Chapter 2
C HAPTER 2
RUBY
The lie isn’t ours.
But we wear it as overtly as our new party dresses and shoes. As our drugstore lipstick and mother’s pearls. As the accents that sit, awkward, upon our tongues, waiting and ready for polite conversation over the course of one gilded evening.
“Fuck, it’s haunted.”
That’s the first thing Wren whispers to me after slamming the chauffeured SUV’s door shut with a decisive echo. She doesn’t use her accent.
Before us, the western sun is hanging over the Continental Divide like a blowtorch, a line of fire trailing along every nook and crick of the Rocky Mountain peaks. It’s beautiful—magical, even—the perfect backdrop for literally any story the night wants to tell. It also lies in stunning juxtaposition to the gothic mansion staring back at us.
Painted a flat black across a solid three-story construction, its windows are stacked like the eyes of a spider, while turrets akin to spindle wheels reach up, eager to prick the sky and send it to a deep sleep.
Hegemony Manor.
We’ve never been so close to it. It’s been perched on the edge of Mom’s tiny mountain hometown for a century and counting, vast enough to house every resident within its walls, its grounds larger than the city limits, all roped off by barbed wire strung for acres until they become miles.
For a few years after the divorce, we lived in Wood Rose with Mom, and drove past the manor on our way to visit Dad and our stepmom, Karen, in Grand Lake. Mom almost always pulled onto the shoulder for a moment’s appreciation of the moody lines of the manor, wishing the Hegemonys would open it to visitors or turn it into a bed-and-breakfast operation. Anything for a peek inside. Then three years ago a drunk driver took Mom away from us. We moved in with Dad and Karen, and the drives past Hegemony Manor became a relic of the past.
In this moment, I can’t believe we’re just feet from the front door.
I wish we could tell her.
Inside the barbed-wire perimeter and massive gates, there’s a beautiful brick drive that loops in a teardrop up to the manor and back out to the private road that leads to the property from the highway. I stand on that drive now, wedging my brand-new stiletto heels between the bricks as I stare back at Hegemony Manor, trying to find solid ground. Suddenly feeling nervous about this plan.
About what we’re about to do to the people who live here.
People who’ve been more rumor than reality in my life up until this very moment.
The rumors at school went like this: Three kids lived behind these great gothic walls and towering, treacherous gates. Two boys and a girl, orphans all. Cousins, adopted by their grandmother. Kept by nannies and tutors before calling boarding school home.
With a collection of rumors like that, as big and bold as the mansion that bears their name, it’s strange that we’re about to make rumor a reality and then lie .
I wouldn’t have said yes to tonight if Wren hadn’t already done it—my sister and her habit of hoovering up experiences to fuel her dreams of stage and screen.
“Do you think they name their ghosts?” Wren’s amber eyes pop wide, false eyelashes like fireworks as she leans in. “Like, ‘That’s just Old Imelda, crying in the foyer again’? Or maybe they just ignore them—too numerous to bother?”
“Please make sure to corner an honest-to-God Hegemony and ask.”
The sarcasm in my voice practically drips onto her dress but she ignores it.
“I just might. They’d probably find that kind of innocent inter est endearing after spending all semester with walking icicles in sweater sets and pearls.” Wren adds a self-indulgent hair toss while disparaging the entire female population of the Hegemonys’ boarding school of choice, Walton-Bridge Prep, before a shade of anxiety flashes across her face and she clutches my wrist. “Wait, what do we wear at the Baxter Academy for the Arts?” That’s where the real Lavinia and Kaysa go to school. “If they have some sort of awful green plaid as a uniform, I need to know about it for character development reasons.”
Wren is living for this.
I am not.
She whips out her phone. I pull out mine too, and my palms immediately slip with sweat around my phone case. I resist the urge to wipe my hands on the silk of my dress and try again, swiping away a “Made it to Boulder” text from Dad that I missed on the group thread twenty minutes ago. When my lock screen disappears, it reveals the document I have about the dinner party guests. It’s something Marsyas sent us after we’d accepted her opportunity—details on the families in attendance. Names, pictures, and surface information—employment, schooling, hobbies. Totally creepy, actually.
Evidently, no one besides Marsyas is related to “us,” which was much to Wren’s relief as she’d tagged literally everyone under the age of twenty attending as “so hot.”
Hot or not, these are people who need to believe we’re Lavinia and Kaysa Blackgate, at least for tonight. According to Marsyas, none of them have seen the sisters since the pair of them learned how to read and write. The girls aren’t allowed on social media, and, like everyone at this party, the internet has never heard of them.
“Do you have reception? This won’t load.” Wren stabs at her phone screen as if that will make it do anything. Looks like I don’t have a signal either. “I know, I know, if I’m quizzed on the specs of the Baxter Academy uniform, it’s my cue to recast the small talk to something far more interesting.” She waggles her eyebrows into her thick fringe of bangs. “Perhaps the ghosts.”
She’s about to laugh—until she sees my face.
