Chapter 12
C HAPTER 12
RUBY
Auden’s magic hunkers beneath my skin, nothing like the biting, terrifying chill of Ursula’s binding spell. He’d only touched me for a moment, but the mark of his power is pleasant, and enduring—and I can’t stop grazing my fingertips along the ridge of my repaired knuckles as we follow his cousin to the room that’s been set aside for Marsyas.
Winter leads us down a flight of stairs—not the big winding ones in the foyer, but the kind of hidden corner stairwell found in hotels. From there, we pop out onto the second floor and turn down a hall that takes us in a totally different direction than the way that would lead us to the solarium—I think.
It’s all very confusing, and darkly lit by sconces that do almost nothing to brighten up a hallway hung in more wallpaper that could double as a weighted blanket. The only irregularity is a long bank of windows at one side that might show some sort of green space. It’s hard to make out anything but what looks like the fuzz of landscape in the moonlight.
“All the guests stay on the second floor. The Starwoods are on the other side of the courtyard. The Cerises have a double suite here.” Winter gestures as we pass a pair of doors beneath twin female elk heads. “Your room is at the end of the hall.”
Winter gestures and makes a beeline for a suite settled under a huge roaring mountain lion. I suppose we’ll always know which door is ours. “In the morning, I’ll bring you a selection from my closet upstairs that might fit you both.”
We thank her profusely because this is truly generous, and Winter plasters on the same hostess smile we saw in the garden. It looks out of place on a canvas of her tear-stained makeup. “You’re welcome. Good night.”
She disappears down the next bend of the hall, rather than going back the way we came.
I shut the door and lock it, just as I did when we went to the bathroom earlier. Before I even have the dead bolt in place, Wren twirls into the center of the sitting room, arms wide and flailing.
“Holy shit, can you believe this?! This is insane! I totally thought we were goners back there on the drive when Auden was like, ‘Turn around with your hands up,’ but—”
Now, because I can, I literally clamp my repaired hand over her mouth. She bats at it, but I hold fast, scanning every corner of our suite. The richly appointed sitting room in which we’re standing leads to two bedrooms, each stuffed with a massive bed, marble fireplace, fainting couch, desk, vanity, wardrobe, plus enough mirrors and lavender-stuffed flower vases to guarantee something will be broken by the end of this all—if we survive.
Satisfied, I haul Wren into one of the two en suite bathrooms. Her heels slip on the tile in muted protest as I check both linen closets, the rainwater shower, the massive tub.
Finally, I remove my hand and Wren mutters something about her ruined lipstick. Like it was in such great shape after she vomited her guts out on the drive.
She might have said more, but it doesn’t register—my body is a live wire of worry that someone will overhear us.
I turn on the water—sinks, bath, shower—until it’s roaring. There’s no fan, but honestly, given the look of this place, I should’ve been pleased to have running water. I haven’t spotted a single electrical outlet to go along with the lamps—which I’m beginning to suspect are actual gas lamps, not replicas—and the lack of both Wi-Fi and cell service. Everything about Hegemony Manor is a step back in time. And not in the fake “let them joust” way.
My sister watches me race around. “Is all this necessary?”
“Yes,” I snap.
Wren’s hands fly up. “Whoa, there. I’m on your team.”
I suck in a deep breath. This room smells like they clean the tile with literal lemons. The air burns going down.
I snatch Wren’s wrist to pull her close. I force her to look in my eyes as the words flood out, as furious as the water all around us.
“We’re trapped on an estate with nine witches, and someone—possibly one of those nine witches—was willing to murder an old lady in her own backyard to trigger some magical Easter egg hunt. No one knows where we are. We can’t contact the outside world. We need to be as careful as possible. This is me being careful.”
By the time I’m done, spit clings to the corners of my mouth, my nostrils are flaring, and I’m sucking down this fiery, citrusy air hard. To show for it, all I get from my baby sister is a flash of her winning smile and a firm dismissal. “Oh, calm down. Just think of the story we’re going to tell.”
“Are you insane? We’re never going to get out of here to tell anyone.”
I clutch at her bare shoulders again, but when Wren yelps, I fling my hands out wide, palms bunching. “Sorry. It’s just—you are on my team. And I need you to focus with me on how the hell we’re going to survive the next three days.”
Wren’s lips fall into a flat, colorless line. “I am focused. Focused enough to amend your statement, Lavinia, with the fact that we aren’t locked in with a murderer.” I raise a stiff brow. “Marsyas did it. Why else would she vanish? Why else would she kill our driver?”
“If Marsyas did it and left, there’s no one to punish except for us .”
“You heard them in the meeting. They’re going to find a way around that. And they’re witches, surely they can.”
“We don’t know these people. They could’ve already agreed to off us if they don’t come up with a better plan,” I point out. Before she can protest that there’s no way, I add, “They had the time while we were running away.”
Wren blows out a “fine, jeez” breath, before whining, “But we didn’t have anything to do with it.” She motions to my newly repaired hand. “Auden will vouch for us.”
“We don’t know that.”
“He likes you, Lavinia. He’s helping us because he thinks you’re hot. And lucky you, because he literally has magical hands.”
