From Hell, With Love

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Ramona Greenbriar had always been good at finding things that were lost, just never the things she was actually looking for.

Case in point: the sandwich.

She stared into the donation bin with the kind of resigned horror that came from two years of working retail.

She’d seen a lot of things show up in these boxes — dog-eared romance novels, self-help books with suspiciously specific margin notes…

Once, the bin box had been filled to the brim with an entire collection of VHS tapes about competitive bird watching.

But this was a new low.

Someone had donated their lunch.

She snapped on a pair of latex gloves that she kept for donation-bin excavation and gingerly lifted out what had once been turkey and swiss on whole wheat. The smell hit her immediately — something between decay and despair. She gagged, arm outstretched as she speed-walked to the dumpster out back.

Late January in Fernwick was the kind of cold that made her nostrils stick together when she breathed in.

Her breath fogged in front of her face as she tossed the bready biohazard into the trash.

The metal lid clanged shut. She stood there for a moment, hands on her knees, breathing in the slightly less offensive smell of dumpster and dead leaves buried under dirty snow.

The universe had a sick sense of humor.

“You good out here?”

Ramona straightened to find Marcus leaning against the doorframe, vaping something that smelled like artificial mango and broken dreams. He was twenty-three, exclusively wore black turtlenecks, and had never done actual magic a day in his life but burned palo santo in the shop because it “elevated the vibration.”

He was also, annoyingly, her boss.

“Someone donated a sandwich,” Ramona said.

“Gross.” Marcus took another pull from his vape pen, shrugging his shoulders. “Don’t forget to sanitize your hands before touching inventory.”

He disappeared back inside, and Ramona stood there in the cold, staring at the dumpster. The metal was rusted at the corners, peeling paint like dead skin.

Thirty-five years old. An advanced degree from Thornwood Academy. A handful of years of published research on medieval spellwork translation that people still cited at conferences she was no longer invited to.

And she was throwing away strangers’ lunches behind a bookshop that sold fifteen-dollar bundles of sage.

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, the vibration sharp against her hip. A text from her sister.

Iris: Mom keeps asking about Imbolc. What should I tell her?

Ramona’s thumbs moved on autopilot: Tell her work is great. Super busy. Can’t make it.

The lie came easy. Too easy. Work was busy — her mother just didn’t need to know that “work” meant alphabetizing crystals and pretending tarot cards were an actual product worth $65. That her “research sabbatical” had turned into two years of retail purgatory.

She shoved her phone back in her pocket and headed inside, grateful for the blast of overheated air from the ancient radiator. The shop smelled like incense and dust and the faint chemical tang of Marcus’s stupid vape pen.

The donation box awaited. She used hand sanitizer on top of her gloves, then returned to sort through the rest. Most of it was the usual — three copies of The Secret, a book about essential oils that smelled like it had been stored in a gym bag, outdated advice guides with titles like The Cabbage Soup Cleanse.

She was about to declare the whole box a loss when her fingers brushed something at the very bottom.

A book.

But not just any book.

The cover was water-stained leather, cracked with age, with hand-drawn sigils that had faded to barely visible.

The spine was broken in three places. No title on the outside, but when Ramona carefully opened it, the first page read in elaborate calligraphy: Summonings and Bindings: A Practical Guide.

Her heart stumbled in her chest. Now, this. This was a find.

This was a real grimoire. She could feel its magic.

An actual, legitimate, old-as-hell grimoire, the kind with handwritten spells and ingredients that included things like “grave dirt” and “moonlight captured in silver.” The kind she used to study in candlelit libraries, feeling very important and very scholarly.

The kind of book that had always called to her.

She caught sight of herself in the mirror near the affirmation card decks.

Purple hair sticking up at odd angles, the result of a glamour spell gone wrong back in high school that she’d decided to just live with.

Dark circles under her eyes. The Mystic Moon Books shirt hanging off her shoulders like a costume she couldn’t quite pull off.

She looked away.

Marcus was helping a customer select a “manifestation journal” — really just a fifty-dollar notebook with moon phases printed on it. Her boss wasn’t magical, and probably didn’t even know witches and magical beings were real, and that Fernwick was one of the largest magical cities in the country.

