Chapter 23
C HAPTER 23
AUDEN
Evander looks like a dead man walking. The entire back of his lacrosse jersey sticks to his skin, the blood heavy and stinking of iron and earth, pasting the fabric to his skin.
Yet it’s me who receives a cautious prod about my well-being.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
Lavinia whispers it as the four of us traverse the narrow trail back to the house in a slow, tight slog. Our bodies are packed together under a shield created by Evander, his healing body able to manage the spell and forward movement, and not much more.
I, however, am having a very hard time masking my utter exhaustion.
Though my life element has rebalanced enough that I’m no longer catatonic, it hasn’t refilled. I’m drained in every sense of the word. Dehydrated, nauseous, shaky. My vision blurs at the edges, plummy spots casting through the center. Any thought I have of gaining information from the Blackgates has gone out the window as I struggle to stay upright.
Altogether my symptoms have manifested to produce a stumbling, weaving performance on this hike no matter how much I focus. The toes of my running shoes snag every rock and root, stumbling through smashed pine cones and brittle leaves crunching over the trail, and as a result, I weave here and there, palming the sturdy firs as I pass.
“I’m fine.”
“You literally just bounced off that tree.”
She gestures with a little laugh, and I glance at her.
Lavinia’s whole left arm is streaked in blood, the fine hairs dark and matted. Evander’s fingerprints had buffed away some of the stain around the original cut, healed by his renewed magic so quickly it would be an afterthought if not for all the evidence.
“But really—I know you’re fine, but healing him took a lot out of you. Literally, it seems.” She’s watching me now, and I have to look away as I bump another rock with my toe and stagger to the side. Lavinia makes to catch me, but I toss my arms out, balance firing at the last moment.
Thank God we’re almost to the manor.
“Come on, keep up,” Evander shouts from up ahead, feeling the tug on the shield as we fall behind, his pace increasing steadily with the stark onyx visage of the house looming ahead on its elevated perch. Like the world’s most gothic, inedible cake on a stand.
When we’ve resumed our huddled march, Lavinia places a hand on my elbow, her relic angled down and away. It’s the hand I healed—just a gentle reminder that she’s close enough to steady me. When I don’t move away, she grimaces at the ground and asks, quietly, “What if you have to do it again?”
“Let’s hope I don’t.”
I need water and food—and rest that I’m even less likely to get.
“Are we going to talk about who threw them?”
“Not many choices.”
“No,” she agrees, quietly.
The Cerises. Infinity. Winter. Maybe even Luna—nothing seems impossible or easy to dismiss since Ursula left us.
I nod to my cousin, driving fast and determined up front, Kaysa on his heels as we knot tightly—woozily—behind. “Let’s just see if we’re right and move from there. It’s much easier to confront everyone if we have another master.”
We march straight into the courtyard from the most direct route, the tearoom, which straddles the back of the house and the courtyard on the first floor. A relief, because I can put eyes on the only other possible weapon I know that exists in this manor—Shadrack’s Horace-killing Colt .45.
It’s still there. On the wall, next to the bear’s roaring final protest.
I don’t know if the antique revolver is loaded, or if it would work if it was, but it’s a relief that it hasn’t disappeared.
“Courtyard, straight ahead,” Evander directs, picking up speed.
We step through the glass doors leading to the courtyard.
The gaping center.
Unlike the outside of the black-as-night exterior of the house, the siding here is whitewashed brick, a canvas for climbing ivy reaching for the sky, gargoyles growling down from above. There are enough fountains to dry the Colorado River, and vegetation is packed into every inch except for the thin, star-tile walkways crisscrossing to various points of interest like so many veins, an echo of the design in the garden behind the manor.
Squat and square, the courtyard was designed as an outdoor space that could guarantee privacy in a world that was becoming increasingly less private, more prying eyes and population, even in the wilds of the Rockies.
