CHAPTER 60 GIGI
GIGI
Hawthorne House didn’t look any different than it had the last time Gigi had seen it, but it was hard not to feel like everything had changed, like the Gigi who had visited Grayson here on occasion was a different person. For one thing, that Gigi had never traveled with an entourage.
They were a motley crew, if by motley, you meant some combination of wounded, dangerous, barely masking desperation, and in need of a shave.
Of Gigi’s three companions, Slate was unquestionably the most stable at the moment, and even Gigi could recognize that things were pretty dire when My-Only-Friend-Shot-Me-But-I’m-Not-Going-to-Get-All-Up-in-My-Feelings-About-It Boy was the grounded, rational one in a group.
Knox hadn’t spoken—to Gigi, to anyone—since they’d left the Thorp mansion.
Toby’s brood factor had gone off the charts when Gigi had confirmed that Candidates could die in the Crucible.
Truthfully, Gigi was having trouble finding a wellspring of eternal optimism herself.
She’d managed to get ahold of Savannah and had ascertained that her sister had survived her encounter with the duchess but definitely wasn’t feeling chatty.
Unsure what else to do, Gigi had decided to allow Knox to deliver her to his employer. Hence, Hawthorne House. Per the instructions Knox had received, they came in a back way, and Alisa met them at the door.
“She’s all yours, Ortega.” Knox broke his hours-long silence. “Delivered in one piece, as per our deal. I’m out. She’s your problem now.”
In other circumstances, Gigi might have been offended by that, but Knox pretty much had a universal get-of-jail free card at this point, given the whole my-first-love-was-also-kind-of-my-sister-and-now-she’s-gone-and-I-can’t-even-hate-her-because-maybe-she-really-did-love-me thing.
“Not going to inquire about your payment?” Alisa arched a brow at Knox.
“You planning on holding out on me?” Knox’s voice sounded the way his eyes looked: hollow.
Alisa stared at him, then clicked her gaze over to Gigi. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Everything,” Knox replied, and then he turned to Gigi. “Like I said, you’re her problem now, kid.”
“Not a kid,” Gigi replied amiably, “and I’m everyone’s problem, pretty much always, but if you think I’m letting you stalk off to wallow in the dark place alone, Knox Landry, you’re almost certainly underestimating my ability to jump on your back and cling to your shoulders like a spider monkey with attachment issues. ”
Knox choked. He didn’t snort. He didn’t wheeze. He choked, like his body was caught between a laugh and a roar. Gigi decided to take that as a good sign. She was debating whether or not to try her luck with a bear hug when a familiar voice spoke from beyond Alisa.
“Gigi.” That was all the warning Gigi got before she was pulled into a tight embrace.
“You’re okay.” Grayson bent his neck to murmur directly into the top of her head. “And you are in so much trouble.”
“Or I would be,” Gigi corrected, “were I not a legal adult who would be happy to do the I-have-agency-and-I-know-that’s-hard-for-you dance while we walk and talk.” Gigi wiggled out of Grayson’s grasp and deployed scooty hands in Alisa’s direction. “Lead the way, oh lawyerly one.”
“To where?” Alisa said.
“The action!” Gigi declared.
Slate snorted. Audibly. Grayson pivoted sharply to glare at him. “You.”
“Him,” Gigi agreed. “He’s mine.” She gestured at Knox.
“That one, too. Your uncle Toby is more of a temporary-custody type thing, just until we get Avery and Eve back, but for now, I understand from my temporary Toby that we’re all working toward the same goal, trying to solve pretty much the same mysteries, and I just know in my heart of hearts that there’s a whiteboard around here somewhere with clues written all over it. ”
There were, it turned out, four whiteboards.
“Meet Lucy, Ethel, Bonnie, and Clyde,” Xander told Gigi and her entourage.
“You name your whiteboards?” Slate said dryly.
“You don’t?” Xander replied, and then he looked from Slate to Gigi, from Gigi to Slate, and back to Gigi again. “You have horrible taste in men,” he deadpanned.
