It is starting to seem to me as if Ellis has an answer for everything. She wants us to break into a locked building just to find out if we can, to mark the locations of every security camera around Godwin House, to research the best way to remove bloodstains from clothing. I have no idea how much of this, if any, will make it into Ellis’s book.
“I doubt Margery wrote notes at all,” I say, but Ellis shrugs and adds a flourish to Clara’s name on the final envelope.
“Perhaps not. But this way’s more fun, don’t you think?”
Tonight, Ellis chooses the location, one much closer than the clearing I sent us to last time. It’s a brief walk through the forest, dead leaves crunching underfoot and the beams of our flashlights bobbing amid the branches.
Ellis and I get to the meeting place at 11:40, five minutes before Leonie is supposed to arrive, just early enough to try and get a fire started. Ellis is dressed in hues of charcoal gray and black; she all but blends in with the landscape, a shadow among shadows. Next to her, in ivory, I feel like a lantern. This time, we forgo the masks.
“A new moon,” Ellis says, turning her face toward the starless sky. “I don’t know why the myths always pair a full moon with the uncanny. Total darkness is so much more paralyzing.”
“I suppose under a new moon, you’re less likely to die by meeting a ghost than you are tripping over your own feet.”
Ellis laughs. “Or perhaps you’ll be murdered by the two Godwin girls, in the woods, with the garrote.”
Just two weeks ago, I would have flinched. Tonight, I smile with her instead.
I crouch down on the forest floor and pick up a long stick, prod at the weak shambles of our fire. It’s still smoldering coals and flickering twigs—hardly the rapturous bonfire we’d envisioned. I blow on the coals, and sparks spray into the air like fireflies. We’d built a circle of stones to keep from accidentally burning the woods down, but that risk is starting to feel very distant indeed.
“We should meet in a graveyard next time,” Ellis muses. She leans past me to light her cigarette on the flames, which have finally started to ignite the gathered timber.
Leonie arrives soon thereafter, then the other two; they plop themselves down on the ground as if they’ve forgotten to care what happens to their tailored skirts.
Ellis positions herself by the fire, posed such that the flames appear to be licking up the straight legs of her trousers, consuming her. She holds her book in both hands: a reverend presiding over her flock.
“Ex scientia ultio,” she says.
Only the crack and snap of smoldering wood answers her, like gunshots in the empty night. In the half-light we look like ghosts.
I’ve never felt like this before. The Margery coven was different—constructed for alumnae connections and nepotism, not sisterhood. This…this is real.
“What happened to the goat’s blood?” Kajal says.
“It’s a poetry reading.” Leonie has clearly spotted the book in Ellis’s hand. I half expected it to come out sounding derisive, but it doesn’t. There’s an upward tilt to the words, delight making music of Leonie’s voice.
Ellis lifts Averno and smiles.
“It seemed appropriate,” she says, “given our name.”
We stand in a circle around the fire and read—Ellis first, then she passes the book to Clara, who takes over. Around the circle two times, thrice. Ellis unearths a flask of bourbon from my bag, and we drink that, too, choking down the bitter liquor and telling ourselves it doesn’t taste like gasoline. By the time we have read the last poem, my mind feels pleasantly liquid, my thoughts floating on the surface of a golden sea. Clara clasps both my hands in hers and smiles like a child, Kajal dances in the bracken and Leonie lies on her back, dirt forgotten.
“Look how easily they give over to emotion,” Ellis murmurs, her fingers slipping into my hair, her lips whisper-cool against my ear. “No drugs or magic necessary. Couldn’t the Dalloway Five have done the same?”
But if this is magic, it isn’t the kind the Five practiced. I’m sure of it. For once, the forest is empty of ghosts, the sky clear and glittering. Nothing evil can touch us like this. We’re dryads cavorting in autumn, wood spirits breathing out starlight.
Eventually, though, even dryads must sleep. We stagger home in single file, bramble-cut and smelling of campfire smoke. The next day Ellis tears a poem out of Averno and pins it to her bedroom wall and tells me this is it, the beginning of everything, the first page of our story. A story that has no dark corners, just us, just happiness and freedom.