I’m fairly certain I’ve begun to go green underneath my makeup. My heart is rabbiting against my breastbone, and when Wren ditches her phone to snatch my hands, they’re clammy against her dry grip. “Look, just because you’re allergic to fun doesn’t mean you need to be nervous. You’re going to do fine.”
I shake my head and try to put words to the unease uncoiling in my belly at the thought that this is actually happening. “I just don’t like this.”
Wren rolls her eyes. “It’s not actually haunted.”
It’s not that Hegemony Manor seems scary, per se, it’s just… too right . Too stately, the grass too green and lush for the summer drought, the air too still. It’s like the whole thing is a mirage, and a little dose of reality will slough off the perfection like dead skin.
“I know, it’s just—” I tug on Wren’s hand. Pinky to pinky. “Promise you’ll leave with me if I need to bolt.”
Wren’s lips purse into a lopsided smirk. “Only if you promise not to panic and at least make an effort to have a good time. It’s a party, not a funeral.”
“Girls,” calls a voice with a whisky-warm rasp—Marsyas, or tonight, Nona. Appearing from around the rear bumper of our SUV, Marsyas is a bowling ball of a woman punctuated by a tight chignon. She drops the keys into what truly looks to be a handbag fashioned from a decapitated raven. Like, with feathers and a wing and everything. Satisfied, she flashes that eccentric grin of hers, a mile wide and as treacherous as a canyon. “Let me have a look at you.”
Marsyas addresses my sister first—“Kaysa”—and Wren frowns. She isn’t a fan of the name she’s been given. The old woman’s fingers tug at Wren’s neckline, straightening the drape of silk across her collarbones and the flash of skin at her shoulders. At first I think she’s going for the price tag we left tucked under her collar, but then she removes the string of white pearls at Wren’s throat and deposits them into my sister’s open palm, the meaning clear— put these away . “There.”
As Wren drops Mom’s pearls into her wristlet without a word, Marsyas hits me with the full force of her critical eye. My dress is less complicated, an ankle-length A-line and belted, and it must pass the test because rather than a single adjustment she hums out a “mmhmm” and smiles again, teeth tea-stained and surprisingly wolflike for a grandma. I suppose I’m allowed to keep Mom’s pearl studs. “Perfect, girls. Now, take my hands.”
“Yes, Nona,” we answer in our accents now, as she’s instructed us to do, and sweep our hands into hers, stepping to either side. The black rabbits’ feet she’s clasped on delicate gold chains about our wrists tap gently into her own matching ones.
I’d declined my bracelets when she’d foisted them upon me, but I was informed wearing them was nonnegotiable. A Blackgate necessity.
My bracelets might go missing the moment Nona starts drinking.
This close, Marsyas smells of layers of expensive makeup and roses, and like us is dressed head-to-toe in black. Along with her own dead bunny bracelets, she accessorizes with an elaborate cascade of natural black pearls cloaking her considerable décolletage like a mass of tiny beetles. Her earrings have the unsettling swing of a spider weaving webs through the too-still air, stark against her pale powdered skin.
Marsyas doesn’t lead us toward the gravestone steps rising to the ornately carved doors of Hegemony Manor. Instead, we walk entwined down a strand of star-shaped stone tiles leading around the side to a massive manicured garden that hugs the rear of the house like a cape, its hem disappearing into the Rocky Mountain wilds.
Voices hum under the melodic whisper of stringed instruments, though the way the hedges bracket the space, no guests can be seen from where Marsyas’s steps have halted.
The old woman seems to be gathering herself, straightening her thoughts like she did Wren’s dress with a deep breath and an upturned tip of her heart-shaped face.
“Girls,” Marsyas whispers as her grip on my hand tightens impossibly, “two final rules, and it is imperative that you follow them.”
Her dark eyes are no longer mischievous as she finds each of us before continuing. They’re sharp with seriousness. My heart churns back up to racing speed as if a gun has gone off. I swallow and stare at her, focusing on every word.
“First, we need to stay together. Second, we must do whatever Ursula Hegemony says. Do you understand?”
My speeding heart skips and my stomach drops. Yet I match Wren as she answers, so that we’re in near unison. “Yes, Nona.”
Marsyas tosses back her shoulders, points her chin toward the garden, spiderweb earrings swinging, the pins in her hair glinting like the clustered eyes of a housefly. Her grimace curves upward with a heave and a new proclamation. “Smile, girls. Blackgates always smile.”
Grins in place, we enter under the bough of baby pink roses arcing above the privacy hedges. Though it’s still bright enough, small lights bound the garden like so many fireflies strung into position.
A clever trick.
In fact, floating, enchanted light seems to be a theme, as at the center of the garden is a line of seemingly hovering chandeliers, gold with taper candles illuminating a long table. Apparently, gravity doesn’t exist if you’re rich enough.
It’s so perfect it’s disconcerting. There’s not a single flaw.
The party is small—fewer than ten guests. And, as they all turn to assess our arrival, I catch Wren’s attention over the top of Marsyas’s intricate chignon, and soundlessly mouth, Promise me.
Wren’s response is yet another eye roll and a flash of pale lipstick and white teeth as she mouths back, Live a little.