First Bite
Something sharper—ozone and old spells, like the air before a summer strike when the sky hasn’t decided whether to break yet.
Autumn set it carefully on the stone altar in her ritual room, hands steady only because she forced them to be. The pendants lay beside it, positioned with deliberate symmetry: the newer flame-bright one to her right, the older dagger-bound pendant to her left. They hummed softly, out of sync, like two hearts that had never learned to beat together.
She had bathed before coming here.
Saltwater, cold enough to sting. She’d scrubbed until her skin burned, murmuring the old words her grandmother used to insist on during full moons—to cleanse what clings, to quiet what li
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