An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 13

“I hate exams,” Tai complained. “I just want to be hot and rich.”

“You’re already hot and rich,” said Ellory, typing a nonsense conclusion into her international-politics essay. Exam season swung like the Sword of Damocles above them, and fall break was, apparently, no excuse to miss a due date. She had two papers to write and a test to study for; since returning to campus, she had spent so much time in the Graves that she’d started to dream about it. She couldn’t be sure she wasn’t dreaming now, in fact, except her stress felt very real. “It won’t help you pass.”

On the other side of the table, Cody snorted. “Don’t tell her that. You’ll upend her entire worldview.”

There was a book open in front of Cody, but they were on their phone, playing Candy Crush. Tai leaned against their shoulder, her eyes glued miserably to her own textbook. Even without counting fall break, it had been a while since Ellory had spent time with her friends. When she’d suggested this study date, Tai had pointedly asked, You won’t be busy with Graves? This mystery glued Ellory and Hudson together, but she hadn’t realized how isolated she’d been until that snide wake-up call.

Now, tonight, she refused to even mention him.

Tai and Cody joked back and forth about old mobile games while Ellory read over her essay a couple of times before submitting it. Her neck and shoulders ached. Pressure built behind her eyes, warning of an impending stress headache. When the words of her second paper began to swim in front of her, Ellory closed her laptop and rubbed her temples.

“You know,” said Tai, frowning, “Lor, you don’t seem much more relaxed now than you were before fall break. What’s been going on with you lately?”

“Are you and Hudson finally dating?” Cody asked. “I’ve got a bet going with a few of the soccer bros.”

“No,” Ellory said, avoiding any reference to Liam so that Cody learned a lesson about gambling and friendship. “And fall break was fine. It was good. I’m fine.”

All things considered, she was fine. Fall break had passed in the blink of an eye, but Aunt Carol had remained in perfect health and Ellory had actually gotten a call from her parents. Their pride over how hard she was working on her political science degree had made guilt ferment in her chest, but not enough guilt to stop her from purchasing the séance materials she’d researched. Otherwise, it was quiet. She learned to make two new meals for Carol’s post-stroke dietary plan. She bought the latest Ironheart comic. She considered texting her old friends to hang out and went to the Air and Space Museum alone instead.

She’d refused to think about magic and memory at all.

Perhaps fine was a stretch, but there was little to be done about how quiet her phone had been that week. High school had been a blur of work and academic achievement, sleepless nights and long days with the goal of qualifying for the kinds of schools that she couldn’t afford to attend. Her friends had taken her constant refusals as a sign she didn’t want to be invited anywhere at all—and as those invitations had dried up, as those names had fallen farther down her list of open text threads, as the seasons had changed without a single meaningful word exchanged, she’d let them all go.

Now she knew that Polly hated the feeling of wearing wet socks, that Zane was allergic to cats, and that Shug cried at the end of any Disney movie about families. Intimate details about strangers that were two years out of date. Useless residue from the friendships that had evaporated while she’d been buried in her books.

Every second Ellory spent in this country was devoted to building a future that seemed further out of reach the closer she supposedly got. She had to work hard here in order to get there. Then she had to work even harder there to get over there . And if she wanted to get up there , well, she’d have to work ten times harder than that, because she was Black and a woman and an immigrant, and very few people with those intersections ever made it up there .

Ellory hadn’t figured out if Warren was yet another stop on a still-expanding road of academia—masters, doctorates, postdocs—or if this was finally where all her hard work and sacrifice would pay off. If these were the years she would finally get to live, to thrive. All she knew was that she was tired of treading water until the next wave came.

She rubbed her temples harder. “I need a longer break, I think. Five days wasn’t enough.”

“You’re really not going to tell us what you and Graves have been up to, huh?” Tai asked, leaning forward so that Ellory could see her even with her head dipped toward the table. “Or why you guys are suddenly spending all this time together if you’re not dating?”

“I did tell you,” Ellory grumbled, “and you told me I was cracking under pressure and took me out for lunch.”

Tai blinked. “I was trying to help you. If you were upset, you could’ve said something.”

“I’m not upset.”

“Can we please not do this passive-aggressive bullshit? This isn’t middle school.”

“I know you’re not accusing me of passive-aggressive bullshit—”

“I obviously missed something,” said Cody, looking between them. “What’s going on?”

