Alistair gaped. Even with the high magick, it was merely a hangover curse. It shouldn’t have managed … this.
Not unless he’d messed up the crafting.
Unable to help himself, Alistair leaned over the arm of the couch and threw up on the carpet.
When he finished, the man was on the ground. He wasn’t dead—his chest still rose and fell with his breaths, but he was gravely and likely permanently injured. He lay pathetically in a pool of his body’s juice. The room reeked of it and Alistair’s vomit.
Agent Yoo knelt at the man’s side, seething. “That was … grotesque. You didn’t have to—”
“This man attacked me in my own home,” his grandmother answered. “But I can assure you…” Marianne’s gaze shifted to Alistair with a treacherous glare. “The curse wasn’t intended to cause such harm. You could’ve killed yourself casting that.”
Alistair wasn’t quite sure he hadn’t. His stomach gave another violent clench.
“I don’t know what I did wrong,” he rasped. If you weren’t careful, spellmaking could turn volatile. Alistair was lucky he hadn’t blown up the entire estate.
He thought he’d done everything to pass this test. But now, his lips still speckled with his own sick, Agent Yoo and the spellmakers looked at him not like he was a monster, but like he was just a boy. Which was so much worse.
“Thank you all for coming,” his grandmother said tersely. She stood, stepped over the body, and walked out of the room, her footprints leaving a violet trail across the floor.
ISOBEL MACASLAN
Spellmakers are the silent eighth force of the tournament, and that makes them complicit, too.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Isobel paused in front of the window display of her mother’s spellshop advertising the end-of-summer sale. Cosmetic spells, one of her mother’s specialties, were 50 percent off. All the spellstones were cut in marquis or princess shapes—the latest trends in Ilvernath’s high-end stores. They glittered in rotating display towers, sending the afternoon light spinning in all directions.
But she hadn’t stopped to admire her mother’s taste.
CHILD KILLERS
The graffiti stretched across the window from top to bottom, dripping crimson paint.
Her skin prickled in alarm, and Isobel peeked over her shoulder, where the upscale shopping neighborhood paid the vandalism no mind. Why should they? It had happened countless times before, ever since Isobel had been announced as the first of the Slaughter Seven.
Isobel stepped inside and took a deep breath of the perfumed air to calm her nerves—it smelled like bubblegum. Everything within the store was designed to make you feel good. The wall of mirrors with elegant, gilded frames were spelled to give your complexion extra glow, and the neutral colors made the spellshop feel open and uncluttered. It was the total opposite of the MacTavish curseshop Isobel had visited with her father a week ago.
“Mum?” she called, setting down her purse and bookbag as she peeked into the back room. Usually her mother sat among the suede floor pillows, surrounded by a sea of empty, glimmering spellstones, wooden spellboards, and flasks filled with raw common magick. When another spellmaker released something new and trendy, her mother would hole up in this room for hours, trying to concoct a matching recipe of her own. There was a competitiveness to the indie spellmaking business. To invent new spells to catch the public’s attention, to produce better versions of your competitor’s products, to sell enough simple spells to support your family’s favorite specialty. Her mother’s was divination.
Looking at all this, the pink, the gleaming, the pretty, it was difficult to imagine her mother ever living in her father’s house. Isobel’s parents had divorced when she was eight years old. Isobel had memories of her mother living with them, of her mother at Macaslan gatherings with her cousins and relatives, of her parents in love with each other. The memories always felt wrong, mismatched puzzle pieces wedged forcibly together.
It was business hours, and the shop was unlocked, which meant her mother was here. She’d probably slipped to the apartment upstairs for a moment. Perhaps that was for the best. The graffiti would only upset her.
Isobel knelt behind the counter and riffled through the drawers of pre-filled spellstones. At last she found a Mess Be Gone! in a fashionable tourmaline crystal. The barcode sticker labeled it as class two.
She slipped outside and cast it on the mess. It took eight uses of the spell to clean the window completely, but the improved, sparkling storefront gave her no satisfaction. With only a handful of days remaining until the tournament, some other outraged out-of-towner would just vandalize it again.