Chapter 20
C HAPTER 20
AUDEN
The search for more dead bodies goes quickly.
The magic does its work easily between the three of us, as we toil in silence. Within minutes, we not only know there aren’t any more, but that every other person who entered the property through the gates is accounted for.
The five permanent employees, ten contractors, and the single remaining driver—the Starwoods’ chauffeur because Hector always insists on driving the Cerises—are all accounted for. All sleeping soundly under Ursula’s spell.
The magic is definitive. It is the eleven of us, alive and moving about. No one else.
And so, as soon as we get the Blackgates’ former driver into the house’s root cellar and spell the body to an appropriate temperature, my cousins seal the exits to the cook’s kitchen in which we’re standing, seeming intent on murdering me .
Not with magic, but with pent-up accusations and withering glares of disappointment.
Evander is the first to speak, of course. He crosses his arms and leans against the central island, still dusted with flour from Chef Maggie’s toiling before our guests’ arrival. The hearth fire in the old kitchen throws shade on the profile of his face, already bruised with sleep deprivation and he’s silently simmering with a level of perceived betrayal he’s been holding in since the driveway.
“You knew about that body, and not only did you not tell us about it, you covered it up .”
I should’ve figured out something to say by now, but instead I fumble. “I—”
“Auden,” Winter cuts me off, grimace as sharp as the tilt of her clavicles above her aggressively folded arms. “Don’t deny it. We’d know your magic anywhere, and even if you hadn’t been stupid enough to cover it up, even I believe Hex’s account of you walking right past it.”
I lean against the pantry door as leisurely as possible and pretend to be unbothered, inspecting my nails but wishing I had a book to feign reading. “Congratulations. You’ve caught me with something I finally do know.”
My sarcasm might as well bounce straight off Evander, his body language and expression as hard as stone. “Something you purposefully kept from us.”
“Something you lied about,” Winter adds, more to the point. Like Sanguine, she has a habit of drawing blood with her admonitions. “Why?”
“We know the Blackgate girls don’t know of their grandmother’s plans, but do you ?” Evander goes further, for blood. “Are you working with Marsyas?”
“What—no. Of course not.”
Frustration sharpens the edges of my voice. I’m so sick of him questioning me, but this time I deserve it. Looking Evander right in the eye, I swallow down the frustration and speak as plainly, as directly as I can. Nothing to hide behind, all of it in the open.
“I covered up the body. Yes. Honestly, I’m not even sure why I did it.”
That’s the truth of it.
I took one look at the dead man, read the panic on Lavinia’s face, and I just did it. Her fearful eyes and pale cheeks rise in my vision now and I have to shake them away. Doing such a thing for this version of Lavinia that I barely know makes even less sense than doing it for the version of ten years ago I knew well enough to loathe.
I don’t understand it. I can’t defend it.
“But,” I continue, drawing in a deep breath, “I didn’t tell you because I simply recognized that we had enough going on last night and chose not to say anything.”
Even to my own ears the answer is both vague and weak.
Evander bares his teeth. “Last night you told us not to put all of our attention on Marsyas. You literally argued for us to look at everyone else while knowing there was a man dead by Marsyas’s hand on our property.” He’s no longer stoic, he’s shouting. “Knowing about the murdered driver could’ve changed things last night—”
“What would it have changed, Evander?” I shout right back.
Even I’m surprised when there’s the heavy bludgeon of anger in my words instead of simply my hot, festering annoyance that they’ve managed to tack this indiscretion onto a fight we had when Ursula was alive. I try to swallow it down, to soften my voice like I’d managed to do mere moments ago, but my next words still come out edged like a razor.
“It would’ve given you more leverage to interrogate the Blackgate girls, yes, but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Kaysa would’ve submitted to that truth spell just as she did this morning, she would’ve passed, and she would’ve shoved your sniper’s target off their backs. That’s it.”
“Auden’s right.”
We both turn to stare at Winter. She’s hauled herself onto the counter by the fridge, sagged sideways against it, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“While I’m not pleased he chose to keep this information to himself when he had ample opportunity both last night and this morning to share news of the dead driver with us and the group at large,” she continues, adding stress to each word aimed at my indiscretion, “the outcome wouldn’t have changed.”
Evander looks like he might blow a literal gasket.
“Between us? Everything has changed. Auden, I believed you yester—”
“Right, which is exactly why you’re bringing it up again. Asking me if I’m in on it. Again. Third time’s the charm, Evander. It’s totally when I’m going to cave and blurt, ‘Yep, you’ve caught me, I murdered Ursula for your title!’” I explode back. “Is that what you’re hoping to hear? That I’m the villain?”
Evander scrubs a hand down his face, worrying the fresh dark stubble lining his jaw. He pins me with his heavy-browed stare, the clear green of his irises the only pinprick of light. His exhaustion is different now, somehow. Older, deeper.
“Before we lost Ursula, I thought she was keeping something from me, not you. But now? You didn’t tell us about the body. You didn’t tell us about your title—”
“Our titles are not anything to be guilty about,” Winter snaps, slamming the side of the fridge with a thump that rattles the mixing bowls on a nearby shelf. “Let’s not re-litigate this shit, it’s just dick measuring by another name. No thank you, boys.”
Evander throws up his hands. “The point is… I’m going to be wondering what you’re keeping from me.”
I pin him with a glare of my own. “I’m not keeping anything from you.”
