Chapter 1
At exactly three in the morning, the Ouija board’s planchette slid across Beth’s coffee table and spelled:
U UP?
Beth, naked on her sagging velvet couch except for one flip-flop and a robe that had long since surrendered around her elbows, blinked at it through one smudged eye.
“No,” she said.
Not because she was scared. Because she was busy.
The room was set correctly, at least. Full moon. Rain at the windows. Black candle for banishment, red for lust, white for clarity, though Beth had almost skipped that one because clarity had been nothing but rude to her lately. Rosemary smoked in a chipped saucer. Moon water sat beside her ex-boyfriend’s printed photo, which she had placed faceup so Brad could look hot, guilty, and doomed.
Eight cats watched from various corners of the apartment, each one radiating a different flavor of disapproval.
This was supposed to be a simple sex hex.
Beth was, generally speaking, a good witch. She did protection work, uncrossings, practical charms, fairy offerings, the occasional ghost mediation, and only mild retribution when spiritually necessary. She believed in the rule of three, more or less, though lately she suspected the universe had poor math skills and a flair for overreaction.
All she wanted tonight was for Brad’s dick to fail at the most emotionally inconvenient time possible.
That felt proportional.
He had cheated with a yoga instructor named Brynlee who captioned bikini photos with things likesoftness is my rebellion, so Beth had decided to rebel with hematite and give her softness.
Technically, the crystal was sold as a massage wand. Technically, Beth was using it for focused sympathetic magic. Technically, she had wiped it with Florida Water, passed it through rosemary smoke, and told it exactly what it was meant to do.
Still, it was cold, blunt, and not nearly as inspiring as revenge should have been.
Her heart wasn’t in it.
Neither, humiliatingly, was her body.
Beth had been in a lull with the craft for months. Her Etsy spell kits weren’t selling. The abundance jar she made for herself had attracted three overdraft fees and a coupon for tires. Even her job atHEX, the phone line for people who needed emergency spell advice, spiritual consultations, and permission to make terrible romantic decisions with candles, had become a chore.
Earlier that night, a woman had paid $4.99 a minute to ask whether she could bind her situationship using his abandoned vape and a photo of his dog.
Beth had said, “No,’ then paused and added, ‘not safely.’ She immediately wondered when she had stopped loving her life.
So she went to the tiki bar across the street, drank six mai tais, came home during a thunderstorm, brewed a cup of wild lettuce, kava, mugwort, and blue lotus tea, and decided the cure for spiritual burnout was erotic vengeance.
The tea had helped. Kind of.
It was mildly hallucinogenic in the way witches called things “dream-opening” when they meant “this might make the curtains breathe.” Beth had used it before for lucid dreaming and astral work. Since her last hex, it had also made odd objects talk to her.
Spotify shuffle. Autocorrect. The microwave clock flashing 8008 and 6969.
Beth suspected she had picked up a spirit guide. Possibly a flirty one. Possibly a pervert. Last week, her phone corrected banish him to baby, punish him, and instead of being alarmed, Beth had thought, honestly, useful note.
Now she was sprawled naked on the couch with one knee hooked over the back cushion, one foot braced on the coffee table between a candle and a bowl of salt, trying very hard to look like a priestess of the old ways and not a woman losing a fight with gravity.
“I can’t even come,” she muttered.
The planchette scraped across the board ending on YES and vigorously moved over it. Beth glanced down, wondering if her foot was jostling the table, or if her spirit guide was mocking her.
One of the cats sneezed.
Beth ignored him.
She curled her hips, tried to focus, and immediately remembered something important.
“Oh, shit.”
She had forgotten to cast a circle.
Of course, she had. Because she was drunk, horny in theory only, and spiritually operating at forty percent. No circle. No boundary. No properly opened or closed container. Just Beth, eight cats, a rainstorm, several lit candles, a sexually repurposed crystal, and an unsecured Ouija board sitting two feet from her bare ass like a spiritual glory hole with vowels.
Beth looked back at Brad’s picture. Brad with his stupid nice teeth. Brad with his useful shoulders. Brad, who had once told her he “respected witches” because his grandmother got “really accurate feelings about hurricanes.” Brad, who had cheated with Brynlee and then said he “never wanted to hurt her,” which was apparently man-speak for I wanted to do it, but I hoped you wouldn’t find out.
The anger helped.
Not enough at first.
She was still having trouble getting wet, which felt like betrayal on a cellular level. Here she was, naked under a full moon, surrounded by candles, making a sincere attempt at weaponized arousal, and her body had decided to respond like it was bored.
She reached for the mug of tea, poured the last splash on the hematite, and glared at Brad’s photo.
