Chapter 17
C HAPTER 17
RUBY
Once I’m showered and dressed in high-end athleisure courtesy of Winter Hegemony—and have made sure Wren trades the cocktail dress for the same—I tie on a pair of designer tennis shoes so pristinely white it feels like a crime to wear them, and go in search of food.
As Infinity promised, there’s an entire spread set up in the entrance to the solarium. Laid out is a tray of delicate pastries, whipped butter to match, several bottles of Evian, three carafes of coffee and one of hot water for tea, and actual cream served with sugar cubes and wafer-thin bone china. There aren’t any scones in the pastry selection—a fact I would’ve attributed to a joke by Auden at my expense if last night hadn’t gone so terribly, horribly wrong.
Breakfast in hand, I cast about the gorgeous space—which I didn’t really admire in the fevered minutes after the murder. The room’s west side is completely made of glass, configured in a trio of grand double doors and windows with sashes so slim they seem but a whisper in the glass. This allows for an unfettered view of the stone veranda with the gardens, fountain, lawn, and mountains beyond.
Mercifully, the room is empty. I’d like to engage in as little small talk as possible with people who think we’re cogs in a murder plot.
Wren trails her fingertips along an ancient settee more expensive than Dad’s house, arranged like the others with side tables and coffee tables, and their own bevy of candle pairings in such a way that somehow makes them perfect for both small, quaint conversations, or purposeful seclusion. Take your pick.
Though we’re alone, Wren has her accent pulled on, straight and tidy, when she turns to me with coffee so pale it could be straight cream and two absolutely heavenly looking croissants piled together like throw pillows atop a parchment-thin plate, and announces, “It’s a lovely morning to sit on the terrace, don’t you think?” She gestures dramatically with her priceless porcelain like the stage rat she is. “We can’t sit in this giant room, alone, stuffing our faces with croissants. We should be outside, alone, stuffing our faces with croissants.”
“Did you not just tell me half an hour ago that you wanted to throw up?”
“And you told me it’s only going to get worse, so I better get serious about sustenance and hope my gut can keep it together.”
Wren takes off, absolutely expecting me to follow. And I do—but not before snatching two butter knives from the arrangement, slipping them into the long pocket sewn into the hip of my tights.
Silly? Maybe.
But without actual magic, and with the multiple x factors making up the rest of the Hegemony family, a butter knife—two—seems like a reasonable weapon to keep on hand. With my flowy tank top settled over the waistband, the knives are completely camouflaged. And… there if I need them.
The terrace is affixed to the western part of Hegemony Manor and therefore the wrong direction to enjoy the morning sun, but I trail Wren as she drags me to a bistro table just far enough from the roofline to be positioned squarely in the rising light as it crests the turrets.
As we sit, I try not to stare at the still, shrouded form of Ursula over the lip of the terrace. The proximity tugs at my heart, especially with the abandoned hull of the dinner table, with its shattered porcelain and beached chandeliers, a still-life reminder only a few more feet to the west.
I nibble at my croissant and force myself to look at the view and work on a plan of how we’re going to address today. Everything is a painter’s palette shot through with the unfiltered crispness of Colorado summer. Gone is the abject perfection that came with Ursula’s magic when we first arrived, and what’s left in its wake is the abject perfection of nature’s own hand, told in wheaten golds, soft greens, warm browns, and sapphire, cloudless sky.
And there, on a trail in the distance, is a blur of motion.
“Is that… Evander?” There’s a figure in a red shirt and black shorts kicking up dust along a trail. The brawler’s build and the warm brown skin are answer enough, but then, as I lean forward, I realize there’s another person behind him. “And Auden?”
“And Winter.” Wren points to someone in pastels moving against the brush toward the tree line. I squint at the moving bodies, cranking through a switchback and into a wall of netted pines.
Wren stuffs the remainder of her pastry in her mouth, dusts crumbs from her hands, and stands. After a swallow, she says, “Good call on athleisure. Let’s get moving.”
“Wait. You want to chase them?”
