I closed my eyes and let the old magic take me.
***
I’d always thought the stories of magic were warnings. Old Nan with her boiled tongue, her tales of girls who strayed from the path and were swallowed by the woods. The lesson was to obey, to stay close to the hearth, to let the men do the dangerous work. But here I was, belly-down in the snow, my whole body a map ofpain, and the only thing that waited for me was the circle and the storm.
Thunder stalked the sky, moving in low, rolling growls that made the ground tremble. Each time I tried to push myself up, the ankle screamed, but so did the rest of me, the hunger, the cold, the blood oozing from my knees and palms. I dragged myself by inches to the very center, where the snow was gone, and only black earth showed, ringed by the roots of the oaks.
The air was strange here. The wind, which howled everywhere else, died at the edge of the circle. The silence inside was so thick it pressed on my eardrums, turned my breath to thunder. But there was something else, too: a heat, like the way it gets before a summer storm, where the air trembles and every hair on your body stands up to listen. It made no sense, but I welcomed it, even as it burned in my lungs.
I tried to look up, but my head would not obey. Instead, I lay there, face to the dirt, and let the storm rage over me. The lightning came again, closer now, turning the oaks into giants, their limbs snaking overhead. The thunder that followed cracked so loud I thought it would split my skull. The air sizzled. It was not just light and sound, but force, a wall that shoved at my back and threatened to drive me through the earth.
I felt the ground buck beneath me, a ripple that passed from tree to tree. The circle was alive. I knew then that what the men feared was not the old stories or the girls who ran, but this—the truth that the world could change, that the rules could break, that a girl with nothing left might draw down the sky and remake the night.
My vision was mostly gone, black at the edges and white in the middle, but I forced my eyes open one last time. The trees leaned in, their branches almost touching, as if eager to see what would happen next. The air inside the ring began to shimmer, a distortion like the heat above a cookfire, bending the trunks intoimpossible shapes. My hands, pressed into the mud, tingled with a current I’d never felt before, something older than pain.
The storm spoke to me in a language I understood only because it was made of need and of endings. I pressed my bleeding palm to the dirt and whispered, “If you want me, take me. But let it be somewhere better than this.”
I thought of Mother, of Agnes, of the widow with her brave, battered hands. I thought of the man with the wolf on his arm, the one who said “come through” as if it was a blessing and a dare. I thought of the men behind me, their boots and torches, their certainty that the world belonged to them. Let them have it, I thought, and spat the last of my blood into the ground.
The light came then, not gold or white but a blue so sharp it burned. It filled the circle, swallowed the trees, boiled the snow into steam. It touched me, and for a second, I was everywhere at once: in the circle, in the manor, in the hunting lodge, and the old stone church. I saw my own body, small and broken, watched as the lightning threaded up my arms and across my chest. There was pain, but it was clean and bright, nothing like the slow rot of cold or the hunger that had gnawed me for days.
I screamed, but the wind took the sound and turned it into something else. The blue light thickened, wrapped around my limbs, and lifted me from the ground. I hung there, weightless, above the dirt, and watched the world dissolve at the edges. My thoughts were shards, scattered and sharp. I felt myself slipping, body tearing away from the mind, and I wondered if this was what dying was like.
But then there was a second pull, a drag sideways, and the world flipped. For a moment, everything stopped—the thunder, the pain, the cold. I was nowhere. I was nothing.
And then, in the silence, I heard a voice.
“Scarlette.”
The sound was gentle, but it hurt worse than the lightning. I tried to reach for it, but my arms were gone. I tried to answer, but my mouth would not form the words.
The blue light went white, then black.
I fell.
***
I woke with the taste of smoke and iron on my tongue, and the memory of a man’s hand wrapped around mine.
But when I opened my eyes, the world was new.
Moab
Itold myself I wouldn’t come back to the circle. Promised, even, that whatever had drawn me the first time was just some fever dream, a hiccup in the brain chemistry of a man who’d already seen the world’s ugliest angles. But obsession is the last honest addiction, and it doesn’t let go, not even when you try to drown it in gasoline and bad whiskey.
I made the ride out on a night when the air was so thick it felt like the sky wanted to smother the ground. The storm warnings on the radio grew more hysterical the closer I got to the service road, until the voice gave up and just repeated a list of counties under threat. By the time I killed the Harley and walked the rest of the way, the clouds had lowered themselves like a ceiling about to collapse.
The path was mud and roots, every step a slide into the next. It was a miracle I didn’t eat shit before the tree line, but maybe I was just too angry to fall. I hadn’t slept in two nights. The tasteof copper and ozone hung on my tongue, a phantom aftertaste from dreams I couldn’t shake. In those dreams, the girl was always running, but sometimes I was the one being chased.
Tonight, the woods were loud with the anticipation of lightning, every branch and leaf shivering for the main event. By the time I reached the edge of the clearing, I was already drenched through the jacket, but I didn’t stop. The oaks waited, thirteen deep, arranged with a kind of purpose that made you think they’d planned it themselves.
The grass inside the circle was flattened, blown sideways by the wind or by the pressure that radiated out from the center like a migraine. The air wasn’t just thick—it was shimmering, an oil slick of color rolling just above the ground. I’d seen mirages before, but this was more like a hallucination trying to break into the real world. The wolf tattoo on my arm prickled and burned, as if the ink was trying to get loose and climb out of my skin.
I hesitated at the line. Every cell in my body vibrated with “no.” But obsession, as always, overruled instinct. I took a step in. The rain stopped making sense, falling sideways, then up, then not at all. The inside of the ring was dry, silent, and freezing cold, despite the rest of the woods boiling in a summer storm.
Lightning hit, so close that the flash lit every tree from the inside. I blinked and saw the bones of them, white and naked. The second step was harder, like pushing into a crowd at a football riot, but I forced my way in, one foot after another, until I stood at the exact center.
That was when the air folded.
