Chapter 7
The dawn sky over Central Park was the color of pink leaking into blue-gray, pigeons half-awake, and joggers already starting their mornings. Cal Monroe should’ve been one of them.
He wasn’t in the mood today. He needed the next three days off after yesterday’s warehouse fire. So, he wandered the park with a paper cup of burnt coffee and the vague intention of remembering what “fresh air” felt like.
He was halfway through convincing himself that birdsong counted as therapy when he saw them.
A circle of eight women, all wearing black. No, one was a man. They stood in a clearing near the Ramble. Not tourists. Not a bachelorette party for a goth wedding. These individuals radiated something else.
The tall one with the fiery red hair pointed at a patch of ground, like she expected it to answer her back. The one with the brown braid looked pissed off and strong. And the smallest one—
Cal blinked. It was her! Lioness Graves. The tiny woman who had shimmied through collapsed beams to rescue him like it was nothing. The one who’d crawled into hell with the confidence of someone retrieving a sweatshirt from under a couch. The one he had not been able to stop thinking about since.
He took a step closer, careful, quiet. He didn’t want to intrude. He just wanted to make sure she was okay. Or maybe he just wanted to see her again. He wasn’t interrogating that part of his brain yet.
Lioness stood at the far edge of the circle, rubbing sleep from her eyes and arguing with the tall redhead.
Rayna, he thought her name was. The argument seemed equal parts irritation and affection.
Something about coffee. Something about rules.
Something about someone not being allowed near an obelisk unless properly supervised.
He frowned. Obelisk?
Then the wind shifted, and the air hummed.
A faint vibration crawled up his spine, like the tremor before a building gives. Cal automatically scanned for danger. Structural weakness. Gas leak. Smoke… There was none.
Yet the ground inside the circle shimmied as if lightly rolling beneath their feet. Not dangerous exactly, but not normal, either.
He took another step.
That was when Lioness noticed him.
Her head snapped up, green eyes widened. Her wild blonde hair floated on the wind. “Oh, no,” she muttered. “Not today.”
Rayna followed her gaze. “What? Wait. Is that the firefighter?”
Cal lifted a hand in a tiny, awkward wave. Smooth. Very smooth.
Lioness made a sound like a tea kettle starting to whistle. “Rayna, stall him.”
“Why do I have to stall him?” Rayna asked. “You’re the one who apparently left a hot civilian wandering around unsupervised.”
Cal choked, “Hot—?”
Lioness hissed at Rayna, “Don’t you dare.”
Rayna smirked. “Please. I dare constantly.”
Cal approached anyway, hands up in the universal “I come in peace and also have questions” gesture. “Morning. Sorry. I didn’t mean to, uh… interrupt your…”
Lioness folded her arms. “Don’t say ritual.”
“Okay,” he said, “I definitely won’t say ritual.”
Lioness winced. “You said it.”
Rayna sighed dramatically. “Well, he’s seen too much.”
“Seen what?” Cal asked.
Magda waved a dismissive hand. “Magic. Trauma. Emotional chaos. You’ll get used to it, if what Lioness thinks is true.”
Cal blinked. “Magic?”
Lioness pinched the bridge of her nose. “Great. Awesome. Fantastic. Explaining magic. Exactly what I needed today.”
“Lioness,” Rayna murmured, leaning in. “He already knows some things. He was literally trapped under a collapsed building with you. Also, look at him—he’s harmless.”
Cal straightened. “I am not harmless.”
Lioness studied him, really examining, and her head bobbed just a little. “Debatable.”
Rayna shoved Lioness lightly forward. “Just talk to him before the house decides to throw him into a tree.”
Cal blinked. “The house?”
“Don’t ask,” Lioness said quickly. “Long story. Our magical home. Territorial. Sometimes petty.”
Rayna nodded. “Very petty.”
Lioness dragged him a few steps away from the others, her annoyance sparking off of her like static. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He swallowed. “I live three blocks away.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He knew. And yet, because he wasn’t an idiot, he didn’t push. “I saw you. You looked tired. I just wanted to check in.”
Her expression wobbled for a heartbeat. Gone before he could name it.
“Oh. Well. I’m fine.”
“You sure?” he asked softly.
She hated that his voice did something to her. Her jaw tightened, her shoulders squared, her short hair frizzed aggressively, as if staging a protest.
“Positive,” she said.
Then the ground hummed again—harder this time.
Lioness grabbed his arm, then his hand. Warm. Strong. Hers was barely bigger than his palm.
“Nope, nope, nope—back up,” she ordered, tugging him behind her like she was escorting him out of a burning building instead of a mildly magical situation. “You are a civilian. You do not get absorbed by the ground today.”