“I want to join them, duh.” Wren’s already quickstepping it toward the stairs that lead down to the garden. “They’re up to something, and if that something has to do with the relics, it’ll be the perfect distraction to the discovery of our friend on the drive.”
I rise from my seat but hesitate. “You do remember that the last time we saw all three Hegemonys together, Evander wanted to interrogate us. I mean, he literally tried to stop everyone from going their own way for the evening because he wanted to drill us about Marsyas.”
“I do, which is why I think it’s best to change the narrative. We need to show them we’re engaged in the magical scavenger hunt, and we’re fun to hunt with, not to mention beautiful and talented.” She shimmies her shoulders and winks, again pointing herself at the garden. “Nona’s vanishing act really killed all of our goodwill last night, but we can build it back up.”
I hold up a hand. “I have a better idea.”
Wren cocks a brow at me in question.
“If they’re there, that means the third floor is empty.” Winter all but spelled out that the Hegemony family lived on the third floor, with guests on the second floor, and the first floor for entertaining. “Which means the study is empty.”
A mischievous gleam instantly appears in Wren’s eyes. “Oh my God, you want to snoop?” she whisper-squeals. When I nod, she does too. “Better idea is better. Lead the way.”
The third floor of Hegemony Manor is deathly quiet as we wedge open the door from the corner service stairs and peek into the convergence of two halls.
To the right, the corridor leading to our target, the study and all the books therein. To the left, a line of heavy wooden doors interspersed with plant stands, pedestals with cut-flower vases, and oil portraits.
We creep into the hall, and I hold the stairwell door until it snicks shut rather than slams. Despite my proclamation of an empty floor, Infinity might still be in the reading room, and—
“Oh shit,” Wren curses, as the nearest door in the non-study hallway yawns open.
I fling us against the wall of the opposing corridor, until we’re both obscured and pressed against the heavy wallpaper. Wren nods toward the study, obviously suggesting we make a break for it, but even on carpet pile three inches thick our footsteps will most definitely be heard by whomever is this close.
And besides, I want to know who else is up here and why.
I shake my head, a finger pressed against my lips, and pointedly shoot a glance toward the turn of the corner, where the other person is five feet away at maximum. Wren gets the picture and stops struggling against me, her own features scrunching in concentration as she listens too.
“I can’t believe you,” seethes a whispering voice—a female. Ada, maybe? Or Winter, and we misjudged on who was hiking up the mountain. There’s the whip of something soft colliding with something much harder. “Put on your damn shirt.”
“She was upset.” Hex. Definitely Hex. Wren and I make eye contact. His voice goes muffled as he must pull the shirt over his head. “I was trying to help.”
“You were trying to help yourself to a vulnerable girl who’d rather light your balls on fire than ever date you again.”
“She let me stay, didn’t she?”
“On the couch. Because you weren’t needed or wanted, but she’s a Hegemony—”
“Says you. And how’d you even know I—”
“How could I not ? You’re really goddamn lucky I care enough to lie through my teeth about the two of us going to get Mama and Papa food and then marching up here to retrieve your ass.” There’s a tap on plastic. “We’ve already wasted five minutes. Come on, we need to materialize with pastries and coffee ASAP or we’re both screwed.”
Footfalls start echoing our way as they head to the stairs we just used. Beside me, Wren squeezes her eyes shut, her body pressed flat against the wall and still as stone. I hold my breath, but I can’t look away as the twins appear in profile, still deep in conversation as Hex fixes his collar.
“Okay, yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t think about what it would mean for you—”
“Of course you didn’t. You never do. And it’s not just me. You know the stakes here. And stakes make everything worse.”
Unblinking, I wait for them to notice us. Wondering just how we can explain away our eavesdropping—which we can’t. But Ada storms ahead of Hex, through the door to the stairwell. He follows in a rush.
When the door crashes shut behind them, I finally exhale, snatch Wren, and jog straight for the study’s double doors, the thick carpet muffling our advance. It’s blessedly unlocked, and empty.
“Holy shit, Hex dated Winter?” Wren asks, breathlessly latching the doors before throwing herself against the jamb with a dramatic flair, like she’s about to faint. “And then he snuck out and tried to get with her last night? After all that?”
