Page 33 of Incoronate
“Why did you stop?” demanded Dominic with enough ice in his voice to make the back of my neck prickle.
He was still looming over Caleb with his arms crossed and his face carved in shadow, watching him the way a man watched something he was seconds away from dismantling.
Caleb shook his head, beads of sweat rolling off his forehead at the movement. “I don’t have enough power. I can’t get through—”
“Try again,” ordered Dominic, leaving no room for argument.
Caleb lifted his head to Dominic, staring up at him through grief-rimmed eyes. “I—”
“I. Said. Try. Again.”
A weighty silence moved through the room, thick enough to make me feel like I was choking on it. Caleb blew out a slow breath and then finally nodded, though it looked a lot more like placation than anything related to hope.
“Carly,” he said without looking at his sister.
She didn’t need to be asked twice. She scrambled to the coffee table before dropping to her knees beside her brother, grabbing his outstretched hand without hesitation. The moment their skin connected, the light reignited. Her face went pale as she closed her eyes, allowing her brother to drawfrom her power reservoir and siphon her magic to fuel the spell.
I could feel the shift almost immediately…more power flooding into the spell, more hooks sinking into my blood, more of that insistent, stripping pull digging deeper into my veins. A gasp broke out of me as my back arched off the sofa, my hands fisting in the cushions beneath me.
“Morgan!” called Caleb, his voice ragged around the chant he was still trying to hold together.
Morgan hesitated for only a heartbeat before she moved, kneeling on Caleb’s other side and gripping his free hand. The connection snapped into place and the light blazed white-hot, so bright I had to look away completely, the glow burning through my closed eyelids like I was standing too close to the sun.
The three of them formed a chain now, power flowing from the twins and Morgan into Caleb, then channeling through him into the spell. I could feel it working, feel the magic clawing at the toxicity in my blood, trying to rip it free. My entire body went rigid as the sensation turned from pulling to tearing, like something was trying to drag my insides out through my skin.
A raw, strangled sound tore out of me before I could stop it. My hands flew up to clutch at my stomach as though I could hold myself together through sheer will alone, but it was useless. Whatever the spell was doing, it wasn’t waiting for permission, and every second of it felt like acid being poured over an open wound.
Caleb’s chanting reached a crescendo, his voice raw and desperate. The candles burned so bright they looked like miniature suns, the flames stretching upward in impossible lengths. The smoke from the herbs became a thick column, swirling around us in patterns that defied physics.
For one beautiful, terrible moment, I actually let myself believe it might work.
And then Caleb’s voice cracked and the light faltered like a dying breath.
His chanting stuttered, words breaking apart mid-syllable. Carly made a small, pained sound beside him, her body swaying on her knees as the strain caught up to her all at once while Morgan’s face had gone completely white, her lips pressing into a thin line as she visibly struggled to maintain the connection, every muscle in her arms trembling from the effort of holding on.
And then the light went out completely.
A soundless pulse of energy ripped outward, slamming through the room like a shockwave, knocking Trace back against the arm of the sofa with a grunt and sending Dominic stumbling a few steps backward toward the fireplace.
All three Casters collapsed backward in unison, the chain breaking as they released each other’s hands. Carly landed against the chair, her chest rising and falling in uneven bursts as Morgan sagged against the sofa with her head dropping forward like it had suddenly become too heavy for her neck to hold.
My eyes darted to Caleb. He was laying flat with his back against the floor and his eyebrows pitched as though the failure were a physical weight pressing him into the floorboards.
The healing spell hadn’t worked. I didn’t need to look down at myself to know it, but of course, I looked anyway, hoping against hope I was wrong and all their hard work hadn’t been in vain.
But it was.
The black lines hadn’t changed. If anything, they looked darker. Thicker. And now they’d spread to my hands too,branching down into my fingers in fine, jagged lines while we’d been distracted with the spell.
Caleb pushed himself up to his knees, staring at my arms like he could force the black lines to disappear through willpower alone. “That should have worked. We had enough power, the spell was clean, it should have—”
“It didn’t even make a dent,” whispered Morgan, her eyes wide with horror as she looked at me.
“Then try again,” said Trace, wrapping his arm around my shoulder and pulling me into him like he could shield me from anything so long as he kept me close enough.
Caleb shook his head, the defeat in his eyes making my chest constrict. “I gave it everything I have. Her magic is just too strong for my spell to penetrate. The spell rot is too deep.”
“That’s unacceptable,” snarled Dominic as he stood with his arms folded in front of the fireplace, his voice carrying the promise of violence. “Find another way.”
