Chapter 13 #2
“Yeah.” Ramona turned her head, finding Zara’s face inches away. “I’m good.” She smiled.
And she was. Standing in this crowd, with the music vibrating through her chest and Zara’s hand warm on her hip and the string lights casting everything in soft gold, she was actually, genuinely good.
The songs blurred together, one into the next, the crowd moving as a collective organism.
Felix appeared beside them at one point, grabbed both their hands, and attempted to teach them some kind of dance that involved too much spinning and not enough coordination.
Ramona laughed — really laughed, the type of laugh that came from somewhere deep — as she stumbled into Zara, who caught her with both hands and steadied her with an ease that suggested she had significantly better balance than any human in the room.
“I thought you said you don’t dance,” Zara said, grinning.
“I don’t. This isn’t dancing.”
“It’s adorable, is what it is.”
Ramona rolled her eyes.
“Adorable,” Zara repeated, deliberately. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the crowd, her hair slightly disheveled from the movement. Her black shirt had shifted during the dancing, riding up even higher on one side.
Ramona absolutely did not look. She looked straight ahead. At the stage. At the band. At anything that was not Zara’s bare skin.
The music shifted into something slower.
The crowd loosened, people swaying rather than jumping.
Zara’s hand found Ramona’s hip again, and this time it was unmistakably not about navigating the crowd.
To steady herself and for no other reason, Ramona wrapped her own arm around Zara’s middle, bare skin on bare skin.
They swayed together, not quite dancing, not quite still. Close enough that Ramona could feel the heat radiating off Zara’s body. Close enough that every small movement brought them closer.
“Thank you,” Ramona said quietly, not entirely sure why she was whispering when the music was loud enough to cover conversation.
“For what?”
“For this. For making me come out tonight.” Ramona looked up at her. “For not letting me hide.”
“You deserve to have fun,” Zara said simply. “Everyone does. Mortals are so bad at it. Especially you.”
The weight of that sentence settled between them, heavy and warm. Ramona held Zara’s gaze and didn’t look away.
The walk home was cold and quiet. The kind of late-night silence that felt sacred — Fernwick settling into itself, streetlights casting pools of amber on the sidewalk, their breath making small clouds in the air.
Felix and Kashvi had peeled off earlier, Felix stumbling home with Kashvi’s arm around him, Gerald awake and cooing from his shoulder, both of them singing fragments of the last song badly and at full volume.
Ramona and Zara walked side by side, close enough that their arms brushed with every step. Neither of them moved apart.
“That was good,” Ramona said. “The band.”
“They were excellent. The enchanted instruments were a nice touch.”
“Was that your first concert?” Ramona asked.
“No, demons love music. We have plenty of it, and we’ve been known to sneak into a mortal festival or two. People on mind-altering drugs are easy prey for quota days, and why not enjoy yourself at the same time, you know?” Zara’s mouth quirked up in a grin.
“That’s diabolical.”
“That’s efficiency, Mortal.”
They walked in silence for a while. Comfortable silence that didn’t need filling. Their hands swung at their sides, fingers brushing with each step. Brush. Swing. Brush.
Neither of them reached for the other’s hand.
Neither of them pulled away.
“Ramona,” Zara said eventually.
“Yeah?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“I know.”
“Are you ready?”
Ramona considered the question. The ritual. The severance. The end of the tether, the end of shared emotions, the end of Zara’s hand on her back and her warmth in Ramona’s bedroom and her voice first thing in the morning.
The end of everything.
“I don’t know,” Ramona said honestly.
Zara nodded, like this was the answer she’d expected. They kept walking.
They turned onto their street — the quiet, slightly broken street where Ramona’s apartment building sat between a laundromat and a pizza shop. The streetlight above them flickered, casting unsteady light across the sidewalk.
Ramona slowed to a stop.
Zara also stopped, turning to face her. The flickering light caught the sharp lines of her face, the curve of her mouth, the dark eyes that held Ramona’s gaze with an intensity that made her breath catch.
“Thank you,” Ramona said again. “For tonight. For everything.”
“Ramona—”
“And if tomorrow works, and I don’t get a chance to…” Her voice was getting thick. “You know, to say it—”
“I know.” Zara stepped closer. Close enough that Ramona could see the way the streetlight reflected in her eyes, liquid gold and warm honey. “I know, Ramona.”
The air between them was charged again. That same electric pull, that same magnetic force that had been building for weeks.
Zara’s hand came up to Ramona’s face. Fingertips against her jaw, featherlight. Tilting her chin up.
Ramona’s eyes fluttered closed.
“Hey! Watch it!”
They both jerked back.
A group of college students stumbled past them on the sidewalk, loud and drunk and completely oblivious to what they’d just interrupted.
One of them bumped Zara’s shoulder without noticing, laughing at something his friend had said.
Another tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and grabbed Ramona’s arm for balance before stumbling on.
The moment evaporated like morning frost. Ramona steeled herself. This connection wouldn’t make the ritual easier, and letting Zara kiss her would only make her sadder in the long run.
Zara turned, and Ramona swore her entire body grew larger. One of the students fell to the ground, and his buddies helped him up.
“Sorry,” one of the students called back, waving vaguely. “Didn’t see you two there!”
They disappeared around the corner, still laughing, still oblivious.
“Did you make that guy fall?” Ramona asked, stifling a small smile.
Zara smirked. “I don’t know what you mean, Mortal.”
Silence settled back over the street.
Ramona and Zara stood there, a careful foot apart now, neither of them looking at the other. It seemed Zara was thinking the same thing she was.
“Well,” Ramona said eventually.
“Yes,” Zara agreed.
Another beat of silence.
“We should go inside,” Ramona said.
“Yes.”
“We should sleep.”
“That would be wise.”
Neither of them moved.
Finally, Zara let out a breath — something that might have been a laugh if it weren’t so quiet. “Ramona.”
“Yeah?”
“Go on, I’m right behind you.”
Ramona’s heart ached. Her own emotion, or Zara’s? She couldn’t tell anymore.
She unlocked the door and went inside and tried not to think about how tomorrow night, if the ritual worked, she wouldn’t be able to feel Zara’s emotions anymore.
Wouldn’t feel the warmth of the tether.
Wouldn’t know, without asking, whether Zara was happy or sad or scared.
Wouldn’t know whether any of this had been real.
They walked in silence down the hallway and into the apartment, letting the door click shut behind them as they shuffled into Ramona’s room.
A few moments later, Ramona lay in the dark and pressed her hand against her chest, where the tether hummed — steady, warm, insistent — one last time before everything changed.
If the ritual worked, Zara would leave. Not dramatically — not with a farewell speech or a grand gesture or any of the things Ramona had spent her whole life wanting from the people she loved.
She would simply go back to where she came from, because that was where she belonged, and Ramona would be here, where she belonged, and the three weeks between would become just another chapter in a life already full of strange things that had ended too soon.
Zara would be gone, and Ramona would wake up and the tether would be gone and the apartment would be quiet in a way it hadn’t been since Zara arrived, and she would make coffee for one, and that would be that.
She tried to imagine it — the silence, the empty armchair, mornings without Zara’s precise handwriting in notebooks left on the desk.
Tried to picture going back to the way things were before, when Ramona’s biggest problem was whether the self-help section needed reorganizing and her biggest fear was running into Simone at the grocery store.
It should have been easy to imagine. It had been her life for two years.
But sitting here now, with Zara’s warmth on the other side of the room and the tether humming between them like a heartbeat, Ramona couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like to be alone.