“None of our business,” I stonewall, making a beeline for the stuffed bookshelves.
“Are you kidding?” Wren screech-whispers, following my path. “It’s totally our business! A secret like that is exactly the sort of juicy shit we need to know.”
“I highly doubt Ursula was murdered because those two used to date and Hex apparently has exactly zero self-awareness or boundaries.”
“But it could be important. You heard Ada—their parents might blow a gasket if they figure it out. Quel scandale! ”
“The wrong scandal. We want to learn about whatever happened ten years ago.”
Wren cocks a brow, her mood swinging back to mischievously delighted with the croissant carbs hitting her bloodstream and the thrill of what she’s just learned in the hall. “Turn our educated guess into a research-based reality? Or drop it on the cutting-room floor?”
Talk about mixed metaphors. “Yes. That.” I gesture to the bookshelves. “Let’s dive in at eye level and work from there. You start on the left; I’ll start on the right. Our priority is anything that can give us insight into what happened to Marcos Blackgate, the cousins’ parents, and, I don’t know, any sort of ledger or record that Ursula may have kept.”
Wren rolls her eyes but allows me yet another mock salute and gets to work. Though she can’t do so without hearing her own voice. “You know, I’m supposed to be the trusting one and all that but maybe I’ve been listening to you because, well, not that they have something nefarious going on but… why would Infinity just offer up their theories to you in the hallway?”
This does surprise me. Both the timing of Wren’s query and that she’d think of it at all. Even worse, I don’t have a great answer. “I… uh, thought they were making conversation.”
“Before seven in the morning after a night full of literal terrors?”
My breakfast flops unceremoniously in my gut. “Valid point. I thought they just wanted someone to talk to. Some people are morning people, you know.”
“Well, yeah, but, like, why you ? You’re so much of a stranger that they didn’t recognize you.” I don’t miss her emphasis on the fact that I’m not the person they knew all those years ago and yet they accepted me as such.
“Um… I guess that’s something to think about.”
Wren taps her temple. “Multitasking. Searching books, thinking about motive.”
“You know studies show that multitasking actually makes you mediocre at everything instead of more efficient, right?”
“Only someone who fears the power of multitasking would even set out to prove that point.” Wren starts combing through her side of the shelf. “Anyway, something to chew on with Infinity.”
“Indeed.”
It doesn’t take long for me to key in on several uniform, leather-bound journals. I pull out the first one and flip through it—last year’s date is prominently stamped at the top. Short entries line page after page, with longer missives taking up pages in handwritten ink. “Looks like these are dated ledgers of some kind.”
Sweeping across the slim spines, I go ten years back. Ledger retrieved, I begin thumbing through, intending to find the dates in July because the yearly dinner seems like a good place to start in figuring out the timeline and circumstance of the deaths in question.
My sister frowns. “Where’s the one for this year?”
“Maybe in her desk?” I guess.
Wren must agree because without a word, she scuttles around the desk and starts yanking at knobs and handles carved into the massive piece of furniture.
Within the ledger, the pages are lined, and thick with the same looping handwriting I’d seen in Ursula’s signature when I bound my blood—and the two of us—to the contents of the will. Dates run in an orderly fashion throughout—each page is topped with one, and though there are often gaps of three and four days, they’re sequential entries of what appears to be Four Lines business.
Funds donated against a new oil pipeline.
A record of a presentation from Horatio Cerise (Hector’s father?) on new medical technologies.
Correspondence with the United States Forest Service.
But in mid-March the pages go blank with a strange gleam.
“Locked, locked, locked,” Wren groans. “Maybe that key Auden has goes to these?”
“Maybe. Though Evander had a key too, remember? He put that ring on its chain.”
“Oh right.”
As Wren gives up on the desk, I turn back to the strange border between what appears to be bare paper and the pearlescent sheen—it’s like where a frozen puddle meets its melty edges, the line of delineation a haze. Before thinking twice, I rub my thumb across it.
“… and knew Callum was gone…”
I yelp and drop the book.
