That did not sound promising. She gave a curt nod anyway. It wasn’t a no, at least. And with a second location, that meant Marcus would be away from this store more.
“When does it open?” Ramona asked. “The new store.”
“Dylan’s already there, getting things set up. We’re really building it from the ground up together,” Marcus said, looking pleased.
“Oh, okay. Congrats on a second location. That’s super exciting.”
“Yeah, I’m getting some signage installed here so I needed to have you up to speed when customers are asking about it.”
“Right. Yeah. Consider me sped up,” Ramona said, mentally cringing at herself while she surreptitiously brushed her clammy hands on the sides of her skirt.
“Cool. Glad we’re on the same page.” He pushed off the bookshelf. “Oh, and can you work on stocking more of those manifestation journals? They’re selling like crazy.”
He walked away, leaving Ramona surrounded by books about chakras and auras and finding your inner goddess.
The injustice of it sat in her throat like broken glass.
She made it through the rest of her shift on autopilot. Rang up customers. Smiled. The manifestation journals felt heavier with each one she restocked, like the universe was fucking with her specifically. A woman asked if maybe Saturn in Scorpio was affecting her love life. A man wanted to know which crystal would make him better at day trading.
Ramona answered their questions with the same tired, upbeat script she’d used for two years.
At 5:03 p.m., she clocked out, walked to her car, sat in the driver’s seat, and started crying.
Not pretty crying. The ugly kind, where her face got blotchy and her nose ran and she couldn’t catch her breath. She cried until her eyes hurt and her throat was raw and she’d gone through an entire travel pack of tissues from her glove compartment.
Two fucking years and Marcus’s frat boy brother was going to run the new location.
She caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror. Her hair was a mess. Mascara streaked down her cheeks. The face of a full adult woman crying in a shitty car in a strip mall parking lot because she didn’t get promoted at a fake magic shop.
Thiswas rock bottom.
Or at least, shehopedit was rock bottom. Because if therewasfurther to fall, she didn’t want to know about it.
The Grimalkin wasthree blocks from the apartment, which was exactly the right distance for a bad day. Close enough to walk to without thinking about it. Far enough that going there felt like a decision.
Ramona had not made a decision. She had just started walking and ended up there, which was how The Grimalkin worked.
It was on a block that didn’t quite make sense geographically — a narrow door the color of charcoal, set between two buildings that shouldn’t have had space for it, marked by a wooden sign in the shape of a cat with the paint half gone, swinging on a single chain in a nonexistent breeze. If she didn’t know to look for it, she could walk past it every day for years and see nothing but wall. Ramona had been coming here since moving into the apartment.
She pushed the door open. It swung inward, as it always did, regardless of which side she pushed from.
Inside, The Grimalkin had low ceilings, dark wood, candles burning at a color that was almost but not quite orange — something closer to an golden-violet that made everyone look like they were lit from the inside. Every table and counter had mismatched chairs that were all, somehow, comfortable. A long bar made of something that might have been reclaimed church pew. The jukebox in the corner, an old Wurlitzer in iridescent green, playing something slow and slightly accusatory that Ramona felt was directed at her specifically.
Odette was already there.
Odette was always there. The Grimalkin’s owner and usual bartender, she was ageless in the specific way of certain women and certain bars — not young, not old, but permanent, like the building had grown up around her. Maybe it had. She had dark hair pinned back with something that might have been a bone hairpin. Eyes that had seen everything and filed it away without judgment. She had never, in all the years Ramona had been coming here, asked a single intrusive question. She had also never failed to pour the right thing.
The Grimalkin’s regulars were the kind of magical community that had fallen through the cracks of respectable coven life — hedge witches who would never be accepted to Thornwood Academy; a pair of elderly sisters who came every Thursday and had been coming every Thursday since before anyone could remember and ordered the same thing and never spoke to anyone else; a water witch who tended bar sometimes and could make a cocktail that tasted exactly like whatever you were grieving. Most importantly, there was a three-legged cat named Parliamentarian who belonged to no one and accepted tribute from everyone. A warlock named Dennis who claimed to be retired, which nobody believed. People who had left their covens and people who had been asked to leave their covens and people who had never wanted a coven in the first place — the self-taught, the lapsed, the quietly powerful, the catastrophically mediocre. It was not a place where anyone came to be impressive.
As for the non-witches: There was a corner booth that two orcs had been occupying for what seemed like decades, running what appeared to be an extremely informal mediation practice for other supernatural beings. A banshee Ramona had talked to once who only came in on nights when she wasn’t working, just to sit somewhere loud enough to drown out the noise in her own head. Something in the back that Odette acknowledged with a nod and nobody else looked directly at. The fae, when they came, were obvious immediately — too beautiful, too careful with their words, ordering drinks they’d nurse for hours while watching everything. Odette charged them double, and they paid without comment.
The Grimalkin had a policy that was never written down anywhere: Everyone was welcome as long as they kept their business off the tables, settled their own debts before theywalked out, and didn’t make the cat uncomfortable. It was a remarkably effective policy.
Parliamentarian was currently occupying the stool next to Ramona’s preferred spot at the bar. He looked at her when she sat down. She looked back. He moved one stool over with the dignity of someone making a deliberate choice rather than a concession.
Odette set something dark and warm in front of Ramona before Ramona had fully settled onto the stool. Ramona didn’t ask what it was. She drank it. It tasted like the specific exhaustion of being exactly who she didn’t plan to be.
Odette moved away. Parliamentarian stared at her. The jukebox changed its mind and put on a song featuring jaunty piano.
