Page 28 of Autumn L.A.W

He nodded. “Okay. I can do that. Or not do that. You’d better get back to your… not ritual.”

She hesitated just long enough for Cal to catch the dilated pupils in her eyes.

“Be careful,” she muttered.

“You too,” he said. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

And for the first time, Lioness didn’t argue. She just rushed back to the circle, saying, “He won’t be a problem.”

Lioness Graves had drawn a lot of weird things in her life, but this was the first time the landscape felt like it was drawing her back.

The fissure cut through the Central Park earth like a surgical scar, neatly cordoned off with city-issued barricades and a few “totally legitimate” laminated signs that Joell had conjured on the fly. The air around it buzzed, too quiet for normal ears but loud as a migraine to anyone with magic.

Lioness stood at the edge of the taped-off zone, sketchbook open, pencil hovering. Lines tugged at her hand the way they always did when her remote viewing wanted out. She breathed through the pull. Not yet. Not until Rayna said so.

Behind the barricade, the witches moved like a very glamorous, highly stressed pit crew.

Crystal paced the perimeter barefoot, fingertips brushing the ground every few steps as if she could soothe the soil. “There’s water under here,” she muttered, mostly to herself. “Old streams, old pipes, a whole nervous system of wet. And it’s… twitchy.”

“What do you mean by twitchy?” Rayna asked, hands on her hips, gaze sweeping the site as if she could bully the ley lines into behaving.

“Like it wants to get away,” Crystal answered. “Water doesn’t usually do that. It prefers drama, not retreat.”

Magda crouched near the fissure, planting small glass vials around the edge of the circle. Cool blue, steady green, purple, and a rose quartz shade. Stabilizers, dampeners, like emotional seatbelts. Wally poked his head from her satchel, nose wiggling like he could smell the anxiety.

“Potion anchors set,” Magda said. “If this thing throws a tantrum, at least it’ll have to go through three layers of enchanted protection first.”

On the far side of the taped-off area, Victoria held a wooden stake in one hand and a length of twine in the other, glaring at everyone’s feet. She stuck the stake in the center and, walking around it, measured out the nine-foot circle

“We are not dying in an asymmetrical circle,” she announced. “Rayna, your toe is over the line. Move your right foot.”

Rayna shifted. “Happy?”

“Marginally,” Victoria said. Reginald the raccoon was perched on her shoulder, wearing his homemade armor made from tin cans. His tiny paws gripped her jacket. His ringed tail flicked in a steady, irritated rhythm.

Brianna stood near Victoria, shivering even though she was layered in a scarf and a leather jacket. Her gaze kept sliding just past the fissure, like she was watching something replay in slightly the wrong order.

“Time’s messy here,” she said quietly.

Lioness caught the strain in her voice and turned. “Messy how?”

“Like it’s buffering,” Brianna said. “Little skips forward and back. Half a second, maybe. I tried to fast-forward the next hour, and all I got was static and a very rude headache.”

Lioness grimaced. “So, fun times ahead.”

“Allegedly,” Brianna said, swiping under her nose with the back of her hand. “Also, Sahara would yell at me for even trying to jump, so nobody tell her.”

“Sahara’s already mad we left her at home,” Rayna said. “She’s on magical concussion protocol. She stays with Chad, and we handle this without getting her brain overwritten again. Non-negotiable.”

The mention of Sahara made the air feel thinner. Lioness felt it like a hollow in her stomach. Sahara should have been here, muttering about glyph syntax and yelling at Lioness to stop free-handing the geometry. Instead, they had a photocopied notebook and a mage with additional notes.

Ezra knelt on a folded blanket beside the fissure, Sahara’s field journal open on his lap. His hand hovered over the page. The glyphs on the page were fuzzy, black ink lines. They were supposed to be crisp.

Ezra squinted. “Okay. Mildly alarming question.”

Rayna exhaled. “New rule. We don’t start sentences that way within fifteen feet of a ley-line rupture.”

“These symbols,” Ezra said, tapping the page, “were static yesterday. I checked them three times. Today they’re not.”