Everything was perfect.
“The incantation,” Zara said quietly. She held up the grimoire, turning it so Ramona could see the page. The textglowed faintly in the candlelight — old magic responding to older magic, the words themselves charged with centuries of use.
Ramona nodded. “Together.”
They’d practiced this. They’d practiced the pronunciation, the rhythm, the way the language shifted mid-incantation — the power marker, the command structure, the linguistic architecture that made the spell work. They’d gone over it a dozen times, sitting with coffee and sticky notes and Zara’s careful handwriting filling the margins.
Ramona knew every word. She knew where to breathe, where to pause, where the magic would build, and where it would release. She knew it the way she knew her own name.
“Ready?” Zara asked.
Ramona looked at her across the ritual space. At the woman who had defended her from her mother, who had pushed her back into her own expertise, who had held her hand in the dark after a nightmare, who had worn Ramona’s too-short shirt and made her forget how to breathe.
The demon she was about to set free.
“Ready,” Ramona said.
They began.
The incantation rose from both of them simultaneously — Latincane first, the framework, the foundation. Ramona’s voice and Zara’s voice winding together in the cold night air, curling around each other like smoke. The words were old. Older than either of them. Older than the trees that ringed this clearing. They carried weight, carried authority, carried the accumulated intention of every witch and demon who had spoken them before.
The moonstone dust in the bowl flared brighter. The candle flame stretched upward, defying physics, reaching toward the sky like a finger pointing at the stars.
The tether between them pulled tight — tighter than it had ever been. Ramona could feel it like a physical cord wrapped around her chest, vibrating with tension. She could feel Zara’s heartbeat through it, fast and steady. Could feel her own fear reflected back, amplified.
The shift to Lysienne. The command structure. The moment where the spell stopped being theory and became action.
The air in the clearing changed.
It was subtle at first, just a shift in pressure, like the atmosphere itself was holding its breath. The shadows cast by the candle grew longer, darker, swirling along the ground like smoke. The snow around the salt circle seemed to glow brighter, the moonstone dust pulsing in rhythm with the incantation.
Ramona kept going. The words were flowing out of her now, automatic, driven by years of linguistic expertise and weeks of careful preparation. She could feel the magic building around her. In the convergence point. In the ancient oaks. In the salt and the hawthorn and the moonstone.
It was working. She could feel it working.
She caught Zara’s eye as their lips moved in tandem, reciting in perfect harmony.
And then…
Something went wrong.
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no flash of light, no thunderous crack. It was subtle — a hiccup in the rhythm of the incantation, a moment where the magic stuttered like a heartbeat skipping. Ramona felt it in her chest, in the tether, in the space between one word and the next.
She kept going. One word after another. The incantation demanded completion — stopping midway would be worse than finishing.
The magic built. And built. And built.
The tether was screaming now — she could feel it, vibrating at a frequency that made her teeth ache, pulling at something deep inside her chest. The candle flame was blinding, a column of white light reaching into the sky. The salt circle was glowing, the hawthorn branches rattling in a breeze that seemed to cease existing.
The world went white.
Pain.
Pure, absolute, all-consuming pain that started somewhere in her chest and radiated outward through every nerve ending in her body. It felt like she imagined being struck by lightning and set on fire simultaneously would feel. Like every cell in her body was being torn apart and reassembled in the wrong order.
Ramona heard herself scream. Distantly, like it was happening to someone else.
She was on the ground. When had she fallen? The snow was cold against her cheek, soaking through her jacket. The sky above her was full of stars—sharp, impossibly bright, wheeling overhead like the world had been tilted on its axis.
