CHAPTER ONE
Ramona Greenbriar had always beengood at finding things that were lost, just never the things she was actually looking for.
Case in point: the sandwich.
She stared into the donation bin with the kind of resigned horror that came from two years of working retail. She’d seen a lot of things show up in these boxes — dog-eared romance novels, self-help books with suspiciously specific margin notes… Once, the bin box had been filled to the brim with an entire collection of VHS tapes about competitive bird watching.
But this was a new low.
Someone had donated their lunch.
She snapped on a pair of latex gloves that she kept for donation-bin excavation and gingerly lifted out what had once been turkey and swiss on whole wheat. The smell hit her immediately — something between decay and despair. She gagged, arm outstretched as she speed-walked to the dumpster out back.
Late January in Fernwick was the kind of cold that made her nostrils stick together when she breathed in. Her breath fogged in front of her face as she tossed the bready biohazard into thetrash. The metal lid clanged shut. She stood there for a moment, hands on her knees, breathing in the slightly less offensive smell of dumpster and dead leaves buried under dirty snow.
The universe had a sick sense of humor.
“You good out here?”
Ramona straightened to find Marcus leaning against the doorframe, vaping something that smelled like artificial mango and broken dreams. He was twenty-three, exclusively wore black turtlenecks, and had never done actual magic a day in his life but burned palo santo in the shop because it “elevated the vibration.”
He was also, annoyingly, her boss.
“Someone donated a sandwich,” Ramona said.
“Gross.” Marcus took another pull from his vape pen, shrugging his shoulders. “Don’t forget to sanitize your hands before touching inventory.”
He disappeared back inside, and Ramona stood there in the cold, staring at the dumpster. The metal was rusted at the corners, peeling paint like dead skin.
Thirty-five years old. An advanced degree from Thornwood Academy. A handful of years of published research on medieval spellwork translation that people still cited at conferences she was no longer invited to.
And she was throwing away strangers’ lunches behind a bookshop that sold fifteen-dollar bundles of sage.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, the vibration sharp against her hip. A text from her sister.
Iris:Mom keeps asking about Imbolc. What should I tell her?
Ramona’s thumbs moved on autopilot:Tell her work is great. Super busy. Can’t make it.
The lie came easy. Too easy. Work was busy — her mother just didn’t need to know that “work” meant alphabetizingcrystals and pretending tarot cards were an actual product worth $65. That her “research sabbatical” had turned into two years of retail purgatory.
She shoved her phone back in her pocket and headed inside, grateful for the blast of overheated air from the ancient radiator. The shop smelled like incense and dust and the faint chemical tang of Marcus’s stupid vape pen.
The donation box awaited. She used hand sanitizer on top of her gloves, then returned to sort through the rest. Most of it was the usual — three copies ofThe Secret, a book about essential oils that smelled like it had been stored in a gym bag, outdated advice guides with titles likeThe Cabbage Soup Cleanse.
She was about to declare the whole box a loss when her fingers brushed something at the very bottom.
A book.
But not just any book.
The cover was water-stained leather, cracked with age, with hand-drawn sigils that had faded to barely visible. The spine was broken in three places. No title on the outside, but when Ramona carefully opened it, the first page read in elaborate calligraphy:Summonings and Bindings: A Practical Guide.
Her heart stumbled in her chest. Now, this.Thiswas a find.
This was a realgrimoire. She couldfeelits magic. An actual, legitimate, old-as-hell grimoire, the kind with handwritten spells and ingredients that included things like “grave dirt” and “moonlight captured in silver.” The kind she used to study in candlelit libraries, feeling very important and very scholarly. The kind of book that had always called to her.
She caught sight of herself in the mirror near the affirmation card decks. Purple hair sticking up at odd angles, the result of a glamour spell gone wrong back in high school that she’d decided to just live with. Dark circles under her eyes. The MysticMoon Books shirt hanging off her shoulders like a costume she couldn’t quite pull off.
