“Ramona. Ramona. Ramona!”
Zara’s voice. Hands on her face, her shoulders, turning her over. Zara’s face above her, pale in the moonstone’s glow, her eyes wide with something Ramona had never seen in them before.
Fear. Real, raw, undisguised fear.
“I’m—” Ramona tried to speak. Her chest felt like it had been cracked open. “I’m okay.”
“You are not okay.” Zara’s hands were shaking. Actually shaking. “You were struck — something hit you, I don’t know what, the magic—” She was touching Ramona’s face, her arms, checking for injuries with frantic precision. “Can you move? Does anything feel broken?”
Ramona tried to sit up. Pain lanced through her chest, sharp, electric, residual. She gasped, and Zara’s arm was behind her immediately, supporting her weight.
“Slowly,” Zara said. “Slowly.”
Ramona sat up. The clearing looked wrong. The salt circle was shattered — scattered in an irregular pattern, like something had exploded outward from the center. The hawthorn branches had been flung to the edges of the clearing. The silver bowl was overturned, the moonstone dust scattered across the snow in a glittering trail, scattering in the slight breeze that had returned to the clearing. The candle was out.
The tether hummed between them. Still there. Still intact.
The ritual had failed.
Ramona stared at the destroyed ritual space. At the scattered salt and the extinguished candle and the moonstone dust dissolving into the snow. Two weeks of research. Days of careful preparation. Everything they’d built together, destroyed in seconds.
Something dark and hot and enormous swelled up inside her chest.
“No,” she said.
“Ramona—”
“No.” The word came out louder than she intended. Sharper. “No, no,no?—”
She was on her feet before she knew she was moving, swaying, her chest still screaming with residual pain. The clearing spun around her. She pressed her hands against her face, feeling the burn of tears she refused to let fall.
“It didn’t work,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “It didn’t fucking work.”
“We can try again?—”
“This is all my fault,” Ramona said, her fingernails digging into her palms. She wanted to scream, to pound her fists on the ground, to fall apart.
“No, it isn’t?—”
Ramona spun to face Zara. “I didn’t want you to go.”
Zara went primordially still, staring at her.
Ramona groaned in deep frustration. “I hesitated.” She shook her head and scrubbed her hands over her face again. She was so ashamed. “I hesitated because I didn’t want you to leave me, and I fucked everything up because I’m path?—”
Zara was in front of her now, holding her upper arms, holding her steady and still. “I didn’t want to go either,” she confessed, her voice a whisper.
Ramona paused for a moment, sniffling as she looked up at the demon standing over her. “Wh-what?” Her voice cracked on the word.
Zara’s hands tightened on her arms, not painful but grounding. Anchoring. Her dark eyes searched Ramona’s face with an intensity that made Ramona’s breath catch.
“I didn’t want to go,” Zara repeated, and there was something raw in her voice now, something that sounded almost like fear. “When the ritual started, when I felt the binding beginning to loosen, I—” She stopped, her jaw working. “I wanted it to fail.”
The words hung between them in the pre-dawn air.
“That’s impossible,” Ramona whispered. “You’ve been trying so hard to?—”
“I know what I’ve beentryingto do.” Zara’s voice was rough. “I know what Ishouldwant. To go home. To get back to my perfectly organized life and my perfectly predictable responsibilities and my perfectly empty apartment.” Her hands slid down to Ramona’s wrists, holding on like Ramona might disappear. “But when I felt the magic pulling at me, all I couldthink was that I wasn’t ready. That we weren’t—” She stopped again, looking away. “That I wasn’t finished here yet.”
