Chapter 10
C HAPTER 10
RUBY
“Witches. Motherfucking witches,” Wren whispers as we barrel down the most beautiful set of stairs I’ve ever seen. They’re wide and winding, with shining marble planks and twin polished walnut banisters spiraling down to what looks like the main entrance to Hegemony Manor.
“And a kid named Hex ! Like, what is that if not a dead giveaway? I suppose it’s only a giveaway if you know magic is real, but Jesus Christ, talk about hiding in plain sight.”
“Shhhhhh,” I warn because I’m moving too fast and in too high of heels on a slippery surface to clamp a hand over her mouth.
The foyer is as sonorous as it is grand, and Wren is being too loud for the lack of distance between us and the room we just escaped from. It rises all three stories of the main house, with a massive, candle-burning chandelier hung from the ceiling, suspended from a long chain as thick as my forearm. But I don’t dare linger upon the glittering extravagance of it all—I don’t look anywhere but where my feet need to go.
Down, down, down.
Out, away, and into the cover of night, where we can slip off the lie that we’re Lavinia and Kaysa Blackgate. Where we can hide, and forget we ever set foot in Hegemony Manor.
Because if those witches, sorcerers, mages— whatever —get ahold of us and realize who we are and what secrets we’ve seen?
“Stop talking and keep moving or we’re dead. Just go .”
Our plan is to run straight out the front entrance toward the cars, slip through the barbed wire, and onto the road. There’s a slim hope in the back of my mind that because we weren’t supposed to be here, because we’re not actually Lavinia and Kaysa, the magic can’t hold us and we can disappear into the trees, wander long enough to get cell service, and safely call a ride.
It’s a gamble, a guess, but it’s all we have.
Wren beats me to the final landing, her strides stuttering, mouth dropped into an awestruck O . “It’s so beautiful.”
Instead of the stately wallpaper of the solarium, hallways, and the parts of Ursula’s study that weren’t covered in books, the entire foyer is painted in a massive mural of mountains and sun, wildflowers, and wet-bottomed basins.
It’s striking and completely at odds with the gothic noir of the exterior.
There’s a creak from above, a sound, movement, and in a blink, I’m grabbing Wren’s hand, my heart ratcheting back up to a furious pace against my sternum. “Stunning, gorgeous, amazing. Definitely haunted. Go .”
We plow toward the front door—doors, actually, a pair of them. The way they’ve been painted into the mural, it’s as if we’re stepping onto a trail leading through an alpine grove instead of barreling out onto those gravestone steps we saw in the daylight on the drive.
I wrench down on the levered handle, expecting resistance of the locked or magical kind, only to find I’m pressing far too hard, and leaning too far in. The door falls open easily, and as we fall with it, I lunge forward. My foot catches my drooping A-line skirt—the delicate hem rips.
Shit.
I won’t be able to return it now, and as much as it’s gut-wrenching to know that most of my cut of Marsyas’s upfront advance will now go to paying off the credit card bill for this dress, it’s really the least of my problems at the moment.
I barely break a stride, hiking up my skirt with the hand that isn’t holding on to Wren, my new flayed hem swinging, and rush down the front steps.
“She did ditch us. Old hag,” Wren grits out as we hit the bricks.
My head snaps up.
Our SUV is missing. A bald patch of drive squats beside a sleek silver sports car.
Marsyas left us.
Before the spell took effect. She slipped out, taking those keys she weaseled away from the chauffeur, and jetted before the speech. Before Ursula’s last breath.
“Oh God, ” Wren screeches. “That’s the driver.”
She extends a finger toward where a pair of shiny shoes catches the gray of the moonlight.
“He’s just like the rest of the staff, he’s a vegetable until they fulfill Ursula’s request,” I remind her without a second look, my attention on the looming gate, the barbed wire obscured by brush.
“Jesus, Ruby, look at him. That is not the same.”
There’s a stiff inhale and a sob bracketing her words, and she’s become completely immovable. I yank hard, but she tenses up further.
