I had a very uncomfortable feeling as I looked at the list of internal angles to this ritual. I’d spent half an hour getting them, then checked several of them again, worried I was wrong.

The internal angles of a ritual said which god the ritual called out to, but in truth it was more complicated than that. The gods were like points in space and each ritual was sent to a different point in that space.

Depending on which of a god’s dominions you wanted to call on, you could even pick different points within the same god to get different results. How important the exact point was increased with the complexity of the ritual.

I didn’t know what these components pointed to, of course. Despite Felicity’s insistence, I was not a magical savant. I would need to spend a very long time doing very complicated math with all of these angles to have any degree of certainty about where they pointed. But they looked so familiar…

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Felicity walk into the room with me from the bedroom. I hadn’t seen her leave, but logically she must have. For a split second, I caught the expression on her face before she hid it. It was so severe I almost asked her if she was ok, but remembered myself in time.

After a few more minutes of triple-checking, I accepted I was done.

“I’ve got what I need,” I told Felicity. I had photos of the entire ritual, so at worst I would be able to reconstruct any mistakes I made.

“I just made a dramatic exit,” Felicity said. “Would you mind going to get-”

“I heard!” Lily called from inside the bedroom.

I raised an eyebrow and Felicity smiled, making my traitorous heart flutter.

“Yes, we were having vigorous sex while you did your measurements.”

I smiled back despite myself.

“Didn’t think you one to kiss and tell.”

“Oh, only for you princess.”

“How convenient.”

“My morals are quite flexible, as am-”

“Enough,” Lily pleaded as she stepped out to join us.

While Felicity’s teasing did a great job of distracting me, Lily’s worn-out expression made it clear that a serious conversation had been had without me. Most likely about me.

I made a mental note to check in with Lily about that. Felicity might try something drastic to remove a so-called rival, even over my objections. I should’ve been watching her.

“We don’t have long now until the club meeting,” I said. “Felicity should probably come with us to that, just to be safe.”

“By any chance,” Felicity asked, “do you mean the supernatural studies club?”

It took me an embarrassingly long moment to connect the threads. Of course she would know, that had the cult written all over it.

“Is it Moonrise?” Lily guessed. Felicity nodded. “That’s great, it’s one of the only leads we have for Amy.”

“Amy?”

I blinked.

“We never told you what we were doing,” I realized.

Felicity had the grace to look embarrassed about it.

“I assumed you didn’t want to tell me. I am merely the bodyguard after all.”

I nodded, content with that situation. Anything Felicity knew, the cult knew, so it was best to keep secrets close. Lily seemed to disagree.

“Amy Neilson, my roommate, was the first victim of the spider-thing summoned by that circle.”

Felicity’s eyes widened as she realized the implications.

“So the killer on campus is a hedge witch.”

“No,” I said reluctantly. “They’re definitely a real witch. This summoning ritual is far too well made. They have a thorough enough understanding of eldritch magic to balance out the contradictions with the Dreaming.” The Dreaming was the technical term for the fey, one I chose to use entirely out of spite towards Felicity. “That’s two separate schools of training, at least. I won’t know how they did it without more research, but the fact that this building isn’t a conceptual smoking crater is proof they did it right.”

“Which means this is an attack on Margaret’s territory. But who... Could it be a new coven? The mixture of distinct magic certainly implies such.”

“Except,” Lily interjected, “neither of the two deaths had anything to do with whatever wizard politics you’re talking about. They were a freshman and a professor whose class she didn’t have.”

That was the problem. It was too magical a method for a hedge witch but too mundane a goal for a real one.

“There’s a piece we’re missing,” I theorized. “Some additional thread that ties together these two stories.”

“Which we won’t find by standing around here,” Lily said. “Should we erase the circle?”

“God no!” I almost shouted. Lily took a step back in surprise, which I immediately felt bad about, so I rushed to explain. “If we erase it then the bindings come undone. It could do almost anything if it got free.”

Lily frowned, clearly unsatisfied by my explanation. Felicity gave her an odd look.

