Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ramona woke up in her childhood bedroom.
She knew it before she opened her eyes, just from the lavender sachets and old wood and that particular scent that belonged only to Greenbriar Manor. The mattress was too soft, the expensive kind that her mother insisted on. The sheets were a soft linen, cool against her skin.
She’d woken up here a thousand times as a child, as a teenager, during college breaks.
Never had it felt this wrong.
She opened her eyes. The ceiling was the same pale cream it had always been. The crown molding. The chandelier that was too fancy for a bedroom. Everything exactly as she remembered.
Everything except the silence.
The room wasn’t quiet — she could hear voices downstairs, muffled conversation, someone’s laugh.
The silence was inside of her, in the space where the tether used to be. Where she and Zara had been bound to each other.
For seven weeks, she’d had Zara’s presence constantly. A hum of awareness. The knowledge that she wasn’t alone. The feeling of another consciousness threaded through hers, separate but connected.
Now… nothing. An empty, terrible nothing.
Ramona sat up too fast and the room spun. She grabbed the edge of the mattress, waited for it to steady.
Her magic responded immediately to her distress.
The lamp on the nightstand flickered. The curtains rippled despite the closed window. Small objects on the dresser vibrated.
She took a breath, trying to calm down.
The fox appeared from somewhere — under the bed maybe. He jumped up, lying down across Ramona’s lap. Heavy and warm and real. She placed a hand on his soft head, petting between his twitching, alert ears.
The magic settled instantly. Settled, like it was listening to her, responding to her will instead of fighting it.
It felt strange. Clean and easy, like it had never been broken at all. In a way, she supposed it hadn’t been. She had never been broken, not really. Now that the curse was gone, her magic could stretch its wings, fledge into possibility.
The curse was gone, she reminded herself, blinking at the too-bright light coming in through the window. Her shoulders hunched. The curse was gone, and Zara with it.
Ramona pressed the heel of her hand to her chest, like she could physically hold the grief in. Keep it from spilling out.
Zara’s last moments replayed in her head.
That panicked look, the way her dark-tipped fingers dug into the earth, desperate and frightened.
It hadn’t been a peaceful goodbye. Zara had been ripped out of this realm right before Ramona’s eyes, and now she couldn’t stop picturing that constantly cool and collected woman looking small and scared in the end.
Her chest ached, and she pressed her hand harder against her bones.
A knock on the door startled her, leaving one moment before the door opened.
Felix stuck his head in. Gerald rode his shoulder, his eyes sharp and beady like he was looking for his next victim to bite.
Ah, back to normal. He was alert, cooing as he looked around the room.
Not at all like he’d been lying unconscious with a broken wing when she last saw him.
“You’re awake,” Felix said. His voice was careful. Gentle. “How do you feel?”
“Like shit,” Ramona said honestly.
“Yeah.” Felix came in, sitting on the edge of the bed. Gerald cooed softly. “That tracks.”
The fox lifted his head, sniffing at Gerald. They touched noses, and the fox rested his head back down on Ramona’s lap.
“He hasn’t left your side,” Felix said. “Apparently he can teleport? Or walk through walls. Both? We’re not really sure. He was just suddenly here when Eleanor brought you back.”
“Back from where?”
“The convergence point. You passed out after—” Felix stopped, clearing his throat. “After the ritual. Eleanor brought you here. Said you’d be safer at the manor with wards and protections. We all came with you. Wouldn’t let her separate us.”
Ramona stroked the fox’s fur. He rumbled with a sound that was not quite a purr, but close.
“How long was I out?”
“Only about eight hours. It’s almost noon.” Felix paused. “Eleanor said magical exhaustion plus curse-breaking plus tether severance was a lot for your system. You needed rest.”
Eight hours.
Zara had been gone for only eight hours. Was she back in Hell already? Had she been recalled to the same position the instant the tether broke, pulled across planes in seconds? Or was there a process? A reintegration period?
Ramona didn’t know. Had never thought to ask.
“Come downstairs,” Felix said gently. “Everyone’s worried. And Cammie made coffee. The good kind. She didn’t let Kashvi help.”
Ramona nodded. She let Felix help her up. Her legs felt shaky, but they held under her.
She followed him down the familiar stairs, the fox at her heels, to the sitting room.
Everyone was there.
