Page 30 of Autumn L.A.W

No. This was not his problem. Not if she could help it.

“Positions,” Rayna said, voice suddenly sharp. “We do this fast. Magda, keep the anchors stable. Crystal, monitor the water. Victoria, if the circle shifts, shout. Brianna, no more time-hopping. Ezra, read only the glyphs we absolutely need. Lioness…”

She turned to her. Lioness felt the weight of it like a hand on her shoulder.

“Remote view only as deep as you have to,” Rayna finished. “If it tries to drag you, let go. Immediately.”

Lioness nodded once. “Understood.”

She stepped into her place in the circle, Spirit Lion pacing at her side like a living, glowing warning sign. The hum under her feet grew louder, syncopated with her heartbeat.

Outside the barricade, Cal leaned back on the bench and tilted his face to the sky, pretending he didn’t feel the air go dense and strange.

Lioness lifted her sketchbook again, opened to a fresh page, and let her pencil hover over the white.

The earth beneath them seemed to inhale.

She drew the first line. Definitely human-looking. Then, as the picture took shape, it looked like a man, trying to claw his way out.

Sahara Nadir hated being benched almost as much as she hated mistranslated glyphs.

The L.A.W. mansion’s command room had started life as a formal library, but like most things in the witches’ world, it had evolved. One wall was bookshelves stacked with atlases and grimoires. Another held three mismatched whiteboards layered in equations, glyph fragments, and Joell’s passive-aggressive reminder about cleaning up coffee mugs.

A wide oak table dominated the center, currently covered in maps of Central Park, printed seismic readouts, and a crystal bowl brimming with black water that reflected none of the light in the room. Chad had parked himself on one of the armchairs.

The mansion itself hummed around them in a low, anxious throb. The lanterns along the wall didn’t sway, but their glow brightened and softened in a nervous rhythm, like the house was trying to breathe.

Sahara sat at the table with her feet planted, hands braced on either side of a notebook she’d already filled with too-small handwriting. The back of her neck prickled. Every time her mind drifted toward the obelisk, something cold and bright in her skull tried to grow larger.

She placed her tongue between her teeth, forcing her jaw to relax, and focused on the map instead.

“Report,” Chad said into his phone, because he thought being official would make this less frightening.

“Begin shutting up now,” Rayna said. “Ritual starting…”

CHAPTER 8

Lioness Graves had drawn ruins before. Collapsed temples, abandoned subway tunnels, one extremely haunted doll factory that still showed up in her dreams whenever she ate chili too late at night.

But this was the first time something was drawing her. She drew the view from the ground, looking up at the circle of witches. “Nope.” She tore the page out and let it fall to the grass.

The fissure in Central Park wasn’t just a crack anymore. It had grown around the edges, and the stone underneath puckered upward as if the earth were vomiting a minor monument. The air smelled like mold and dirt and something older than both.

Her pencil hovered over fresh paper. Her hand tingled, tendons buzzing like plucked strings. “Not yet,” she muttered to her pencil. “I will absolutely put you in time-out if you start without permission.”

No one answered, because that would have been too easy. The ground did a tiny, sarcastic shiver instead.

Rayna stood at the northern edge of the taped-off zone, hands lifted, voice low and steady as she chanted. Ezra walked just inside the makeshift circle, pouring salt around the witches. Sahara’s journal was open in his other hand. His lips moved in whispers as he fed directions to the magic.

Magda’s potion vials glowed in soft pastel tones at the cardinal points. Crystal paced barefoot, murmuring to the underground water like it was a nervous horse. Victoria checked and re-checked the circle. Was every salt line thick enough? Brianna hovered beside Rayna, open palms facing the sky.

On the other side of the barricade, Cal sat on the approved bench with his back turned, pretending he was just another New Yorker enjoying bad coffee and ignoring the supernatural. His posture fooled exactly no one.

“Okay,” Rayna said, voice calm with steel under it. “As soon as Ezra completes the circle.”

Lioness’s ribs tightened. Spirit Lion stood at her side, huge and luminous, mane sweeping the air in slow, warning arcs. Every time his paws touched the dirt, the hum under her feet flared.

Her pencil twitched. A line slid onto the page without her permission. Long. Vertical. Dark. She clenched her fist. The graphite pushed against her skin.