“For every lie and every fling,” she whispered, moving the hematite slowly, “may nothing rise, salute, or swing.”
Nothing.
She shifted lower on the couch, robe bunched beneath her back, bare skin sticking slightly to the velvet. Her blonde hair had come loose from its tie and was caught under one shoulder. She yanked it free and knocked over a tarot card with her elbow.
The Tower stared up at her.
“Not now.”
Then she looked at Brad’s picture again.
Really looked.
His mouth. His jaw. The obnoxious confidence in his eyes. The memory of his hands before she knew where else they had been.
Her body finally started to respond.
Beth hated that.
The fact that Brad’s picture helped the massage wand slide more easily shamed her so much she almost lost momentum again. There he was, the human equivalent of a gas leak with abs, and apparently, some dumb, traitorous part of her still wanted him badly enough to make the spell work.
“Fantastic,” she whispered. “My pussy has Stockholm syndrome.”
Her phone lit up on the coffee table.
“Playing ‘Hot in Here,’” Siri announced.
Beth stared at it.
“No.”
The song played for exactly two seconds before skipping again.
“Still Into You.”
“Shut up.”
Another skip.
“Thong Song.”
Beth barked out a laugh despite herself.
“Stop!”
But the laugh loosened something. The anger sharpened into focus. The shame became fuel. The spell caught.
The tarot spread beside Brad’s photo seemed to approve.
The Tower.
Knight of Wands reversed.
Justice reversed.
At first, Beth had taken that as a screaming green light. Collapse, failed erection, cosmic correction. Gorgeous. No notes.
Now that she remembered the missing circle and the Ouija board was flirting like a frat boy, she had to admit the cards might have been saying something more like, "Girl, maybe don’t."
Too late.
Her body started to respond in earnest now. The rain helped. The candles helped. Watching the hematite disappear and reappear helped more than she wanted to admit. She was finally wet enough to use her other hand, fingers moving in small, focused circles above where the crystal worked.
Beth looked over at Brad’s photo gleamed in the candlelight.
Her pleasure sharpened, shameful and useful. Then she remembered why she was on the couch naked in the first place.
Brad reaching for another woman and finding only panic, flop, and divine consequences.
“For every lie,” she gasped, “and every fling—”
The knock hit the door.
Three hard raps.
Beth jerked so violently the crystal slipped in her hand, and the orgasm broke through her body wrong: sudden, thin, and ruined.
“Oh, fuck you.”
The apartment went silent.
Even the cats froze.
Beth collapsed back against the couch, furious, sweaty, and deeply unsatisfied. Her robe was open. Her pussy pulsing, but the reward was gone, stolen at the finish line like some cosmic joke. Her mascara had migrated. The candles flickered like they were trying not to laugh.
The knock did not come again.
Beth turned her head toward the door.
No footsteps. No voices in the hall. Just rain, thunder, and Spotify quietly starting “Seven Devils” beside her.
She sat up.
The spell had been interrupted, but not lost. Energy raised was energy raised. A sloppy seal was still a seal if the intention was clean, and Beth’s intention was extremely clean: Brad humiliated, Brad humbled, Brad’s little goblin hiding in the spiritual shrubbery.
She picked up his photo.
“Fine,” she whispered.
Then she wiped the picture between her legs, quick and vicious, sealing the working with what her body had managed to give.
“May nothing rise,” she said. “May nothing salute. May nothing swing. So mote it be.”
The red candle went out.
Beth stared at it.
“I’ll take that as a good sign.”
She pulled on her robe, tied it tight, and stepped over Butter, who had chosen that exact moment to lie across the path like a fat familiar with tenure.
At the door, Beth paused.
Her apartment looked suddenly too witchy, too cluttered, too full of shadows. Bundles of herbs hung from the ceiling. Spell jars lined the kitchen sill. The litter box fan in the bathroom rattled uselessly, the same broken fan she had hexed her landlord over five months ago.
That hex had backfired.
Instead of fixing the ventilation problem caused by eight cats, three litter boxes, and one bathroom fan that sounded like a possessed wasp, he had raised her rent.
Beth was pretty sure Brad was the threefold return on that one.
She leaned into the peephole.
No one.
The hallway was empty.
Just the ugly yellow bulb, the stained carpet, and the neighbor’s plastic wreath that still said "Bless This Mess" even though it was May.
Beth waited.
Nothing moved.
She exhaled.
“Tea,” she muttered. “Definitely the tea.”
She went back to the couch, sore and sticky, feeling resentful that even her orgasm had managed to disappoint her.
Thunder shook the walls and the planchette was moving again.
Beth watched it spell the message one letter at a time.
Not U UP?
This time, it spelled:
I C U