“Outsiders come from worlds very alien to ours,” she said slowly, like she was speaking to a child. “It is probably suffering a great deal right now.”

“You don’t have to be there when we kill it,” I promised.

Lily nodded, though she still seemed uneasy. I hadn’t expected her to be squeamish, but maybe that was common for mundane people.

“Well then, shall we go?”

“While we do,” Lily turned to Felicity. “You said this place was part of Moonrise? Which means you can find out who booked this room.”

Felicity and I both paused, sharing in the embarrassment of not considering that.

“I’ll have a word with the people downstairs,” Felicity promised.

We filed out of the room, Felicity in the lead. She got the elevator again, just as she had while we were dating. She mercifully skipped the routine of informing me that ‘the royal carriage’ had arrived. She’d seemed to have so much fun with it and like a naive fool, I’d enjoyed the feeling of being pampered.

In hindsight, it was a very clever strategy. The difference between that and how Margaret treated me had made me practically addicted to Felicity. There was still a shameful part of me that wanted to leap back into her arms every time she called me her princess.

Felicity would let me. That was the worst part, the absolute certainty that if I pretended I didn’t know the truth, I could have it all back.

The elevator arriving on the bottom floor cut off my musings. I prayed that Felicity couldn’t see the flush on my face, but I had little doubt she was watching me.

When we got to the front entrance, Felicity stopped us.

“I’ll be just a moment,” she said, before going to speak to one of the staff.

In a split second, I weighed the odds that she’d lie about who rented the room against the value of checking in with Lily now. Lily won.

“What did you two talk about while I was measuring?” I asked. Bluntness usually paid off for me with Lily.

Lily paused, golden eyes searching my expression as she did calculations of her own. It struck me once again how breathtaking she was. Strands of dark red hair framed her face, her expression guarded. It’d been easy to forget in the face of such an impossible ritual, but there was no such distraction here.

“You, obviously,” she said with false nonchalance.

I waited expectantly for her to say more, but that seemed to be it.

“If she threatened you, I can probably help,” I said. She just shook her head, but I pressed. “Just tell me she didn’t threaten you then.”

Lily scowled, such an unfamiliar expression I took a step back.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t try to trap me with your lie detection.”

I hesitated, unsure how the conversation had derailed so quickly.

“We’ve been using it on people for the last two days,” I pointed out. “Also I can’t turn it off.”

Lily sighed in frustration.

“Then when I say I don’t want to talk about something, we don’t talk about it.”

“Ok,” I agreed immediately. I didn’t want to lose my only friend, not over this. Not over anything, actually.

Lily blinked, surprised. Did she think I wouldn’t agree to that? I’d already done it about her lockpicking abilities.

“I really only wanted to be sure you were ok,” I said.

“I am.”

Before I could figure out if I should press her on that lie, Felicity returned.

“The room is vacant,” she said. “It has been for several months. The doors do not keep logs, so we cannot even tell when it was broken into.”

“How hard would that be?” I asked Lily. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t a probing question and almost believed it.

Lily shrugged.

“The equipment is expensive, but electronic stuff isn’t much about skill. If you had the tools, anyone could.”

Felicity did not react to the discovery of Lily’s breaking and entering expertise, which was almost more interesting than the expertise.

----------------------------------------

To say I was not looking forward to this club would be an understatement. The odds of it turning into any clues were tiny now that we knew it couldn’t be a hedge witch. I should be spending this time studying the madman’s miracle of a ritual we just saw instead of talking to people who thought magic was wishing for things really hard.

The idea of being in that environment with an unusually agitated Lily and a faux-jealous Felicity sounded like torture designed specifically for me.

However, I had promised Lily I would go with her, which made it impossible for me to consider otherwise. Not magically, an inability to lie still let me change my mind, but it might as well have been a binding oath for how committed to the choice I felt.

Not to mention that it was getting increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that I was now walking around Reston with not one but two beautiful young women. I’d mostly been resorting to not looking at Felicity for the sake of my composure. Being around some normal people would be good for my health.

