Chapter 2 #2
The Grimalkin’s regulars were the kind of magical community that had fallen through the cracks of respectable coven life — hedge witches who would never be accepted to Thornwood Academy; a pair of elderly sisters who came every Thursday and had been coming every Thursday since before anyone could remember and ordered the same thing and never spoke to anyone else; a water witch who tended bar sometimes and could make a cocktail that tasted exactly like whatever you were grieving.
Most importantly, there was a three-legged cat named Parliamentarian who belonged to no one and accepted tribute from everyone.
A warlock named Dennis who claimed to be retired, which nobody believed.
People who had left their covens and people who had been asked to leave their covens and people who had never wanted a coven in the first place — the self-taught, the lapsed, the quietly powerful, the catastrophically mediocre.
It was not a place where anyone came to be impressive.
As for the non-witches: There was a corner booth that two orcs had been occupying for what seemed like decades, running what appeared to be an extremely informal mediation practice for other supernatural beings.
A banshee Ramona had talked to once who only came in on nights when she wasn’t working, just to sit somewhere loud enough to drown out the noise in her own head.
Something in the back that Odette acknowledged with a nod and nobody else looked directly at.
The fae, when they came, were obvious immediately — too beautiful, too careful with their words, ordering drinks they’d nurse for hours while watching everything.
Odette charged them double, and they paid without comment.
The Grimalkin had a policy that was never written down anywhere: Everyone was welcome as long as they kept their business off the tables, settled their own debts before they walked out, and didn’t make the cat uncomfortable. It was a remarkably effective policy.
Parliamentarian was currently occupying the stool next to Ramona’s preferred spot at the bar. He looked at her when she sat down. She looked back. He moved one stool over with the dignity of someone making a deliberate choice rather than a concession.
Odette set something dark and warm in front of Ramona before Ramona had fully settled onto the stool. Ramona didn’t ask what it was. She drank it. It tasted like the specific exhaustion of being exactly who she didn’t plan to be.
Odette moved away. Parliamentarian stared at her. The jukebox changed its mind and put on a song featuring jaunty piano.
Ramona stared at the bar top and let the ambient noise of other people’s problems wash over her.
She was on her second whatever-it-was when the stool beside her filled up. She didn’t look. Then it filled up on the other side. Then a third time, the scrape of a chair pulled up behind her.
She looked.
Felix. Posey. Kashvi, already unwinding her scarf. Gerald, on Felix’s shoulder, watching her with the solemn attention he brought to most situations.
“Hi,” Ramona said.
“Thought you might be here,” Posey said simply, settling her coat over the back of her chair. She had soil on her left sleeve.
Kashvi’s fingers sparked once, briefly, gold. “Your spiritual energy was very loud.”
“My energy—”
“Very loud,” Kashvi repeated and flagged down Odette.
Ramona looked at them. All of them, here, on a Tuesday, because apparently her emotional state had broadcast itself across three city blocks. She opened her mouth to say she was fine, she was just having a drink, she didn’t need—
“Marcus is opening a second Mystic Moon location,” she said instead. “And giving it to his brother, Dylan.”
“Dylan? The frat guy?” Felix said.
“That’s the one.”
“What a dick,” Kashvi said. A particularly aggressive sparkler shot sideways and narrowly missed the person on the next stool, who didn’t flinch, because this was The Grimalkin and people minded their own business.
Odette replaced Ramona’s drink without being asked. Ramona took it as the gift it was.
Cammie arrived twenty minutes later, pulling her café apron over her head as she walked in the door.
She took one look at the situation, sat down, and said “okay” in the tone of someone who had assessed the damage and was prepared to stay until it was dealt with.
She’d been their roommate for eight months.
Ramona still wasn’t entirely sure how Cammie had answered the Croneslist ad — Felix and Kashvi had been living together when Posey and Ramona had joined, and none of them had thought to question how a thoroughly non-magical woman had found a listing on a thoroughly magical classifieds board.
Cammie had never explained and they had never asked, because Cammie had a quality of existing exactly where she was supposed to be that made questions feel unnecessary.
She sat down, pushed her red hair back from her ear — the one with the dozen piercings, each one slightly different, a collection with no apparent system — and looked at Ramona expectantly.
Somewhere around the third drink, Ramona found herself giving a speech.
“Assistant Professor,” Ramona said. The words came out slurred at the edges. She gestured with her glass, nearly sloshing it. “Published researcher. Office with a window. And a wife.” She paused. The word sat there. “I had a fucking wife.”
The table went quiet. Even Gerald went still.
Cammie tilted her head. Her red hair slid over her shoulder. “I didn’t know you were married.”
Right. Because Ramona didn’t talk about that. Didn’t talk about much, actually. Kept to her room, paid her rent when she could, shared the kitchen in shifts. When she moved to a new city to start a new life, she focused on not bringing too much of the old one with her. That was the arrangement.
“Simone.” Ramona took another sip. The drink had given up tasting like anything. “So fucking pretty. Everyone loved her. Everyone.” She paused. “Especially Kate Stone.”
The group got quieter. Even the jukebox seemed to hold.
“Six months they were sleeping together. Six months.” Her voice cracked on it. “And everyone in the coven knew. Everyone in my department. Every single person.” She pressed her thumb against the base of her glass. “And no one told me.”
“Fuck,” Posey said quietly.
Kashvi’s sparklers had gone completely dark. She reached over and put her hand over Ramona’s on the bar. Didn’t say anything.
