Be Careful What You Wish For
The dark moon has risen. And I’m standing in the centre of my living room and looking at the summoning circle I’ve spent the past three months preparing.
The carpet is rolled up against the wall.
The floorboards are covered in chalk runes, each one drawn with painstaking precision according to texts that most witches don’t even know exist. Black candles flicker at the cardinal points.
Herbs smoulder in a ceramic bowl, filling the flat with smoke that smells like earth and graves and something older than either.
My hands are shaking.
I’ve checked everything three times. The runes are correct. The components are exact. The timing is perfect. The dark moon hangs invisible in the sky outside my window, and the veil between realms is at its thinnest.
This is going to work.
It has to work.
I crouch down and light the last candle. The flame catches and holds, burning with that particular black-edged flicker that means the magic is already gathering. The air in the flat feels thick. Heavy. Like the space itself is holding its breath.
I stand outside the circle, in the exact cardinal point of due north, and close my eyes.
I’ve never attempted anything like this before. No one in my coven has. Binding spells, yes. Minor summonings, certainly. But calling a former shadow king across the veil and trapping him in the human realm? That’s the kind of magic that gets you killed if you do it wrong.
Or possibly if you do it right.
I push the thought away. I’m not backing out now. I’ve come too far. Spent too long researching and preparing and building toward this moment.
Dis burned my flat down. He tried to use me as bait. He was willing to kill me without a second thought, just to draw Hex away from Adam. Dis wanted to do terrible things to my best friend.
He needs to answer for that.
I take a breath. Then another. I let my magic rise, that familiar sensation of power flowing through my veins like liquid heat. It builds in my chest, in my fingertips, in the space in my heart where all magic lives.
I begin to chant.
The words are old. Older than English. Older than most languages I know. They taste like iron on my tongue, like blood and salt and the particular flavour of power that has been sleeping in ancient texts for centuries.
The candles flare brighter. The smoke thickens. The air in the room shifts, becoming colder, heavier, wrong in ways that make my skin prickle.
I keep chanting. The words flow faster now, building momentum. My magic pours into the circle, feeding the spell, anchoring it to this realm. I can feel it working. The veil is thinning. Something is listening.
The temperature drops sharply. My breath mists in the air. The candle flames turn blue.
I raise my voice. The chant becomes a shout, the words ringing through the flat with a force that rattles the windows. My magic is a roar now, a flood, pouring everything I have into the circle.
The runes on the floor begin to glow. Faint at first, then brighter, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. The smoke swirls into shapes that might be hands or might be something worse.
This is it. This is working.
I throw the final word into the spell with everything I have left. The magic surges, peaks, crashes through the circle like a wave breaking against rocks.
The candles go out.
All at once. Every single flame snuffed in an instant.
The flat plunges into darkness.
I stand in the centre of the circle, breathing hard, my magic still crackling under my skin. The air is so cold I can barely feel my fingers. The smoke hangs thick and motionless.
I wait.
Nothing happens.
I keep waiting. My heart is hammering in my chest. My hands are clenched into fists at my sides.
Still nothing.
Slowly, the temperature begins to rise. The smoke starts to dissipate. The wrongness in the air fades like a dream on waking.
No.
No, no, no.
I drop to my knees and press my hands against the floorboards. The runes are still there, perfectly drawn. The components are all in place. Everything was exactly right.
But the circle is empty.
It didn’t work.
Reality hits me like a physical blow. All those months of research. All that preparation. All that hope and rage and desperate need.
Nothing.
I sit back on my heels and stare at the empty circle. My throat feels tight. My eyes are burning in a way that has nothing to do with the smoke.
Of course it didn’t work. What was I thinking? I’m not powerful enough for this. I’ve never been powerful enough. I was told I was weak, pathetic, not worth the effort it took to teach me. And apparently they were right.
I push myself to my feet. My legs feel shaky. Weak. Everything feels weak.
The flat is still dark. I don’t bother turning on the lights. I just walk to the kitchen on autopilot, my feet finding the path through muscle memory.
I fill the kettle. Put it on. Pull a mug from the cupboard. Tea. I’ll make tea. That’s what you do when everything falls apart, isn’t it? You make tea and you pretend it helps.
The kettle boils. I pour the water over the tea bag and watch it steep, the colour bleeding out into the water like all my plans bleeding out into nothing.
I pick up the mug and walk to the window. Bristol spreads out below me, lights and streets and ordinary lives happening everywhere. People who aren’t standing alone in the dark feeling the weight of their failure.
I take a sip. The tea is too hot and burns my tongue. Perfect. Just perfect.
This is what I get for thinking I could actually do something that mattered. For thinking I could make him pay. For thinking I was capable of anything except being a victim.
I sigh and rest my forehead against the cold glass.
Failure tastes bitter. Worse than the tea.
