Chapter 1 #2
Ramona found Kashvi brandishing a spatula at a pan that was producing alarming amounts of smoke, sparklers shooting from her fingertips in agitated bursts. Whatever had been cooking was now a blackened hockey puck that might have been a grilled cheese in a past life.
Felix emerged from his room, Gerald the pigeon perched on his shoulder like some kind of deranged parrot. Felix calmly reached up to silence the alarm. “You’re officially forbidden from using the stove.”
“It’s my kitchen, too!”
“And yet somehow you’re the only one who consistently summons the fire department.” Felix looked at Ramona, his expression somewhere between sympathy and exhaustion. “Thai leftovers in the fridge if you want them.”
Her other two roommates, Cammie and Posey, sat on the couch watching Love Potion, their current favorite reality dating show.
Ramona mumbled something noncommittal and headed straight for her room, shutting the door on the sounds of Kashvi arguing that the grilled cheese “wasn’t even that burnt.”
Her room was small. A bed held together mostly by duct tape and hope, a dresser she’d found on the curb, a bookshelf sagging under romance novels and magical theory textbooks she couldn’t quite throw away. The window looked out on an alley where someone’s cat held screaming concerts at three a.m.
She sat on her bed. The springs creaked.
She pulled the grimoire out of her bag. The leather was still cool under her fingers, worn smooth by decades — maybe centuries — of hands.
She wondered who’d owned it before. Another desperate witch?
Someone who’d succeeded where she’d failed?
Or someone who’d ended up worse off than her, donating their most precious possession alongside a moldy sandwich?
She’d stopped doing magic. Really stopped, not just “taking a break” like she told people. Two years since the incident, since she’d decided her magic was more liability than asset.
The grimoire fell open to page forty-seven, like it wanted her to see it. Written in faded ink:
To Summon Success and Fortune
When darkness descends and all paths seem barred, call upon those who dwell beyond to light your way. Speak the words thrice and offer what you hold most dear. Aid will come, though perhaps not as expected.
The ingredients were simple. White candles. Salt. A personal item of value. The incantation was only four lines.
Ramona read it three times, her academic brain automatically parsing the structure. Basic summoning framework, standard protective elements, reasonable power requirements. The kind of spell she would have assigned to undergrads to translate.
The kind of spell that shouldn’t work on someone whose magic consistently did the opposite of what she intended.
She closed the grimoire and set it on her nightstand.
This was stupid. She was thirty-five years old, possibly about to be fired from a job she’d taken as a temporary stopgap, living in an apartment with roommates like she was still in her twenties, and lying to her parents about everything that mattered.
Her sister was thirty-seven with two kids, a thriving business, and a husband who actually showed up to family dinners, even if he had the personality of a damp napkin.
Most of her grad school cohort was tenured by now.
Her ex-wife had already replaced her on every level — new relationship, new house, new life.
And Ramona was here.
Stuck.
Her phone lit up with her mom’s contact photo.
She’d arrived in Fernwick with the hope that an entirely new city meant a fresh start. And it did offer anonymity, but apparently two hours wasn’t far enough away to entirely escape her past.
Ramona watched it ring. Once, twice, three times. She sighed and answered on the fourth ring, already grimacing.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Ramona! Finally. I was starting to worry.” Her mother’s voice was formal and precise, just as it had always been. “Iris mentioned you’ve been busy.”
“Yeah, really busy. We’re doing inventory this week.”
It wasn’t technically a lie. Marcus had mentioned inventory. Sometime back in September.
“That’s wonderful, honey. I wanted to call about Imbolc dinner and give your apparently very busy schedule a chance to remember your dear family on one of our sacred days.
” She really had to give credit to her mom’s ability to make a dinner invitation sound disappointed.
“Iris will be there, and your father and I would love to have you there.”
Ramona tugged at a loose thread on the edge of her skirt, realizing her tights had a run. She traced her finger along the ladder of threads. Damn. These were her last good pair of tights. “I’ll try. Work’s been really demanding.”
They talked for another five minutes, her mother filling her in on her father’s latest chess tournament and the new expansion at her apothecary. Ramona made the appropriate interested noises, gave vague updates about her “career,” and promised to try harder to make it to Imbolc dinner.
When she finally hung up, she stared at the grimoire on her nightstand.
She stood up, swaying slightly, and crossed to her dresser. She glanced toward the grimoire, but something inside of her gave a sharp tug. Don’t.
Ramona instead pointed her finger at her reflection in the mirror above her dresser. A simple Level I spell. Just a minor color correction, take the purple back to her natural brown.
She spoke the incantation clearly, deliberately, pouring what little sober concentration she had left into the spell.
Nothing happened.
Her reflection stared back at her, purple hair and all. Mocking.
She tried again, enunciating each syllable like her old professor had taught her. Intent and precision. Will and focus.
Nothing.
One more time, adding more intent, more focus, more desperation—
Her hair flickered for half a second to a shade of purple so dark it was almost black, then snapped back to the faded mess.
She turned back to the grimoire on her nightstand. If she couldn’t even manage a basic glamour spell most witches knew at thirteen, what made her think she could successfully cast a summoning from a donation-bin grimoire?
The book sat there, innocuous. Just leather and paper and someone else’s desperation, donated alongside a turkey sandwich.
Ramona picked it up, feeling the weight of it. For a moment — just a moment — she imagined it. Lighting the candles. Speaking the words. Something, anything, changing.
Then she set the book back on the nightstand and turned off the light.
The spell wouldn’t work anyway. Nothing ever did.
She climbed into bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin, ignoring the hunger pang in her stomach. Through the window, she could hear the alley cat starting its nightly concert. The radiator clanked. Somewhere down the hall, Kashvi was still arguing with Felix about the stove’s sensitivity.
Tomorrow she’d go back to Mystic Moon Books. Marcus would have his talk. She’d probably get fired from a fake magic shop run by a twenty-three-year-old who thought crystals were a personality trait.
And the grimoire would sit on her nightstand, gathering dust.