Kashvi was on the couch with her laptop. Posey was by the window with a smoothie, staring out at the garden. She looked pale. Drained. But, strangely, she also looked okay. Alive. Cammie was on the other couch, fidgeting with her phone.
And on Kashvi’s lap sat a cat.
Translucent. Pale. Definitely not solid.
A ghost cat, Ramona realized with curiosity.
Once the group realized she was awake, Cammie bounded toward her, wrapping her in a hug that felt bone-crunching. Something bright and silver glowed in Cammie’s eyes as she smiled at Ramona.
“Cammie, your eyes—”
Just as quickly as she’d seen it, the silver disappeared.
“Hey! You’re awake,” Kashvi said with a wide smile. “Good morning.”
Posey smiled at her from where she leaned by the window, giving her a small wave.
“Is everyone okay?” Ramona asked.
“Depends on your definition,” Kashvi said, and Ramona could see now that her neck was bruised where the spectral hands had choked her.
“Everyone is alive and slightly improved from eight hours ago?” Ramona clarified.
Three women nodded back at her.
“Now that we’re all here, I have something to confess to everyone,” Kashvi said.
She looked nervous. Determined. Her eyes had a slightly wild quality to them, like she’d had too much coffee or not enough sleep, or both.
“I can see and talk to ghosts. I mean — I always could, a little bit. But now it’s—” Small sparks flew from her fingers.
Blue-white. Brief. Like static electricity but more purposeful.
“It’s everywhere,” Kashvi continued. Her voice was slightly frenzied.
“I can see them all. All the time. There are three in this room right now. One’s a Victorian lady who’s very upset about Eleanor’s interior design choices.
Another is a man who died in a hunting accident in 1847.
And this…” She gestured to the cat. “This is Percival. He’s been following me since we left the convergence point. And, and look. I can do this now.”
She held up her hand. The sparks intensified. Formed a small ball of light that hovered above her palm. Then split into three balls. Then six. They orbited her hand like planets around a sun before dissipating.
“All right, now that’s very cool,” Ramona said, watching the balls of light encircle Kashvi’s hand. “That’s way more than you used to be able to do.”
“So much more. The ritual last night must have amplified what I already had by, like, a thousand percent. I can feel it like electricity in my veins. Like I’m vibrating at a different frequency than the rest of the world.” She laughed, a little wild. “I haven’t slept. Can’t sleep. Too much energy.”
“You need to ground,” Posey said from the window. Her voice was quiet but certain. “Channel some of that excess energy into the earth before you burn yourself out.”
“I know. I will. I just—” Kashvi looked down at the ghost cat. “It’s overwhelming. But also kind of amazing?”
Felix shifted. Gerald fluttered to the back of a chair, and kept fluttering. Not settling. Moving with a precision that seemed different. More calculated.
“Gerald’s wing healed,” Felix said. “Like, completely. Not just healed. He’s way stronger than before. Watch.”
Gerald took off. Not his usual clumsy pigeon flight. This was controlled. Precise. He flew in a perfect figure eight around the room, then landed on the chandelier. He dove backward, drew a circle in the air, then landed back on Felix’s shoulder without a single wobble.
“He’s never been able to fly like that,” Felix said. His voice was awed. “Pigeons aren’t acrobatic birds. But now he can—” Gerald demonstrated by doing a barrel roll. “He can do that.”
“How?” Ramona asked.
“The convergence point,” Posey said slowly. “When we cleansed it, all that energy had to go somewhere.”
“And that combined with the unbinding ritual. It seems that it might not have been a curse stifling our magic, not like yours, but something else was,” Kashvi explained.
“Self-doubt, perhaps?” Felix offered, shrugging.
“It went into us,” Kashvi said. “Amplified what we already had. Made it stronger. More.” She looked at Posey. “You felt it, too, didn’t you?”
Posey was still staring out the window. At Eleanor’s garden. The one with the banewood tree. And now the banewood tree was dead. Truly, this time.
Ramona could see it from here, or rather, couldn’t see it. The tree that had loomed dark and large over the garden for as long as she could remember was simply… gone. The curse’s anchor, destroyed when they broke the spell.
In its place, flowers.
Dozens of them. Hundreds. Growing in wild profusion in the space the tree had stood.
Irises and lilies and roses and flowers Ramona didn’t have names for.
In colors that shouldn’t exist in nature — deep purple irises shot through with gold, roses that faded from pink to blue, lilies that seemed to glow faintly in the afternoon sun.