“And you have extremely large whiteboards,” Gigi replied, surveying them.
All four were covered in notes. Gigi could make out several different sets of handwriting. She recognized Grayson’s and Xander’s and was betting the left-handed scrawl was Jameson’s. As for the other handwriting snuggled up with Grayson’s here, there, and everywhere on board number two…
Gigi assessed the occupants of the room. In addition to her crew, she counted six Hawthornes (four brothers, one wife, one aunt), one Alisa, one Max, and a Lyra Kane.
Bingo, Gigi thought.
“This is it?” Slate eyed the boards. “This is everything you’ve got?”
“He, too, is very impressed by your large whiteboards,” Gigi translated, and then she gave herself a minute to take in the writing on all four boards: notes; shorthand; a geometric symbol; what appeared to be a poem with a strange array of dots underneath it; a lone photograph held to one of the boards with a magnet.
As Gigi read through it all, certain words stuck in her head.
Prague. Orpheus. The Mercy. Monoceros. One entire board was taken up with a timeline that stretched all the way back to a Crucible in 1967.
From across all four boards, names jumped out at Gigi, one after another.
Calla. Zella. Lyra, my Lyra. Edgar and Luiz Aquila Reyes. Alice. Avery, Eve, and Hannah.
Gigi couldn’t help glancing at Toby when she read that last one. Uncle Grizzlypants Hawthorne hadn’t said much on the flight, but Gigi had her ways—enough so that she now knew that Avery’s mother, Hannah, had once turned down an offer from the Gilded Blade.
Enough so that Gigi wasn’t surprised to see the name Alice on the board.
“You want to tell me everything,” Gigi announced to the room at large.
She took a page out of her siblings’ books and chose not to phrase that as a question.
“All of you, Hawthorne and Hawthorne-adjacent types alike, want to walk me through everything you know, explaining every last notation on this board, so I can make some additions of my own.”
Grayson opened his mouth, probably to object, but Slate preempted him. “Save your breath. Your sister always wins in the end.”
And eventually, Gigi did win. The others walked her through everything, bit by bit. Gigi said nothing until their explanations were done, and then she held out a hand to Xander. “Marker me, baby.”
Xander obliged. “Lucy, Ethel, Bonnie, and Clyde are all yours.”
Gigi started with the timeline, which she extended back from 1967 to 1951. Over the year, she wrote the word Crucible and three names: Helena, Vega, and Andy, adding a notation that Vega and Andy, at least, were pseudonyms chosen as a part of the Crucible ritual.
Next, Gigi turned her attention to the whiteboard with Grayson’s handwriting on it… and Lyra’s. You could tell a lot from handwriting.
I shall call her Code Name Buying Limes, Gigi thought.
Beneath the heading Watcher/Lily/Woman in Red, Grayson had written Calla’s name, and he’d identified her Candidate for the current Crucible as Eve.
Lyra’s scrawl took over for the heading Hand/Omega/Woman in Black, with no Candidate yet identified for the current cycle.
Grayson’s grandmother was the Judge/Monoceros/Woman in White, and Avery’s name was written beneath Alice’s with a question mark next to it, since it was theoretically possible—though, Jameson believed, unlikely—that the Omega was the one who’d taken her instead.
Regardless…
“It wasn’t supposed to be Avery,” Gigi said, and then she told them about Nora.
All about Nora. Then, adding notes to the board here and there as she went, Gigi moved seamlessly onto Helena Thorp and the Crucible and spiders and webs, not to mention the fact that Helena Thorp had insisted Calla wasn’t the Watcher.
No one interrupted Gigi, so she just kept going and going.
“At the end of the Crucible,” she eventually circled back to explaining, “one of the three Candidates ascends—that’s what they call it—and becomes the Watcher.
The other two, if they survive, return to society.
The Gilded Blade places them somewhere they’ll be of use, in wealthy, powerful families, close to would-be kings.