I opened my eyes, finished reinforcing my persona. Claire the Witch wasn’t looking forward to this either, but at least she wouldn’t make a fool of herself.

“Are you ready?” Felicity asked. She had reduced the beauty of her glamour and changed her clothes to a much more casual plaid shirt with a blue sleeveless vest and a mid-length skirt. I also noticed that much of the makeup and lipstick was gone.

I nodded. Lily and I hadn’t changed, since we were wearing real clothing. We’d come straight here from the apartment regardless, Lily filling Felicity in on the details of our investigations along the way.

It was a building that to me looked like any other. The interior was virtually indistinguishable from the building we’d failed to locate Nathan in, but supposedly this was a student center and therefore completely different. It had rooms that could be reserved for club activities, which were not classrooms except sometimes when they would be used as classrooms.

Colleges were very strange places. The clubroom we wanted was on the second floor, directly across from the stairs.

Felicity opened the door to the clubroom and Lily sucked in her breath. I peeked around the corner to see what had caught her attention.

The room had a large table in the center, around which a dozen or so chairs had been arranged. I counted eleven people sitting at the table, one of whom I recognized with surprise was Rachael from the library’s front desk.

A girl stood up, clearly about to say something before she saw Felicity. A moment seemed to pass between them, and then the girl was waving us in, all smiles and charm.

As we drifted in, I looked at Lily curiously and she whispered to me.

“The guy in the green shirt is Nathan.”

Well then, maybe we would be getting something from this.

----------------------------------------

You could learn a lot about a group of people just by sitting and listening to them with communication for a few hours.

We’d been seated on the side of the table by the door. Lily was to my right, directly across from Nathan. Felicity had been on my left, but Lily gave her a note and a few minutes later she had somehow maneuvered herself into sitting on the right side of Nathan. Both girls had turned their charm up to eleven, but I mostly kept quiet, trusting they’d be better at this than me.

The basic structure of club activities was people discussing news events that were supposedly supernatural. Interestingly, I could identify at least three different kinds of beliefs among the group. Each member individually believed or disbelieved in each category.

1. Monsters, or cryptids as they insisted. Their news events seemed to mostly consist of blurry pictures, of which about a third might be something real. One of them also pointed to a strange number of coincidental deaths among zoologists that I realized with some surprise might be the Inquisition. After all, somebody had to keep the most reckless monsters under wraps.

2. Magic. They thought it was an instinctual, animistic, and/or shamanistic practice. At least, that was the most I could synthesize from how they discussed it. If I had to hear any more about chakras or water crystals freezing, I would hurt someone with real magic just to see how they’d react.

3. Psychic powers. I had been compelled to ask if that wasn’t also magic and was told in no uncertain terms that it was not. Psychic powers, supposedly, were superpowers that some percentage of the population was born with but would lie dormant until awakened. None of them agreed on what awakened them.

Almost none of them lied about which groups they believed in, but most lied about the evidence they provided.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The other most noteworthy thing was that none of them brought up the killings on campus. I couldn’t figure out why. It was more suspicious than anything else presented and was even correct to call it magical. But Lily’s attempts to ask about Amy naturally were met with nonanswers and rude glares.

Rachael only believed in psychic powers and was the only one of them who didn’t assume she herself was psychic. She didn’t bring any news of her own and offered little commentary on topics that weren’t psychic. I’d had to ask her directly to confirm which groups she was a part of. She seemed shocked I was talking to her but quickly grew animated once she got to talk about psychics. It was surprisingly endearing.

Lily interestingly avoided the topic of psychic powers altogether, despite being willing to lie like a salesman in her efforts to inundate herself with the group about the other two topics.

Nathan believed in monsters. He kept his dirty blond hair long for a boy, though still shorter than mine, and he was quite sociable. It was his first meeting, so he didn’t bring any news, but he very noticeably engaged the most with the ones about monsters. He also pretended to be willing to hear out topics of magic, lying through his teeth that it made sense to him.

