The air in Blackwood had grown heavy, weighed down with something dark and invisible. It started small—first, it was the tension that pricked at the back of my mind, and then the strange way people looked over their shoulders, eyes shadowed with something like fear.
Then the disappearances began.
By the time the third person vanished, the whole town was buzzing, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Luca and I were somehow at the center of it. The curse, the ritual… It all felt too connected, like something we’d disturbed was now reaching out, picking off people one by one.
The first time I heard Isaac’s name was in the library. A whispered exchange between two older women at the checkout desk caught my attention. I was shelving books when I overheard one of them mutter, “They should as
