CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Zara crossed the ballroom.
The crowd parted for her — not out of respect, but out of that particular human instinct to move away from something they couldn’t categorize.
Ramona still hadn’t moved. There was champagne soaking into her shoe. She didn’t care about that either.
Zara stopped in front of her.
The tux fit like it had been made for her, which it almost certainly had been. The purple in the lapels matched Ramona’s hair precisely enough that it had to be intentional. Which meant she’d known, which meant she’d planned this, which meant?—
“You’re here,” Ramona said. Her voice came out like it had been days since she’d last spoken, crackly and too high.
“I’m here,” Zara said, dipping her chin in a small bow.
Ramona reached forward, tentative, afraid that if she touched Zara, the dream would end and she’d wake up, or her friends would drag her away from a hallucination. “How.” It wasn’t really a question. It came out more like a word she needed to say while her brain caught up with her eyes. Zara’s shoulders were solid under her palms.
“It’s a long story.” Zara’s voice was careful in the way it got when she was paying close attention to something. “Can we… Is there somewhere more private we can talk?” Her eyes widened as she looked around, and Ramona realized that an entire ballroom of witches was watching them.
Ramona took Zara by the hand and spared a quick thought to clean up her broken glass with an easy spell, then hurried out of the ballroom to the coat closet in the foyer of the building. She shut the door behind Zara.
“How long before you have to go back?” Ramona asked, feeling frantic. The fear arrived all at once, sharp and specific. “An hour? A day? What are we working with?—”
“Ramona.”
“—because I need to know how much time?—”
“Ramona.” Zara took her hands. Ramona realized that her touch was warm. Human-warm, not the particular heat Ramona had catalogued through seven weeks together. Something was different. “I’m not going back.”
Ramona stopped talking.
“The ritual,” Zara said. “It didn’t just break your curse and the tether. It brokeallbindings. Including my contract with Hell.” The corner of her mouth moved. “Turns out, three hundred years of bureaucratic experience is very useful when you’re trying to formally resign from a demonic institution.”
“Your contract,” Ramona repeated slowly.
“Was a binding. An old one, but structurally not that different from the one we’d just dissolved with a full coven at a cleansed convergence point during a new moon.” Zara’s expression was careful, as though she wasn’t trying to reveal everything all at once. “The power doesn’t discriminate.”
“So when you got back to Hell?—”
“I was there by momentum. Not by obligation.” A pause. “I went to my supervisor. Submitted my resignation. They werenot pleased. Told me if I left, I’d lose my immortality. Age and die like any human.” Something moved briefly across her face. “They meant it as a threat.”
Ramona’s chest hurt. “And you…”
“I told them that was fine.” Zara said it the same way she said most things — precisely, without fuss. Like it was a straightforward cost-benefit analysis that had come out clearly on one side. “More than fine.”
“Zara.” Ramona’s voice cracked on it. “You were immortal.”
“I know.”
“You could have lived forever.”
“I know.” Zara’s thumb moved across Ramona’s knuckles. “What use is all the time in the world without the woman you love? I’d just have to spend eternity miserable and lonely and missing you.”
Ramona was crying. She hadn’t noticed starting. Zara reached up and wiped her cheek with the same unhurried practicality she brought to everything, and Ramona laughed despite herself — a wet, undignified sound that had no business being made at the Ostara Gala.
“So you’re… mortal,” Ramona said.
“As of about two hours ago.” Zara paused. “I can feel my heartbeat. It’s quite strange. And I think I might be hungry, which is apparently something that happens now.”