This was probably because Felicity was acting most receptive to stories about magic. Nathan was practically drooling over Felicity, who was doing her best to court his attention without seeming like she was. At some point, she’d switched back to the outright beautiful glamour and was finding progressively more excuses to be amazed by whatever Nathan said. The one time he looked at me he flinched away from whatever expression I was making.

It was clear from the room's momentum that things were wrapping up, moving to more social chats than anything on-topic. Lily seemed to realize this as well.

“I have a case,” she said abruptly. A few people turned to her annoyed, as if that wasn’t why they were here. “The deaths of Amy Neilson and Professor Lansberg.”

The room immediately quieted to an oppressive silence, no one willing to respond to her first. It wasn’t until someone dropped a pen that everyone seemed to remember they were allowed to make noise at all.

Someone, a girl who believed in monsters and psychics, spoke up first.

“Doesn’t that seem a little…” she trailed off.

“Well,” Felicity jumped in, “something is supernatural there. Both of their bodies were torn apart in locked rooms. What could have done that?” She faked a shiver like she was frightened by the topic.

Nathan put a comforting hand on Felicity’s shoulder, which she leaned into. I looked away, not wanting to ruin her ploy by scaring him again.

Another voice spoke up, a guy who only believed in magic.

“I knew Amy. It wouldn’t be right to talk about that at our club.”

“What was the point of lying about that?” I asked him. I was getting tired of this group and we’d gotten nothing by playing nice. He stared at me in confusion, so I clarified. “You didn’t know Amy.”

“What, and you did?” he asked angrily. Was he mad because he’d been caught or just posturing?

“Not in the slightest,” I said. I saw an opportunity. “Did anyone here know her?”

I scanned the room, trying to read faces. The general mood was against me. Rachael was just surprised, Nathan was mostly annoyed, Felicity looked confused, and Lily was unreadable.

“Anyone?” I tried. At a minimum, Nathan wasn’t responding and I knew he did. “Do speak up.”

“I don’t think anyone does,” Rachael said hesitantly. It was an ambiguous statement and communication was inconsistently literal.

“Do you think anyone in this group does? Do you know if she ever attended?”

Rachael seemed surprised by the intensity of my questions.

“Um, no she’s never been at the club,” she said. “I’ve been here since I was a freshman.”

This was a waste of time then. No, not really, we’d gotten Nathan. Some distant part of my brain also noted Rachael was presumably older than I’d guessed.

I was content to let the issue drop. I’d broken the flow of the room though and people seemed unsure how to move back to their conversations when I stopped asking questions.

“Are you some kind of cop? What the hell was that?” It was the guy I’d called out for lying. A bruised ego, probably.

“No,” I said curtly.

He didn’t seem satisfied with that, but no amount of awkward silence would make me care what he thought, so eventually the room moved on.

Before we left, there was a surprising amount of social pressure applied to get us to come back next time. The girl who had reacted to Felicity when we came in was especially pushy about it, getting embarrassingly affectionate in her efforts to extract a promise I’d be here again. I almost agreed before Lily intervened to smooth things over. Lily’s agitation seemed to spike again for a while after that incident.

I did notice some people who were quicker to leave than others.

Among this group were Nathan and Felicity, who seemed to be talking in hushed tones as they left. Felicity giggled in a way that sounded so fake I don’t know how he bought it. Lily and I got up to follow but she gestured behind his back for us to wait.

We filtered out with everyone else about ten minutes later, though Felicity was nowhere in sight.

“So…” Lily said. “What do you think her plan was?”

“No idea,” I admitted. “There’s no reason to do the interrogation without me, so unless she wants to fuck him first-” I cut myself off. What was wrong with me?

Lily didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Mercifully, my phone started buzzing a minute later. It was a call from a number I didn’t recognize.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Claire, we’re behind the building, back exit on the first floor. Red SUV. Do hurry, he’s quite upset I took his phone.”

Felicity hung up and I was already headed down the stairs, Lily following me.

