Bile filled my mouth as I sat on our windowsill and watched Mordue enter the North Tower after Alice.
It was too early; just after ten. Had the guard suspected the breach and alerted the dean?
I suddenly wished I’d been the one to go instead. The thought of anything happening to Alice was visceral and unthinkable.
What if I had to watch her fall to her death, red hair swooshing up behind her, the sickening crunch of impact, those ice-blue eyes snuffed out forever?
Anger began to simmer at the very core of me. It was the world we lived in that ultimately led her here. That pushed her to the ritual in the first place. A world that made her think that to be angry as a woman was fundamentally wrong; something that needed to be exorcised or carved out by whatever dark force necessary.
Rather than running from it, I leaned into the anger, felt its righteous arms welcome me in.
The rage churned in me until it was all-consuming, until it was larger than myself, until nothing else existed. I became vaguely aware of a struggling sensation beneath my ribs, in the corners of my lungs, in the pulsing atria of my heart.
Then there was a sudden, searing starburst in my throat.
A blinding light threw me back into the room.
A pain in my skull so intense I thought I’d been shot.
For a moment, everything went from hot white to absolute black, and I was sure, in that moment, that I was dead.
But slowly, slowly, my eyes pushed open like moth wings unfurling from a cocoon, new and bright and strange.
As the room came into soft focus, I realised I was no longer in the dorm.
I was in the Observatory.
It was dark and cold and empty; a round, stone-floored room at the top of the North Tower, with open Gothic arches around its circumference. The stars in the sky beyond were brighter than I’d ever seen them; swirling sprays of silver white across a black canvas. The convent was crypt-quiet but for the sounds of the nearby forest.
I knew at once that this was not the 1990s. This was the 1890s.
And I was not Charlotte Fitzwilliam.
The other-life glimpses that had dogged my dreams for months were no longer shutter-click images; they were rich, full memories I could swim around in like lakes.
Age-spotted hands – my own hands – illuminating a manuscript about devil possession, painting a little demon behind the chapter heading with a tiny brush and potent-smelling oils. Reading the script secretly as I worked, and recognising the signs in myself.
To think oneself possessed.
To lead a wicked life.
To live outside the rules of society.
To utter obscenities and blasphemies.
To show a frightening and horrible countenance.
To be tired of living.
To be uncontrollable and violent.
I had learned of the soul purification ritual through that same manuscript. I’d hunted high and low for the tincture ingredients; taking cuttings, planting them all in the same wooded glade for ease. I stole blood from Sister Elizabeth’s discarded bandages when she tripped and fell on an uneven cobble. Then I performed the ritual; the temporary relief, the eventual unravelling. The wolf-wildness in my heart.
With a lasso-yank, my memories flung back further. Years earlier, little girl Maria slapped in the face by her father for a minor indiscretion, and so slapping him right back.
The punishment: the palm of my hand held over a candle flame, anger churning in my gut.
My retribution: burning his study to the ground, and taking half the house with it.