Those words…they’re my words, from the letter I wrote Alex a week after she died.
The letter that was buried in her empty casket.
I slam the book shut and grip it between both hands, as if that will erase what I saw. My gaze flits back out the window, past the colored marbles—I should never have blown out those candles, should never have let down my guard—and out into the thick night.
The first time I found this book in my room, I’d thought it must be Ellis playing a prank. But she wouldn’t have any way of knowing what I wrote to Alex.
Then I’d thought I might have hallucinated the book.
I’m not hallucinating now.
I open the book again and reread the inscription. Alex’s handwriting is…There’s no mistaking it. Even so, I dig out the old letters she sent me and crouch down on the floor, comparing the swoop of Alex’s s in the book to her calligraphy from when she was still alive—the spiky peaks of her n’s, the way she always forgot to add punctuation and just began the next sentence with a capital letter.
Alex wrote this inscription. Resuming my medication hasn’t chased her away, and she didn’t vanish in the face of what Ellis and I built together. She’s here. She’s always been here, her ghost called back by the legacy of magic sunk deep into the bones of this school, the dark curse that infected me the night I spilled my blood on the Margery Skull.
Enough.
I can’t live like this.
It’s time to face Alex.
It’s time to pay for my crimes.
Sympathetic magic, must mirror a curse to undo it.
—A note, in Felicity Morrow’s handwriting, appended to her thesis materials Margery was a silhouette against the trees, but the way the mob’s firelight caught on the whites of her eyes made her look crazed. Demonic.
“I did it,” she whispered. “And I would do it again.”
—From a manuscript by Ellis Haley
The graveyard is in Kingston; it’s too far away to walk.
I steal Kajal’s bike and ride it into town and rent a car at the same place as last time with the false ID my mother gave me as a misguided sixteenth birthday present; the last thing I want right now is to sit in the back of a stranger’s cab for an hour, fielding questions about what I’m studying at school, why I’m out so late, why I look like I’ve seen a ghost.
Blanketed under snow, the cemetery looks nothing at all like it did when Ellis and I last visited. The tombstones rise out of the gloom like onlooking specters, black and silent. It’s four in the morning by the time I arrive, the night as dark as it will ever get and the cold reaching down into my bones as I step out of the car and let myself in through the iron gate.
The snow has fallen ankle-deep; it’s a slow trudge past the mausoleum and toward the silent oak tree that stands watch over Alex’s grave. The hellebore has been buried under that weight, and as I approach, the grave looks unmarked. Undisturbed.
It’s only once I kneel down by Alex’s headstone that I realize the snow there has been shifted. It’s not the pure faultless blanket that covers the other graves; the snow here has been freshly shoveled back into place, someone’s meager attempt to hide what they’ve done.
I twist around, expecting to find a shadowy figure standing behind me, but the cemetery is empty of all but the dead.
Alex never died in that lake. We didn’t find a body because there was no body to find.
While I ran down from the cliff to find her body, Alex pulled herself out of that black water and staggered into the woods, vanishing without a trace.
Of course she did. She could have. Her career was over, her reputation ruined. Everyone thought she was violent now, too emotional, too unprofessional. She’d told me there was no escape, that she could run and run as far as she wanted, but she’d never stop being Alex Haywood.
She dug up her own grave and read the letter I wrote. That’s why the snow is disturbed. That’s why the inscription appeared in the book. Because Alex did write it.
Then what’s in her grave that she wants me to find so badly?
All at once, I no longer feel the cold. It’s a strange heat that blooms under my skin, smoldering in my chest like fury. I push to my feet and make my way along the winding path that leads to the caretaker’s shed. The padlock hangs unlocked around the door, not even frosted over. I kick the door open and stumble into the dull warmth of the interior.
The dust knocked down off the rafters makes me cough. I pull my phone out of my back pocket and flick on the flashlight app, the beam illuminating the dark corners of the space. There. A shovel rests against the far wall, tip down. I drag it out of the shed. I should have brought gloves; my fingers are already white-tipped and numb where they curl around the handle.