“Get away from her,” Briony snarled, at the paparazzi, at Alistair, calling upon every spellring she could. Two spells, three spells—it didn’t matter. She was strong enough to cast them all.
Magick spread from her hands, tendrils of white curling around her. Mirror Shards. The Deathly Slumber. And the spell Elionor had crafted for her, the one that had helped her realize this tournament was a septogram—the Overcharge.
“You want a story?” Briony called out, stepping between Isobel’s body and the camera flashes. She locked eyes with the nearest reporter, a young man only a few years older than herself. He looked utterly terrified. “You want to know what this curse really does to us? I’ll show you.”
Briony let the magick go, sending ripples of power in all directions. Glass shards spiraled toward the paparazzi, smashing their camera lenses and slicing bloody gashes in their flesh. Those that weren’t hit fell to the ground, fast asleep. But Briony wasn’t done.
She smiled and let Overcharge free.
Crackling electricity rose around her, coiled taut, then spiraled outward in a neat circle. Every single camera in her sight line sputtered and sizzled, sparks rising pathetically into the air.
There would be no pictures of this moment.
She stared around at the paparazzi—either passed out on the ground or retreating, frightened. At Gavin and Finley, watching her with expressions she couldn’t read.
And then she turned to look at the Lowe brothers, still standing on the front steps.
“Isobel was right. No more fighting,” Briony said, in her best team captain voice. “Not today.”
To her surprise, Alistair was nodding before she’d even finished speaking.
“Please,” he said, starting forward. “I didn’t mean— I— Please let me try to heal her.”
Briony hesitated. But then she gazed into Alistair’s face, and saw grief and fear and—love. Or at least something close to it.
“Can you help her?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Alistair whispered. “But I have to try.”
Briony understood suddenly that both of them were only trying to save the people they cared about, in the only ways they knew how.
“Okay,” she said. And stepped aside.
ISOBEL MACASLAN
Do not judge the champions too harshly. Survival could make villains of any of us.
A Tradition of Tragedy
The last time a death curse had touched Isobel, it’d been a graze. A trace of white against her cheekbone, as though a chalk mark had been drawn on her face. And even that, though barely perceptible, was enough to prove deadly. Had Briony not healed it, Isobel’s body would still lay untouched on the moors.
She choked as this new one struck her, her hand grasping at her chest. For a brief moment, the world around her ceased. The pain … the pain was burning. It was agony. It tore the air from her lungs and pierced into her skin, a thousand needles gouging into flesh and bone and marrow. Searching for the heart within. To end her entirely.
The world went cold. Isobel shivered as she collapsed onto the ground, cheek pressed against damp, mossy cobblestones. There wasn’t enough life in her to let out a scream.
She tried to stretch her arm forward, but she didn’t move at all. Her heart clenched. She felt so cold it hurt, like skin pressed too long against ice, from the inside out. A cage of frost was closing around her heart and gradually shrinking, tightening.
Then her fingers finally found it.
The locket.
For weeks, Isobel had been so focused on the other enchantment that dangled from the necklace that she had forgotten the original one: the greatest gift that her family had given her, on the day she and her father went to visit Reid MacTavish.
Life.
She barely had the strength to cast the spell, but as the world around her numbed, she focused everything she had left into the magick.
The Roach’s Armor seeped out of the locket, a swarm of magick skittering across her skin. She felt it everywhere. In the grooves between her fingers and toes. At the edges of her ears, beetle-like legs and antennae grazing her eyes.
Crawling and cramming their way down her throat.
For several heartbeats, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She could only panic.
But then all at once, the sensation stilled. Isobel’s eyes flew open as she coughed out a sticky violet tar and gasped as new air burst into her lungs, as the curse slowly drained from her body.
Alistair Lowe knelt beside her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and took her in his arms. Behind him, the others hovered. And beyond them, a dozen members of the paparazzi or cursechasers lay unconscious, scattered limply across the courtyard. A welcome sight.