She had maybe five minutes before Marcus would be on her to stock something for him.

Ramona turned the pages of the grimoire carefully, the old paper crackling under her fingertips. Some of the spells were standard fare — protection wards, attraction charms, the usual. Others were more esoteric. More powerful.

More interesting.

A spell to summon your heart’s desire.

Another to call forth prosperity and good fortune.

One that claimed to “reveal your truest path when all seems lost.”

The academic in her — the part that wasn’t quite dead yet — recognized the linguistic patterns, the symbolic frameworks.

This was old magic. Pre-standardization, working on intent rather than precision, which meant it was either incredibly powerful or incredibly dangerous, depending on who was casting.

Most likely it was a mix of both powerful and dangerous for anyone.

Ramona should have put it on the clearance shelf. Should have priced it at $5.99 and let some college kid buy it for the aesthetic.

Instead, she slipped it into her canvas tote bag. The leather was cool against her palm. It felt like something.

It felt like possibility.

Or maybe just stupidity. Hard to tell the difference these days.

The rest of the shift crawled by with the speed of continental drift. A woman spent an hour asking about crystal energies before leaving empty-handed. A man tried to convince Ramona that the $42 oracle deck should really be $28 because “Mercury is in retrograde and money is just energy anyway.”

The urge to explain that Mercury retrograde was an optical illusion and had nothing to do with cosmic commerce died in her throat. She smiled. She nodded. She ran his credit card for the full amount.

Marcus took a two-hour lunch and returned with a green juice that cost more than Ramona made in three hours. When five o’clock finally arrived, Ramona was grabbing her coat when Marcus’s voice stopped her.

“Hey, Ramona? Got a sec?”

Everything inside her went cold.

Those three words — got a sec — never preceded good news. They preceded conversations about “productivity” and “company direction” and “unfortunately, we have to make some changes.”

She turned, coat half on, clearing her throat and forcing her voice into a casual, feminine pitch. “What’s up?”

Marcus pressed his lips together and tilted his head, the expression he probably thought looked sympathetic. “So, uh, I wanted to give you a heads-up. We should probably talk tomorrow. About where things are going. Your role here, that kind of thing.”

“My… role?” Ramona asked, a tiny squeak in the words.

“Yeah, just… let’s touch base in the morning, okay?” He was already looking back at his phone, dismissing her. “Have a good night.”

Ramona stepped out into the January cold. Her breath fogged. Her fingers were numb. Let’s touch base was corporate-speak for You’re fucked.

Two years she’d been working here.

Two years, and apparently that earned you a firing delivered in startup-bro language.

Her phone buzzed. A text to the family group chat from Iris with a photo attached: Iris and her husband at some Italian restaurant, everyone’s teeth unnaturally white in the dim lighting. The caption: First Mommy and Daddy date night in months!

Iris, with her thriving curse-breaking business and her perfect family and her complete lack of understanding about why Ramona couldn’t just “bounce back” from a divorce and a career implosion.

The photo made something twist in Ramona’s stomach. Not jealousy, exactly. More like grief for a version of herself that used to exist. The one who had dinner reservations and date nights and a wife who looked at her like she mattered.

She shoved her phone in her pocket and headed for her car — a rusty sedan old enough to vote that made an ominous rattling sound whenever she went above forty-five miles per hour. Once upon a time, she’d driven a sensible Subaru. Had a parking spot with her name on it at the academy. Had a future.

The grimoire sat inside her bag on her passenger seat the entire drive home, a presence in her peripheral vision. She didn’t look at it directly. If she looked at it, she’d have to decide what it meant that she’d taken it.

The smoke alarm was going off when she opened the door to the apartment.

The building was the kind of place where the radiator clanked all night and the landlord responded to maintenance requests with “I’ll get to it” and then didn’t.

But rent was cheap, and her Croneslist roommates were — well, they were something.

Three other witches and one accidental human who’d moved in via a “roommate needed” ad in a major miscommunication.

“I know!” Kashvi shrieked from the kitchen. “I know it’s smoking!” She seemed to be yelling at the alarm, not a person.