Because she’s Wren, she adds a dreamy sigh.
A furious heat starts to creep up my cheeks, and I attempt to swallow it down. I barely know Auden and he didn’t seem to like me much at all until he saved our butts and my hand on the driveway. I’m not about to put all my eggs in that one very handsome basket with our lives on the line.
“He could be lying,” I remind her. “He could’ve healed me to ingratiate himself to us. I mean—we don’t know. Auden says he believes we weren’t in on it but even if that’s true, he’s one of nine other people here. There’s only so much he can do.”
“Trust him to fight for us—he already basically magically lied or whatever for us.”
He did. I don’t know why but he did. My thoughts are too jumbled to make sense of any of what he did for us when he found us escaping. Still—no. This won’t work.
I hook a brow at her. “Do you recall the last time we trusted one of these people when they simply seemed like they wanted to help us?”
Wren places a hand over her heart. “I take full responsibility for trusting Marsyas. Auden is different. And you know it—I can see it in the way you’re totally going full tomato right now.”
“Am not.”
“God, look at yourself, will you?” Wren flips our grip and hauls me closer to the mirrors. Then, my sister abandons her mission altogether when she notices the toiletries lined up in antique metal-and-glass packaging on the counter. She rummages until she finds a toothbrush and a little lip-balm-sized pot of toothpaste.
“Oh, thank God, my mouth tastes like bubbly and bile.”
The moment Wren’s dabbing the corners of her lips with a towel, fresh and clean, I launch into her.
“The point is we could become collateral damage, which they won’t figure out until we’re dead and they’re still locked in. They can only kill us once, and I’m pretty sure magic can’t bring us back, or Ursula would’ve been revived and doled out punishment herself.”
Wren shrugs her slim shoulders like I’m being completely melodramatic about all of this. Like she isn’t the theatrical one and I am. How on earth is this still an adventure to her? We have a single white-knight moment with Auden—who may or may not be trustworthy, by the way—and she’s back to floating on a cloud, being an adorable, bullheaded thrill seeker.
“So we’ll just tell them.”
I gape at her.
In answer, she hauls her butt onto the vanity counter—which is definitely antique and probably very breakable—and positions herself right in front of me. Wren shakes her head, voice low, amber eyes level with mine.
“We drop the accents, pull out our driver’s licenses, and prove we’re not Lavinia and Kaysa. We’re just two innocent girls who were propositioned by an eccentric witch-lady con artist while slinging falafel.”
I frown and Wren snatches up my hands, holding them tight.
“They’ll take pity on us, Ruby. Protect us. Auden is already in our corner and Evander has ‘overprotective grump’ written across his permanently furrowed forehead. I mean, even Winter is letting us wear her clothes, so she’s not totally two-faced.”
I wonder if, for all her time spent on stage and mainlining movies, my sister has completely forgotten that motive isn’t just something that appears in the aftershocks of a crime. It’s woven into all of it. Motive compels people not just to do bad things, but to do literally everything. Why on earth would the motivation to protect two strangers be stronger than the motivation to protect their own family, and its legacy?
Wren thinks she can bat her eyelashes at our problems, and they’ll solve themselves. That’s never how anything works.
Finally, I punch out an exhale. “It’s as hard to believe as it is to prove. Our driver’s licenses won’t mean anything to these people— they probably think the only valid type of identification is a passport anyway. Can you picture Sanguine Cerise driving herself anywhere?”
I can barely envision the woman brushing her own teeth. She probably has a manservant for that. The next two days and change will be roughing it for her.
Wren’s eyes begin to sparkle, and she waggles her brows in a way I should’ve seen coming. “I’ve certainly pictured Evander going a hundred miles per hour in the Maserati parked out on the drive, with me in the passenger’s seat.”
Exasperated, I tug myself away from her grip and run my hands through my hair—a terrible and futile idea because it’s full of product carving out waves I don’t truly have.
“Look,” I half-sigh, walking to the end of the bathroom and pivoting on one teetering heel, “they won’t believe us when we tell them who we are because they were already suspicious of us thanks to Marsyas vanishing, the dead guy in the driveway—when they find him, and I’m sure they will eventually or Auden will toss us under the bus or… something—and our unlikely appearance at this particular party after, what, ten years away?”
God, I’m truly pacing now, multiple laps under my belt. “And, on the extremely off chance that they do believe us, we’re two regular people who now know all about their very secret, very important witch stuff. If they’re willing to kill their own, they’re not just going to let two party-crashing imposters walk away with a handshake promise not to tell.”
I’m prepared to go off on Wren if she so much as mentions Auden “liking” me one more time, but instead she draws from her vast experience marathoning sci-fi on Dad’s Netflix account. “Maybe they can magically zap our memories. You know, just clean our clocks, and leave us by the side of the road, then we’d be two hot schlubs with no recollection.”
“I don’t think they’re ‘do no harm’ kind of people.”
Wren’s shoes fall off to the immaculate honeycomb tile with a one-two clunk-clunk . Her eyes lift to mine.
