“I beg your pardon?” I croak at last.
I wanted Ellis to join the Margery coven. I wanted her to wrap herself up in the shroud of their dark games—not drag me down with her. The Margery coven felt safe. They didn’t practice real magic—their craft was all about aesthetics and pretension, the foolish games of wealthy girls who wanted to feel powerful, who wanted to touch the hem of night’s cloak but nothing further, nothingreal.
“Real magic is something different. Real magic has risks.”
Ellis lifts one shoulder and drops it. “Let’s make our own coven. Why not? If I’m to do this properly, like a real method writer, I should explore the same pastimes the Five explored. Even if they didn’t die by magic, some still believed they practiced it.”
My palms are clammy as I press them to my face and suck in several hot, recycled breaths. I’m well aware of my own hypocrisy: I try to get her to join a coven, and then I balk at the very idea. But Ellis doesn’t understand—even if she can flirt with devils, I can’t. I can’t.
“Some things shouldn’t be toyed with, Ellis. Magic is dangerous.”
“Magic isn’treal,” Ellis says.
“You don’t know that.”
She sighs. “I suppose, if you’re the kind of person who also chooses to be agnostic as to the existence of deities or fairies in the garden. Yes, there’s always achanceit’s real. But is that what you really believe?”
My jaw hurts from gritting my teeth so hard. “You know I do.”
“I told you that I’d prove there was no magic involved in the Dalloway Five’s deaths. There’s no magic, period. We can make our coven asmagicalas you like, but no demons will rise from the underworld to meet us. And besides…this could be precisely how the girls are killed in my book. The Margery character needs to lure her victims away from safety. This is how.”
I think that once we’re out there in the forest, under the moonlight, she’ll see things differently. Who knows what lurks in the woods, which beings rule the cold space beneath the trees?
Still, perhaps this is harmless. Perhaps I’m overreacting: maybe Ellis’s presence alone would serve as a shield, her rational mind stalwart against the insane. I spend the rest of the night thinking about it: planning what spells we could try, how we could adapt magic that might have worked three hundred years ago for the modern day.
It isn’t until the next night that my fear surges back like a briny sea, my body frozen at the door of my bedroom with my shoes on but my coat still clutched in both hands.
Something about this feels wrong. I promised I wouldn’t do magic anymore; all those fantasies from last night about bonfires and bacchanals reveal their sharp edges when dusk falls.
I’m afraid that if I take this leap, there will be no coming back. I’ll free-fall forever.
But that’s why youhaveto do it,a voice whispers in my head, one that sounds suspiciously like Ellis Haley.
I need to be able to touch the dark without being consumed by it.
We had sent the invitations as three notes, handwritten on paper Ellis tore out of the backs of books she doesn’t like and slid through the uneven cracks beneath the Godwin House bedroom doors:
Meet me here at midnight. Tell no one you’re coming.Then a set of coordinates, signed with Ellis’s name.
The times Ellis gave were staggered, to ensure that no one runs into each other as they leave the house—every one of the Godwin residents thinks she is coming alone.
I exhale and make myself open the door. Ellis is waiting for me downstairs, already masked. She emerges from the poor light like a slim black bone, inhuman and hollow-mouthed. It’s difficult to imagine a soul exists behind the void of those empty eye sockets. In the Margery coven they told us that when the initiated wear the mask, their spirit departs their body; we are possessed instead by the ghost of a Dalloway witch. One of the Five.
I press my hand against my chest, and my heart thumps against my palm.Myheart?
Or someone else’s?
This is a mistake.
What if this is what Margery wants? Her spirit could be watching me, waiting patiently for my willpower to snap. She could possess me while I’m vulnerable, one foot already stepping into the night. She would force me to dance on her strings. To kill until the dead are satisfied. To perish so that her ghost can rest.
Perhaps I was never haunted. Perhaps this whole time Margery knew, and Alex knew, they wouldn’t have to chase me.
They knew I’d come looking.
—
The darkness lends a sense of intimacy, of import. We move through it like specters, silent—we become part of Godwin House, sprouted from the uneven floor and shadowed corners, descendants and daughters of witches who died centuries ago.