“It’s not forever,” Cammie said finally. She sounded like she was trying to mean it and wasn’t quite sure she did.
“Isn’t it, though?” Ramona’s vision blurred.
The candlelight smeared at the edges. “Two years and I’m going backwards.
Marcus’s frat brother is going to run a store and I’m going to keep pretending Mercury retrograde is real and—” She pressed her palms against her eyes.
Everyone was giving her that look. That careful, pitying look she’d been getting for two years. “I should go home.”
“Ramona—” Felix started.
“I’m fine.” The lie came easily. “Just a bad day. Thank you for—” She gestured vaguely at the drinks, at them, at the whole situation.
She slid off the stool. The room tilted slightly. Parliamentarian watched her go with an expression of three-legged dignity. Odette said nothing, which was its own kind of kindness.
She managed three blocks.
The apartment building came into view with the particular relief of a place that was hers even when nothing else was. She got the door open. Got up the stairs. Got into the apartment and stood in the dark hallway for a moment, just breathing.
They were nice people. Good roommates. They weren’t her friends. She’d learned the hard way what happened when she let people get too close. It was safer to keep the walls up.
Even if the walls were starting to feel less like protection and more like a very small room she’d been standing in for two years.
She changed into the thrifted novelty T-shirt that said Witch Happens and sat on her bed. The springs creaked. The room was quiet.
The grimoire was still on her nightstand, exactly where she’d left it.
Ramona picked it up, her thumb caressing the smooth leather. The pages were brittle with age, crackling softly as she turned them.
She flipped to page forty-seven.
To Summon Success and Fortune.
Right. Because that had worked out so well for everyone in the history of magical disasters.
But.
But what did she have to lose at this point?
Her job was a dead end. Her sister was thriving. Her parents thought she had a career when really she had a name tag and a slowly dying sedan. She was thirty-five years old and drunk on cheap liquor and she couldn’t even fix her own hair and she was so, so tired of pretending everything was fine.
Maybe the universe owed her one. Maybe after everything was taken from her — her marriage, her career, her dignity — maybe it was time for something to finally go right.
“Fuck it,” she said to her empty room.
The words hung in the air. No one answered.
The living room had gone mercifully quiet as she stepped out to gather the ingredients with the methodical focus of someone who’d given up on hope but hadn’t quite given up on spite.
White candles courtesy of Felix’s stress-shopping habit.
They smelled like “Autumnal Harvest” and had probably cost more than they should have.
Salt from the kitchen, the cheap kind in the cardboard container that left her fingers gritty. A personal item of value.
She stared at her jewelry box. Most of it was costume jewelry, things she’d picked up at thrift stores or received as forgettable gifts.
But there, tucked in the corner, was a silver ring her dead grandmother had given her when she graduated from Thornwood.
The metal was tarnished, the small stone — some kind of quartz — cloudy with age.
Her grandmother had pressed it into her palm at the ceremony, her papery fingers warm. “For when you need to remember who you are,” she’d said.
Ramona picked it up. The silver was cold. Heavy.
She placed it in the center of her floor.
The candles went around it in a circle, their flames casting shadows that seemed too large for her small room. The salt formed the barrier.
She lit the candles one by one. The flames flickered, casting strange shadows on her walls that seemed to move independent of the light source. Probably just the draft from the window.
Her hands were shaking. Whether that was from the wine or the nerves or the sheer stupidity of what she was about to do, it was impossible to tell.
Then she read the words. They felt strange in her mouth, not quite Latincane or the ancient tongues she’d studied.
Once. Her voice cracked on the second syllable.
Twice. Clearer now, more confident, more defiant.
Three times. The final repetition came out steady, almost aggressive. Like a dare.
Nothing happened.
Ramona sat there on her floor, surrounded by candles that smelled like a sad beige catalog, feeling ridiculous.
Of course nothing happened. This was a spell from a donation-bin grimoire donated alongside someone’s turkey sandwich.
What had she expected? A lightning bolt?
A choir of angels? A fucking sign from the universe that her life wasn’t a complete—
The candles went out.
All of them. All at once.
No wind. No reason. Just sudden darkness.
The temperature in the room dropped so fast, Ramona could feel it bite at her throat as she breathed. Her heart kicked against her ribs. The air smelled like sulfur and something else — expensive perfume. Bergamot and something darker, heavier. Oud, perhaps. Like smoke and crushed flowers.
The shadows in the corners of her room seemed to deepen, to move, to coalesce into something solid. Something with weight and presence and intention.
And then there was a silhouette.
Standing in the center of her salt circle, backlit by the streetlight coming through her window. Tall. Broad-shouldered. The outline of a person, maybe, but the edges seemed wrong somehow. Too sharp. Too still. Like someone had cut a hole in reality and something had stepped through.
Ramona’s heart was trying to exit her body through her throat. Her hands were frozen on her knees. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think beyond the single, screaming thought: Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.
The figure shifted, and then…
A long-suffering sigh. A whispered, “Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
A woman’s voice. Low and rough with an accent that seemed from somewhere far away, with a quality that made Ramona’s bones vibrate. Not loud, but everywhere at once, like it was coming from inside her own skull.
The streetlight caught the edge of a face. Sharp cheekbones. A jaw that could cut glass. Eyes that reflected the dim light like an animal’s.
And Ramona, drunk and terrified and so far past the point of rational thought, could only think one thing:
The spell actually fucking worked.