Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Forests felt so different at night.
During the day, they were just woods a short drive north of Fernwick — scraggly trees and underbrush, the kind of unremarkable forest that backed up against neighborhoods. Kids cut through them on the way to school. Dog walkers and birders used the trails. Nothing special.
But at night, under a new moon, with the last light of dusk bleeding out of the sky like a wound closing — they were something else entirely.
The trees pressed closer together the deeper they walked, their bare branches interlocking overhead like fingers laced in prayer.
Or warning. The snow on the ground was untouched, pristine, reflecting Ramona’s flashlight in a way that made everything glow faintly blue.
Their footsteps crunched in the silence — the only sound besides the occasional crack of a branch settling under the weight of frost.
“This forest is really creepy,” Ramona said after about ten minutes of walking in silence, darting her flashlight toward every twig break, every dry leaf rustle.
“Mortal, I assure you, I’m the scariest thing in these woods,” Zara said, her voice so low it felt more like a growl.
Ramona carried the ritual bag. Moonstone dust. Blessed salt. Hawthorn branches, cut forty-seven hours ago, still wrapped in enchanted cloth. Yarrow flowers. A silver bowl. A candle that Posey had blessed for them without asking too many questions.
Zara walked beside her, close enough that their arms brushed with each step.
She carried the donation-bin grimoire alongside the summoning severance grimoire — a thirteenth-century text they’d spent days translating together, opened to the marked page, the incantation bookmarked with a strip of red silk.
“What will you do?” Ramona asked. Her voice came out smaller than she intended, swallowed by the trees.
Zara glanced at her, her eyes reflecting the light like a wild animal in the dark. “What do you mean?”
“When you get back to Hell.” Ramona kept her eyes on the path ahead — the narrow trail winding deeper into the woods, toward the convergence point they’d mapped. “What’s the first thing you’ll do?”
Zara was quiet for a moment. Thinking about it, Ramona realized. Actually considering the question rather than deflecting it.
“Sleep,” Zara said finally. “In a real bed. For approximately fourteen hours.”
Ramona huffed something that was almost a laugh. “That’s it? Three weeks tethered to a disaster witch and the first thing you want is sleep?”
“It’s been a very long three weeks.” But Zara’s voice was soft. “And then… I don’t know. File my reports. Check my inbox. See what chaos my department has descended into in my absence.” A pause. “Probably quite a lot of chaos. I’ve been gone longer than I’ve been away in… ever.”
“They’ll survive.”
“We shall see.” Another pause, longer this time. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“After. What will you do first?”
Ramona considered it. The convergence point was close now — she could feel it, a subtle shift in the air, a magnetic pull that made the hair on her arms stand up beneath her jacket. The magic here was old. Older than Thornwood, older than covens, older than anyone alive could remember.
“I don’t know,” Ramona said honestly. “Sleep, probably. And then figure out how to live without—” She stopped herself.
Without feeling you.
She didn’t say it. But the tether hummed between them, and she knew Zara felt the shape of the unfinished sentence anyway.
They walked on in silence.
The convergence point was a clearing — roughly circular, maybe thirty feet across, ringed by ancient oaks that had grown in a perfect circle.
The snow here was undisturbed, flat and glittering, and the air felt charged in a way that made Ramona’s skin prickle.
Magic pooled here like water in a basin — deep, old, patient.
Ramona set down the ritual bag and knelt in the center of the clearing.
Her hands were steady. She was surprised by that. After everything — the fear, the resistance, the weeks of avoidance — her hands were steady as she unpacked the supplies with careful, methodical precision.
“Okay,” she said, more to herself than to Zara. “All right.”
The salt first. Blessed salt, poured in a perfect circle around the ritual space.
Ramona moved slowly, letting the white crystals fall in an unbroken line, tracing the circle with the kind of care she used to bring to her most delicate research.
The salt caught the glow of Ramona’s flashlight, glittering like a constellation mapped onto the ground.
Then the moonstone dust. Ramona opened the jar and felt the familiar tingle of convergence-sourced magic against her fingertips — warm, almost alive.
She poured it into the silver bowl, watching the dust settle in a fine, luminous layer.
