She would be the final champion to ever carve their name into that stone.
ISOBEL MACASLAN
Someone usually dies the first night.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Isobel stood at the edge of her father’s estate, on the hill overlooking the graveyard at the city limits. The cemetery was eerie and still. Even the wrought iron entrance gate swinging in the wind made no sound. It was silent except for the steady ticks of her stopwatch.
Three minutes to sunset.
Isobel unfurled the crumpled, bloodstained paper clutched in her hands. The page she’d torn from Reid’s grimoire. She kept reading and rereading it, searching for a clue in the Reaper’s Embrace’s recipe for what she’d done wrong when she’d tried to craft the curse. But her mind couldn’t focus.
You cannot die yet, she ordered herself. You haven’t been accepted to fashion school. You’re still a virgin. You’ve never even left this damned city.
She checked her watch. Two minutes to sunset.
What Isobel needed was more time. If she claimed one of the Landmarks, she’d have protection. She’d originally hoped to seize the Crypt and all its magickal booby traps, but the Castle had the most powerful defensive enchantments of any of them—it was effectively impenetrable. The champions could each choose their starting point at the edge of town, so Isobel didn’t know where the other champions were. But the Castle was close. If she could make it there, she’d have somewhere safe to figure out how to fix her mistake.
One more minute.
Isobel tucked the scrap of paper away in her duffel bag, then fiddled with her locket. The Roach’s Armor couldn’t protect Isobel without her powers, but the piece of her mother brought her comfort just the same.
She wished she’d apologized to her. Now it was too late.
Her watch alarm rang, its mechanical screech slicing through the graveyard’s quiet. Isobel’s sweat-slicked fingers trembled as she pushed the stop button.
Overhead, red seeped across the sky like paint on a canvas. It swept up past the treeline, devouring the oranges and violets of sunset, swallowing each of the stars until they shone scarlet, as though trapped behind a window of stained glass. Soon the sky was red across every stretch of the horizon.
This was the fall of the Blood Veil, the signal of the tournament’s beginning. Day and night, Ilvernath would remain a haunting crimson until all but one of the champions were dead.
Isobel turned around to see the other, inner Veil that had fallen around the city, a darker curtain stretching from land to sky. She stilled for a moment, taking in the phenomena she had only ever seen in poorly saturated photographs. The inner Veil blocked her path back into Ilvernath—and prevented any spectators from venturing onto the tournament grounds.
Starting now, she was truly cut off from the life she’d known.
Starting now, all the champions would race from town into the wilderness to claim their Landmarks.
Starting now, Isobel could be killed at any moment.
She ran.
Down the hill, past the tombstones, into the forest. Isobel had never been athletic, not like Briony, but she was too buzzed with adrenaline and panic to slow down. When she’d imagined this moment, she’d never considered the way the scarlet light would alter the landscape, how every puddle resembled a blood spill, how the briary trees took the shape of teeth. But the terror only made her run faster. The Castle was three kilometers away from her father’s house—she was the closest of all the competitors. So long as no one used a Here to There spell, Isobel would get there first.
As she neared the end of the woods, the Castle loomed over the moorlands ahead, its impressive crenellated towers and surrounding barricades unrecognizable compared to the heap of moss-covered stones it had been before the Blood Veil fell. She locked her sights on the drawbridge lowered across the moat. If she was the first to cross it, the Castle would accept Isobel as its champion. And all of its protection would be hers.
The moment Isobel stepped past the edge of the tree line, a blast erupted in front of her, knocking her off her feet and onto her back. She gasped as her head smacked the dirt and the air rushed out of her lungs, then she frantically rolled over and fisted the grass, her vision spinning—red, everywhere red.
She cursed herself for hoping she’d be the first one here. Of course another champion would use Here to There or Pick Up the Pace spells to reach their Landmarks.
“You missed!” someone shouted—a girl. She wasn’t speaking to Isobel. Her voice was a loaded taunt, despite the terrifying power of the explosive spell. Isobel peered up at the figure through the smoke.