She gritted her teeth as she sliced across her upper arm, in a spot her dress would conceal tonight. Blood dripped down her skin and onto the stone.
To complete the recipe, Isobel leaned down and kissed the spellboard.
“It’s done,” Isobel said breathlessly. “Now to fill it…”
She opened the flasks of raw magick and spilled their contents over the spellboard. The particles glimmered over the septogram, white as bones.
Same as she had for Oliver, Isobel coaxed the swirling magick into the stone. Because the Reaper’s Embrace was class ten, this ring could only hold a single charge.
The crystal began to pulse with faint, wispy light.
Suddenly, Isobel’s stomach clenched, and her mouth filled with something hot. She bent over the spellboard and spewed blood onto the septogram.
And she didn’t stop. It poured out of her with choking, shuddering heaves, seeping into her dull green carpet and staining it black. She leaned over and clutched her stomach, moaning. More blood came. More and more until everything was drenched in it, until it dribbled down her chin, dampened her hair, coated her hands.
She’d made a mistake.
Pain cleaved through Isobel’s chest, followed by panic. She keeled over, her cheek pressed against the spellboard’s edge. The room spun, and blood splattered more and more as she coughed.
Black and white bloomed across her vision like splotches of ink, even when she squeezed her eyes shut. The air she breathed was prickly with magick. It was more magick than she’d ever felt. Choking her.
She was supposed to be strong. She was supposed to survive.
Numbly, she prepared herself for the worst.
Then, all at once, the sensation vanished.
Isobel waited for several moments before shakily sitting up. Both her floor and her clothes were a mess. Her heart pounded, and she clutched her stomach.
She knew that cursemaking could be dangerous. She’d experienced backfire before, but never from an enchantment as powerful as this.
Hesitantly, she grasped for the cursering in the spellboard’s center, the blood that coated it dripping down her hand and wrist. She smeared it away with her thumb. The light within the stone had stopped pulsing, so—if it hadn’t already been obvious—she knew that her crafting attempt had been a failure.
Gasping out a sob, she threw it against the wall.
Some survivor, some champion, she was.
She staggered to her feet and opened her jewelry cabinet. Though most of her supplies had already been packed for the tournament, a few basic spellstones remained inside. She reached for a class one Bye Bye Tummyache spell.
But the moment before she grabbed it, she noticed something strange. There was no light inside it.
There was no light inside any of the stones in her cabinet.
No light inside any of the rings on her fingers.
She stumbled back, confused. Then she knelt in front of her duffel bag and unzipped it. Inside were clothes, a water bottle, nonperishable snacks, tampons, and—at the bottom—her magickal arsenal for the tournament: spells and curses of all sorts, flasks brimming with pre-collected raw magick.
Except the flasks were empty.
And the spell-and cursestones had gone dark.
“No,” she moaned. That couldn’t be possible. Magick didn’t just vanish.
Seeking comfort, Isobel instinctively reached for her mother’s locket around her neck and snapped it open. The Roach’s Armor Reid had given her should’ve been sealed in the stone inside.
Instead … she saw nothing.
And that was when she realized it. The power hadn’t disappeared. Her perception of magick had. She couldn’t see it, couldn’t sense it, couldn’t use it. No spells, no curses, no anything.
Isobel pressed a hand to her mouth. She swore she could hear a funeral march in her head.
The opening ceremony began in a few hours, and she was defenseless. She’d be lucky to last the night.
She should tell her father. Even if he couldn’t fix this, he could tell the family. They could find another champion. But …
Her chest tightened. He would think she’d done this to herself on purpose. After she’d cried to him about not wanting to be champion, after he’d accused her of being cowardly and ungrateful and ashamed of who she was, of course he would suspect sabotage.
And then both of her parents would hate her.
A small voice in Isobel’s mind reminded her that was still better than being dead.
But a louder, sharper voice disagreed. For the past year, Isobel had known all too well how it felt to be hated by the people she’d once cared about. By the whole world.