But in the time since Shadrack envisioned it as a place of contemplation, it’d evolved like everything else. Not in a technological way—everything here is frozen in the time of Ursula’s childhood, her preference as matriarch and distrustful modern citizen. No, in that over the generations, bare soil and magical talent were augmented with love, time, care.
Like the rest of the grounds, the plants here are dying now. Drooping, drying, petals falling, and stems withered brown.
There are cracks in the whitewash too, ones that weren’t there days ago. Not superficial like Lavinia’s wound, but deep enough to touch the next layer, bricks dislodged and falling to the courtyard, cracked, broken, pebbled. The decay is from magic withdrawal. A spell from Ursula or some other source, I don’t know.
My bleary vision zeroes in on the eastern wall, where the ivy runs in thick ropes, as dense as yarn taut in a loom. The leaves overlap into a patchwork, feathers by another name. A single slash of sun nails the bare spot between swaths of ivy, revealing a smattering of black dots that freckle the whitewash. I point. “It’s there—the mural.”
Lavinia gasps—the most delighted noise I’ve heard in at least a day—as a smile lights her dirt-smudged face. “It’s a negative. Black stars on a white sky.”
“Exactly.” I nudge the ivy apart. Evander doesn’t help, holding the shield. “But I have no idea where the Great Bear might be. Nothing is labeled and with all this ivy, it’s hard to know what we’re looking at.”
We’re quiet for a moment, surveying the massive space before us. The sky above us has gone indigo, the clouds from this afternoon ambling on east, an intrepid slash of sunlight lasering onto the ivy, cut with precision by the western roof line.
“Wait, I have an idea.” Lavinia produces her phone and turns it on. Marsyas didn’t give her the memo about bringing an external battery, I see. After a moment, she unlocks it, swipes, and taps. “I have Radical Stars. My da—I, um, thought this app might be neat to use while we were in the mountains.”
Pinking with excitement perhaps at the fact that she can contribute, Lavinia flips the phone around so I can see. “You hold it up to the sky and it shows you what you’re looking at.”
“I have it too,” Kaysa adds. “It’s totally cool. Doesn’t need Wi-Fi or cell data, so you can really use it in the middle of nowhere.”
Evander leans in to inspect and Lavinia gestures to it, maybe a little sheepish. Over the fact that she hoped she might enjoy this trip enough to stargaze or that as a Blackgate she’d even think of doing something so romantic, I’m not sure. Now that I’m really looking at it, I notice the phone is nearly obsolete, which is odd, but who am I to judge someone who likes old things when I grew up within the halls of Hegemony Manor?
“It might be too bright now, but it could be worth a shot because I bet you Shadrack painted the sky how he saw it,” Lavinia explains, before looking up. “So, if we comb the night sky above, we can transfer the location of the Great Bear and go from there?”
I nod. “Genius.”
Lavinia smiles tightly, and her cheeks pink further. Without hesitation she points the phone straight up, her brows furrowed in the reflection of her shiny screen as the gyroscope within the phone syncs to the app’s features.
“Please work,” she whispers to it.
It sounds a bit like a spell spoken aloud, and maybe it is, because the second it’s out of her mouth and into the air, the app springs to life, and the darkening sky above is overlaid with the names of the constellations and stars of note above.
Ursa Major does not appear.
Lavinia slowly moves the app up and around. “Okay, there’s Ursa Minor… with the North Star, soooo… Ursa Major would be over there.”
She’s turned toward the western wall now, almost exactly opposite from where she was when we began.
“Wait,” Kaysa pipes up, with a little note of triumph right where she’s standing. “It’s a mirror. Ursa Major is in the northwest sky, but the mural is on the east wall and facing west.”
“You’re right,” Evander agrees.
And then we’re all nodding as Lavinia takes a screenshot of the location of Ursa Major and spins around. She holds it up to the ivy-draped mural, brows furrowed to touching and lips bitten in thought. “So, if we go southeast on the wall…”
And that’s when I see it. Right where the last fingers of daylight touch the ivy. It’s as if the sun itself is giving us a clue with the pointed direction of a penlight.
