Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Ramona woke up to the sound of someone screaming.
She bolted upright, heart pounding, before realizing it was just the cat in the alley. Again. She lay back onto her pillow and stared at the water stain on her ceiling that looked vaguely like a duck.
The duck seemed to judge her silently.
Her phone buzzed on her nightstand. A calendar reminder: Rent due in one week.
She closed her eyes. Right.
Ramona opened her banking app and immediately wished she hadn’t. Between groceries, her car insurance, and the fact that she’d been low on hours this month, she was exactly $442 short.
The number sat there on her screen, accusatory.
She lay there for a moment, doing mental math that refused to work in her favor.
Her next paycheck wasn’t until after the due date, and she’d been late almost every month for the past six months.
She could ask her parents, but that would require explaining why she needed money, which would lead to questions about her job, which would unravel the entire lie she’d been maintaining for two years.
“Fuck,” she whispered to the duck-shaped water stain.
She dragged herself out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen, where Felix was making coffee and Gerald was perched on the back of a chair, watching with his judgmental pigeon eyes.
The morning light coming through the kitchen window was gray and weak.
The weather outside had all the charm of a wet paper bag.
“Morning,” Felix said, not looking up from his French press. He was wearing a sweater with a cat on it, which Gerald seemed to take as a personal insult based on his agitated cooing.
Ramona poured herself coffee and gave a sideways glance at Gerald.
“Hey, about rent, I’m going to be a tiny bit late again,” Ramona said, not looking at Felix with deep concentration. As the longest tenant of the apartment, Felix had become the rent collector, a job that meant Ramona had to apologize to him near the end of every month.
Felix shrugged. “Okay. Get it to me when you can.”
The bookshop felt smaller than usual. Or maybe Ramona just felt like the walls were closing in.
She’d arrived ten minutes late, and Marcus was already there, reorganizing the crystal display in a way that made absolutely no sense. Rose quartz next to obsidian? The man had no understanding of basic energetic principles.
“Morning, Ramona,” he said without looking at her.
“Morning.”
She busied herself with opening the register, counting bills with numb fingers, anything to avoid the inevitable conversation. Maybe if she looked busy enough, he’d forget. Maybe a meteor would hit the shop. Maybe she’d spontaneously combust.
Unfortunately, none of those things happened.
At 10:47 a.m., Marcus found her restocking the Occult section in the back corner — the small, dark area filled with books that no witch worth her wand would ever touch.
Wicca for Dummies. How to Talk to Your Spirit Guides.
A book called Crystals and Cryptocurrency that seemed to fundamentally misunderstand both concepts.
“Hey, so.” Marcus leaned against the bookshelf, vape pen in hand. The artificial mango smell made her stomach turn. “About that talk.”
Ramona set down a copy of Moon Magic Made Easy and turned to face him. Her pulse kicked up. “Right.”
“So, the shop’s been doing really well. Like, really well.”
For one wild, impossible second, Ramona’s heart lifted. They were doing well. He was going to give her a raise. Maybe even make her assistant manager. She’d been here two years, she knew every corner of this place, she could—
“We’re opening a second location,” Marcus continued, grinning like he’d just announced world peace. “Downtown. Bigger space, better foot traffic. It’s gonna be huge.”
“That’s… great,” Ramona said carefully. The hope in her chest continued to bloom.
“Yeah, and I’ve been thinking about who should run it.” He paused, and Ramona held her breath. The moment stretched.
Ramona saw the meaning of his pause. He was trying to tell her he wanted her to run the new shop. She smiled, almost blushing at the idea. “I’d—”
“My brother’s perfect for it. He just graduated, super business-savvy, you know how it is.”
The breath left her lungs. The smile left her face. She blinked in surprise. “Your… brother,” she repeated slowly, as if maybe he just needed to hear it said back to realize what kind of an idea that was.
“Yeah! Dylan. He was in Sigma Nu, so he’s got great people skills. He’s gonna crush it.”