With a sigh, Ellory repeated the same story she’d told Tai, about her disappearing tattoo and the day at Bancroft Field, an endless sense of déjà vu and the not-quite-memories that slipped out of reach. This time, she added the note in her own hand, what she and Hudson had learned about the symbol, and the hidden room in the founders’ museum, carefully skirting any mention of Hudson at all. Cody’s eyes were dinner-plate wide by the time she finished. Even Tai looked apologetic.

“So, what’s your next step?” Tai asked. “Or, rather, our next step?”

“ Our ?”

“If you’re being cursed or whatever, you’re not going to deal with that alone. I have sixteen Nigerian aunties on speed dial who could help you.”

Cody lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I think I have a third cousin everyone says is a bruja. I’m not sure it’s true , but I’m willing to reach out and confirm.”

Ellory blinked slowly into the silence that followed, but it seemed that Cody and Tai were serious. She glanced at her phone, face down on the table, and then back at her friends and their earnest desire to help. She’d planned to do this with Hudson, as part of their partnership, but…

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Meet me back here at around one a.m.? We’re going to summon the Graves Ghost.”

“Oh, is that all?” said Tai, before muttering something in Hausa.

Cody placed a hand on her shoulder. “The Graves Ghost isn’t even dangerous. It just presses all the buttons in the elevators and pulls books off the shelves sometimes. It’ll be fine.”

Ellory nodded, hoping Cody was right, hoping it would be fine. If not, it wasn’t as though her school year could get any worse.

***

An Ivy League university library was surprisingly easy to break into, even without employing CIA – level tactics. The door was unlocked, which struck Ellory as strange until she remembered she was here for a séance. Like going to a cemetery at night or saying Bloody Mary into a mirror, this activity was already on the list of things a person should do only if they were tired of being alive. The Graves Ghost had probably unlocked the door in anticipation of a new friend to skip through the stacks with. Ellory imagined the ghost as one of those sisters from The Shining , standing beneath the skylight and waiting for her to take his hand.

She shivered as she took the elevator underground. The ding of the closing doors sounded like a cry for help.

Ellory emerged into the fourth floor, her sneakers whispering across the carpet. Tai and Cody had beat her here; they sat side by side at one of the tables, watching a video with the volume low. Ellory had chosen this floor on a whim, because it was exactly halfway from the surface and halfway from the basement, a liminal space for a liminal act. There was a wrongness to the way the shadows stirred when she expected them to be static, filling the hollows of the empty stacks. The circular skylight that lit the center of the room was like the open mouth of a howling wolf.

She set her bag on the table, the items clattering inside. “What are you watching?”

“Witchcraft explainers, which are an actual thing,” said Tai. “And I’m starting to regret every choice that led me here.”

“It’s not too late to leave,” Ellory told her, even though her stomach tightened at the thought. “Both of you. I can do this alone.”

“It’s like you’ve never seen a single horror movie.” Tai rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to summon a ghost, you don’t do it alone . You also don’t do it if you’ve got some melanin to your skin, but we’ll ignore that.”

Cody shut off the video. “So, what’s the plan?”

Ellory’s pulse quivered at her throat. This was the part that made her wish she had invited Hudson instead of her friends. She was sure they could handle themselves, but she didn’t worry about Hudson the way she worried about Tai and Cody. Hudson knew what he was getting into. His skepticism was like armor against the supernatural, without being offensive enough to provoke a duppy. At the very least, he would check her work whether she asked him to or not, driven by the same compulsive need to be better than that inevitably pushed them to outdo each other.

“Lor?” Tai blinked at her from across the table, her night-dark eyes made darker by the hazy lighting. “What are we doing?”

Ellory infused her voice with the confidence she needed to feel. “I cross-referenced the most common details of the Graves Ghost legend with news articles about dead young adults from the last century, and I think I found a match.” She placed the printed pages between them. “Malcolm Mayhew. He was a junior crushed between two fallen shelves during finals week in 1983. They found him at dawn, dead from blunt force trauma and internal bleeding. The earliest mention of the Graves Ghost that I could find is from 1987, so the timeline fits.”

There was a loaded silence.

“You know, I spent fall break at my family’s lake house,” Tai murmured. “Some people do that.”

“Some people don’t have a family lake house.”

“I wish that were your problem.”

