What if this is the curse playing itself out again and again, an endless string of deaths to satisfy an insatiable bloodthirst? If this is the curse, the evidence will only point to me.
Checkmate, Margery Lemont murmurs from the darkness.
I tug an extra-long sweater over my head and don’t bother with the rest of my clothes. I dart down the hall in my underwear, faltering when a floorboard creaks, terrified Kajal will emerge from her room and ask where I’ve been.
I avoid looking at Clara’s door altogether.
On the second floor Leonie’s room is open and empty. Ellis’s door, though, is shut. I can’t tell if her light’s on or not.
I knock anyway. No one answers, of course. I don’t know what else I was expecting. If she’s in there, she won’t answer for me.
My pulse is beating fast—so fast. I read once that a hummingbird’s heart beats over a thousand times per minute. I feel like that now, like my heart is just a quivering lump of meat inside my chest. Am I afraid? Or just…angry.
I shouldn’t even be here. It’s foolish, reckless—a good way to get myself killed.
Even so, I call Ellis’s name, pounding louder. No response. I grab the knob, but the door is locked from the inside.
“I know you’re in there,” I accuse. “Open the door.”
Silence, still. Just like that time after the party: Ellis’s insistence that she’d been writing, too busy to see me. It’s not even ten in the morning, and with all the times I’ve found Ellis up fully dressed and working well past four a.m., I refuse to believe she’s out of bed with her nose to the grindstone.
I press my brow against the wood and strain to hear something, anything: the click of typewriter keys, or the soft strains of classical music played on vinyl, even the soft susurration of Ellis’s breath. But there is nothing behind that door. It might as well open up into the void of space, an inevitable tumble into the crushing heart of a black hole.
I stalk back up the stairs and into my room, kick the door shut behind me. I lie down on my bed, press my face into my pillow, and scream.
* * *
—
By the next evening, Clara has been missing for a whole day. Too long to be extracurricular. Too long to be innocent. I skip class and stay in bed as the sun tracks its course across the sky, but after dusk falls, there’s a knock at my door.
I consider staying in bed and pretending I’m not home. But sooner or later someone’s going to come looking for Clara. And when they do, I can’t afford to seem suspicious.
I crawl out from beneath the sheets and shuffle across the rug and open the door.
Ellis blows past me with her arms full of typewritten pages and a feverish glow in her cheeks.
“I did it,” she says, clutching the book to her chest and staring at me like she doesn’t really see me at all. “I finished the book, Felicity. I finally finished it.”
I stand there in the doorway, wishing I had something to hold in my hands. A weapon, maybe.
“Clara’s dead.”
Ellis shoots me a sharp glance, something almost disapproving to the set of her mouth as she shuts my bedroom door. “I know. You don’t have to say it so loudly.”
She watches me like she’s expecting a specific kind of response to that. I have a feeling it isn’t the response that creeps up the back of my throat, bilious and sick:
“You killed her. You…You…”
Ellis sighs, and at last she moves to set the stack of pages down on the corner of my desk. “Okay. I suppose if we must have this conversation…yes. I killed her. And it worked, Felicity. It worked! I’d spent months trying to push through this scene. You don’t even know how many sleepless nights I wasted trying to eke out just one more word, to find the perfect phrase or image.”
The knot in my chest loosens slightly. It was her. It was Ellis. Not the curse, not the witches, not my fault.
It wasn’t my fault.
She draws closer, and I cannot move, not even to pull out of reach. Her hands curl around my wrists, drawing my arms up to press my fists against her chest. She’s near enough that I can smell the cigarette smoke that clings to her hair. I can see new shades layered in her eyes: pale-gray water over black stones, lurking below the surface.
Ellis smiles.
“It’s done now. I did it. Thanks to you. I can’t even tell you how much I…This book. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. You understand, don’t you?”
I don’t know how to reply to that. What is there to say? I can still see Clara’s cold body in the back of my mind. The blood on her stomach. Her blank gaze.