It’s very all right. I’d rather her ask a broad question and be unable to interpret the answer than ask anything specific myself—like whether Alex’s ghost will leave me alone. Like whether I’ll ever be able to piece myself back together again.
“There’s a cross,” Ellis says. She flips through the tea leaf book to the index, trails her finger down the long list of keywords until she finds the right one. “That represents death—not surprising, perhaps, given your history. It’s toward the bottom of the cup, which signifies events that occurred in the past.”
I lean forward a little, trying to peer beyond the fall of Ellis’s errant hair and into the cup. I can’t make sense of any of it, of course.
“A mountain,” she says. “That’s usually powerful friends. Oh, and apparently you’re going to be very successful in your career, that’s nice. Maybe that’s where you meet said powerful friends?” She trades me a quick grin. “We also have something that looks like a hand.” She has to check the book again, flipping back and forth between chapters. “That means relationships, either you helping other people or them helping you. Or it means justice. But that seems like quite the departure from the other interpretation, doesn’t it?”
“I think you’re very bad at this,” I inform her with a wry grin.
She smiles and tilts over the teacup again. “All right, last one. This looks kind of like a bird…that means dangerous situations. But it could also mean you’re being watched by spirits—I’m not sure which. Perhaps the ghosts of the Dalloway Five come to haunt their witchy inheritor?”
Spirits. Or spirit, singular. I’ve tried to ignore the heaviness in this house, but after last night…that handprint on the window, right after I realized the truth…it’s too much of a coincidence. My tongue tastes metallic.
Alex used to say I was too obsessed with the Dalloway Five, with magic in general. She told me I was being irrational. She told me I was crazy.
But I’m not irrational, and I’m not crazy.
Some things are too dark to be seen—or explained.
I must have shivered visibly, because Ellis shuts the book and pushes the cup away, her gaze meeting mine across the table.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her with a false smile, “I’m not frightened by some soggy—”
The crash of ceramic shattering is so loud it feels like a gunshot. I’m on my feet, dizzy, staring across the room, where a potted plant just fell off the fireplace mantel, scattering pottery shards and black soil across the hardwood floor.
It’s her. I knew it. She won’t leave me alone. Not now, not ever. It’s her, it’s her—
Those words are stuck on a loop in my head now, trembling in my mind. Ellis pushes the saucer aside and tilts in closer, her eyes as wide and gray as cold pond water.
“Felicity,” she starts, reaching for me; I flinch away.
“It’s her,” I gasp. I want to press a hand to my face, but I don’t dare close my eyes. Even here, even with Ellis, Alex won’t leave me alone. “She won’t ever…She…”
“Talk to me, Felicity.”
I suck in a shallow, sharp breath and force myself to look away from the plant. It must have been freshly watered; dark liquid seeps along the floor, staining the fringe of the nearest rug.
“What’s going on?” Ellis demands.
I sit, but I’m shaking badly enough that Ellis must feel it when I brace an elbow against the table. “Nothing,” I say, trying to calm myself.
But Ellis has scented blood, my soft underbelly exposed, and in this context—as in all contexts—she is nothing if not a shark. “Tell me.”
I twist my hands together in my lap, hidden under the coffee table. An exhale heats the nape of my neck; I wonder if Ellis can see Alex behind me, her skeleton fingers closing around my throat.
“You’re going to think I’m stupid.”
The look Ellis fixes me with then is tight and disapproving. “I would never think you were stupid.”
You’ve done it now, a voice scolds in the back of my head. Because it’s too late. I’ve gone and made this an enigma for Ellis to unravel. I have to say something, or else she’ll never stop picking at the knots—and if I unspool at Ellis’s hands for a second time, I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to stitch myself back together again.
I grimace. “It’s…” Spit it out. No evasion, nowhere to hide. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask. “Real ones.”