There’s a distinct possibility our favorite Blade-y Lady-Cult has been doing this since the Middle Ages, thereby establishing an indeterminate but possibly very large number of family lines passed down through the generations.
In a historical context, I guess the whole thing almost makes a twisted kind of sense?
Not a lot of choices for the ladies of the Middle Ages! But I digress.”
“Survive?” Grayson said the word like it was a thorn in his throat, like even after he spoke, it was still lodged in his windpipe, making it harder to breathe. Gigi couldn’t bring herself to even look at Jameson.
She offered them what she could. “Some years, all the Candidates survive.”
“But not always.” That was Knox, from the edges of the room—as far from the rest of them as he could get without Gigi initiating Project Spider Monkey for his own good.
“Not always,” Gigi echoed. “And technically… I never saw the Woman in Red’s face, just her eyes, and Helena seemed pretty certain that Calla was dead. And technically, I kind of was told that there was no Calla Thorp anymore?” Gigi swallowed. “That Calla was gone.”
“And that’s it?” Lyra asked. “That’s everything?”
“Almost everything.” Gigi found a blank spot on the board Xander had called Clyde and drew the Thorp fleur-de-lis, labeling each component part of the symbol as she did. “Lily. Omega. Monoceros.”
Gigi could see it now that she was familiar with the term: The bottom of the fleur-de-lis could have passed for a stylized, pointed horn. Lily. Omega. Monoceros. The Gilded Blade.
“Helena Thorp adopted this symbol as her own,” Gigi explained, “but the necklace she got it from belonged to one of the other Candidates in nineteen fifty-one. Vega, as she was called in the Crucible, came from a certain family line within the Gilded Blade, an ancient, dangerous one. When Calla pulled her disappearing act six years ago, what really happened is that Helena sent her to Vega’s family for training.
Based on Nora’s reaction to the fleur-de-lis symbol, I’m betting she’s from that same very dangerous family line.
” Gigi paused, then ripped one last bandage off.
“And also Nora might have heavily implied that men who know about all of this stuff tend to die?”
Gigi hadn’t seen any point in holding back, not when Grayson and his brothers already knew so much, but as she said the word die, she couldn’t help glancing at the lone photograph on the board, at the names written beside that photograph: Edgar and Luiz Aquila Reyes.
Lyra’s story had been chilling.
“On the bright side,” Gigi said, determined to find one, “I was told immunities could be bargained for when a Candidate says yes, and every Y-chromosomer in this room has a close connection to a Candidate, past or present, so we’ve got that working for us.”
Hopefully. Probably.
“You’re all safe enough.” That voice, Gigi thought. That accent—musical and sharp. “For now.”
Gigi whirled, and there Nora was in the archway, backlit like some kind of apparition.
“Where’s Oren?” Grayson’s aunt Zara demanded, immediately going to DEFCON 1… for values of DEFCON 1 that were poised, polished, and extremely pissed off.
“Close by, I’d wager, with me in his sight,” Nora replied.
“I found exactly two weaknesses in his otherwise flawless perimeter, but I never would have gotten this far if John Oren hadn’t allowed me to.
The security measures around this place are, in a word, impressive, so I can only assume that Mr. Oren made a strategic decision to use me to test the efficacy of his precautions and that he then allowed me to make my way to all of you because he’s confident he can take me out at any moment—and desperate to hear what I might have to say. ”
Nora’s general air of zen about the possibility of being taken out was not comforting, but Gigi did her best to rally before anyone else could launch a welcoming attack.
“This is my friend Nora,” Gigi announced.
“She’s the sentimental and stone-cold meditative type but also kind of deadly, so let’s all just take a deep breath and—”
Grayson did not take a deep breath. He moved toward Nora like a shark through water, “You,” he said.
“Hello, Grayson.”
Gigi blinked. “You two know each other?”
Nora stepped across the threshold and into the Great Room, moving like a person used to flowing between shadows and light. “Your brother and I met a little over two years ago,” she told Gigi. “At Harvard.”