Kashvi began, “I know we’re not the biggest fans of your sister?—”
“Understatement,” Zara muttered.
“But she’s an incredible witch,” Kashvi said.
Any other day, Ramona might have agreed. Today, that sentiment made her want to set the kitchen curtains on fire.
They gathered around the kitchen table, grimoires spread across every available surface. Coffee mugs multiplied. Gerald supervised from the windowsill. The fox claimed the armchair and watched everything with those intelligent amber eyes.
And for a week, that’s where they stayed.
Not literally — people slept in shifts, they paused for a planning drink at The Grimalkin once, and Cammie ordered pizza at some point that nobody remembered eating — but the kitchen table became the fixed point around which everything else orbited. Felix’s laptop never closed. Kashvi filled three notebooks. Posey helped with annotations. Zara translated, cross-referenced, and occasionally spoke a few words of Abyssian to test the incantations, which dropped the temperature in the room several degrees and caused Cammie to say “okay, that’s terrifying” and Ramona to say “I actually think it’s kind of hot” and everyone else to groan audibly.
Three rituals, but structurally related — all dissolution magic, all sharing components. They could combine them. Run them in sequence at the convergence point during the new moon, using the site’s amplification properties to do in one night what would otherwise take three.
The components they sourced from improbable places — blessed iron from Iris, who appeared at the door at seven a.m. and handed over four hand-forged nails; lunar water from Mystic Moon’s back room, where it had been sitting next to the decorative crystals since Marcus had ordered it by mistake, thinking it would work in lava lamps; salt from the bag Eleanor had pressed into Ramona’s hands in the study, which Zara confirmed was sacred-ground salt, which meant Eleanor had given them exactly what they needed while trying to get them to leave.
“She’s going to be furious,” Ramona said.
“She already is,” Zara replied. “Might as well use the salt.”
Ramona looked at the table — at the grimoires and the notes and the bark from the tree that had been quietly ruining her life since she was eight years old — and felt something that wasn’t quite hope but was in the same approximate neighborhood.
They had a plan. A complete, actual, terrifying, probably-going-to-work plan.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” Zara agreed.
Ramona looked at the plan one last time before she turned off the kitchen light. It was good. It was going to work. She wished that felt like better news.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It had beenFelix’s idea, which meant nobody had been given a choice.
“Last night before the ritual,” he’d announced, appearing in Ramona’s doorway at seven with his coat already on and Gerald on his shoulder looking equally resolved. “We’re going to The Grimalkin. All of us. Don’t argue with me.”
“I wasn’t going to?—”
“Zara, tell her not to argue with me.”
Zara, who had been reading among the plant forest at the desk with the focused stillness of someone who had spent multiple centuries getting very good at ignoring chaos, looked up. “Don’t argue with him.”
Ramona had argued anyway, briefly, and lost.
The Grimalkin wasbusy for a weeknight, which meant it was full of people who probably didn’t exist during daylight hours. The jukebox in the corner was deep in some kind of old soul phase — playing something that sounded like it was being performed live in 1962 by musicians who were definitely ghosts. Odette movedbehind the bar with her usual uncanny efficiency, setting drinks down in front of people slightly before they ordered them.
They’d pushed two tables together near the back. Felix had claimed the chair closest to the fire with Gerald tucked against his collar. Kashvi was already two drinks in, small golden sparks drifting from her fingertips whenever she laughed, which was often. Posey had a glass of something green that smelled like a garden and was absentmindedly growing a small vine up the leg of her chair. Cammie had arrived last, still in her café uniform, took one look at the table and said, “Okay, yeah, I need one of whatever that is,” pointing at Kashvi’s drink, and sat down.
Ramona and Zara were wedged together on the bench along the wall. Not by design, exactly. Just by the geometry of the table and the fact that nobody had left them much room, which Ramona suspected was entirely deliberate.
Odette appeared at Ramona’s elbow. Set down two glasses without being asked.
Ramona looked at hers. It was dark, deep red, with a single dried rose petal resting on the surface. “What is this?”
“The Occasion,” Odette said and walked away.
Zara examined hers with the careful attention she brought to things she didn’t entirely trust, then took a sip. Something shifted slightly in her expression. “It tastes like—” She stopped.