“Was that…?” Wren gasps.
“Ursula’s voice?” I confirm. She’d said those words. “Yeah.”
Fingers shaking a little, I kneel to retrieve the slim ledger. I’d dropped it face down, and when I pick it up and turn it back over, two gleaming pages stare back. Bracing myself a little, I tap my forefinger on the shiny part.
Again, Ursula’s voice blares up from the page.
“… the wards were intact, something that Ulysses would’ve known.”
Wren is kneeling now too, lower lip snagged between her teeth as her hazel eyes flare wide. “It’s almost like she did a magical voice memo or something. Maybe go to the beginning?”
“Good idea.”
I place the book on the thick rug between us, and thumb back carefully until I find the first page on which the strange gleam appears. On the page next to it, Ursula’s entry celebrates the spring equinox.
The next date, March 21, is scribbled at the top. Below it, words are scratched out with thick, deep scratches of quill. Then the gleam begins.
Starting at the left-most edge, I touch my index finger to the shimmering page and drag it across like a new reader following sen tence after sentence across a chapter book page. There’s a delay, some muffled noise and settling for a second or two at the beginning, then yet again the words of High Sorcerer Ursula Hegemony rise into the room.
“… This is the voice of Ursula Elvire Muscatel Hegemony, High Sorcerer of the Four Lines. There has been an accident. No—no, an attack.”
There’s a pause and Wren and I exchange a glance—though Ursula’s voice is now familiar to both of us, what’s not is the tone. Rather than the gravitas and confidence we’d heard in life and after her death, here she sounds exhausted. Shaken. Like she’s been crying.
“I have opted to record my voice because… honestly, my fingers are not working properly at the moment.” There’s a deep swallow, a long exhalation of trembling breath. “I must regret to enter into the Four Lines records that my children, the oathed heir Ulysses, Lana, and Callum, are gone.”
Gooseflesh prickles my arms.
My finger skips to the next page and Ursula’s voice picks up again.
“The following is a timeline I have put together from the evidence and circumstances around the discovery of their bodies in various locations upon the grounds of the Hegemony Estate. For reasons that will become apparent, I will not go into detail about the location of where each of my children was found. I will state for the record that Ulysses, the oathed heir, was found first, followed by Callum, then Lana, and that the evidence suggests they all died in the same manner.”
Ursula’s voice is clipped and professional, even as it seems worn to nearly nothing. Her sense of duty hangs in the air like humidity at the beach.
“It appears,” she continues, “that on the morning of March twenty-first, the three of them were… coerced into attempting to find and destroy the master relics hidden upon the grounds of the Hegemony estate. As directed by Four Lines decree, the locations of the master relics are known only to me, the High Sorcerer, and each one is guarded by lethal security wards in addition to the secrecy surrounding their locations.”
Ursula had mentioned the disabling of the security wards in her last will and testament. I’d figured they just deterred theft or detection… not that they were lethal .
I truly shouldn’t be surprised.
“The security wards were intact, something that Ulysses would’ve known as oathed heir from his years of training under my aegis. Per accordance with custom, he did not know the location of the master relics, nor their composition. However, it appears that with outside influence, Ulysses, Lana, and Callum were able to locate three of the four master relics, and performed a coordinated spell in an attempt to bypass the wards and retrieve the master relics. The spell did not work, and the security wards activated.” There’s a deep, tremulous inhale. “The security wards for all four master relics detonated, killing my three children instantly.”
Oh. God.
My heart plummets, nausea churning in choppy waves against my sternum. Wren’s chin bobs as she wipes a hand across her face, catching a fat tear before it dribbles down her cheek.
“At exactly ten A.M. this morning, the High Sorcerer’s ring alerted me to a trip in the wards. First, I summoned the nanny on staff to escort my grandchildren to a predetermined safe space within the manor. Next, I summoned my children to search the grounds for intruders while I, alone, inspected the security of each master relic. My children did not answer.”
Ursula’s voice breaks, and now there’s something hot and hard in my throat.
