Last night didn’t summon snow.
Last night summoned death.
I stare into the trees, waiting for her to reappear: The spirit with white eyes and poisoned fingertips. Alex with her tangled hair and lake-drenched dress. I know she’s there, because I can feel her watching me; every shift of wind through the pines is her voice whispering.
I need to leave. I can’t be here. I need to leave.
I stagger to my feet and almost trip over the body.
“Shit!”
It’s Leonie, her dark skin silvery beneath the light dust of snow that covers it. She’s still, so still—a corpse in bespoke—and we never should have come here, never should have let ourselves fall asleep.
Only then she moves, curling her fingers into a fist, mouth twisting with discomfort. I glance away, and that’s when I realize we’re all here: Ellis huddled under a tree with her coat tugged in tight, Clara asleep in a pile of leaves with her cheeks gone pale and damp.
Her red hair in the snow is bright as spilled blood.
I gag and whip away. Don’t think about Alex. Don’t. Don’t think about—
There’s movement in the trees. Oh god—I see it. I see her. Barely more than a shadow, but I’d recognize her anywhere. I press my hand over my eyes so I don’t have to see. Only then memory is painted across the black velvet space behind my eyelids: Alex on that cliff, hair knotting in the bitter wind, her cheeks flushed in anger—and she was shouting at me, she wouldn’t stop shouting, and so I reached out and I pushed—
“Felicity?”
That’s Ellis’s voice. And so it must be Ellis’s touch that finds my shoulder, turning me away from Clara, from the bodies scattered on the forest floor like discarded trash.
“Felicity,” she says again, and cold fingers slide up the nape of my neck to grasp my skull. “It’s okay. It’s all right. We fell asleep. But everyone’s fine.”
I can’t breathe. The air is too thick out here, oxygen-poor and stinging like broken glass. It floods my lungs like cold water. How long can one survive without air? How long until my body collapses in on itself like Alex’s did? Twenty minutes? Thirty? The lake closes overhead. I sink into the dark. The earth swallows me whole.
“Shh. Just breathe.”
I can’t.
“Breathe.”
I’m crying now, the tears sliding down my cheeks. It’s not cold enough for them to turn to ice, not yet.
I didn’t kill her. I don’t have the capacity for something like that. I’m just…I’m losing my mind. I’m—
Margery. It’s Margery coiled like a viper in my heart, making me think these things.
“Felicity. Can you look at me?” Someone brushes the tears away, their touch skimming my face as if to map its topography. “Look at me.”
I look.
Ellis is close enough that for a moment all I can see are her eyes, cloud gray and steady. Her hands are on my cheeks. Her lips are flushed.
“You’re all right,” Ellis says again, and strokes my hair like a mother with her infant, and that’s when I realize the others are awake now: Clara and Leonie both standing there staring at me, Leonie’s hand over her mouth, Clara’s gaze wide and hungry.
I can still hear Leonie’s voice echoing in my skull: It’s so silly, isn’t it?
Ellis exhales softly; I feel the heat of it on my skin. Finally, her touch drops from my face down to my shoulders; she rubs my arms hard.
“You’re soaked,” she murmurs. “Come on. We should get you home.”
I don’t remember the walk back to the truck. When I try to envision it, I see four bedraggled girls with numb noses staggering over fallen logs and lurching past pools of snowmelt. Ellis’s arm around my waist keeps me upright, Clara trailing behind like a watchful shadow.
Ellis bundles me into the front seat and drapes a blanket over my lap. I twist my hands up in the wool and stare out the window as we trundle over uneven ground and back out to the one-lane gravel road.
It’s only five minutes back to Dalloway. I don’t know why it felt like we’d gone miles that night, thousands of miles, like we’d traversed the globe a dozen times over.
Kajal’s asleep when we return, and Clara is too timid for confrontation, which means there’s no one to fight me for the third-floor shower. I turn the water as hot as it will go and sit on the floor underneath the spray. My mind is a blank sheet of ice, a still lake that stretches far toward the horizon. I contain nothing. Everything inside me is cold and dead.