Chapter 14
C HAPTER 14
RUBY
Wren and I make it from our room, down the hallway lined with dark window wells overlooking the inky black courtyard and back to the foyer, which is still lit up, a guidepost in the night. While Wren stands there gawking at the mural, I wrack my exhausted brain for something close to an educated guess about the location of a library. It isn’t like there are placards in a place as sprawling as Hegemony Manor, announcing the names of rooms and, if you asked Wren, their appointed ghosts.
Hegemony Manor is three stories above ground. Our quarters are on the second floor, the same floor as the solarium. It’s obviously residential, with wings mashed together at right angles overlooking the courtyard in the middle. My first inclination is that a library would be on the first floor. Something mixed in next to a formal dining room or a drawing room or parlor.
But then, somewhere between looking up at the cheery blue of the sky painted into the very ceiling, and the realization that the cut and positioning of the veiny marble is part of the whole beautiful picture too, the idea hits me that even if there’s a library on the first floor—and likely there is—that’s not where a very powerful secret witch would keep her very powerful secret witch books.
Not out in the open where just anyone could waltz in and read about the Four Lines and secret master relics and all the ways magic can apparently shoot invisibly from people’s fingers.
Ursula Hegemony would’ve kept that stuff close at hand, especially considering she obviously did not rely on computerized records of any sort.
Which is how we end up back on the third floor.
The faint scent of out-of-season lilac announces Ursula’s floor before we finish our approach, the smooth dark planks of the staircase bleeding into a lush herringbone carpet that traps the sounds of our footsteps like secrets.
During our escape attempt, I hadn’t noticed the delicate floral scent, nor its origin: two massive vases set like sentries along the landing wall, stuffed to brimming with the cuttings of lilac. They’re a royal purple, and a little wilted, but fragrant and gorgeous. They frame a massive portrait in an ornate, gilded frame as thick as most windowpanes. It’s not a portrait, but a painting inside. A little plate etched into the frame announces this is the man who founded the manor and likely wrote the clues and hid the relics we’ll be collecting for the next three days.
Shadrack Zebulon Gradefon Hegemony (1832–1910)
His title—High Sorcerer—is missing, probably as a safety precaution. But even without it, even without anything else beyond this placement of honor pointing toward his role in procuring both this land and building this house, it’s clear he’s a very important person, with every word of that phrase italicized within an inch of its life. It’s there in the cut of his jaw, the focus of his eyes, the aristocratic slash of his cheekbones and nose.
“It’s Shadrack the clue scribe,” Wren jokes, dismissing all the manufactured reverence with a tilt of her head. “Or maybe the secret relic Easter Bunny?”
“I know you’re just trying to amuse yourself so you don’t pee your pants out of fear, but please don’t piss off his ghost in the process,” I deadpan.
My sister’s lips twist. “I am trying to amuse myself. Which is why I’ll feed the dumbest nicknames I come up with to Hex and watch Evander eviscerate him. I disagree with Winter; sourpuss can be very sexy.”
“I’m going to ignore that.” I haul her to Shadrack’s left. “Let’s go clockwise.”
Every door is locked, none of them are marked, and before we know it, we’re hanging a right, down the hall that we know houses the study. It’s straight ahead on our right, smack in the middle of the floor. If the courtyard weren’t a donut hole in the middle of the house, Shadrack’s painting would’ve been on the back side of it.
I mouth study at Wren, and point to the pair of doors, still closed.
Duh, my sister mouths back.
She rolls her eyes for good measure before pointedly pushing a lock of hair behind her ear and leaning into the door to eavesdrop.
I scramble to yank her back, but she bats at me and darts away.
No! I mouth and successfully clamp down on her wrist this time, hauling her several steps away from the double doors before lighting into her.
“What are you doing?” I snap, looking back over my shoulder, relieved to see the doors still closed. “They’re going to know you’re there.”
“They are not. I couldn’t hear a thing, which means they couldn’t hear me.”