“I learned very quickly why they had not responded. Ulysses was nearest, found seven minutes after the trip in the wards . At first, I believed he had perhaps come across the would-be thief and was injured in a fight. But when I tried life-saving measures, I realized what had occurred. My eldest son was dead by the wards meant to keep his inheritance safe.”
I swallow thickly, doing absolutely nothing to dislodge the emotion balling in my windpipe. My gut trembles; Wren sniffles.
“From there, I moved to the next closest master relic. I could see from afar the shape of a body and knew Callum was gone. Here, the master relic had been revealed to the open air, but the security wards kept it in place. I obscured the master relic and searched for the final two. The third place I tried was empty, the relic apparently undisturbed. There were footprints but not a body or signs of an injury that could have been a result of the detonation of the master relic’s security ward. No telltale sign of spell use or magical signature. The fourth location was where I found Lana, gone like her brothers.”
Ursula takes a moment here to collect herself with several breaths that bleed from one page to the next with my moving finger. When she picks up again, anger sparks in her tone, her words gaining speed and ferocity.
“I found no other bodies with them, but the evidence of coercion speaks for itself. My children are heirs to the title of High Sorcerer. Ulysses, Lana, Callum. They’d all taken their oaths to the Four Lines. They’d all produced an heir per the Hegemony custom of volunteerism and surrogate vacation of rights.”
“Wait… they were bred ? Like racehorses?” Wren hisses. We don’t have time to parse that weird witch shit—I shush her with a shake of my head and start my finger across the page again.
“It is unfathomable to me that my children, with all they had given to the Four Lines, with all they had given to me, would abandon their ambitions and abdicate their duty to protect the Four Lines by making an attempt to steal the master relics that provide order and safety to thousands of witches who call the Four Lines home. For this reason, I believe they were spelled by powerful magic to go through with this… this plot, that ultimately led to their deaths.”
Ursula’s voice trembles and my fingers shake right along with it.
“I do not know at this time if the coercion occurred from another magical group, unmagical persons, or from within the Four Lines. But I will find out who did this—and I will make them pay.”
The shiny page comes to an end.
“That’s it?” Wren asks, craning her neck, greedy fingers tugging at the pages.
The entries afterward are one bleak day after another.
An adoption ceremony for Evander, Auden, and Winter.
A joint funeral for Ulysses, Callum, and Lana.
Meeting after meeting of heads of the High Families—Ursula, Horatio, Luna, Marsyas.
And then, thumbing ahead, we find the entry for the next annual meeting, July of that year, just like the one we’d attended.
This time, there’s no stunned voice memo. There’s not even a hint of emotional edge to Ursula’s looping, confident script. Just one inflectionless paragraph.
At the annual gathering of the High Families of the Four Lines, arguments were presented, and a verdict reached concluding Marcos Blackgate of the Death Line was guilty in the coercion and ultimate deaths of Ulysses, Callum, and Lana Hegemony on March 21 of this selfsame year. Per Four Lines law established in the time of Salem, the punishment for the murder of another witch is death. I, Ursula Elvire Muscatel Hegemony, meted the appointed punishment at 11:43 P.M. on this date, July 13. It was determined that the line of succession would point from Death Line matriarch Marsyas Blackgate directly to her granddaughters—Lavinia Blackgate, age seven, and Kaysa Blackgate, age six.
And that’s it. The passing of a torch, lives changed forever.
I sit back on my haunches, completely wrung out.
The Hegemony parents died while locating and trying to remove—destroy?—the very relics their children were now tasked with finding. A fact that Evander, Auden, and Winter clearly knew—they’d been there for the murder trial and subsequent execution of Marcos Blackgate.
Truly, they all saw him punished. Executed. Every person in this house. Marcos’s mother, his wife, his kids too.
How absolutely horrifying.
Wren draws in a rattling breath. Her face is pink, her eyes still leaking. “Do you think—”
A violent pop from the fireplace behind us cuts off Wren’s question, and we both jump—but then another voice we know booms into the room.
“Hegemony Manor guests!” Evander calls from both the fireplace flue and seemingly everywhere. “Please gather in the third-floor study. A master relic has been found.”