Cal stayed exactly where she put him. “That’s… a horrific thought.”
“Experience,” she said flatly.
Behind them, the man raised a hand. “Lioness? We might actually need you over here.”
Lioness groaned.
Cal glanced at the circle again. “Do you need help?”
Lioness snorted. “Unless you’re secretly a mage who can fling salt in a perfect circle, no.”
“I can fling salt,” he offered.
She laughed, the kind of laugh that startled itself out of her, bright and real.
His chest warmed. “What did your friend mean when she said, ‘You’ll get used to it, if what Lioness thinks is true’?”
Lioness shoved him lightly. “Go sit on that bench that’s facing the other way and pretend none of this is happening. If you peek and see anything glowing, humming, levitating, or trying to crawl out of the earth, make sure no one comes over to investigate.”
“What if I see something trying to crawl out of the earth and I want to investigate?”
“Do not!” she said, extra loud.
He nodded. “Okay. I can do that. Or not do that. You’d better get back to your… not ritual.”
She hesitated just long enough for Cal to catch the dilated pupils in her eyes.
“Be careful,” she muttered.
“You too,” he said. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”
And for the first time, Lioness didn’t argue. She just rushed back to the circle, saying, “He won’t be a problem.”
Lioness Graves had drawn a lot of weird things in her life, but this was the first time the landscape felt like it was drawing her back.
The fissure cut through the Central Park earth like a surgical scar, neatly cordoned off with city-issued barricades and a few “totally legitimate” laminated signs that Joell had conjured on the fly. The air around it buzzed, too quiet for normal ears but loud as a migraine to anyone with magic.
Lioness stood at the edge of the taped-off zone, sketchbook open, pencil hovering. Lines tugged at her hand the way they always did when her remote viewing wanted out. She breathed through the pull. Not yet. Not until Rayna said so.
Behind the barricade, the witches moved like a very glamorous, highly stressed pit crew.
Crystal paced the perimeter barefoot, fingertips brushing the ground every few steps as if she could soothe the soil. “There’s water under here,” she muttered, mostly to herself. “Old streams, old pipes, a whole nervous system of wet. And it’s… twitchy.”
“What do you mean by twitchy?” Rayna asked, hands on her hips, gaze sweeping the site as if she could bully the ley lines into behaving.
“Like it wants to get away,” Crystal answered. “Water doesn’t usually do that. It prefers drama, not retreat.”
Magda crouched near the fissure, planting small glass vials around the edge of the circle. Cool blue, steady green, purple, and a rose quartz shade. Stabilizers, dampeners, like emotional seatbelts. Wally poked his head from her satchel, nose wiggling like he could smell the anxiety.
“Potion anchors set,” Magda said. “If this thing throws a tantrum, at least it’ll have to go through three layers of enchanted protection first.”
On the far side of the taped-off area, Victoria held a wooden stake in one hand and a length of twine in the other, glaring at everyone’s feet. She stuck the stake in the center and, walking around it, measured out the nine-foot circle
“We are not dying in an asymmetrical circle,” she announced. “Rayna, your toe is over the line. Move your right foot.”
Rayna shifted. “Happy?”
“Marginally,” Victoria said. Reginald the raccoon was perched on her shoulder, wearing his homemade armor made from tin cans. His tiny paws gripped her jacket. His ringed tail flicked in a steady, irritated rhythm.
Brianna stood near Victoria, shivering even though she was layered in a scarf and a leather jacket. Her gaze kept sliding just past the fissure, like she was watching something replay in slightly the wrong order.
“Time’s messy here,” she said quietly.
Lioness caught the strain in her voice and turned. “Messy how?”
“Like it’s buffering,” Brianna said. “Little skips forward and back. Half a second, maybe. I tried to fast-forward the next hour, and all I got was static and a very rude headache.”
Lioness grimaced. “So, fun times ahead.”
“Allegedly,” Brianna said, swiping under her nose with the back of her hand. “Also, Sahara would yell at me for even trying to jump, so nobody tell her.”
“Sahara’s already mad we left her at home,” Rayna said. “She’s on magical concussion protocol. She stays with Chad, and we handle this without getting her brain overwritten again. Non-negotiable.”
The mention of Sahara made the air feel thinner. Lioness felt it like a hollow in her stomach. Sahara should have been here, muttering about glyph syntax and yelling at Lioness to stop free-handing the geometry. Instead, they had a photocopied notebook and a mage with additional notes.
Ezra knelt on a folded blanket beside the fissure, Sahara’s field journal open on his lap. His hand hovered over the page. The glyphs on the page were fuzzy, black ink lines. They were supposed to be crisp.
Ezra squinted. “Okay. Mildly alarming question.”