Ramona stared at Marcus. At his stupid turtleneck and his stupid vape pen and his stupid, oblivious face. The entire shop was funded by his rich parents — of course he’d hire his brother. Her hands were shaking. She shoved them in her pockets. “And what about… here? The original location?”
“Oh, you’ll keep doing what you’re doing. You’re great at it.” He said it like he was giving her a gift. Like she should be grateful. “I mean, someone’s gotta hold down the fort, right?”
“Right. Like… a manager here?” Ramona said, not exactly proud of the embarrassingly high octave her voice her had reached.
“Uh, hmm. We’ll figure that out.”
That did not sound promising. She gave a curt nod anyway. It wasn’t a no, at least. And with a second location, that meant Marcus would be away from this store more.
“When does it open?” Ramona asked. “The new store.”
“Dylan’s already there, getting things set up. We’re really building it from the ground up together,” Marcus said, looking pleased.
“Oh, okay. Congrats on a second location. That’s super exciting.”
“Yeah, I’m getting some signage installed here so I needed to have you up to speed when customers are asking about it.”
“Right. Yeah. Consider me sped up,” Ramona said, mentally cringing at herself while she surreptitiously brushed her clammy hands on the sides of her skirt.
“Cool. Glad we’re on the same page.” He pushed off the bookshelf. “Oh, and can you work on stocking more of those manifestation journals? They’re selling like crazy.”
He walked away, leaving Ramona surrounded by books about chakras and auras and finding your inner goddess.
The injustice of it sat in her throat like broken glass.
She made it through the rest of her shift on autopilot.
Rang up customers. Smiled. The manifestation journals felt heavier with each one she restocked, like the universe was fucking with her specifically.
A woman asked if maybe Saturn in Scorpio was affecting her love life.
A man wanted to know which crystal would make him better at day trading.
Ramona answered their questions with the same tired, upbeat script she’d used for two years.
At 5:03 p.m., she clocked out, walked to her car, sat in the driver’s seat, and started crying.
Not pretty crying. The ugly kind, where her face got blotchy and her nose ran and she couldn’t catch her breath. She cried until her eyes hurt and her throat was raw and she’d gone through an entire travel pack of tissues from her glove compartment.
Two fucking years and Marcus’s frat boy brother was going to run the new location.
She caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror. Her hair was a mess. Mascara streaked down her cheeks. The face of a full adult woman crying in a shitty car in a strip mall parking lot because she didn’t get promoted at a fake magic shop.
This was rock bottom.
Or at least, she hoped it was rock bottom. Because if there was further to fall, she didn’t want to know about it.
The Grimalkin was three blocks from the apartment, which was exactly the right distance for a bad day. Close enough to walk to without thinking about it. Far enough that going there felt like a decision.
Ramona had not made a decision. She had just started walking and ended up there, which was how The Grimalkin worked.
It was on a block that didn’t quite make sense geographically — a narrow door the color of charcoal, set between two buildings that shouldn’t have had space for it, marked by a wooden sign in the shape of a cat with the paint half gone, swinging on a single chain in a nonexistent breeze.
If she didn’t know to look for it, she could walk past it every day for years and see nothing but wall.
Ramona had been coming here since moving into the apartment.
She pushed the door open. It swung inward, as it always did, regardless of which side she pushed from.
Inside, The Grimalkin had low ceilings, dark wood, candles burning at a color that was almost but not quite orange — something closer to an golden-violet that made everyone look like they were lit from the inside.
Every table and counter had mismatched chairs that were all, somehow, comfortable.
A long bar made of something that might have been reclaimed church pew.
The jukebox in the corner, an old Wurlitzer in iridescent green, playing something slow and slightly accusatory that Ramona felt was directed at her specifically.
Odette was already there.
Odette was always there. The Grimalkin’s owner and usual bartender, she was ageless in the specific way of certain women and certain bars — not young, not old, but permanent, like the building had grown up around her.
Maybe it had. She had dark hair pinned back with something that might have been a bone hairpin.
Eyes that had seen everything and filed it away without judgment.
She had never, in all the years Ramona had been coming here, asked a single intrusive question.
She had also never failed to pour the right thing.