Chapter 18 Sam #3
Rook tries to rise again. And again, Tamsin’s spell forces him back to his knees. He raises one hand, and for one heart-pounding moment, I think he might finally be signaling to the referee that he’s yielded.
Instead, his fingers crook. I practically flinch from the screen as Rook casts another spell.
It’s useless. Tamsin’s net is too cleverly made, too well constructed. She’s absorbing everything in her path, and Rook’s magic, powerful as it is, simply feeds her.
The net closes in around him. Rook cries out and goes belly-down on the stage.
The net digs into his skin, constricting his movement.
It makes the kind of picture that could go viral and fuel memes on every magic-obsessed corner of the Internet: Lysander Rook, cocooned in starlight, looking utterly helpless for the first time in his dueling career.
“Just yield,” I whisper again. As if he can hear me through the screen. As if he’d listen, even if he could.
Rook looks up, glaring directly at the cameras. He’s got a black eye blooming on one side of his face and a thin smear of blood trickling from one corner of his mouth. He doesn’t look frightened, though. He doesn’t even look especially panicked or disappointed in his own performance.
As I watch, he grins with all his teeth. Blood coats some of the whites. He looks utterly ghastly and utterly defiant. A thread of starlight slices open the skin under his good eye. He doesn’t even wince. Blood trickles lazily from the new wound.
Still, he doesn’t yield.
He’ll never yield.
I’m moving before I realize what I’m doing.
I step into untied shoes and lace them up with shaking fingers then shrug into my windbreaker.
I barely remember to grab my room key before I’m racing out the hotel suite door.
Thank god we were booked into accommodations directly next door to the New York Magicians’ Arena.
Because I need to get to that arena right now.
Security lets me through.
I’m so relieved I could cry. Rook and I have been on such terrible terms for the past couple days, I was half convinced my name would end up on the banned visitors list.
It didn’t, thankfully. And for all intents and purposes, I’m still listed in official record as Lysander Rook’s designated second for this duel.
What we fought about days before doesn’t matter.
All that matters is what the record says—and the record says that I still belong to Rook.
Which means that I have free reign of the arena.
I waste no time taking advantage of it.
The New York Magicians’ Arena is spectacular in its own right, but it’s at its most breathtaking in moments like these: when it’s filled to the brim with spectators.
Before now, I’d tried, as best I could, to imagine how this place would look on the night of a sold-out magic show.
I imagined this venue over and over again, replaying this night in my head, as I mapped out my plot against the Blackwoods.
How loud the crowd would be. How bright the lights would be when Tamsin Blackwood’s bloody body was dragged from the arena, never to duel again.
Nothing in my imagination compares to the real thing.
The arena is a glittering metropolis, a city within a city, teeming with people.
People who are about to watch my former champion bleed out on stage before their eyes—the exact same way my brother bled out in one of Mateus Blackwood’s back-alley clubs four years ago.
These audiences are always so hungry for blood, and they never seem to have enough of it.
And year after year, duel after duel, from those back-alley clubs to the grandest arena in New York City, we magicians step into arenas to sate that audience’s bloodthirst. To answer their need for beautiful, terrifying entertainment.
Master Silverstein looks surprised to see me making a beeline for the second’s seat at his side. “Chan?” he yells over the roar of the crowd. “What are you doing here?”
“What I should have done a lot sooner,” I yell back. I slide into the second’s seat like I was born to it. “Lysander!” I scream.
At the sound of his name, the hunted, feral figure curled up before me on the stage looks my way.
Blood drips into his eyes, red framing the familiar blue, as his gaze meets mine.
For a moment, we’re the champion and the second at any other duel, thinking and moving and casting in sync. One mind split into two bodies.
I know exactly what he’s thinking.
“Yield,” I tell him. My voice gentles. I don’t know if he can hear me over all the noise in the arena.
My best hope is that he can read my lips even through the slow drip of blood off his eyelashes.
“Please, just yield, Rook. It’s going to be okay.
I promise it’s—we’re going to be okay. All you have to do is yield. ”
He closes his eyes. He’s still smiling, oddly serene, despite all the blood and bruises. Swaying slightly, he staggers to his feet.
My heart sinks. He’s going to let himself die in here. His final screw you to me for all the ways I’ve betrayed him, and it’s going to amount to his own destruction.
Then, in the flash of seconds that feel like an eternity, he raises a shaking hand.
“I yield,” says Lysander Rook.
He says it to Tamsin. But he’s looking right at me as he says it.
The duel is over.