Turn 6 of 7

You don't know how long you sit there. Minutes, maybe. Maybe longer. The candles burn down to stubs, and the basement goes dim, and the only light is the gray leak of streetlamps through the high basement windows and the faint orange glow of the laundromat sign outside. Riley hasn't moved from Julia's side. She's sitting cross-legged on the linoleum with Julia's head in her lap, stroking her hair with slow, mechanical strokes, like she's forgotten she's doing it. The grimoire lies open on the floor beside her, its pages still, the ink drawings inert.

The silver cords are cold and slack around your wrists. They feel like rope now — just rope, ordinary and dead. You pull your right hand, and it slides free with no resistance. Then your left. The circle doesn't stop you. Nothing stops you. You stand on legs that feel wrong — too light, too narrow, the center of gravity shifted in ways your muscles don't know how to compensate for yet — and you take a step, and then another, and then you're standing over Julia's body and you can't see her face clearly because your glasses are still in her back pocket and the world is a blur.

You crouch anyway. Your hand finds her jacket, and you reach into the pocket, and your fingers close around the familiar frames. You put them on, and they sit wrong on your face — the bridge doesn't fit, the prescription is off, everything is slightly distorted. But you can see. And what you see is Julia's face, pale and still and peaceful, and Riley's face above it, wet and ruined with mascara, looking at you with an expression you can't decode.

"What do we do?" you ask, and your voice is still that voice — warm, unfamiliar, not yours. Riley's eyes focus on you slowly, like she's remembering you exist. She looks at your face — the half-finished face, the one that's neither Ian nor whoever Julia was building — and something shifts in her expression. Not recognition, exactly. Calculation. She looks down at the grimoire, then back at you.

"The transformation stalled," she says. Her voice is raw. "It's not finished. It's not — you're not done. But the spell's charge died with her." She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand, smearing mascara further. "I don't know what happens now. I don't know if you stay like this. I don't know if it reverses. I don't know if it —" she stops. Swallows. "I need to think. I need to figure out what to do about Jules first. And then I need to figure out what to do about you."

She looks down at Julia again, and her jaw tightens, and for a moment the grief on her face is so raw that you look away out of something like instinct. The basement is cold. The chalk circle is just chalk now. The candles are just wax. And you're sitting on the floor of your sister's apartment with a body that's half yours and half someone else's, and your sister is dead, and you don't know why, and you don't know what you are anymore.