With Lavinia manning the app and Evander holding our shield, I turn to the youngest Blackgate. “Kaysa, do you think you can kill the ivy here?”
“What?” she gasps. “I can’t do that—that would be horrible!”
It would, but—
“Dehydrate it, Auden,” Evander suggests, gruffly.
I don’t argue, I just press my hands to the ivy and draw every ounce of water from the stems and leaves. The vines shrivel and peel back. The dried plants fall away, too brittle to put up a fight. Lavinia is on her tiptoes helping me reveal the constellation.
“You’re going to rehydrate the ivy, right?” Kaysa asks, voice small.
“Of course. I’m not a monster.”
The Blackgates of old would’ve taken my attempt at humor and flipped it back at me, barbed and well-aimed—I’d asked them to kill it outright, after all. The sisters don’t. Focused on the task, and perhaps truly changed.
Together, we scramble and pull and twine the dried pieces together and…
There it is, the Great Bear, Ursa Major.
Unlabeled, but just as Lavinia’s screenshot promised—hundreds of stars forming the larger of the two bear constellations. And there, literally highlighted by that final falling strip of sun, is the beast’s representative paw.
“Is that a niche?” Lavinia asks, fingertips brushing the paint.
I smooth my hands over the brick. There is most definitely a piece that doesn’t fit. I knock it and a hollow thrum sounds back. “It is.”
“Open it,” Evander urges, still holding fast to our shield enclosure. He knows if we’re right, the security wards will detonate, and we’ll need it. There’s no use in changing places now, though I would if he asked. I’m surprised he hasn’t ordered me to do so yet. That he’d demand to hold it first. Maybe that’s progress.
Kaysa inspects it, nose scrunched. “How do we open it?”
The entry has to be hidden, but well-made if it’s lasted this long, blending in with the side of the house. Brick isn’t an element, but it is made of pieces of the elements. That, I can work with.
“Stand back.” I press both my hands to the hollow piece.
Moisture floods from the brick into my fingers until the paint and mortar flake and crust just enough that the brick dislodges with a satisfying little sigh, dehydrated, not unlike the ivy.
I wedge it free, and there, behind the hollowed brick, is a dark vial—magically preserved, completely without dust, mold, age. I fish it out and turn to our little group and the fraying, narrow light.
The vial is cobalt blue and ringed with protective iron and a stopper set in wax, and more iron crosshatched over the top and neck like a spiderweb. We peer at it, foreheads bent and nearly touching as I rotate it slowly in my palms. A liquid roils within, sloshing against the sides, and leaving a film that darkens the vial to near black with every revolution.
And there, on the side that had been pressed into my palm, is the thickest piece of iron in all its protective trappings, letters etched in a hand that is blocky and efficient.
The Blood of Nostradamus.
“Wait, like, the prophet?” Kaysa asks, voice thunderstruck and eyes nearly cartoonish. “The guy with the long beard who predicted the rise of Hitler? That Nostradamus?”
In answer, the security wards detonate.
The Blackgates yelp and cover each other, while Evander and I track the wards as they ring us in a ten-foot diameter. This time, instead of a wall of fire, it’s pyrotechnics—gun smoke and magic exploding in a string of light and sound, all beginnings and fizzled endings. Again, the security wards just show their hand, they don’t do anything near the lethal capability they once had.
“I suppose that means this is the right one.” Kaysa gives a relieved little laugh once the wards dissipate and the smoke clears. “Good job, sis.”
She tags Lavinia on her healed arm, but then yelps when her fingers come away sponged pink with her sister’s tacky blood. “Ugh, gross. Maybe we’ve earned you a shower. You too, Evander. Might be time to throw away that shirt.”
His lips kick up in something of a smirk. “It’s not a shirt, it’s a jersey, and for your inf—”
Whatever pithy, flirty, grumpy response Evander had at the ready goes unheard, cut off by the long, desperate howl of a scream from inside Hegemony Manor.