“That’s like assuming if you shut your eyes, they can’t see you. We don’t know what they’re capable of, and until we know, let’s assume they can hear us, see us, smell us, detect us in ways that normal people can’t—”
“ Smell us? They’re witches, not vampires or werewolves. Seriously, like—”
The study doors open a crack, and Auden’s head pops out, brows furrowed. He looks handsomely disheveled, suit coat doffed, the sleeves of his lavender button-up rolled up like a campaign trail politician. He blinks at us. “Can I help you?”
“Oh, um, sorry. We were trying not to bother you,” I blather with a stiff smile, immediately feeling like I’ve used up all my get-out-of-jail-free cards with this grieving boy. I swallow and drop Wren’s wrist. “The library? We don’t remember where it is exactly, but we thought it was this floor?”
“The reading room is off the third-floor landing in the turret. Follow the spiral stairs.”
Wren smacks me on the arm. “Told you.”
Auden nods. “Good luck and good night.”
He vanishes back into the study with a click of a lock.
My face flames as we shuffle back down the hallway. “I sure hope you know where these spiral stairs are after you made it sound like you did because that excuse won’t work twice.”
“I do, actually.”
When the scent of lilacs and Shadrack’s unsmiling face greets us a second time, Wren points triumphantly at an alcove beside the grand staircase landing. But from this vantage, with the nearest gas lamp flickering over my shoulder, I see it for what it really is—another set of stairs, narrow and short.
They dump us out into the open entry of a little jewelry box of a room with a single window on each of the four sides, the telltale scent of books punching us square in the face as our eyes adjust to the weak sconce light.
Window seats are tucked under each sash, a foursome of antique chairs in the same bright green of Winter’s dress are spun around a small table in the middle, and every other nook and cranny is set with books. Built-in shelves line every bit of wall space, and more ring the chairs in the middle, low and perfectly aligned with the chairbacks as not to make everything claustrophobic or lose what’s likely a very lovely view of both the mountains and Wood Rose in the day.
“Dear God,” Wren stage-whispers into my ear, “are you sure you’re not a witch? Because you might have conjured this from one of your book-nerd daydreams.”
This is what I dream of when Agatha’s is empty and I’m shelving carts of vintage paperbacks, though truth be told I’ve never seen a collection like this before in person. There must be at least a thousand very old, very loved tomes living on these shelves, holding new worlds between worn leather spines.
I swallow, heavily. “First objective, Death magic. Second objective, Four Lines information, like the Wikipedia overview of how it works, and—”
Wren cuts me off with a raised hand.
“Drill sergeant, a question.” I roll my eyes as she lowers her arm. “This must have happened before, right? Ursula probably didn’t just pull this out of her figurative magical witch hat, did she? Wait. Possibly not figurative. She probably really could rock a hat.”
I don’t doubt that.
“Okay, three objectives. Death magic, Four Lines information, hunt for the relics.” I hold up my phone. “Take pictures of anything that might be relevant, and we’ll review in our suite.”
Wren does her best impression of a military salute, and, after doffing our ridiculous heels, we fan out. I claim the far wall overlooking the courtyard, while my sister opts for the shelves overlooking the front lawn.
The books are as delicate and aged as I’d inferred, with translucent pages in some parts, the covers leather-bound or moldering cloth. Most of the books are typeset but some are literally hand-written in the same strangely shiny ink of Ursula’s last will and testament. And next to none have any sort of index.
I realize that perhaps I need to think like an ancient witch who already knows everything there is to know about witch culture and the Four Lines. If I wanted to find basic information about the Blackgate witches or the general distinctions between the Four Lines, it wouldn’t be in a book any Hegemony used often. Therefore, the type of book I want wouldn’t be close at hand or at eye level—in this room, Ursula’s office, or any other literary repository hiding in this house.
I start hunting for big, obvious titles on the top shelves. I’ve loaded my arms up with five huge reference-style resources and turned toward the reading table when Wren punches out a frustrated sigh—the kind that blows her bangs up and away. “I literally just found a book of recipes. Witchy cooking stuff with cauldrons. There were unidentifiable splotches in the margins. I mean, it’s cool to know that spells and cauldrons are actually a thing, but I really couldn’t tell if that was blood or wine or you know, witch juice, on the page.”