“Okay,” she says, and the word is a relief. The giddiness has receded, my worry hammered home and nailing over the thrill of tonight—the flirting, the magic, the surprise. You’d think seeing a man with his eyeballs literally ripped out would’ve done it, but Wren is nothing if not a pendulum swinging her way through the most exciting points in life. “So what do we do?”
And that’s when reality hits me too.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“Rubes,” she whispers, “do you hear yourself? We’re stuck in a haunted-ass house with witches, a dead body, and probably several named ghosts. We need to start thinking out of the box or we’re dead meat.”
Gambling, I haul myself onto the counter too and hold up the hand I’m very lucky looks and feels normal right now, an exhibit in what I’m about to say. “If there’s a way out of here other than what Ursula announced… don’t you think the witches would be on that?”
Her brows touch. “No, because they’re all focused on the relics and power they’ll win. It’s robbed them of their sensibility. And even if they didn’t have that distracting them, those people aren’t us .” Wren finger-guns me. “We’re resourceful.”
I nearly laugh because “gullible” is more like it. I bite my lip but it doesn’t cut the sarcasm. “It’s our resourcefulness that got us into this mess, sis.”
Wren sighs. “Bought hook, line, and sinker for a couple thousand bucks, a few compliments, and the promise of a good time for an easy lie.’”
We sit in the heavy truth of it. The running water is growing warm now, the enclosed space stifling and condensation beginning to mist on the counters. Wren’s eyes narrow.
“Marsyas had to have expected us to sell her out. Right? Tell them who we are immediately and beg for mercy. And to what end? She still looks guilty—her whole family looks guilty.” Wren taps her bottom lip. “So what’s the play?”
“Does it matter?” I sigh. “Whatever she intended, it was for her own means. Now our job is to survive. That’s it. Not play the game, just to survive it and make it out. To Dad and Karen.”
To Dad and Karen, who are in Boulder for a weeklong art exhibition. It’s Saturday night in midsummer and with the Ren Fest over, no one’s even going to miss us until my shift at Agatha’s on Wednesday afternoon. By then, we’ll either be locked in here forever or free because we survived or we died. Fuck.
“How?” Wren asks, softly.
My sister knows how to act, but I know how to strategize—or, well, at least plot, thanks to every dog-eared mystery I’ve ever read. “We learn everything they expect us to know and wield it like a shield. We’re going to have to be them to survive them.”
“Okay, but that’s just defense. Reactionary.” She claps for emphasis. “We need to do something too. We need a sword to go with the shield.”
Wren’s right. A hundred percent right.
“They suspect us…” I start, my mind stumbling through the fog of our situation. Then, it clears, open and bright. “So we’re going to have to prove them wrong and find the killer. It’s either Marsyas—and we’ll have to show we had nothing to do with what she did—or it’s someone framing Marsyas. Either way, finding the truth will protect us from the witches’ suspicions and from the actual murderer—”
“Because we’ll tag their ass before they can off us.” Wren grins something feral. “Okay, where do we start?”
Our fencing metaphor has a good answer. “Before we wield that sword, we need to strap on the shield. Both the informational one—the basics about the families and the magic— and the actual one.”
I present my wrist.
Wren’s face scrunches. “You think the dead bunnies are shields?”
“Auden said as much—they’re relics.” She blinks at me, and I throw my hands up like we were ordered to do at the fence before lowering my voice into something deeper. “Turn around with your hands up, and relics clear.”
Wren smirks. “Was that supposed to be Auden?”
“You know it was. You just didn’t get the line right when you did your impression five minutes ago.” She’s annoyed but doesn’t argue. “The point is the Blackgates are witches. If they’re witches, we’re witches . The kind who do eyeball-sucking, murdering magic—with these things. Relics, not master relics, just regular ones.” The foot swings in exclamation, a little furry pendulum. “The more we know about what they can do and how they use them, the better we can protect ourselves with their reputation, even if we can’t actually do a single thing.”
Wren flicks her bracelet. “It would be cool if it weren’t so utterly disgusting. Doing magic through dead things? I mean—ew.”
“It’s just an educated guess. One we need to confirm,” I say, though the skunk story and the way everyone glanced at us before Ursula’s body was covered are pretty good hints along with the “Death Line” moniker attached to the Blackgate name. “We need to know as much by morning as possible.”
“Morning, when somebody might notice the magical Band-Aid covering the dead driver?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Okay.” Wren slips off the counter to the tile, stomps into her heels, and looks to me for direction, repeating her earlier question. “Where do we start?”
Ursula’s office would be ideal—she probably had the most top-secret information close at hand—but it’s also probably still full of Hegemonys. Judging by the way things went tonight, they had lots to discuss.
I raise a brow. “You think this place has a library?”
“Oh, I’m betting it has at least three.” Wren straightens the waist of her dress, which has meandered. “Probably all haunted.”
“As long as the ghosts don’t report back to the witches what we’re actually looking up, it’ll appear we’re doing our research for the master relic scavenger hunt.”
I turn off all the faucets in succession. Without the rush of water, the silence is suddenly deafening.
I grab my sister’s hand. “Let’s go figure out what we’re dealing with.”