“Why did she call you from his phone?” Lily asked curiously. She had good hearing it seemed.

“Because I have her numbers blocked.”

“…numbers?”

“She tried a few phones.” I’d had to get a new phone before they stopped. Though apparently, she knew this number too. What did that mean, that she hadn’t called it?

Lily was quiet the rest of the way down.

----------------------------------------

It was already past sunset when we got outside, the parking lot lit only by bright overhead lights. The red SUV was in the parking lot behind the building. There didn’t seem to be too many other cars, but there were enough to worry me.

We found Felicity straddling Nathan’s lap in the back seat with a pocket knife against his throat. When she saw us, she opened the car door, kicking it as far out as it would go.

“Claire, why would you block my number on a new phone?” She seemed genuinely confused. It was somewhat funny, how casual her tone was compared to the situation.

“What the fuck is this?” Nathan asked. He was terrified, eyes flicking between us frantically as he tried to piece together what was happening.

I sighed, checking to be sure Felicity was using the pocket knife I thought she was. It had a fake wooden rounded handle and a shining silver blade she must’ve replaced at some point. Of course she would still have it, it was the only birthday present I’d ever given her.

“Felicity,” Lily sounded like she wanted to scream but kept her voice down. “What are you doing?”

“You have questions for him, don’t you? Ask them.”

I hesitated. It wasn’t like Felicity to act this aggressively if she didn’t have to. She was a finesse instrument.

“Did he try-”

“I promise I will explain later, just ask him your questions.”

That seemed reasonable, Nathan was getting more agitated. Lily too.

“Did you kill Amy Neilson?” I asked him.

“That’s what this is- oh god who the fuck are you people?!” Nathan started to struggle before Felicity pressed the knife deeper into his neck. She seemed to enjoy it, though she might’ve been playing it up for me. I could see a small line of blood run down his shirt and tears well up in his eyes.

“Well,” I said. A glance told me Lily was still too uncomfortable with this situation to lead. “That’s a particularly telling reaction. So you did kill her then?”

“No! No, I didn’t.”

“Then why did you just start panicking?” I asked.

“Because there’s a fucking psycho with a knife to-”

“Watch your tone,” I snapped.

“Wouldn’t want to upset the psycho, now would we?” Felicity practically purred, a smile on her face as she teased his neck with the knife. Her movements were so slow and sensual, but the blade stayed perfectly controlled. It was unsettling how hot she was doing this. Focus Claire.

“I know when you’re lying to me,” I said. “What are you trying to hide?”

I risked another glance at Lily, who seemed to have resigned herself to what was happening.

“How do you know?” Nathan asked. His tone had gone up another octave in fright.

“Magic,” I replied sarcastically.

“Oh god you’re a witch.”

I blinked. I rapidly went through what he said back at the club. He’d honestly believed in monsters and dismissed psychic powers as fake. He had lied about believing in magic… no he’d lied about believing in the examples given. Which was also what I would have done since I knew what real magic was.

“You’re a hedge witch,” I guessed. A real witch would know the area enough to recognize me as Margaret’s apprentice. Even if they didn’t know my face, knowing I could detect lies would mark me as a Witch of Weaving and basic deduction would connect me to Margaret. “You found a bit of real magic somewhere, enough to know that the club’s version is nonsense. A summoner’s book?”

He couldn’t possibly have made that ritual, but it was the only version of events I could see. If this boy turned out to be some sort of prodigy, I might go mad. There was a limit to how much stress I could take.

Nathan’s eyes widened, but he didn’t respond.

“If you don’t talk to me we’re just going to kill you,” I pointed out. The odds of him leaving alive at all were fairly low by now, but he didn’t need to know that.

I heard Lily suck in her breath.

“Ok ok,” he pleaded. “If I talk you won’t kill me?”

“Of course,” Felicity lied for me. It was incredible how quickly she could shift to such a reassuring tone. She pulled the knife away to seem like she was backing off, though she kept it close enough to be there in an instant.

