She chews on her lower lip. I wish I knew her well enough to reach over and take her hand, but most of our interactions have been under Ellis’s watch. I only know the parts of Leonie that Ellis wants to see.
I need to figure out a way to change that.
“Anyway,” Leonie says eventually, “I’m going to record her stories while I’m home. Kajal’s helping. I feel like there ought to be some kind of archive, you know?”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea.” I smile when I say it, and I genuinely do admire Leonie for that. And I envy her. No one in my family cares about literature at all. My mother views my love of reading with the same vague bafflement with which she viewed my former interest in running—a hobby one might reference in polite conversation, but ultimately unnecessary.
If she knew I want to study English in college, that I hope to be a literature professor one day, my mother would die from sheer disgrace. A society woman doesn’t need to work, and in fact, ought not.
“I’m glad we decided to start doing these,” I say after a few long moments. “The Night Migrations. Ellis thinks it will help with her book, so…”
Leonie laughs. “Oh. Right, yes. It’s so silly, isn’t it? The rituals, the theatrics of it all. Even worse with the Margery coven—it took me ages to get the smell of dead goat out of those robes. But it’s fun. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”
Yes. It is.
Maybe it’s all right to love this. Maybe it’s okay to find comfort in the darkness, as long as I don’t let myself take it too far.
And I can’t help myself. I have to know; I have to know if Leonie knows. I wet my lips and start: “Listen, Leonie, about the Margery coven—”
But Leonie shushes me, grabbing my wrist and pointing across the clearing. “Look.”
A light has appeared in the woods, bobbing between the trees; eventually the forest releases Clara onto the horizon. She’s bundled up in what looks to be two cloaks, her flashlight beam shaking with how bad she’s shivering.
“Did you walk?” I say, horrified.
“How else was I supposed to get here?”
“Bike,” Leonie and I say in unison, then exchange glances.
Clara makes a face and comes to stand at the other side of the fire, rubbing her hands together and apparently refusing to sit in the wet grass.
Eventually a pair of headlights curve around from the far end of the field—there must be a road over there that I missed on the map. The vehicle lumbers over the hill and comes to a stop twenty feet away, the engine running for another solid ten, fifteen seconds before it shuts off. I’d be worried about who might have driven up here in the middle of the night if I wasn’t equally confident that the likelihood of some stranger finding us here, at the random coordinates I chose in the middle of the woods, is next to zero.
I don’t recognize Ellis’s truck until she emerges from the driver’s side wearing riding boots and a shearling coat. She tramps across the dead ground without a flashlight; when she’s close enough, I realize she’s not even wearing gloves.
Ellis doesn’t say a word about Kajal, or about anything else for that matter. When she comes to a stop between me and Clara, she’s at such an angle to the fire that the light casts her features half into shadow.
“Who are we reading this time?” Clara asks. “Sylvia Plath?”
Ellis shakes her head. “Felicity’s in charge for this one. I think she had her own idea. Didn’t you, Felicity?”
I nod and rise to my feet at last, dusting off the bark and bracken that cling to my skirt. “It’s a bit of a hike,” I tell them, kicking damp leaves over the fire. “Come on.”
I lead them through the forest, down the slope of the hill, occasionally pulling out my phone to check the coordinates. It occurs to me only now that I have no idea how the others have been locating the Night Migration spots—none of them have mobile phones.
Surely they don’t use compasses?
After ten minutes’ walk we emerge into a clearing, and from the soft murmur behind me, I can tell that the others recognize this place—from photographs of the town’s history, if not from real life.
The church has been abandoned for over forty years now; the windows are boarded up, the front door padlocked, although I suspect the police were more concerned about squatters than witches. The white clapboard exterior is stained near black in places, as if with soot, though according to the property records there was never a fire. Even the steeple lists slightly east, the ancient cross that used to crown it toppled over and hanging nearly upside down.