Ellory elected to ignore this, rolling up the sleeves of her forest-green hoodie instead. From her bag she pulled a used video game, a pack of Twizzlers, and a bottle of Cîroc Snap Frost Vodka—offerings to Malcolm Mayhew, based on her research of things he’d liked while alive. This was followed by a vial of graveyard dirt to form a circle to contain his spirit. Finally, there was a candle to be placed in the center of this makeshift altar, to light the Graves Ghost’s way to the realm of the living.

All she needed now was magic.

The hair on the back of Ellory’s neck prickled with warning. She ran a hand over the still-smooth, still-bare skin, and let her next breath out slowly in a futile effort to slow the thaDUM thaDUM of her telltale heart. Ignoring the two sets of eyes on her, she constructed an altar as best she could. Her circle was lopsided. The candle was off-center. Every horror movie she had ever watched about summoning ghosts flipped through her mind like the world’s worst silent film, monochrome reminders that she was going to die.

“All right,” she said, too loud, too earnest. “We have to stand at the points of the circle.”

“A circle doesn’t have points,” Tai whispered.

“Shut up,” Cody whispered back.

Ellory stood with her back to the door as Cody and Tai took their positions. Together, the three of them formed an invisible right triangle outside the graveyard dirt. At her instruction, they closed their eyes, and Ellory took one last deep breath before joining them. Darkness pressed upon darkness, blocking out everything but their breathing and the occasional crackle of the candle.

Sometimes the answers for the living rested with the dead. Part of her had always known that. Now she was ready to stop running.

With her eyes closed, Ellory stared into the abyss and waited for something to stare back.

A low buzzing overtook the silence—not bees, like she’d thought before, but the trill of a hummingbird’s wings. Her skin warmed despite the cold that made her hands tremble. Images flashed across her lids, like flipping through a deck of playing cards: memories from her childhood, from high school, from the last few months. They began to slow from a blur of color and feeling, and the closer she came to focusing on one, the more fear tightened her chest, warning her about what she was about to see…

Then something hit the floor.

Ellory’s eyes shot open, her body unmoving in that absolute silence between two heartbeats. Across the circle, Tai’s hands twitched over an upturned chair, like she might still be able to catch it if she tried hard enough. Cody had covered their mouth with a hand, which lowered when they realized the only danger in the library was Tai’s ill-timed clumsiness. Ellory stared at her friends, and they stared back, and the candlelight made shadows dance across hollows of their faces but did little to summon anyone or anything from the void.

Her shoulders slumped. “Maybe I did something wrong.”

“I don’t know that there’s a right way to talk to spirits,” Tai said, bending to fix the chair. Its sharp wooden legs dug into the carpet, leaving divots when she pushed it back toward the table behind her. “Do you want to try again?”

From the corner of her eye, Ellory saw Cody smother a yawn. Seconds ticked by. Ellory dragged a hand over her clammy face. “No. The longer we stay, the more we risk getting caught.”

She made quick work of cleaning up the altar, shoving everything into her bag with frustrated force. A pinch of graveyard dirt spilled over her torn blue jeans, but she dispersed it over the carpet until it almost looked like dust. Cody relieved her of the vodka, shoving it down the side of their shorts for later. Ellory checked one more time that there were no noticeable signs of their presence, and then she checked a second time to be safe.

Tai threw an arm around Ellory’s shoulders, steering her toward the elevator. “I never have a dull moment with you, Lor.”

Ellory managed a smile. “The whole reason I came to Warren was to entertain you.”

The elevator dinged open. Cody entered first, and Tai stepped in after them. Her arm passed through Ellory as if she were a ghost. Ellory blinked several times, but the image before her didn’t change. The elevator framed the forms of three people: Cody, Tai, and Ellory’s body gazing pensively at the ground between them.

She stared at herself, at her pineapple-shaped updo, her toothpaste-white high-tops, her dark brown knee peering through the frayed edges of the holes in her jeans. That was her, but if that was her, then what was she ? And how had she gotten that way?

She remembered the warmth of her skin, and the terror that had gripped her. The flashes in the dark and the sense that if she focused hard enough, then she could see beyond this world on purpose this time. Even so, she stumbled backward as a frightening truth dawned on her.

Her séance had worked.

But she hadn’t summoned a ghost.

Somehow, she had become one.