.

  “I’ve wanted you,” she murmurs, and those three words are sudden heat; when she pulls back, my lipstick is smeared across her mouth, a scarlet streak cutting past her jaw. Her lips are parted and still damp.

  I need to kiss her again, but when I try she tilts away, then smiles. “I want to hear you say it.”

  My breath cuts out of me in shallow half gasps. Both my hands twine in fists around the fabric of her shirt.

  “I want you, too,” I say.

  Ellis’s smirk widens. This time when she kisses me, it’s harder, more desperate. I’m desperate, too, shucking off her jacket and waistcoat, Ellis’s fingers fumbling over the buttons on my shirt in turn.

  My hands find her waist, smoothing down toward her narrow hips. God. I can tell just from this, even with her body clothed in thick tweed and wool, that she’s strong. Powerful.

  I need more.

  Ellis’s forearms bump against mine as she unknots her tie and yanks it free. The drag of that fabric against her collar sends an unexpected shiver down my spine.

  Maybe any other day, or with any other woman, I would have been embarrassed. But there’s something about this night—or about Ellis herself—that makes me feel confident. Sexy.

  Invincible.

  The rest of our clothes come off, and then we’re moving, the backs of my legs hitting the edge of the mattress. Then we’re on the bed, and Ellis is there, touching me.

  I wonder if my skin feels hot against hers. I’m burning up inside.

  “Fuck,” I gasp, and Ellis laughs against my collarbones.

  “Oh dear,” she murmurs. “Language, Felicity.”

  I love the way my name sounds on her voice: husky and low, gravelly in a way that makes me shiver. Being here with Ellis, like this, feels inevitable: as if I could trace our friendship back to the day we met and discover roots there, the original seed of something that would become this.

  And what is this? I’m not sure I know the answer. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

  Ellis performs her work with the slow, determined care with which I imagine she writes her books, leaving me breathless and blinking up at her as she leans down to kiss me again.

  “Not fair,” I say—accuse, really—and Ellis smirks into the kiss, reaching for my wrist to slip my hand down the waistband of her underwear instead.

  She’s flush-cheeked and breathless once she’s finished, lifting her head to meet my gaze. This time when she kisses me, it’s languorous and warm. Then she shifts to kiss my throat, my sternum…and lower.

  “You’re—”

  You’re incredible. You’re inexorable. You’re merciless.

  I don’t even have the ability to speak.

  When you read about sex in books, it’s always described like a magical event, something sacred enacted through the profane: two souls joining on the metaphysical plane while two bodies entwine below. I had never understood that before now. But with Ellis it’s different than it was with the girls I’ve been with before—even Alex. Ellis is something new, and it feels like she creates and unravels me in the same moment, a sentence she writes and erases and rewrites, a product of her wants and imagination. I feel like she invented me.

  I wonder if she feels the same.

  After, I’m left limp and feverish, staring at the ceiling as Ellis shifts back up the length of the bed to settle her body next to mine. She trails a finger along my cheek, toward the corner of my mouth.

  “There,” Ellis says, as if she’s accomplished a task. She kisses the place her finger just touched.

  I coil in closer, and she smiles a small and careful kind of smile, a smile that conceals secrets.

  We fall asleep together, Ellis’s arm thrown over my stomach and my face tilted in against her shoulder. And for once it is so easy to forget I’ve ever known anyone else.

  * * *

  —

  Quinn leaves for Georgia two days before classes are meant to resume. It’s snowing when Quinn drives off, fat white flakes dusting the green roof of their Mustang, and within minutes the snow has covered the tracks the tires made on the drive, as if they were never there.

  Ellis and I are never far apart now. She touches me frequently, as if still amazed that she can: her fingers laced with mine while we read, her hand slipping into my hair as she passes behind me in the kitchen. I’ve stopped finding her touch as unsettling as I did, although it hasn’t gotten less thrilling. I want to memorize the warmth of her skin, the way her eyes sparkle like smoke quartz when she laughs.

  “No one has ever understood me like you do,” she told me after that first night we had together, tangled up in the sheets and awakening before dawn. I keep turning those words over in my mind, engraving them into the firmament of memory. I don’t want to forget this. No one understands Ellis Haley like I do. No one ever will.

  I’ll have to go back to my own room tomorrow, when the other students return. But for tonight, again, I share Ellis’s. I lie beside her in the narrow bed and focus on the heat of her body, the weight of her arm around my waist.

  But without her easy smiles and calm words, the walls close in. I keep thinking about the graveyard where Alex’s empty coffin was buried. I wonder if the book is back there now, covered under several feet of snow, with its pages gone soft and illegible. I wonder if Alex searches for me even now—if she’ll find me hiding here in Ellis’s room, hiding where I think I’m safe, and drag me back down into her hell.

  The gentle respite of our week’s vacation has gone. The clock has started ticking once more, a second for every heartbeat.

  I twist under Ellis’s arm, the dorm room bed small enough it knocks our knees together, and she mumbles in her sleep, rolling onto her other side. I curl up against her back, gazing at the nape of her neck and trying not to think about the sound the storm makes right outside her window—trying so hard not to wonder if that’s a figment of my imagination or if a girl’s voice carries on the wind, calling my name across the snowy hills.

  * * *

  —

  Ellis comments on my insomnia the next morning, the pair of us sitting in the kitchen with tea and coffee, the sunlight outside reflecting white off the snow.

  “Didn’t you sleep last night?”

  I press both hands into my lap and stare down at my tea. I don’t want to see the look on her face right now: concerned, knowing. What we have together feels fragile, not even two days old. I want to seem better now. Sane.

  “A little,” I say. “I had a hard time getting comfortable. Perhaps I shouldn’t have drunk some of your coffee last night.”

  She grins.
“Yes, well, that was your own mistake. You’re the one who stole my mug.”

  A drop of relief trickles down my spine. Ellis is letting it go. She believes me. She doesn’t assume the truth: that I was up all night obsessing once again over witches and ghosts.

  “What’s your plan for the day?” I ask.

  “Write,” she says, perhaps predictably. “Maybe try to get a little reading in before the others get back. What about you?”

  I keep gazing out the window. The trees are so thick, so icy, I can’t see farther than a few trunks deep. Past that the world blurs into gray fog. “I was thinking I might start running again…but it’s too cold today. So maybe I’ll be reading, too.”

  But once breakfast is finished and Ellis has absconded back to her room and her typewriter, I don’t read. Instead I search the titles on my bedroom bookshelf for The Secret Garden (absent) and position a row of candles and dried dandelion along my windowsill. The lit wicks flutter against the glass, a feeble barricade against whatever moves out there in the woods, drawing ever closer.

  Margery’s curse still waits for me. I might have killed Ellis’s coyote, and she might have proven their deaths could happen without magic, but that doesn’t make me free.

  I don’t want to bother Ellis—I don’t even know if we’re together. Even if we are, I don’t want to be the kind of girlfriend who hangs around constantly, present to the point of frustration. So I stay upstairs until I hear the front door open and shut again, Leonie and Kajal’s voices carrying up the stairs as they stomp in from the snow sometime near dusk.

  I meet them in the kitchen. Leonie, for one, seems especially pleased to see me; she grins and throws her arms around me, squeezing tight enough that I can’t help but laugh.

  “You came back!” she exclaims when she finally lets go.

  “Of course I came back,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I come back?”

  Some of the delight dims on Leonie’s face now and she falls onto her heels, Kajal quickly busying herself with the teapot. “No reason,” Leonie says unconvincingly. “How was Colorado?”