“That’s quite judgmental coming from someone who vomited watermelon gazpacho with a champagne chaser an hour ago.”
Wren’s book slams shut. “Very funny. Now I’m both repulsed and reminded I’m doing research on an empty stomach.”
“Stop complaining and help me with these thick ones. They look promising.”
Wren yanks a massive one off the top. It’s nearly square, as wide as it is long, and probably four inches thick. “Ley Lines and Their Faults: A Modern Guide to Energy and the Four Lines,” Wren recites from the cover, pulling a face. Then, she flips inside. “First printing, 1902. Super modern.”
“Don’t knock it until you read it.”
Wren blows out enough air to fill a large balloon with her annoyance. Focused tasks are not exactly her jam. Which is reinforced by yet another lobbed complaint five minutes later.
“Every mention of the names we know are almost like an afterthought—like everything is already understood.” Wren slumps back in her chair. “They mention the Cerises and the Hegemonys and whatever almost as a substitute for their line.”
That I’d noticed too. Everything I’d come across so far seemed to have used each family name interchangeably with the type of magic. Which wasn’t helpful when you were trying to figure what those were exactly and where they came from and whatever the hell else we had going on here.
“But the four families can’t be the only ones with these powers,” I answer, gesturing toward the books, with all their various authors. “There have to be more witches than just the ones in this building. I mean, we know their parents died, but three Hegemonys and three other people made this generation of cousins.”
“You make it sound like they were grown in a lab.” Wren’s head snaps up from her current book, mischief gathering at the corners of her quirked mouth. “Maybe they were grown in a lab. I mean, did you see Winter’s pores? No, you didn’t, because they don’t exist.”
I pointedly roll my eyes in an impression of her. Wren laughs, and I expect her to just tuck back into her book, but then she pings stick straight in her chair, an idea nearly bursting out of her eye sockets as her lips drop open.
“Wait.” She clambers for my wrist. “What if we are witches? I mean, Marsyas picked us for a reason. What if our branch of the Four Lines got lost somehow?”
I’m about to dismiss her starry-eyed suggestion with a quip about her seeing too many movies, because Marsyas’s targeting us had everything to do with our likeness to her granddaughters and our collectively gullibility, but then Wren adds, “Mom did love this place. Maybe she had latent magic and was, like, drawn to it? Like Marsyas was drawn to us?”
I don’t think that’s the case, but something like regret lances through me, collecting in my windpipe and weighing down my gut. I swallow and blink, doing absolutely nothing to mute the emotion.
After too long a beat, “Maybe” is all I can manage to say.
We work in silence until I flip to the firm center of the coffee-table-sized tome I’d been thumbing— Natural and Physical: Magic in This Day and Age (circa 1918), and a two-page spread reveals itself in full-color ink. Atop, in gorgeous calligraphy, it reads, “The Four Lines.”
“ Kaysa. ” I stab the page with an exclamation point.
A drawing very much like the famous Da Vinci depiction of the Vitruvian Man splits the double page in perfectly drawn anatomy. In the pockets of open paper on the diagonal and wedged next to both his outstretched hands and feet are little paragraphs, each labeled with the Four Lines of magic.
I shove the book under Wren’s nose, and breathless, we read the introduction.
The Four Lines
The Four Lines of magic describe the four manners of magical expression and amplification as recorded in witch clans settling North America in the 1600s. The Four Lines do not hold aegis over all magical forms and systems worldwide, in North America, or within the present-day United States. Information on types of magic outside the Four Lines can be found elsewhere. For the purposes of this text, information will solely focus on the Four Lines.