“Look… I only found out about magic three days ago.” Nathan kept his hands up as though surrendering. He didn’t seem to trust this new version of Felicity, which was smart. “I found this book- it was one of those stupid occult horror things, like bloody mary type shit. It’s never real! It said you could mark people for demonic beasts to feed on them. You just have to touch them while thinking of a magic rune- I didn’t actually…”

“That’s so stupid,” Lily said. It was the first thing she’d contributed so far and I couldn’t help but agree.

However, a little thread of possibility was forming in my mind.

“And you used it on Amy?” I asked skeptically. He wasn’t lying, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t an idiot.

“No, Professor Lansberg.” He started speaking quicker, the justifications spilling out of him. “He’s been giving me shit all year, I figured I might as well try it on someone who deserves it you know? Just to see, but it wasn’t- it’s never real!”

“What was the rune?” Felicity asked.

“I don’t,” Nathan floundered, “I mean, I can’t describe it. It was weird, three points-”

It couldn’t possibly... I pulled out my phone and found one of my pictures of the interdiction glyphs, showing them to him.

“Yes, that’s it,” Nathan said. He seemed relieved, which was amusing since he’d just signed his death warrant.

It was a mistake. Whoever summoned the spider was so reckless they had made the targeting mechanism something you could find in some random occult nonsense book. How the hell were we supposed to contain this?

No, a horrifying thought had just occurred to me, which was far more important right now.

“Have you used it on Felicity?” I asked him aggressively. “I can remove it, I just need to know if you did it!”

If he had marked Felicity then I wasn’t sure how I could do the ritual on her without letting Nathan run away. We probably had a decent amount of time before the spider showed up but I wasn’t willing to risk it. We’d have to-

“I didn’t,” he insisted. I blinked.

“Why on earth not?”

“…because I didn’t think of it?” he admitted quietly. Twice now, this boy had surprised me with sheer stupidity.

Felicity was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t understand. When our gazes met, she turned back to Nathan suddenly.

“Where is the book now?” Felicity asked.

Nathan seemed to hesitate again, but not for long.

“Madison’s dorm room. That’s where I found it- I didn’t take it, just looked at it. She’d bent the page about the symbol. But she didn’t- she wouldn’t...” Nathan trailed off, perhaps realizing the absurdity of his claim.

I’d worried Amy’s killer would be someone who had found an unrelated book, leaving us no way to track them down. This was certainly more convenient. Though why would Nathan… oh they were probably dating. Lily had said something about that.

“Madison touched me on the shoulder yesterday, outside the classroom,” Lily said. She pulled out her phone and started texting someone.

“Why would you come out here with-” I cut my question off. I didn’t care about the health of his relationship. “Where’s Madison’s dorm?”

“My dorm,” Lily answered my question for Nathan. She seemed to be waiting for a response to her text. “Fourth floor.”

Nathan nodded as if I wouldn’t trust just Lily saying it. Felicity decided to finish my aborted line of questioning.

“Why were you in Madison’s dorm room?”

“We’re dating- but it’s an open thing!” he said defensively. Felicity found this hilarious, giggling softly. The interrogation seemed to have put her in a great mood.

A thread from yesterday tugged at me, Amy’s books.

“Amy?” I asked. Nathan looked confused again. “Was Amy involved in the arrangement?”

“She was,” he confirmed, “with Madison.”

That made her even more of a suspect. She wouldn’t be the first jilted lover to try to kill their partner. I certainly had.

Lily looked up from her phone with incredulity.

“And you were ok with that?” she asked.

“That is what open means- Wait why are we talking about my relationships now?!”

He wasn’t wrong, we’d gotten well off-topic. Which reminded me why we’d wanted to talk to him in the first place.

“A scrawny boy named Peter seemed to think you had reason to be upset with Amy, a reason involving Madison. Did he-”

“He caught Amy and Madison one day. He told me and I pretended not to know because I didn’t- you know what people think about stuff like that.”

