“I’m sorry,” he said, flopping down on the hard futon couch under the low spot where the sloping attic roof met the wall. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“Oh my God,” Marci said, dropping her chalk to hurry over. “Are you okay? You look terrible.”
“It’s not that bad,” he lied. “I just need to rest a bit.”
Marci didn’t buy it for a second. “Why didn’t you tell me I was taking too much earlier?”
“Wanted to help,” he panted, closing his eyes. “I got you into this. Least I could do.”
The couch creaked as Marci sat down beside him. “That’s no call to kill yourself over it,” she muttered angrily, taking his hands and rubbing his cold fingers between her warm ones, which would have felt amazing if only he’d been well enough to appreciate it. “I should have kept better track, but I got so wrapped up in my work I didn’t notice. Not that it did any good.”
He cracked his eyes open again. “The day’s still young. We’ve only been at this for…” he trailed off, frowning. “What time is it?”
“Nine in the morning,” she replied. “So about four and a half hours. But I’m not sure how much more I can do. I’ve already tried every curse breaking trick my dad and I knew, plus everything I learned in school,pluseverything I could find online, but I might as well have gone out for a crazy, last-night-alive bender for all I’ve got to show for it.”
“Sorry,” Julius said again.
“It’s not you,” she said quickly. “You could be a never-ending fount and it wouldn’t matter. This is a problem of leverage, not power.”
He looked at her questioningly, and she reached up to touch the no-longer-bandaged black mark on her neck. “By putting the curse under all my protections, literallyinmy magic, the police mage left nothing for a counter-curse to grab onto,” she explained. “Most curses are designed like bear traps. The magic clamps onto the victim, which means getting it off is just a matter of shoving enough power inside again to force it back open. But the Sword of Damocles is different. It’s like someone hammered a headless nail deep into what makes me a mage. It doesn’t matter how hard I pull when there’s nothing to grab on to. So far, the only way I can see to get it out is to rip my own magic apart, which would kill me even faster than losing my head.” She sighed and glanced over at the cat bed in the corner. “I thought about asking Ghost to try pushing on it from the inside, but he’s still sleeping, and I’m pretty sure our bond doesn’t work like that, anyway.”
“He’s been sleeping a lot,” Julius said, follow her gaze to the transparent, curled up cat. “Is something wrong?”
A shadow passed over Marci’s face, but then she shook her head. “Nothing I know of.”
That was a lie, but Julius didn’t have the energy to press. He’d figure it out later. Right now, all he wanted was to eat every scrap of food in the house and sleep for the rest of his life. But when he looked over to ask Marci if she wanted anything from the kitchen, she was sitting hunched over with her face buried in her hands.
“Are you okay?” he asked, knowing how stupid that sounded but unable to think of anything else to say.
“Not really,” she muttered. “I know it’s a waste of time to get depressed—crying over spilled magic and all—but I just feel like it’s already over.”
“It’s not over,” he assured her. “We’re not dead yet.”
“We’re as good as,” she said, turning her head to peer up at him through red rimmed eyes. “It isn’t like I’m not used to failing. I fail all the time—see the last twelve hours—but magic is different. It’s the one thing I was always really,reallygood at. Even knowing the Sword of Damocles was supposed to be unbreakable, I thought I could crack it. I thought I was different, but now…”
She trailed off with a miserable sigh. “I’ve never had a spell I couldn’t master,” she said softly. “But I’m starting to think this one really is my Waterloo. I know I should keep trying anyway, but I’ve burned up every magical material in the house, including you, and I’m no closer to breaking it now than I was when I started.” She slumped lower on the futon. “I don’t know what to do.”
Julius didn’t either. “We’ll figure it out,” he said anyway.
“Or die trying,” Marci said sullenly.
He was about to tell her that was no way to think when the back of his neck began to prickle. Marci went stiff at the same time, her head snapping up. “What the—”
Her words made him jump. He was the one with supernatural senses, and he hadn’t heard or smelled anything. Sure enough, though, when he turned his head to follow hers, a dragoness was standing on the stairs, smiling at them over the rim of what looked like a two-gallon mimosa.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Amelia said, though the blatant innuendo in her tone suggested otherwise.
Julius was too shocked to answer. His oldest sister, heir to his family and possibly the greatest dragon mage alive, wasin his house,and he hadn’t even smelled her coming. He supposed he could have blamed that on being exhausted, but Amelia was obviously not even trying to be stealthy. She was actually more outlandishly dressed than she’d been last night, wearing a cherry-red tank top, ancient ripped jeans, and chunky wedge flip-flops that hadn’t been in style for a century. Her long black hair was pulled back in a messy pony tail, and her hazel eyes, always jarring in her clearly Heartstriker-featured face, were painfully smug as they drifted past him to lock on Marci with a broad smile.
“Who are you?” Marci demanded, shooting to her feet. “How did you get in here?”
“Easy, Sparky,” Amelia said, grinning wider. “It takes more than a locked door and a few wards to keep me out. Besides,” she pointed at Julius, “heinvited me to come meet his human.”
After what had happened with Bethesda, Julius didn’t know how Marci would respond to that, but she just pulled herself straighter. “That’s me,” she said proudly. “But you still haven’t said whoyouare.”
“Don’t you see the family resemblance?” Amelia asked, pointing at her face. “I’m his sister.”
“He has a lot of those,” Marci said, looking her up and down. “Are you Chelsie?”
