One second Zara was behind her. The next she was at her side — shoulder to shoulder — and somehow taller. Not physically, not in any measurable way, but the space around her seemed to stretch to accommodate her. The overhead lights dimmed by a fraction, as if the air itself had thickened.
Her body seemed to darken as if in shadow. And her voice — it wasn’t loud. It wasn’t sharp. It was cold.
A deep, crushing cold of something that had never known sunlight. Ancient. Terrifying.
Ramona shivered involuntarily.
Severine looked at Zara for the first time. Really looked at her.
Something shifted in her posture. A minute recalibration. Instinct recognizing apex.
“I’m sorry,” Zara continued, each word placed with surgical precision. “Did you just demand credentials from a customer before agreeing to sell her standard ritual supplies? Supplies displayed openly on your shelves, with no certification requirement posted anywhere in this establishment?”
The glass in the nearest display case gave a soft, almost inaudible creak.
Severine opened her mouth. Closed it.
“Because from where I’m standing,” Zara said, leaning forward just slightly, “it appeared you invented a bureaucratic restriction to justify refusing service.”
The air dropped several degrees. Ramona could see her own breath.
“Or,” Zara added softly, shadows pooling at her feet like spilled ink, “did I misunderstand?” Her smile showed her fangs in full display.
“I— no. I apologize.” Severine straightened, her voice suddenly crisp and professional. “We do have fresh-cut hawthorn in the back. I’ll get those for you right now.”
She disappeared through a door behind the counter with considerably more speed than her previous casualness suggested was possible.
The moment she was gone, the temperature normalized. Zara’s posture relaxed by a fraction — back to casual, back to composed, back to the corporate demon who organized bookshop shelves and drank enough coffee to kill a human.
Ramona stared at her.
“What?” Zara asked, turning to face her with an expression of perfect innocence.
“What the hell was that?” Ramona dropped her voice to a whisper.
“What was what?”
“The—” Ramona gestured vaguely at the air around Zara. “Thething. The ice thing. The ‘I will destroy you’ energy.”
“I didn’t threaten anyone.”
“You didn’t have to. She looked like she was going to pass out.”
“Did she?” Zara tilted her head, the picture of feigned surprise. “I didn’t notice.”
“Zara.”
“Hmm?”
“Your demon was showing.”
“Was it?” Zara examined her own fingernails with apparent interest. “How careless of me.”
Ramona should have been scared. Part of her was — the sensible, self-preserving part that remembered exactly what Zara was, what she was capable of, the sheer, catastrophic power that lived beneath the glamoured blazer and the harmless-looking reading glasses.
But another part of her — larger, louder, far less interested in survival — refused to cooperate.
That part remembered Zara at her parents’ dinner table, calm and unyielding, cutting through passive aggression like it was nothing. It remembered the steady weight of Zara’s attention all morning, the way her gaze lingered at Ramona’s back like a hand placed there deliberately. It remembered the softness that crept into Zara’s expression when she looked at Ramona and thought no one noticed.
