Chapter 6
C HAPTER 6
RUBY
Condensation sweats from my cold glass to my trembling hand, and a blast of pain radiates up my arm. I’d shot to my feet when the light fixtures fell, knocking over my chair, and leaping away from the table.
In a blink it’s no longer pitch black—the flickering chandeliers lie on the table, beached on their sides like burning whales in a sea of spilled pink soup, crushed tableware between them. It’s dimmer than before, the floating lights that’d lit the rest of the garden still out, the house an obsidian void, absorbing the weak illumination like a black hole.
Swallowing, I can see now what I felt before—shards of fractured porcelain embedded in the meat of my arm, pinpricks of blood surfacing like beads of sweat between globs of pink gazpacho.
Bile burns the back of my throat as I catch sight of a slick of red on the corner of the table and seeping out from beneath Ursula’s fall of dark hair. The wind kicks up, carrying the scent of pine, mingling perfumes, and the coppery tang of blood.
Plunking down my ice water with unsteady hands, I scramble for my purse, furiously digging for my cell phone. I get a grip on the phone and yank it out so forcefully I nearly drop it. The screen comes alive. Still no bars of service. No Wi-Fi. No emergency call button.
“Does anyone have a signal?” I have no idea the volume of my request. My tone feels both meek and frantic, panic billowing out of me like a mushroom cloud as it rises above the garden. If I remember my accent, I don’t hear it. “Anyone?”
No one answers me. Everyone is staring at the knot of Hegemonys. Sanguine whispers something to Hector, but no one else is saying or doing anything.
I pivot toward Marsyas, ready to run for the car—if we can’t call an ambulance, we can drive Ursula to the hospital. I can drive Ursula to the hospital. I know Marsyas has the keys. I saw her slip them into her bag.
But Marsyas isn’t there.
I find Wren across the table, and she’s frozen on her feet, just like everyone else. Then the stunned silence breaks with another sound. A mournful wail.
Winter crying.
Balanced on her teetering heels, she’s sunk into a squat, her shiny floral dress tight against her calves—she’s clutching her grandmother’s hand. They’ve got her prone now, Auden cradling Ursula’s head in his lap. Beside Auden and opposite Winter, Evander has removed his jacket and is rolling up his sleeves. Workman-like, he applies two vigorous pumps to his grandmother’s sternum, before bending to blow air into her lungs.
Ursula’s chest doesn’t expand. My heart lurches. As Evander goes in for the next set of compressions, Winter reaches over and roughly shoves him backward. Evander is basically as muscled as a Greek god, but her fury and his surprise tips him back on the heels of his dress shoes. “That won’t work!”
I want to argue with Winter. I’m on Evander’s side—this isn’t over. It isn’t too late. Ursula fainted. Hit her head. We can get her breathing again; we can get her to a hospital. Hook her up to every machine available and bring their grandmother back to life.
“Evander, no! Let me do it! It’s my choice!”
Winter’s voice is shattered and pleading. I see now that she’s trying to get both hands on her grandmother’s body. Evander is pulling her away—maybe they’ve switched positions on life-saving measures? But Auden has a forearm up too, physically blocking his cousin’s desperate reach.
Evander yanks Winter to her feet and away from the body, holding her tightly by the shoulders. “Win, I won’t let you pay that price. Not—”
Across the table, a waiter pitches over into Marsyas’s empty seat with a sick thud and shattering clatter of the second course he’d been balancing on a tray. Remnants of arugula salad litter the lawn around him as he stares up, limp and glassy-eyed.
In the distance, more bodies fall—another waiter, the bartender, the security guard. All around, people drop— thud, thud, thud. Not a scream or complaint. Just the muted sound of bones and flesh hitting the grass or stone.
Suddenly a massive clang reverberates off the sleeping mountains.
The iron gates. Slamming shut.
Then, another collective gasp, soft and sharp.
A wisp of something like smoke rises from Ursula’s still form.
The Hegemony cousins watch—Auden tense as he cradles his grandmother, Winter batting at her mascara-bleeding eyes, lips trembling, in Evander’s firm grip. Yet none of them wear an ounce of surprise.
The plume of smoke shifts and swirls, until it forms a ghostly rendition of Ursula. The likeness hovers high above our heads, easily visible to everyone.
It’s… like nothing I’ve ever seen.
The apparition’s mouth opens, and Ursula’s voice fills the night, as clear and strong as just minutes before, when she was upright, powerful, and missing exactly nothing with those blue eyes.
