I invited them, but for this, their presence is irrelevant. They’re only here because Ellis needs five of us, five to match the five dead Dalloway witches. She doesn’t have five tonight, and that almost ruined everything. But it doesn’t matter.
This spell is about more. It’s about me and Ellis. About magic—and whether forces exist too powerful and arcane for us to understand.
“We’re going to summon snow,” I tell them. “Close your eyes and clear your mind. Try to imagine the way snow feels, tastes, sounds as it blankets the ground. Then repeat after me…We call upon the north wind: greet us with your breath and bless us with your gift.”
It sounds a little silly when I say it out loud, but Ellis closes her eyes and repeats my words, and so the rest of them follow.
A chill sinks into my skin as I turn my gaze down to the holly in my lap, the yellow candlelight dancing on the surface of the rainwater and casting shadows across the backs of my hands. I smile and close my eyes as well, let myself sink into the space that always opens up for me in rituals like this—a quiet space in my chest, a secret space. The only place I ever feel truly calm.
I was wrong to think magic was dangerous. Alex might be. The witches might be. But not this.
Never this.
“Listen,” Ellis murmurs.
For a moment her voice is the only thing echoing in my mind, soft and heavy as the dusk all around us.
And then I hear it: the soft patter of snow falling on the church roof.
Leonie lets out a startled yelp—and when I open my eyes, she’s laughing, face turned up. Beside her Clara has gone still and wide-eyed, arms wrapped around her middle and hugging herself close. If her curves became edges, if her curls were wild and tangled instead of neatly restrained, she might be Alex come back to life.
“It worked,” Leonie exclaims, already on her feet and spinning in place, like a child who just learned that school has been canceled. “Felicity! It’s snowing!”
My gaze flicks over to Ellis, who has a tiny smile settled about her lips as well, although her smile is harder to read. I can’t tell if she believes me, or if she’s mocking me.
Leonie darts across the church to throw open the doors. A flurry of snow scatters in across the floor, and I’m on my feet, too—we all are—abandoning the candles and crystals and holly berries to stand there on the edge of the night with winter stinging at our skin.
For some reason, it doesn’t feel cold anymore. Or maybe that heat is from the flask Leonie presses into my hand, the rhythm of Ellis’s voice steady like a heartbeat when she pulls out a book of poetry and reads to us, our bodies flung on the church floor like discarded dolls.
Leonie’s flask empties, then Ellis’s, and it’s twenty minutes until the feeling hits. But then the euphoria pours over me like cool water, and I’m alive, I’m alight, sliding my fingers through sugar and tasting it on my tongue, snow falling on our faces through a hole in the desecrated roof.
This is better than any Boleyn party, I think, and let my fingers twine together with Ellis’s, my other hand linked with Leonie’s, Ellis’s thumb rubbing heat against my knuckles and the air gone thick like syrup. I’m drunk enough now that the world has gone to watercolor—all shapes and motion without texture.
We end up back in the woods somehow, Clara with a torch held high overhead. I don’t remember where she found such a big stick, or how she managed to ignite it with the wood so damp, but we follow that flame through the darkness, wandering in circles and curving lines with blood searing our veins.
I touch a tree trunk and am amazed by how rough the bark feels, how much I want to press my face against it. Leonie trails her fingers through my hair, and I could kiss her, almost do. Only then we’re moving again, reciting poems in shouts to the shadows and daring the ghosts to come out and play.
I don’t know how long the high lasts. It could have been all night; it could have been an hour.
But I wake up the next morning lying on a bed of bracken and melted snow. There’s frost on my lips and crystallized on my lashes. I’m cold enough that I’ve forgotten how to tremble.
It’s several seconds, several gulping breaths, before I convince myself I’m not dead.
What happened?
I’ve been drunk before, but it was never like this. Did I really have that much? I can’t remember how many times the flask was passed into my hand, how many times its mouth met my lips.
The forest is quiet as the interior of a mausoleum. Whatever protection last night’s spell had given me is gone now, melted like ice.