“We don’t have time—”
She folds over and vomits . It’s wet and thin, and stinks of champagne and watermelon. “Wren, what the—”
My eyes land on the man’s face.
Wren’s right. It’s not the same at all.
The driver isn’t asleep. He’ll never wake again.
His face is a bloodied mess, still wet, but it’s clear by the sunken lines of his features that his eyes are missing. His mouth gags open, an empty void, blood all over his teeth—tongue ripped out. His neck has collapsed in on itself, like a jack-o’-lantern left out too long after Halloween. No windpipe. No throat. No Adam’s apple.
All the soft parts above his torso are just… gone.
Gone. Like Marsyas.
A spell. She used a spell to kill him and get away.
If Marsyas can do that, what can the others do?
My thudding heart rabbits in my chest as bile lurches toward my still-working throat. I swallow it down, a ringing in my ears now, the coppery scent of this man’s blood on the Rocky Mountain wind.
I turn to look at Hegemony Manor. The specter of downward movement is in those dead-eyed windows, right where the staircase coils around the massive chandelier.
Fuck.
“Wren, we need to run, or we’ll be just like him.”
We race for the gate.
“Hard right.” I guide us into the grass off the drive, hoping that we’ll be more difficult to spot, even if it’s slicker here, the fresh dew of evening clinging to each newly deadened blade.
There are footsteps behind us now. I don’t know how many. I don’t even try to guess, or look back, or even count them over the pounding of my blood in my ears, the rough churn of my breath, the yammering of my heart.
It doesn’t matter who’s following us, only that someone is, and though we haven’t seen exactly what the younger ones can do, it won’t be good for us.
We need to leave.
The property line is straight ahead. Fifty yards. Thirty-five. Twenty. Ten.
“It’s not there,” Wren says, her voice hoarse from vomiting, and laced with fear.
I squint at the barbed-wire section, obscured by the close brush, and shadows of the private road, which, like most anything that’s not in the city, has no streetlights.
“It’s there. We’ll get close and try to slide through the strands. I’ll hold it for you and then you for me and then we’ll be out.”
Five yards. Three. One.
We stutter-step to stop on the slick and uneven terrain, the manicured grass giving way to the natural roughness of Colorado at altitude. The barbed wire is there, black and purposefully dull. Impossible to see without being two inches from our faces. It’s too tall for us to scale, so we’ll indeed have to go through.
I squint to check the terrain on the other side—
Beyond the wire is literally nothing.
The same sort of nothingness of negative space and dreamless nights, and consciousness before life or after death.
Absolutely blank.
Before I can stop her, Wren reaches a probing hand between the wires.
“No—”
My hand shoots out between her fingers and the fence, preventing her from touching it… and grazes the nothingness in between.
With a yelp, I snatch it away as if I’ve touched a hot pan on a stove.
Only it’s worse. Much worse.
The skin of my knuckles and the tops of my index and middle fingers on my right hand immediately frays and peels away. The fingernails are just gone, swaddled in a mass of sausage-casing skin, the ridges of flesh along tips of bone are exposed—as red and raw and throbbing as a literal beating heart.
Wren takes one look and screams.
I bite down the wail forming in my throat as the pain tears through me. My gut lurches, and I again fight the urge to lose the meager contents of my stomach along with my gumption because it’s clear now that we can’t go out, we can’t stay in, and they’ll be on us in—
“Turn around with your hands up, and relics clear.”
Auden.
His words are not commanding or even mean, but they’re an order. Over the searing agony of my hand, I vaguely wonder why he didn’t just use whatever magic he possesses to physically stop us. There was nothing in Ursula’s litany of rules that said they couldn’t use magic against two would-be escapees, only against each other during the search for the masters and the murder investigation.
But Auden would know more about magic than me, who learned of its existence mere minutes ago.
