—Medical record note, Silver Lake Recovery Center
The Devil has my consent, & goes & hurts them.
—Abigail Hobbs, confessed witch,The Examination of Abigail Hobbs at Salem Village,
April19, 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.
