Chapter 33 #2
Ramona positioned herself again at the north end of the circle, Zara at the south. The blessed iron nails at east and west, anchoring the ritual space. Holding it together. Hopefully.
“I’ll lead,” Ramona said. Her voice sounded like she’d been screaming. Maybe she had. She couldn’t remember. “You support. Like we practiced.”
“Always,” Zara replied. Her voice was also rough.
Ramona began to speak. The curse-breaking incantation. A dead language, harsh and demanding. Words that required precision. Exactness. Every syllable in the right place or the whole thing would fail.
Her tongue felt thick. Her mind fuzzy. The words kept slipping away from her.
I break this binding. Her voice cracked. I dissolve this curse. I sever the root from the tree.
Nothing happened.
The bark sat there. Inert. Mocking.
She tried again. Louder. Forcing more intent into the words even though she had so little left to give.
I break this binding. I dissolve—
The bark began to smoke.
Thin tendrils of gray. Acrid. Smelling like burning hair and rotting wood and something chemical.
“It’s working,” Felix breathed from outside the circle. Gerald cooed softly, hopefully.
But Ramona could feel it wasn’t. Not enough to matter. The curse was fighting back. Twenty-seven years of magic, anchored deep in living wood and old intent and a child’s feral anger. It refused to let go.
She could feel it clinging. Digging in. Hers. It thought it was hers. A part of her. Essential.
Zara stepped closer. Began to speak in support. Her demonic power lending strength to Ramona’s words. The two languages winding together — ancient and demonic, human and not.
The bark caught fire.
Not normal fire. Cold fire. Blue and white, flames that gave off darkness instead of light. That made the temperature drop instead of rise. That burned without consuming.
The smoke got thicker. Ramona’s eyes watered. Her throat closed. She kept speaking through it, coughing, choking, forcing the words out.
The curse was still there. Still holding. Still—
The air split.
The temperature dropped twenty degrees in an instant.
Then, thirty. Forty. Ramona’s tears froze on her cheeks. Her breath stopped fogging and started crystallizing, tiny ice particles that hung in the air and caught the ethereal light from the cold fire.
Then, the ghosts came.
Not metaphorical ghosts, or echoes or impressions. Actual spirits. Full manifestations. Pale and translucent and screaming.
The sound was inhuman. High-pitched and endless and it went straight through Ramona’s skull into her brain and rattled there.
She wanted to cover her ears but her hands were locked in ritual position, held in front of her as if she were holding an invisible ball of power.
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t protect herself.
The spirits poured into the clearing like smoke. Like water. Like something thick and viscous. They swirled around Kashvi.
Surrounded her.
Reached for her with spectral hands that looked almost solid.
“What—” Kashvi stumbled backward. “What’s happening?”
“The ritual!” Ramona shouted over the screaming. “It must be pulling in these spirits. The dissolution energy is too strong. It’s opening holes between planes.”
The ghosts pressed closer to Kashvi. One of them — a woman’s shape, vague and shifting — reached for her throat.
Kashvi’s scream joined the ghosts’. High and terrified and human.
Gerald shrieked.
Not cooed. Not the soft sounds Ramona was used to. A full-throated pigeon shriek of anguish and terror.
He launched off Felix’s shoulder, flying wildly toward Kashvi, toward the ghosts, and dove straight into the woman reaching for Kashvi’s throat.
The ghost disintegrated instantly, but Gerald bounced back as if hitting a wall, one wing at an unnatural angle.
Bent wrong. Broken. He spiraled through the air, out of control, and hit the ground hard.
The sound of impact was small. Soft. Terrible.
Gerald lay still. Too still. One wing spread at that awful angle. His small body not moving.
“Gerald!” Felix dove for him, breaking the circle, hands scrabbling at the ground. “No, no, no. Gerald, please.” He scooped up the pigeon with shaking hands. Gerald’s head lolled. Limp. “He’s not breathing.” Felix’s voice broke. “He’s not… Gerald, please, please wake up.”
The ghosts were getting denser. More solid. Another one of them had its hands — if Ramona could call them hands — around Kashvi’s throat. She was gasping, clawing at something she couldn’t touch.
Her lips were turning blue.
“Kashvi, stay with us.” Ramona was frozen in place, her feet rooted in place. She cast a panicked look toward Zara, who was watching Kashvi with the same level of terror.
Posey tried to stand, still gray-faced, still weak. She got halfway up and her legs gave out. She crumpled back to the ground with a cry of frustration and pain.
