She shoved her phone in her pocket and headed for her car — a rusty sedan old enough to vote that made an ominous rattling sound whenever she went above forty-five miles per hour. Once upon a time, she’d driven a sensible Subaru. Had a parking spot with her name on it at the academy. Had a future.
The grimoire sat inside her bag on her passenger seat the entire drive home, a presence in her peripheral vision. She didn’t look at it directly. If she looked at it, she’d have to decide what it meant that she’d taken it.
The smoke alarmwas going off when she opened the door to the apartment.
The building was the kind of place where the radiator clanked all night and the landlord responded to maintenance requests with “I’ll get to it” and then didn’t. But rent was cheap, and her Croneslist roommates were — well, they were something. Three other witches and one accidental human who’d moved in via a “roommate needed” ad in a major miscommunication.
“I know!” Kashvi shrieked from the kitchen. “I know it’s smoking!” She seemed to be yelling at the alarm, not a person.
Ramona found Kashvi brandishing a spatula at a pan that was producing alarming amounts of smoke, sparklers shooting from her fingertips in agitated bursts. Whatever had been cooking was now a blackened hockey puck that might have been a grilled cheese in a past life.
Felix emerged from his room, Gerald the pigeon perched on his shoulder like some kind of deranged parrot. Felix calmly reached up to silence the alarm. “You’re officially forbidden from using the stove.”
“It’s my kitchen, too!”
“And yet somehow you’re the only one who consistently summons the fire department.” Felix looked at Ramona, his expression somewhere between sympathy and exhaustion. “Thai leftovers in the fridge if you want them.”
Her other two roommates, Cammie and Posey, sat on the couch watchingLove Potion, their current favorite reality dating show.
Ramona mumbled something noncommittal and headed straight for her room, shutting the door on the sounds of Kashvi arguing that the grilled cheese “wasn’t even that burnt.”
Her room was small. A bed held together mostly by duct tape and hope, a dresser she’d found on the curb, a bookshelf sagging under romance novels and magical theory textbooks shecouldn’t quite throw away. The window looked out on an alley where someone’s cat held screaming concerts at three a.m.
She sat on her bed. The springs creaked.
She pulled the grimoire out of her bag. The leather was still cool under her fingers, worn smooth by decades — maybe centuries — of hands. She wondered who’d owned it before. Another desperate witch? Someone who’d succeeded where she’d failed? Or someone who’d ended up worse off than her, donating their most precious possession alongside a moldy sandwich?
She’d stopped doing magic. Really stopped, not just “taking a break” like she told people. Two years since the incident, since she’d decided her magic was more liability than asset.
The grimoire fell open to page forty-seven, like it wanted her to see it. Written in faded ink:
To Summon Success and Fortune
When darkness descends and all paths seem barred, call upon those who dwell beyond to light your way. Speak the words thrice and offer what you hold most dear. Aid will come, though perhaps not as expected.
The ingredients were simple. White candles. Salt. A personal item of value. The incantation was only four lines.
Ramona read it three times, her academic brain automatically parsing the structure. Basic summoning framework, standard protective elements, reasonable power requirements. The kind of spell she would have assigned to undergrads to translate.
The kind of spell that shouldn’t work on someone whose magic consistently did the opposite of what she intended.
She closed the grimoire and set it on her nightstand. This was stupid. She was thirty-five years old, possibly about to be fired from a job she’d taken as a temporary stopgap, living in anapartment with roommates like she was still in her twenties, and lying to her parents about everything that mattered.
Her sister was thirty-seven with two kids, a thriving business, and a husband who actually showed up to family dinners, even if he had the personality of a damp napkin. Most of her grad school cohort was tenured by now. Her ex-wife had already replaced her on every level — new relationship, new house, new life.
And Ramona was here.
Stuck.
Her phone lit up with her mom’s contact photo.
She’d arrived in Fernwick with the hope that an entirely new city meant a fresh start. And it did offer anonymity, but apparently two hours wasn’t far enough away to entirely escape her past.
Ramona watched it ring.Once, twice, three times. She sighed and answered on the fourth ring, already grimacing.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Ramona! Finally. I was starting to worry.” Her mother’s voice was formal and precise, just as it had always been. “Iris mentioned you’ve been busy.”
