“Good. Don’t. She’ll start seeing the wind talk.”
Mari perks up. “I want that.”
Sariah laughs, pours us cider without asking, and gives Mari a small, round cookie shaped like a crescent moon. I take the moment to breathe. The warmth here sinks into my skin in a way I didn’t realize I needed. There’s something about the lighting, the mix of gold and amber tones, the hum of a spell circle faintly etched into the floor beneath the rug. It feels like the whole place is holding its breath just to let me exhale.
Outside, the fog’s rolled back in. Thick again. Soft. Almost too still.
“Hey, Mama,” Mari says suddenly, licking cinnamon sugar from her fingers. “There’s people out there.”
I glance out the window. The square is empty.
“What people?”
“In the fog. They’re waving. But not at us.”
I lean closer to the glass. There’s nothing.
“Mari, sweetheart, there’s no one there.”
She frowns, staring a moment longer, then shrugs. “They’re gone now.”
Sariah watches her carefully. “She always like that?”
“Like what?”
“Open.”
I sip my cider. “She sees things sometimes. Dreams things. But nothing scary. At least not yet.”
Sariah leans in. “The Hollow responds to energy. Old blood. Unspoken promises. She might be lighting things up just by walking through.”
“That supposed to comfort me?”
“Wasn’t trying to.”
That night,after I’ve tucked Mari in and double-checked that the wards around the cottage are still quietly humming—yes, actual wards, I felt them like a low drumbeat beneath my feet—I climb the narrow stairs to the attic.
The door sticks. It takes a hard shove to open, and when it finally creaks inward, the smell of dust and clove oil nearly knocks me over. It’s cold up here. Not air conditioning cold—old, forgotten cold. The kind that settles in the bones of a house and doesn’t care if you’ve come to change anything.
I click on the small lamp hanging from a crossbeam. Its light is dim, yellow, but enough. The attic is crammed with boxes, trunks, shelves of preserved herbs, bundles of dried flowers, androws of what look like potion bottles but could just as easily be weird old apothecary keepsakes.
Then I see it.
A chest tucked beneath the far window, covered in a faded quilt with little moons stitched into the fabric. It hums. Not out loud, but under the skin. I know that’s ridiculous. I know I should laugh. But I don’t.
When I lift the quilt, a chill runs up my arm. The lock is heavy, old iron, etched with a sigil I recognize from Johanna’s old letters; never open in haste. Except it isn’t locked. It clicks open under my hand, smooth and certain, like it was waiting for me.
Inside is a book.
Thick, bound in leather, stitched with silver thread that shimmers faintly in the low light. The cover reads:Johanna Briar — Grimoire, Vol. I
I don’t breathe for a second.
Not because it’s scary. Not even because it’s magic—though it absolutely is. But because it makes something inside me shift. Click. Like finding the missing page in a story you didn’t realize you were telling.
I carry it downstairs, slow and careful. I don’t open it. Not yet.
But I place it on the table by the window and light a candle beside it.
