The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland

Author:Krystal Sutherland [Sutherland, Krystal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Jude steadies herself with a few deep breaths because she knows what’s coming. There’s a sacrifice every time you give one of these bastards a bit of your soul to gnaw on. It ain’t pretty. The cursewriters she found before Emer both told her there would be a physical price to pay for the power she wanted. Jude had known that, but she had thought it would somehow be much . . . sexier. A fainting spell or fevers, perhaps.

The cursewriter she had commissioned her second curse from, the retired doctor, specialized in chronic pain relief. It was unclear if magic could even be used to combat magical pain, which the cursewriter was quick to point out. No one had come to her with a problem like this before. She usually helped women with endometriosis and postpartum recovery, not necrotic souls. Jude had paid her £10,000 for an invocation to ease her agony. A second demon attached itself to Jude’s soul and seemed to do absolutely nothing outside of cracking her eyesight. A fun side effect of the occult.

The third time she seared herself with magic, she really should have known better, but the songwriter she found on the internet—on a Reddit forum, no less—claimed to know what she was doing. Never commission spells from a songwriter. Bob Dylan may have won the Nobel Prize for literature, but a cursewriter he was not. After that demon started suckling on her soul, granting her the ability to knock herself out, Jude was sick for weeks with what her nannies might have called “an upset tummy” but actually consisted of Jude passing nothing but liquid and mucus. Food would go in and turn into fire inside her, so she stopped eating, which made her stomach cramp and her muscles begin to eat themselves.

Eventually she was hospitalized again. The tabloids reported that she was suffering from an eating disorder and printed pictures of her looking gaunt. Another starving socialite. Like that was even interesting. After a colonoscopy (all her dignity was gone by that point anyway) revealed no reason for the volcano, doctors diagnosed her with irritable bowel syndrome and put her on a special diet to help control her symptoms. Jude ate nothing but porridge for a month, and slowly the dysentery stopped (the mucus, however, remained for much longer).

All this is to say it is not without appreciation for potential dire consequences that Jude takes the roll of lead into the bathroom and watches in the mirror as Emer uses her fingertips to find the place on her neck where her pulse is the strongest. Then, before she can reconsider, she lets Emer nick her flesh in that spot and observes as her blood beads to the surface. It’s not much. Just a scratch. That is all you need.

The blood will bring them. Every wraith within a quarter mile will crowd into this bathroom in moments, such is their thirst for the red juice.

Jude waits. She cannot see or hear or feel them, but she knows they must be there.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.