Chapter 8
Lioness Graves had drawn ruins before. Collapsed temples, abandoned subway tunnels, one extremely haunted doll factory that still showed up in her dreams whenever she ate chili too late at night.
But this was the first time something was drawing her. She drew the view from the ground, looking up at the circle of witches. “Nope.” She tore the page out and let it fall to the grass.
The fissure in Central Park wasn’t just a crack anymore. It had grown around the edges, and the stone underneath puckered upward as if the earth were vomiting a minor monument. The air smelled like mold and dirt and something older than both.
Her pencil hovered over fresh paper. Her hand tingled, tendons buzzing like plucked strings. “Not yet,” she muttered to her pencil. “I will absolutely put you in time-out if you start without permission.”
No one answered, because that would have been too easy. The ground did a tiny, sarcastic shiver instead.
Rayna stood at the northern edge of the taped-off zone, hands lifted, voice low and steady as she chanted. Ezra walked just inside the makeshift circle, pouring salt around the witches. Sahara’s journal was open in his other hand. His lips moved in whispers as he fed directions to the magic.
Magda’s potion vials glowed in soft pastel tones at the cardinal points. Crystal paced barefoot, murmuring to the underground water like it was a nervous horse. Victoria checked and re-checked the circle. Was every salt line thick enough? Brianna hovered beside Rayna, open palms facing the sky.
On the other side of the barricade, Cal sat on the approved bench with his back turned, pretending he was just another New Yorker enjoying bad coffee and ignoring the supernatural. His posture fooled exactly no one.
“Okay,” Rayna said, voice calm with steel under it. “As soon as Ezra completes the circle.”
Lioness’s ribs tightened. Spirit Lion stood at her side, huge and luminous, mane sweeping the air in slow, warning arcs. Every time his paws touched the dirt, the hum under her feet flared.
Her pencil twitched. A line slid onto the page without her permission. Long. Vertical. Dark. She clenched her fist. The graphite pushed against her skin.
Ezra’s chanting shifted, syllables flattening as he tried to match the living glyphs on the page. The text fought him, jittering between shapes. He bobbled the salt before he reached Lioness.
The fissure exhaled.
Lioness inhaled. Her pencil dropped.
“Now!” Rayna’s voice landed like a gavel. The witches’ magic surged outward in a single, synchronized push.
Sound peeled away in layers: first the distant barking dogs and bike bells, then the rustle of leaves, then the city hum, until all that remained was the thunder of her own heartbeat and the low, bone-deep growl of the earth.
The fissure flared with pale, dusty light.
Lioness found herself drawing, no conscious thought between nerve and graphite.
Her hand slashed long strokes and sudden angles, lines too straight, curves too precise.
An obelisk took shape on the page, but not the half-buried chunk from before.
This one was whole, towering, its tip stabbing a sky.
At its base stood a figure. Tall. Cloaked. Head bowed. The face was obscured.
“Lioness?” Magda’s voice bobbed up as if from underwater. “Status?”
“Fine,” Lioness said through a throat that felt full of sand. “Totally chill. Ten out of ten.”
Spirit Lion snarled, low and dangerous.
The fissure convulsed. Cracks spidered out from its edges, skittering across the neatly cordoned-off earth. The barricades rattled. Magda’s vials chimed together in a high, anxious chord, then fell over, spilling their protective potions.
Crystal staggered, clutching her head. “The water’s backing up. It doesn’t like this. It wants out.”
“Containment first, feelings later,” Rayna snapped, though her breath was coming sharper now. “Ezra?”
“Almost there,” Ezra said through gritted teeth. “Just need to stabilize the— oh, that’s bad.” Salt was blowing out of the circle. “That’s very bad.”
“What kind of bad?” Victoria demanded.
“The circle is open, and the glyphs changed verb tenses,” he said. “Present conditional to present absolute.”
“In words that aren’t going to make Rayna throw a marker at you?” Lioness managed.
He swallowed. “It doesn’t say ‘may open’ anymore. It says ‘opens.’ As in, right now, whether we like it or not.”
The fissure erupted with light. Not a blast outward.
A surge upward, straight and contained, like a column of lightning, ironed out.
For a split second, Lioness saw a ghost of the obelisk as it must have stood thousands of years ago: unbroken, perfect, rising from a desert that smelled like hot stone and sweat and incense.
Then the stone in front of them split with a sound like a hard crack of thunder.
A vertical seam tore itself from ground level to the tip. The edges glowed dull red, then cooled to black in an instant, leaving a narrow gap. Inside the obelisk was not solid rock. It was hollow and filled with darkness that moved.
