I don’t have a good argument in response to that. I should, but I don’t. Ellis seems to know that, to taste my surrender like blood in the water, so I nod once and escape before she can think of any other harebrained ideas.
It’s true that I have essay revisions due Monday morning, but after I make it upstairs and sit myself down at my desk to work, I realize I can’t concentrate. The words blur together on my laptop screen and a painful beat pounds in my temple, despite all the pills I gulped down this morning.
I can’t do this. I can’t do magic again. It’s not even about Ellis—I can’t do this to Alex. Even if this ghost is all in my head, it’s…callous, it’s sick to just…
It’s been less than a year since I watched my girlfriend plummet to a watery death. I should be more concerned with Alex’s blood on my hands than the smell of Ellis’s hair.
Magic is what got me in trouble in the first place. Only now, because Ellis has asked it of me, I’m only too willing to give in.
But maybe I am a monster, because now she’s all I can think about.
I drew a card from my deck when I woke up. The Nine of Swords. I replaced it, shuffled, and drew again, and got the Nine of Swords for a second time.
Fear and nightmares.
So even before I see her, I know Alex is coming tonight.
I’ve already written to Wyatt to ask for an extension, and since then I’ve been metaphorically chained to my desk. I keep my hands on the keyboard as if that will force me to use it, but my attention keeps drifting away from my laptop and out my window toward the quick-approaching night. Dusk falls faster now than it did, a curtain dropping over the horizon and trapping us on a darkened stage. The snow brings its own silence.
It’s Sunday. It’s Samhain.
My gaze has drifted from my computer again, past my own face reflected in the window and toward the woods. At first I think it’s a trick of the light, a reflection from my own bedside lamp in the glass—but then it moves.
I slam my laptop shut and lurch across my desk, pressing my nose to the windowpane. Even with the double glazing installed since I left last year, the glass is frigid against my skin.
There. There, in the woods, a figure shifts between the trees.
Even from this distance, I can see Alex’s red hair.
The moonlight reflects off her skin and lends it a strangely iridescent quality, like a white opal dropped underwater. Her movements are inhuman, her incorporeal form like a wisp blown from place to place, flitting between trees and vanishing, only to reappear a moment later farther away.
She’s not real, she’s not real, she’s not real—
She’s real.
I shove back my chair and grab the tartan throw from where I’d tossed it on the foot of my bed, wrapping the wool knit tight around my shoulders as I clatter down the stairs and out the Godwin House back door.
The temperature has plummeted since Ellis and I cut across the quad after fencing practice the other day. My breath clouds in front of my face as I dash across the short field behind Godwin. Already my teeth are chattering; I’m too aware of my bones caught beneath my skin, of my own mortality in the face of Alex’s…of Alex’s…
I don’t know what she is now.
By the time I’m ensconced under the tree cover, I start to wish I’d brought a flashlight, or at least my phone—something I could use to light the way. As it is, branches cut my cheeks, and I trip over unseen roots, stumbling from trunk to trunk and blinded by my own adrenaline.
“Alex?”
My voice doesn’t echo; it’s swallowed by the forest, the silence somehow more complete in the wake of my words than it was before.
The air out here is granite-dry, sucking the moisture from my skin and making my lips feel raw. I twist my hands tighter in the knit throw and slow my pace, too conscious of the way the tree cover consumes the light of the moon, the way the snow muffles every step. If something were to come up behind me, I wouldn’t hear it until it was too late.
The nape of my neck prickles. I whip around, but there’s nothing there, just the blank faces of dying trees and the penetrating dark.
My breath is too loud now. I tug the edge of the tartan blanket up over my mouth, like that could muffle the sound. It only succeeds in making me feel half suffocated by the damp heat of my own air.
“Alex?” This time her name comes out softer, quavering like a baby bird.
I have no reason to think Alex’s ghost is benevolent. She might have drawn me out into the night with any number of motives. She might intend to kill me.