As much, the witches of the Four Lines recognize that though they all are innately magical beings, their abilities are conveyed in the way in which they are amplified. The Four Lines of witchcraft are Elemental, Celestial, Blood, and Death. The witches use available materials to enhance their magical abilities. Since the Witch Hysteria of the 1600s, the witches of the Four Lines have protected their magical amplification abilities by tying their amplification needs to a “master relic” that is protected by the designated High Sorcerer.
The purpose of this tether is to ensure each witch has continued and constant access to their amplification no matter their physical location nor external threats from non-witches. Without the tether, magic amplification is not uniform, and therefore unstable. Previous to the introduction of the master relics, some stability was provided by the ley lines, but that stability is not static and is based on location. The High Sorcerer’s hold of the master relics and the High Families’ maintenance of the Four Lines has provided the stability necessary to keep the sister lines safe from disruption and ensure that the continued practice of each manner of magical expression is consistent and active into the twentieth century.
“Okay, so while I’m not clear on why Ursula is making everyone work so hard, I get why the master relics are important now, I guess,” Wren says.
“Yeah… wait, look at that.”
I tap at the page, a few paragraphs down.
The first High Sorcerer to hold the master relics was Napoleon Demont Cerise in 1690, but since 1692 and the ascension of Mercy Hegemony to High Sorcerer, the title has belonged to the Hegemony family of Elemental witches.
“So, hold on.” I’m trying to parse through this, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Even though everyone seemed eager to work together to find the master relics in the study… wouldn’t someone like Hector or even Luna be interested in challenging Evander for that title if it’s technically up for grabs once they’re actually found?”
“Totally. This is ripe for backstabbing.”
“And if Marsyas did kill Ursula,” I continue, “wouldn’t she want in on the title too? They told us they executed her son, which is motive enough, but why just bury the person when you could also steal the legacy?”
Wren’s mouth pops into a little O . “Yeah, shit. What can we do about that? I mean, is she planning to use us somehow?”
“She already has. But it’s true, there could be more. Not much we can do about though.” I sigh. “Okay, let’s keep reading. Maybe there’s something else in here.”
I read the descriptions, starting in the upper right by the figure’s hand, and moving clockwise from there taking pictures on my phone as I go.
Elemental Magic (Green Magic)
Elemental magic bends the five elements—earth, wind, fire, water, life—to the will of the witch able to harness them. Elemental magic does not rely on overt, spoken spells, but rather the witch’s personal talents to manipulate the elements.
Because, save for the element of life, the elements are limitless and always available for use, Elemental witches have often been considered the most powerful and robust of all the surviving lines of witches. Elementals have long been able to avoid detection and, thus, persecution for their magic, simply because the temperamental aspects of the natural world allow for blurring the line between magic and normal fluctuations in the elemental forces.
Traditionally, the Hegemony Clan—and families like them—oaths its heir with a key worn around the neck. Other family members within the same generation may also receive keys to designate their own roles within the family beyond the oathed heir.
“It says ‘families like them,’” Wren points out. “Guess that answers the inbreeding question.”
I nod. “What about the colors? Green for Elemental, and the others have them too.”
“Shorthand?” Wren guesses, voice going high with a question mark.
I bite my lip. “Maybe.”
Celestial Magic (White Magic)
Celestial witches like the Starwoods are bound to the night sky. Moon cycles, star cycles, the sun’s rise and fall enhance their magic. These Celestial witches have power that ebbs and flows. Certain spells can gather power and bank it for use in rare cases when a large amount of magic is needed at one time.
Some Celestials, and most certainly the Starwoods, find tangential power in the sun and its solar cycles, though this magic is rare and most common in locations with the highest sun radius. The same can be said for tide cycles because of their relationship to the moon. For that reason, Celestial witches often live at or near the equator on the coasts.
Traditionally, the Starwood Clan oaths its heir with a pentagram pendant fashioned from moonstone.
“Dude, pulling power out of the stars, the sun, and the ocean is so badass,” Wren muses.
Blood Magic (Red Magic)
The Cerise Clan is Blood magic in all its lustful force—
“Lustful? Lustful? ” Wren crows. “A Blood witch totally authored this book.”