It glowed faintly in the darkness, casting the clearing in a pale, ethereal light.
The hawthorn branches next. Ramona arranged them in a star pattern at five points of the circle, the enchanted cloth falling away to reveal the dark, smooth wood.
Fresh-cut. Still alive with magic, the way hawthorn always was at convergence points.
She could feel the energy in them — green and vital and ancient.
The yarrow flowers she scattered around the bowl, their dried petals catching the moonstone’s glow.
And finally, the candle — black wax, unscented, blessed by Posey’s careful hands.
Ramona turned off her flashlight and set the candle in the exact center of the bowl and lit it with a match.
The flame burned steady and bright, casting sharp shadows across the snow.
Zara watched from the edge of the salt circle, the grimoire open in her hands. She hadn’t spoken since they’d entered the clearing. Her face was illuminated from below by the candle’s glow — all sharp angles and shadows, her expression unreadable.
“The circle is complete,” Ramona said, sitting back on her heels. She checked everything. Twice. The salt line was unbroken. The hawthorn branches were properly placed. The moonstone dust glowed steadily in the bowl. The candle burned without flickering.
Everything was perfect.
“The incantation,” Zara said quietly. She held up the grimoire, turning it so Ramona could see the page. The text glowed faintly in the candlelight — old magic responding to older magic, the words themselves charged with centuries of use.
Ramona nodded. “Together.”
They’d practiced this. They’d practiced the pronunciation, the rhythm, the way the language shifted mid-incantation — the power marker, the command structure, the linguistic architecture that made the spell work.
They’d gone over it a dozen times, sitting with coffee and sticky notes and Zara’s careful handwriting filling the margins.
Ramona knew every word. She knew where to breathe, where to pause, where the magic would build, and where it would release. She knew it the way she knew her own name.
“Ready?” Zara asked.
Ramona looked at her across the ritual space. At the woman who had defended her from her mother, who had pushed her back into her own expertise, who had held her hand in the dark after a nightmare, who had worn Ramona’s too-short shirt and made her forget how to breathe.
The demon she was about to set free.
“Ready,” Ramona said.
They began.
The incantation rose from both of them simultaneously — Latincane first, the framework, the foundation.
Ramona’s voice and Zara’s voice winding together in the cold night air, curling around each other like smoke.
The words were old. Older than either of them.
Older than the trees that ringed this clearing.
They carried weight, carried authority, carried the accumulated intention of every witch and demon who had spoken them before.
The moonstone dust in the bowl flared brighter. The candle flame stretched upward, defying physics, reaching toward the sky like a finger pointing at the stars.
The tether between them pulled tight — tighter than it had ever been. Ramona could feel it like a physical cord wrapped around her chest, vibrating with tension. She could feel Zara’s heartbeat through it, fast and steady. Could feel her own fear reflected back, amplified.
The shift to Lysienne. The command structure. The moment where the spell stopped being theory and became action.
The air in the clearing changed.
It was subtle at first, just a shift in pressure, like the atmosphere itself was holding its breath.
The shadows cast by the candle grew longer, darker, swirling along the ground like smoke.
The snow around the salt circle seemed to glow brighter, the moonstone dust pulsing in rhythm with the incantation.
Ramona kept going. The words were flowing out of her now, automatic, driven by years of linguistic expertise and weeks of careful preparation. She could feel the magic building around her. In the convergence point. In the ancient oaks. In the salt and the hawthorn and the moonstone.
It was working. She could feel it working.
She caught Zara’s eye as their lips moved in tandem, reciting in perfect harmony.
And then…
Something went wrong.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no flash of light, no thunderous crack. It was subtle — a hiccup in the rhythm of the incantation, a moment where the magic stuttered like a heartbeat skipping. Ramona felt it in her chest, in the tether, in the space between one word and the next.
She kept going. One word after another. The incantation demanded completion — stopping midway would be worse than finishing.
The magic built. And built. And built.
The tether was screaming now — she could feel it, vibrating at a frequency that made her teeth ache, pulling at something deep inside her chest. The candle flame was blinding, a column of white light reaching into the sky.
The salt circle was glowing, the hawthorn branches rattling in a breeze that seemed to cease existing.
The world went white.
Pain.