“Ramona—” Felix started.
“I’m fine.” The lie came easily. “Just a bad day. Thank you for—” She gestured vaguely at the drinks, at them, at the whole situation.
She slid off the stool. The room tilted slightly. Parliamentarian watched her go with an expression of three-legged dignity. Odette said nothing, which was its own kind of kindness.
She managed three blocks.
The apartment building came into view with the particular relief of a place that was hers even when nothing else was. She got the door open. Got up the stairs. Got into the apartment and stood in the dark hallway for a moment, just breathing.
They were nice people. Good roommates. They weren’t her friends. She’d learned the hard way what happened when she let people get too close. It was safer to keep the walls up.
Even if the walls were starting to feel less like protection and more like a very small room she’d been standing in for two years.
She changed into the thrifted novelty T-shirt that saidWitch Happensand sat on her bed. The springs creaked. The room was quiet.
The grimoire was still on her nightstand, exactly where she’d left it.
Ramona picked it up, her thumb caressing the smooth leather. The pages were brittle with age, crackling softly as she turned them.
She flipped to page forty-seven.
To Summon Success and Fortune.
Right. Because that had worked out so well for everyone in the history of magical disasters.
But.
But what did she have to lose at this point?
Her job was a dead end. Her sister was thriving. Her parents thought she had a career when really she had a name tag and aslowly dying sedan. She was thirty-five years old and drunk on cheap liquor and she couldn’t even fix her own hair and she was so,sotired of pretending everything was fine.
Maybe the universe owed her one. Maybe after everything was taken from her — her marriage, her career, her dignity — maybe it was time for something to finally go right.
“Fuck it,” she said to her empty room.
The words hung in the air. No one answered.
The living room had gone mercifully quiet as she stepped out to gather the ingredients with the methodical focus of someone who’d given up on hope but hadn’t quite given up on spite. White candles courtesy of Felix’s stress-shopping habit. They smelled like “Autumnal Harvest” and had probably cost more than they should have. Salt from the kitchen, the cheap kind in the cardboard container that left her fingers gritty. A personal item of value.
She stared at her jewelry box. Most of it was costume jewelry, things she’d picked up at thrift stores or received as forgettable gifts. But there, tucked in the corner, was a silver ring her dead grandmother had given her when she graduated from Thornwood. The metal was tarnished, the small stone — some kind of quartz — cloudy with age.
Her grandmother had pressed it into her palm at the ceremony, her papery fingers warm. “For when you need to remember who you are,” she’d said.
Ramona picked it up. The silver was cold. Heavy.
She placed it in the center of her floor.
The candles went around it in a circle, their flames casting shadows that seemed too large for her small room. The salt formed the barrier.
She lit the candles one by one. The flames flickered, casting strange shadows on her walls that seemed to move independent of the light source. Probably just the draft from the window.
Her hands were shaking. Whether that was from the wine or the nerves or the sheer stupidity of what she was about to do, it was impossible to tell.
Then she read the words. They felt strange in her mouth, not quite Latincane or the ancient tongues she’d studied.
Once. Her voice cracked on the second syllable.
Twice. Clearer now, more confident, more defiant.