I shush her but a grin still plays at my lips because she’s probably right.
Hot to the touch, easy to stain, it leaves a mark. Blood magic drains and replenishes. It burns and heals. Rampant and unforgiving, it’s impossible to escape.
“Yeah, they totally wrote this,” Wren announces.
Blood witches like the Cerises use their own blood to let magic, sewing spells with a few drops, smoke to flame. But when they’re given someone else’s blood to use, the spells are different—instead of being let out, they’re let in, which allows their magic to heal or hurt, control, or cut loose whomever has knowingly—or unwittingly—given them access. Control over another person can be achieved when a drop of the victim’s blood is ingested by the Blood witch. Control then lasts up to twelve weeks.
Traditionally, the Cerise Clan oaths its heir with a horizontal line inked through the grouping of vertical lines Blood witches have tattooed on their inner forearms on the first Blood Moon of the witch’s thirteenth year.
“Awww, Evander went all bananas on Hex because he didn’t want us to become meat puppets for the next three months,” Wren practically swoons and bats me on the arm. “What a gentleman.”
Death Magic (Black Magic)
The Blackgate family is one of the lone surviving clans of Death Line witches in the world. Its proponents amplify their power and their spells through ritual sacrifice, often collecting physical relics of offerings and wearing them on their person. It is believed the historically prevalent mythology of both zombies and vampires stem from Death magic spellwork inappropriately viewed by the non-magical population.
Four Lines scholars have long tied Death magic and Blood magic in origin, offering theories of a single common magical ancestor that split a millennium ago as the two lines of magic evolved. The Blackgates and Cerises deny this connection.
Traditionally, the Blackgate Clan oaths its heir with a knife-point X scrawled over the heart. The X is made to heal without magical intervention, leaving an unmistakable scar behind.
My mind pages back to Marsyas’s elaborate black pearl necklace—was there a scar beneath it? Likely. Meanwhile, the first thing Wren does when we finish reading is brandish her wrist at me, the rabbit’s foot bracelet swinging in an exaggerated swoop.
“I guess you’re right about these things. They’re actually charged with death force or whatever and not just some sort of mage equivalent of a Scarlet Letter.” Then, in a low but very enthusiastic voice, she whispers, “Like, look over here, me in black, wearing zombie body parts! I’m a Death witch if you couldn’t tell .”
I shush her again and try to reread the section, but she’s not done.
“You know when I was doing my character research one of the meanings of ‘Kaysa’ was ‘pure torture’ and I thought, huh, that’s weird, surely they didn’t know about that when they named her, but I bet you they fucking did it on purpose.”
“Do I even want to know what Lavinia means?” I ask, flipping the page.
“You’re the mother of the Roman people. Totally cool in comparison.”
I scan for anything else, Wren does too. There’s nothing, at least not immediately.
When we finish, Wren is quiet a long moment, one bright white incisor biting the faded ruins of her once-perfect lipstick. “I know you like to joke about me watching too much TV, but given the circumstances you can’t fault me here…”
“Yes?” I arch an eyebrow.
Her voice drops, low and punctuated by her large amber eyes. “You don’t think we— they —reanimate the dead or anything, right? Like, necromancers? What else would inspire zombies and vampires?”
“I mean, you heard the skunk story. Sounds like it.”
“But,” Wren starts, “I think if we could do that, they would’ve had us interrogate Ursula. Ask her if she knows her killer’s name? Or who would want to kill her and why? All the answers her soul didn’t spill.”
She’s right, except…
“They didn’t do that because they immediately thought we were guilty. Or that Marsyas was. They wouldn’t trust us to reanimate her, especially after her ‘soul’s truth’ was out. They didn’t want us to touch her, they probably thought that we’d manipulate her somehow.”
My sister sighs. “Good point. Also: ew.”
Wren plunges her head into her hands, elbows propped on the table to support the weight of it. Her fingers ruffle her bangs, scrunching them up, out of their perfection yet again. She stifles a yawn. “Now what?”
I check the time: 11:23. “We read until we drop.”