I turn away from the window. I should probably clean up the summoning circle. Put the carpet back. Pretend this never happened and get on with my small, ordinary, powerless life.
I walk back into the living room.
I stop.
There are eyes in my summoning circle.
Glowing blue eyes, blazing in the darkness like sapphires on fire. Not red like Hex’s. Blue. A blue so vivid and intense it burns.
Just eyes. No body. No form. Just eyes floating in shadows that are somehow darker than the darkness around them.
The mug slips from my hand.
It hits the floor and shatters. Tea and ceramic shards spray across the floorboards. The sound is obscenely loud in the silence.
The eyes don’t blink. They don’t move. They just stare at me with an intensity that makes my breath catch in my throat.
I’ve caught a shadow being.
“Little witch,” says a voice from the darkness. It’s deep and smooth and controlled in a way that suggests enormous power being held on a very tight leash. “We should talk.”
My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat. My magic surges instinctively, defensive, ready to fight or flee or do whatever it takes to survive.
But I don’t move. I can’t move. I’m frozen in place, staring at those burning blue eyes in my living room.
This is Dis. The weapon who carried out a coup. The usurper who sat on Hex’s throne. The being who ordered my flat burned down and wanted me to burn with it.
And he’s trapped in my summoning circle.
The realisation hits me all at once, crashing over me like a wave. The spell worked. It actually worked. He’s here and he’s bound and he can’t leave until I let him go, and I have absolutely no intention of letting him go.
I have a former shadow king trapped in my flat above a coffee shop in Bristol.
This is insane. This is the most insane thing I’ve ever done.
“You’re smaller than I expected,” Dis says.
It makes me bristle immediately, hot anger flooding through me and burning away some of the fear.
I’m short, so what? I would have thought an interdimensional being would be above such stupid human observations.
Height doesn’t mean power. Height doesn’t mean anything except where I shop for trousers.
“And considerably more startled,” Dis continues, those blue eyes narrowing. “Did you not intend to summon me?”
I find my voice. It comes out steadier than expected, which is a small miracle given that my entire body is shaking. “I intended exactly this.”
“Did you.” It’s not a question. The blue eyes narrow further, studying me like I’m a puzzle he’s trying to solve. “How foolish.”
We stare at each other across my living room. The shattered mug lies between us. Tea seeps into the floorboards.
“Welcome to Bristol,” I say. “You’re going to be here for a while.”
The eyes burn brighter. The shadows around them shift and swirl, he’s not deigning to manifest into anything solid, but the binding is holding. He can’t leave the circle. Can’t do anything except exist as eyes and darkness and fury.
“You have made,” Dis says, very quietly, very carefully, “a significant mistake.”
I lift my chin higher. My hands are still shaking, but I clench them into fists and hold my ground. I will not back down. I will not show fear. I will not let him see how terrified I am.
“No,” I say. “You made the mistake. When you burned my flat down.”
Silence. The kind of silence that feels like it’s full of sharp edges.
Then Dis laughs. It’s a low, dark sound that rolls through the flat like distant thunder.
Not amused. Not even close to amused. Something far colder than that.
Something that makes the temperature drop again and frost form on the window behind me, ice crystals spreading across the glass in delicate patterns.
“Oh, Little Witch,” he says, and there’s something terrible in his voice. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
I think about the texts I studied. The binding spells I memorised until I could recite them in my sleep. The three months of preparation that went into this moment, every detail checked and rechecked.
I think about what he did to me, how he destroyed my peace when I had only just won it. I think about how very tired I am of taking hits and never, ever punching back.
“I know exactly what I’ve done,” I say. “I’ve bound you. And you’re not going anywhere until I say so.”
The blue eyes stare at me. Unblinking. Burning with something that might be rage or might be grudging respect or might be both at once.
“You are mistaken,” says Dis.
The shadows pulse, testing the boundaries with more force. The runes flare bright in response, blazing blue-white, holding firm.
“Very, very mistaken to dare to try to hold me,” he growls, and his voice drops into something deeper, something that resonates in my bones. “I am Dis. Dismay. Disaster. Disgrace. Disfigure and disembowel.”
Each iteration drops like the threat it is. Each word is a promise of violence. Primal fear coils in my belly, cold and sharp, but it ignites something else too. Protective rage. Furious determination. He tried to kill me once. I won’t let him do it again.
“Alright, Disney!” I snap.
He slams against the invisible wall with a snarl that sounds like tearing metal. The entire building shakes. I take a step backwards, my heart in my throat, certain the binding is about to break.
But the wards hold. He’s trapped. Properly, completely trapped, no matter how much power he throws at the circle.
I’ve actually done it. I should feel triumphant. Vindicated. Powerful.
Instead, I just feel terrified.
Because I have a former shadow king in my living room and absolutely no plan for what happens next.