“I, Ursula Elvire Muscatel Hegemony, High Sorcerer of the Four Lines, commit that this is my soul’s truth, for any and all living creatures to witness.”
Gooseflesh erupts on my forearms, peaked with specks of blood.
“My truth is this: I have been murdered.”
Something cold drops in my gut.
She—it, the voice—sounds so real. My brain tells me this is some sort of effect, maybe a type of audio/visual combination. But there’s no tinny feedback from hidden speakers, or misdirected sound. It’s from her. Clear as a bell and loud as before.
“The staff have been bodily quarantined. The Hegemony Manor Estate is locked down.”
I shoot a glance at that waiter, his white suit jacket stark on grass that seems less lush than before, suddenly brittle, sapped and faded under his weight.
“To the ears left hearing my truth, know this now: to leave the estate, you must complete my final requests set out for you within my last will and testament.”
The image pauses, its vibrant eyes seeming to take in our reaction as if it can truly see all of us staring back at it. Somehow satisfied, it continues, every word measured.
“If these requests are not completed by midnight on the third day, you will be locked upon the grounds of Hegemony Manor forever.”
My fingers begin to tremble. I try to stamp my numb feet, to will my flesh and blood still.
Nothing works.
Then right there in Auden’s lap, the body shrivels .
Ursula’s refined features suddenly wrinkle and spot, her lovely raven tresses graying and thinning to nearly nothing at all. She ages in rapid time—thirty, forty, fifty years added on to her corpse in a matter of moments—until she’s more of a husk than a human.
I blink once. Twice. Again.
The body is still there, skin and bones, as if every ounce of fluid fled with her life, her beauty, her soul.
It looks like magic.
It has to be a trick.
“I haven’t seen an honest-to-Merlin soul’s truth in twenty years,” Luna announces as if she’s just spotted a bald eagle in the trees. Then the old woman waves a hand at the Hegemony cousins. “Best move, children, the earth’s about to claim what’s left of her. Preservation is necessary when murder is involved—the soul will seal her up to avoid tampering.”
Auden, Winter, and Evander silently exchange looks, and, strangely, more than one set of eyes falls to me. To Wren.
What do they think we’ll do?
A low rumble rises in the air. First just a warning, then the lawn beneath our feet begins to tremble worse than my panicking body. The smashed porcelain on the tabletop clatters, bubbly sloshes against crystal.
The sound sends the Hegemonys scattering, Ursula’s shriveled corpse in the limp embrace of newly dry grass blades as Winter’s shoulders heave into another sob. Auden attempts to tuck her under his wing, but she slinks away on unsteady feet, preferring to wind her own limbs about her quivering frame in comfort. Evander withdraws and then thinks better of it, leaning down and removing something from Ursula’s hand before backing away for a second time.
The earthly trembling becomes an all-out shake as a seam forms from Ursula’s well-appointed heels to the cottony ends of what’s left of her hair. Her body slumps inward, as if the seam will rupture into a true, gaping crack and devour her corpse in one earth-rattling gulp.
Instead, the opposite happens.
Flecks of soil as fine as sand rise from between the weak blades of grass, shimmering darkly in the golden glow of the downed chandeliers. They swarm together like starlings, dancing and swirling above Ursula’s body.
Like the “soul’s truth,” it’s completely magical in effect. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no sound, but if it’s a projection, there’s no visible source creating it. It really does appear to be bits of dirt, balletic in the bite of a rapidly cooling night.
Then, with one sweeping, coordinated movement, the grains dive toward the body. They knit together, as tight as drying cement, about an inch above Ursula’s form. In a matter of two breaths, and nothing more, the collected earth particles have encased the corpse in a protective shell, not unlike the volcanic ash forever swaddling the bodies at Pompeii.
Ursula was there. Now she’s not. And yet she is.
This isn’t an illusion. If I walked up, I could run my fingers along the earthen surface that curves around the newly skeletal lines of her body. The covering is as solid and smooth as molded plastic.
“It’s true then. She was murdered,” Evander says, almost as an aside, staring at the encased corpse as if it’s proof. Maybe it is.
“Of course she was,” Luna replies with a mixture of sage wisdom and pure annoyance. “Souls tell the truth whether anyone is around to hear them or not. Even if we’d all been sleeping off our champagne when she went down, the victim’s shroud confirms foul play. And her last will and testament will prove it.”
It’s an explanation but I’m even more confused.
Luna juts a birdlike arm out to her grandchild, who’s still at the other end of the table. “Infinity, help me up, we best get reading that will. My bones have other plans for eternity than rotting in a guest room at Hegemony Manor.”