Every instinct in Lioness screamed no. Her powers, her bones, the tiny, sensible corner of her brain that had managed to survive this long despite her smart mouth: all of it yanked backward.
Her hand did not listen. Her pencil scrawled something that was not a line. It was an eye. Drawn in one motion, perfect and inhuman, sharp as a chisel mark.
It blinked.
The sketchbook should not have been able to do that. Lioness’s stomach dropped. “Oh, that’s unfair.”
Spirit Lion threw his head back and roared, soundless to mundanes, but deafening in her mind. His mane flared like spectral fire as he leapt between her and the gaping fissure of stone.
The darkness reached out anyway. It didn’t move like smoke. Smoke spread and thinned. This poured, thick and patient, like a snake slithering through Spirit Lion’s glowing ribs without resistance. His form flickered, outlines fraying as the shadow slid through him.
Lioness tried to step aside, but the ground rose around her ankles. Her foot sank into soil that had been solid a heartbeat ago. Her muscles locked, every tendon pulled taut. The shadow lifted its nonexistent head, as if scenting the air, and then darted straight for her chest.
“Rayna—” she gasped.
Too late.
The darkness hit her like icy water. It flooded up her legs, into her gut, up her spine. Sensation vanished in its wake: first heat, then cold, then just… Gone. For one weightless instant, she was nowhere, and nothing, a hollow outline waiting to be filled.
Then something stepped into her. She heard the entity before she felt it.
At last!
The words weren’t spoken out loud. It bloomed inside her skull, a low male voice reverberating in her throat. The sound of a temple door closing. The echo of footsteps in a burial chamber.
Lioness’s own voice tried to say, no, absolutely not, this is a no-occupancy zone. Her mouth did not cooperate. The hum under her feet settled, and the world rushed back in.
Cal Monroe had seen plenty of weird stuff on the job. He’d seen a guy try to smoke in a burning building. He’d seen a woman refuse to leave her kitchen because she needed “just five more minutes” to finish baking cookies, even as half the apartment complex evacuated around her.
He had not, until today, seen the ground open like a zipper on the world’s worst sleeping bag and vomit up a stone thingy.
He stood up from the bench, very slowly, crumpled coffee cup dangling forgotten from his fingers. Lioness had told him not to look. In fairness, she’d also told him not to investigate anything crawling out of the earth, and he was absolutely planning to obey that part. Unless it glowed.
The air over the taped-off clearing shimmered. Light speared upward from the crack, then folded back in on itself. His firefighter brain tried to categorize it as “smoke column” and gave up when he realized he’d never seen anything like this.
The little circle of witches looked smaller.
Rayna braced at the edge of the fissure, hands out, face set.
Magda’s bottles leaked colored liquid like a science experiment gone wrong.
Victoria’s raccoon had latched onto her collar, fur puffed, tail bushed.
Crystal stumbled, one hand planted in the dirt like she needed to hold the park down.
Lioness was at the center, sketchbook abandoned on the ground, hair wild, Spirit Lion blazing beside her in a fading outline and glow.
Cal’s lungs forgot how to function for a second.
Then the light snapped inward, and something dark and wrong slid out of the cracked stone and into Lioness like spilled juice drawn up into a paper towel.
He didn’t see all of it. His brain editing, freezing, then skipping frames the way TV’s occasionally glitched. One moment she was there, sketchbook in hand; the next her knees dipped, her sketchbook dropped, then her body jerked up like she’d been yanked by invisible strings.
“Lioness!” he shouted before he remembered he was supposed to be pretending none of this was happening.
Her head snapped up.
Her eyes had always been green. Different greens, depending on the light, but still human, familiar, alive. Now they were too dark. Like deep, polished onyx.
Cal’s heart dropped into his boots.
“Stay back,” Rayna barked over her shoulder. “Civilian line holds.”
“Too late,” Cal muttered, but he stopped at the tape. His veins rang with the urge to get to Lioness, to haul her out of whatever mess this was and back into boring, understandable danger like a building that had the decency to just be on fire. Something he could deal with.
Lioness straightened again. The way she moved was wrong. Normally, she fidgeted slightly even standing still. Now she rose in one smooth, deliberate line, vertebra by vertebra stretching, until she stood motionless, shoulders squared, chin lifted.
Spirit Lion shrank back a pace, hackles high, ears flattened. A growl rolled out of him that made Cal’s skin ripple.
“Lioness?” Magda’s voice was soft but shaking. “Sweetheart?”