“We have to stop—” Cammie was sobbing. “We have to stop the ritual—”
“We can’t.” Zara’s voice cut through the chaos. Sharp. Commanding. Desperate. “If we stop mid-ritual, the convergence point could collapse entirely. It would take the whole park with it, maybe more.”
The ghosts pressed closer to Kashvi, bringing her to her knees. She was making sounds now as she writhed against them. Choking sounds. Dying sounds.
Felix was sobbing, cradling Gerald’s limp body, begging him to wake up as he crawled on the ground toward Kashvi, unable to get to her through the throng of spirits encircling her.
The bark was burning hotter. The cold fire spreading. The curse fighting back with everything it had. Ramona’s magic was failing, the words slipping away from her, her concentration shattered by the screaming and the cold and the terror.
“Zara,” Ramona called. Her voice was ragged. “Use your power to banish them.”
“I can’t.” Zara’s face was anguished. Her hands were clenched so tight her nails drew blood. “If I use demonic energy now, after we just cleansed the convergence point, it’ll corrupt it again. All of this will be for nothing. The park will collapse anyway. Everything we’ve done—”
“But Kashvi—”
Kashvi’s eyes were rolling back. Her struggles were getting weaker.
Gerald still wasn’t moving.
The fox was pressed against Ramona’s leg, whimpering. Actually whimpering. A sound she’d never heard from him.
The bark was burning but not breaking. The curse was too strong. Too old. Too deeply rooted in a lifetime of believing she was broken.
Everything was falling apart.
They were going to fail.
Kashvi was going to die.
Gerald was already—
No. No, she couldn’t think that.
But the ritual was failing and there was nothing she could do, her magic was too weak, the curse was too strong, and—
“Ramona.”
The voice came from the edge of the clearing.
Ramona turned.
Eleanor stepped out of the woods.
Iris behind her.
For a moment, Ramona forgot how to breathe.
“No.” The word came out broken. Disbelieving. “No, you can’t be here—”
But they were.
Eleanor in a ritual robe Ramona had never seen. Iris in practical clothes, face drawn with exhaustion and guilt and determination. At the sight of them, Ramona’s magic went completely chaotic.
The curse — recognizing Iris, recognizing the one who’d cast it even accidentally, even as a child — surged. Like it had been waiting for this. Like it knew.
Ramona’s magic exploded outward in every direction. Wild. Uncontrolled. Exactly like the incident at Thornwood, but worse. So much worse.
Objects around the clearing flew into the air. Stones. Branches. Felix’s dropped flashlight. They spun in circles, faster and faster, a maelstrom of debris.
The cold fire jumped from the bark to the grass. Spread in a ring. Ramona could feel it — her magic out of control, the curse amplifying it, using it, turning her power against everything she was trying to save.
“Ramona.” Zara grabbed her, hands on her shoulders. “Ramona, you have to control it — “
“I can’t!” Ramona was shaking. Shaking apart. “I can’t, and the curse is… It’s using Iris… It’s using the connection—”
Kashvi went limp, and the ghosts descended as if they would rip her body to shreds.
“No—” Cammie scrambled toward her.
Eleanor and Iris didn’t say a word. They just stepped into the ritual circle, took positions on either side of Ramona, and began to chant.
Eleanor’s voice was strong. Commanding. A banishment that Ramona didn’t know but could feel — ancient, powerful, absolute. It rolled through the clearing like thunder.
The ghosts heard it.
They turned from Kashvi, looked at Eleanor, and began to dissipate.
They didn’t disappear quickly. They moved with slow reluctance, like they were being torn away from something they wanted. But the important thing was that they went, shredding apart like smoke in wind, their screaming faded to whispers, to nothing.
Kashvi writhed on the ground. Breathing. Gasping. Alive.
Iris knelt beside the burning bark. Her palm was bleeding, and she let the blood drip onto the bark.
She began to speak in the curse-breaker’s tongue — words Ramona had only read, never heard.
They sounded like unweaving. Like unpicking stitches.
Like taking apart something that should never have been put together.
The cold fire began to dim.
Gerald twitched, his clawed feet flexing in the air as Felix cradled him on his back.
Felix’s sob was loud in the sudden quiet. “Gerald, I thought I lost you.”
But the curse still wasn’t breaking.
The bark was burning lower but not dissolving. The magic was too old. Too strong. Too deeply rooted in a lifetime of belief.
Ramona could feel it. The curse clinging. Refusing. Hers hers hers. “It’s not working,” she said. Her voice was flat. Empty. So tired. “It’s still not working.”
Eleanor’s chanting faltered. She looked at Ramona. And for the first time in Ramona’s life, her mother looked uncertain.