Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
“My sister wanted me to give you this,” Ramona groaned, sliding a tiny piece of paper across the kitchen table to Kashvi later that day. She’d opened it that morning to find nothing on either side.
Kashvi held it in her hand, her brow furrowed.
“Why is my sister giving you—”
Ramona would have finished the sentence if Kashvi hadn’t whispered a phrase, blowing on the paper in her hand. The paper turned into sand as she blew, and appearing on the table before her — the three grimoires they’d taken from the library. The three grimoires she’d left in the bag in her car.
“Are those…” Felix asked, the coffee he was pouring spilling over the sides of the cup he was holding.
Kashvi began, “I know we’re not the biggest fans of your sister—”
“Understatement,” Zara muttered.
“But she’s an incredible witch,” Kashvi said.
Any other day, Ramona might have agreed. Today, that sentiment made her want to set the kitchen curtains on fire.
They gathered around the kitchen table, grimoires spread across every available surface. Coffee mugs multiplied. Gerald supervised from the windowsill. The fox claimed the armchair and watched everything with those intelligent amber eyes.
And for a week, that’s where they stayed.
Not literally — people slept in shifts, they paused for a planning drink at The Grimalkin once, and Cammie ordered pizza at some point that nobody remembered eating — but the kitchen table became the fixed point around which everything else orbited.
Felix’s laptop never closed. Kashvi filled three notebooks.
Posey helped with annotations. Zara translated, cross-referenced, and occasionally spoke a few words of Abyssian to test the incantations, which dropped the temperature in the room several degrees and caused Cammie to say “okay, that’s terrifying” and Ramona to say “I actually think it’s kind of hot” and everyone else to groan audibly.
Three rituals, but structurally related — all dissolution magic, all sharing components. They could combine them. Run them in sequence at the convergence point during the new moon, using the site’s amplification properties to do in one night what would otherwise take three.
The components they sourced from improbable places — blessed iron from Iris, who appeared at the door at seven a.m. and handed over four hand-forged nails; lunar water from Mystic Moon’s back room, where it had been sitting next to the decorative crystals since Marcus had ordered it by mistake, thinking it would work in lava lamps; salt from the bag Eleanor had pressed into Ramona’s hands in the study, which Zara confirmed was sacred-ground salt, which meant Eleanor had given them exactly what they needed while trying to get them to leave.
“She’s going to be furious,” Ramona said.
“She already is,” Zara replied. “Might as well use the salt.”
Ramona looked at the table — at the grimoires and the notes and the bark from the tree that had been quietly ruining her life since she was eight years old — and felt something that wasn’t quite hope but was in the same approximate neighborhood.
They had a plan. A complete, actual, terrifying, probably-going-to-work plan.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” Zara agreed.
Ramona looked at the plan one last time before she turned off the kitchen light. It was good. It was going to work. She wished that felt like better news.