Wren is whimpering at my side, as she cups my wrist with a furious flurry of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Tears are on the run down her face, her expertly applied liner bleeding into the hollows under her eyes, mascara gathering in the corners. She’s white as a sheet. I have no doubt I’m much worse. My cheeks are wet, and I’m in so much pain, my teeth have started to chatter.
And so of course my little sister squeezes her eyes shut, opens her big mouth, and argues. “Why? You can kill us facing away just as easily as you can kill us looking at you. I’d rather not have your murderous sneer as the last thing I see.”
“Kaysa, I’m not going to kill you.” Auden’s voice is calm and moving closer through the brush. Judging from the volume, he’s only feet away now. And probably not alone. I don’t know what he can do as a witch, and I don’t really want to find out. “I have no interest in seeing any more dead bodies tonight.”
I suck in a breath and blink at the wall of literal nothingness ahead of us. Our only other, terrible option. “So what are you going to do?”
He clears his throat. “First, if you’ll let me, I’m going to heal you, Lavinia. I know you’ve been injured by the barrier. Next, I’m going to escort you back inside, where we’re going to tell anyone who’s decided you’re collateral damage in Marsyas’s assumed murder of Ursula that you simply left to search for her on the grounds, concerned for her safety and eager to prove her innocence.”
Wren and I exchange a glance. I find it hard to believe Auden Hegemony is helping us out of the goodness of his heart with his grandmother dead and his family stripped of its power. I also doubt it’s because I was such an enchanting dinner guest because literally everything about our “reintroduction” was awkward as hell.
But Auden’s file claims he loves to read, and if there’s anything I’ve learned selling books it’s that most readers like to unravel a mystery. I know I do. Maybe Auden does. Maybe right now that’s enough.
I didn’t want to be here tonight. I don’t want to be here now. I didn’t want to lie. But there’s no way out.
There’s only through.
“Quickly, girls,” Auden prompts. “They’re bickering over who stays with the will, but soon enough more searchers will be out here, and they won’t be as forgiving about the dead man on the drive.”
I look over my shoulder but don’t pivot my body. I need to gauge his expression. To search those very nice blue-brown eyes of his for any sign of malice. But they’re the same as when we first met—bright and alive—and if anything’s changed, it’s the exhaustion ringing them.
I want to trust him. I have no other choice. And I need to make sure Wren and I get out of here in one piece.
“You’ll heal me?” I confirm, finding my voice, as rough and stilted as it is. I don’t even bother with my accent.
“Yes.”
I swallow. “We’ll turn and raise our hands. But my hands need to stay together.”
There’s no way my throbbing, burning right hand can manage anything right now without support.
There’s a pause. “If that’s the case, I must remind you that if you use your magic on me, not only will I rescind my willingness to tell the others you were innocently searching for Marsyas and not trying to escape—you’ll be caught up in Ursula’s spelled prison.”
“Understood,” I bite out.
Wren turns first, arms raised and compliant. I follow slowly, darkness spotting my vision now, and my legs are seriously unstable beneath me. My hands are cupped out before my body, almost like one of those angel statues offering water in the waiting well of her palms.
When I present myself to Auden Hegemony, his magical eyes aren’t on my face—they’re on my wrists.
On the rabbits’ feet.
He’s watching them like cowboys in old Westerns watch another man’s gun. Ready to run or draw his own weapon the very second I reach for them.
That’s when it hits my pain-scrambled brain. The weight of what he’s said. What he asked of us.
Relics.
Our bracelets are relics—not masters but still. That’s why he doesn’t want us touching them. They’re magical and what ? A shield? An amplifier? Something else?
Auden Hegemony truly believes we have magic. The same Death Line magic that Marsyas wielded on our poor driver. That can dissolve a man like acid.
Considering the way he flinched in the garden when he grazed the rabbit’s foot? Maybe it is a loaded gun in the right hands. Not mine, but Auden doesn’t know that and neither do the rest of them.
The Blackgates are witches.
Which means we need to be ones too. At least for the next three days.
If we survive that long.