I nodded. In hindsight, we should’ve been far more thorough when interrogating Peter.

Lily’s phone buzzed.

“Madison didn’t go back to her dorm last night,” Lily said, reading the text. “Jessie hasn’t seen her since.”

“It seems we’ve found our way back to your love life yet again,” Felicity said amusedly. “How was Amy and Madison’s relationship, any trouble in paradise?”

Nathan shook his head.

“I don’t know. Madison didn’t like to talk about Amy to me. She said she wanted to keep the relationships separate.”

“She talked about you all the time,” Lily pointed out. “It’s the only reason I didn’t think she and Amy were together.”

“That might have been the intention,” Felicity suggested. “To keep you from suspecting she and your roommate were engaged in a tryst.” Tryst? She really was having fun.

Felicity’s answer didn’t seem to sit right with Lily, but she didn’t argue it. Nathan seemed unbothered, or maybe just more concerned about Felicity in his lap.

I felt we were done with Nathan, but I’d already made the mistake of not being thorough.

“Is there anything else you think we’d want to know from you?”

He shook his head.

“Answer aloud, please.” Felicity drifted the knife closer, though not at his throat yet.

“No, there isn’t.”

“Lily,” I kept my eyes on Nathan as I spoke, “you might want to turn around for this.”

“What are you-” Lily’s question was cut off as Nathan seemed to realize what was about to happen. He tried to shove Felicity off of him, but she jammed the knife into his throat before he could touch her.

Felicity quickly dragged the blade across his throat, opening up a sizable gash. Nathan sputtered for a few seconds as the blood dripped down his neck and he died.

Felicity wiped the knife against his shirt and fished around in his pockets for his car keys.

“Why…” Lily’s voice was almost a whisper. “Why did you do that?”

I turned away from the body to answer her. I had seen people die before, but not very many.

“A few reasons. He had already killed someone and he knew the glyph. We can’t have him arrested for magical manslaughter. More than that, if he started researching and experimenting with magic he could bring the Inquisition here.” And because if he lived, we would be forced to kill the spider immediately.

“You can’t just… you don’t get to make that choice.”

“It is what it means to be a witch,” Felicity said. She’d found his car keys and was pushing the corpse over the back seat into the trunk. “If you need to feel better about it, tell yourself the Inquisition killed him. Or if the professor’s death does not bother you, that he was an accessory to Amy’s murder for not reporting Madison to the authorities.” She’d successfully gotten it over the side and out of view, though plenty of blood still stained the seat.

“Can you handle the disposal on your own?” I asked Felicity. She nodded. “All right, meet me at the library tomorrow morning. I’ll have more on the ritual by then.”

Felicity nodded again with a smile as she closed the car door and climbed up into the front seat. I turned back to Lily, but neither of us said anything until Felicity had driven away.

Lily’s golden eyes practically glowed in the darkness of the night. I spoke first.

“Madison almost certainly killed Amy, so your part in this is effectively done. You don’t need to-”

“Seriously Claire?” Lily interrupted me incredulously. “You’re kicking me to the curb because I’m not ok with you murdering people?”

I winced, realizing how my words had seemed.

“I was trying to give you an out,” I explained. My tone wasn’t quite under control, desperation breaking through. “You aren’t a witch, you shouldn’t have to be a part of this.”

“And will you kill me too? Because I know enough about magic to bring the Inquisition here?” I hesitated for a moment too long. “Are you fucking-”

“No!” I shouted.

Lily wasn’t wrong, that was the problem. She’d seen the glyph. More than that, she knew where Margaret and I lived. She could bring the Inquisition right to our doorstep, which was far more risk than Nathan had posed.

I couldn’t do it. It was stupid and irrational and more than anything it was weak. But it was true.

“I won’t kill you,” I said pathetically. “I don’t know if I even could.”

Both of us stood there for a minute, not saying anything.

“The library tomorrow morning,” Lily said finally. She turned and started walking towards her dorm.

Margaret’s house was in the same direction, so I let her get out of sight before I went back.