Evander stabs a blunt finger into the flat of his palm. His tone hardens into the one he’s been using to try to prove his authority to us, to the other High Families. “No more secrets from here on out. No matter how small.”
His strong-man act is not appreciated.
“What about you?” Winter challenges. “Can you honestly tell us you have no secrets, patriarch ?”
“None,” Evander insists—a slammed door.
Winter’s lips draw back, ready to attack him on both his answer and his attitude.
I don’t let her. “Okay, look. What we all know now is that Marsyas killed that man and left. Though, I do agree that Hex could be right about her being set up, I think we need to recognize that if Marsyas murdered Ursula and vanished before the deed was done, then she has a second part of her plan.”
That gets their attention.
Winter stiffens as she unravels what I’ve said. “If Marsyas murdered Ursula because she knew it would trigger the clause in the will to make the High Sorcerer’s title up for grabs but then left before she could be entrapped on the grounds, she has a phase two coming so that she can obtain the relics and the title.”
“Yes, exactly.”
There’s a little spark in Evander’s eyes in the millisecond before he narrows them and scoffs, “And you seriously think the Blackgate girls aren’t in on that?”
“I truly think they aren’t knowingly in on that. And after that truth spell of Kaysa, I believe deep down you think so too.”
Evander glances away. That’s enough to tell me I’m right. He could feel Kaysa’s innocence in that magic the same way I could read it in Lavinia’s panicked eyes last night as she stood, bravely holding her damaged hand.
And… shit.
“I just realized I’ve kept something else from you.”
They pivot my way, and I wince.
“I didn’t do it purposefully—I just, look, take this for what you will,” I sputter, flashing my palms, placating. “I’m so dead set on the Blackgate girls not being in on it because they tried to escape.”
“They what ?”
“They tried to escape,” I repeat as Evander’s eyes narrow. “They weren’t looking for Marsyas. I think they knew she’d ditched them. When I spotted them, they were approaching the barbed-wire fence. I could see they were negotiating what to do about the spell and Kaysa put a probing hand—”
Winter gasps. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes. Only, it wasn’t Kaysa who got injured—Lavinia wedged her herself between Kaysa’s fingers and the spell at the last second. When I got there, I ordered them to turn around and told them if they would stand down with their relics clear that I’d heal her. They knew they were in a bind and agreed.” I shake my head. “They were truly panicked and frightened. I don’t think it was an act.”
When I glance up, Winter presses the backs of her hands to her eyes, letting her head thud dully against the kitchen wall. Evander, of course, looks like he’s ready to gore me at full speed.
“You forgot to tell us they tried to escape and that you healed them?”
“I’m telling you now. Don’t make me sorry for it. Just take the information and use all your macho patriarch energy to solve this instead of sending me on some self-serving guilt trip.”
“She left them to take the fall.” Winter drags both hands down her face, the clarity of it hitting her now. She blinks at us, head shaking ever so slightly. “Or she simply didn’t tell them so they wouldn’t know. If they don’t know, they can’t reasonably be accomplices.”
“Shitty either way,” I agree. “If Marsyas has plans to use Lavinia and Kaysa somehow to obtain the masters and the High Sorcerer title with them, that means she has to hold all four master relics by the end of tomorrow. We need to consider how she plans to do that if she’s not on the property—I was there when Hex performed the hunt spell. She’s not here. And we just checked ourselves for any other people on the property and came up empty. Even if they’d obscured themselves, we would’ve found them with that spell. We’re locked in and it’s just us.”
For all our magical knowledge, for all we studied at the knee of the great Ursula Hegemony, for all that we are probably some of the best educated witches on the planet—I’ve never once heard of a spell that can transport someone into the kind of powerful magical lock-down that is currently imprisoning us.
Winter slips off the counter and starts pacing the length of the kitchen. “If Marsyas killed Ursula, she’d be insane to come back here. Marsyas knows the punishment for murder is death whether she was here for the will’s stipulations or not.”
“Which is exactly why she ran,” Evander grumbles. “ And killed that man in the process.”
Winter hits the end of the room by the fire and makes an about-face, pinching the bridge of her nose as if this is giving her a headache. It certainly might. “I’m going in circles— we’re going in circles.”
“You’re going in a straight line, actually.”
“Shut up, Auden,” they both bark at once.
I don’t, but I do change the subject.
“Look, we need to get out there. Last night’s plan is still in effect. We need to talk to who we can and figure out if even with the evi dence on the drive—someone else had motive. Or perhaps shares in Marsyas’s motive. It’s possible she could be working with someone else. If not her granddaughters, another party with a joint goal. It could’ve just been Marsyas’s role to leave, and someone else is still inside fulfilling their piece.”
Evander checks his Rolex—a graduation gift from our grandmother.
“Thirty-six hours.” Noon now, then. “Win, you hook up with Infinity and use that Liaison of the Lines relationship to check for Starwood motive.” She scoffs at the idea that either Celestial witch would have anything to do with this, but he ignores her. “Auden, you’re with me.”
A drop of relief swells in my gut. We’re on the same page. He’s making a plan and agrees with me.
“The Cerises or the Blackgates?” I ask.
“Whomever we run into first—the Blackgates might not be as clueless as they appear to be, and the Cerises have generations of motive. Win, if you see either group out there when you’re with Infinity, join forces. They’ll appreciate a knowledgeable Hegemony, and we’ll work both sides of this thing as much as we can.”