Chapter 33
C HAPTER 33
AUDEN
“What?” A gasp barely hisses out of my lips, entirely engulfed by Evander’s fierce, “Excuse me?”
The girl I’d known as Lavinia draws in a stiff breath, her whole body shivering on the inhale.
“I’m not Lavinia Blackgate, and she’s not Kaysa Blackgate.”
I stare as she begs us to understand, voice brimming with pleading, hope—and bald shame. There’s not a trace of that mildly British accent we’ve come to know—that I’ve come to very much like—the past two days.
“We’re not Blackgates at all. Not even witches.”
There’s a long beat of silence.
I hear her words, her new voice, but I’m searching her face for signs that it can’t be true. The dark hair, the dark eyes—fathomlessly deep and sparkling with tears. The delicate swoop of her nose, the pinking of her cheeks, and the swift way she initiates a smile. The dimple that appears like a shooting star. It’s all there.
I took the suggestion and saw exactly what I’d wanted the moment she arrived.
I never second-guessed. Not about this.
“Give me a break.” Winter skewers her with a certain expression of righteous disdain honed and perfected as tennis team captain, head prefect, Hegemony. Human beings want to be in her good graces—it’s a survival technique as much as it is the path of least resistance. Winter Hegemony is never someone you want to disappoint. “This isn’t a soap opera. You weren’t switched at birth.”
The girl who is not Lavinia presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. When they come away, her right one is smudged with the ashen proof of her lies.
“My name is Ruby—that’s why I failed the test just now. Every truth I told registered as a lie because I was addressed as Lavinia.”
Her tone is calm, direct, and shaking with fear. She gestures with a shaking, ash-stained hand at the girl encased in Ursula’s magic.
“This is Wren. We’re a pair of local sisters that Marsyas recruited to pretend to be her granddaughters for this party. She paid us—two thousand up front, and she promised another two thousand afterward—for what we thought was four hours of pretending to be Lavinia and Kaysa. It… obviously turned into more than that.”
Evander sighs heavily. We would have learned this yesterday if he’d used Kaysa’s name in his truth spell. Or if either girl had felt they could trust us enough to tell us.
Hex is so indignant with rage that his movements are unmoored, even as he stays rooted to the ground before her—Ruby. His hands flex, the point of his Cerise family ring still exposed and winking. He’s absorbed her blood, which means, at least temporarily, he has control of her if he wants it.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No! Check my room. Look in our purses. It’s all right there—our driver’s licenses and debit cards have our real names on them.”
“You know what? I’m going to do that,” Winter announces. Then she grabs Infinity’s hand. “And you’re going to come with me and check for your master.”
They leave, up the stairs to the terrace without so much as a look back.
“Wait.” Hex fixes Ruby with a sneer. “So let me get this straight. You were paid a couple thousand dollars to pretend to be witches at a dinner party?”
Ruby’s beautiful face is now mottled with bloody ash and tears, her despair and desperation as palpable as the ley line beneath our feet. I don’t know how anyone here can question this story. Every ounce of it is true. My gut twists tighter with each word.
I believe it. I believe her. And it fucking sucks.
“We didn’t know Lavinia and Kaysa were witches—that any of you were!” Her fear-streaked gaze ping-pongs between our faces, but her round of pleading expressions starts with me and ends with me. “We had no idea. None. We were instructed to make small talk, deflect any direct questions we couldn’t answer, and stay close to Marsyas with our fake accents on as tightly as possible. That’s it.”
She nods to the trashed table and my grandmother’s earthen shroud.
“And then Ursula keeled over, Marsyas disappeared, and magic— literal magic —happened right in front of our faces.” She shakes her head, brows crashing together. “And, and—so you know—Marsyas obtained the driver’s keys from him before we walked into the party. They took forever and we thought she was being weirdly territorial about them, but she probably killed him right there with magic while we were gawking at the mansion.”
Evander sounds like I’d imagine Horace the bear did after taking the first of the three bullets it took to kill him, all bite and bile. “All that and you didn’t think to say anything? You had ample time to tell us.”
“We were shocked— stunned. What the hell could we have said that would’ve made a difference?”
Evander scoffs. “The so-called truth you’re telling us now.”
Ruby laughs, dark eyes shining beyond the mess of tears, smudge of ashen blood, and the flood of blush in her cheeks. “You’re telling me that any of you were in the frame of mind to accept that two non-magical people had not only gained entry to what seems to be the most exclusive witch event of the year, but that we’d also seen your leader murdered in cold blood? That we witnessed a potential shake-up in the balance of secret Four Lines witch power? You guys would’ve been okay with our being here for any of that?”
A glacier of heaviness settles in my gut. She’s right.
Hex laughs back, cruel. Like the true visage of his father exposed in this game. “I’m still stuck on the fact that you took money to impersonate people at a dinner party. Like, who does that?”
“People who need the money!”
“But a couple grand?”
“We need it!” Ruby insists. She runs her hands through her hair now, grimy ash smearing on her temples and the soft curve of her neck as she finishes one exasperated swoop. “A couple grand is a lot of money to normal people. Not everyone can afford boarding school or has the generational wealth for a sixteen-bathroom manor on ten thousand acres in one of the most expensive states in this whole damn country!”
“She’s telling the truth.”
Winter’s voice cuts across the dead grass and cracked tiles. Two wristlets dangle from her arm, and she’s holding a wallet in each hand. “Ruby Jourdain, seventeen, of Grand Lake; Wren Jourdain, sixteen, of Grand Lake.”
Beside her, Infinity is empty-handed. For a moment, everyone’s eyes skip to Wren’s dress pocket. Ruby scrunches her eyes shut and draws in a thin breath, steadying herself—she didn’t know what her sister was up to. She truly didn’t.
Winter passes the wallets around. “Do you have correspondence with Marsyas?”
She swallows, relief in the set of her shoulders. “Yeah. Including a file she sent us to study on all of you.” Ruby produces a phone. “Here.”
“Open it,” Winter orders, as I’m stunned enough to ask, “She sent you a file?”
Ruby addresses me but she’s looking down and away—embarrassed, then, not lying.
“Yes, with pictures and basics—family, hobbies, interests. It didn’t say anything about the fact that you were witches.” Ruby unlocks the phone, and this time Winter accepts it. “We googled you but couldn’t find any information online, so what you see there is exactly what we knew before we walked in.”
“Ursula keeps—kept—all High Families and initiated witches completely scrubbed from the web.” I don’t know why I’m explaining this, but it seems like a bookend to this corresponding thought. One truth met with another.
Winter dismisses the app we’d used to find the Celestial master, scrolls, taps, scrolls again. Mutters a curse and tosses the phone at Evander. He catches it easily. I lean over to view the screen, and there I am:
Auden Hegemony, age 17
Student at Walton-Bridge Academy; rising senior
Hobbies: varsity lacrosse, poetry club, running, hiking, fishing
Family: Callum Hegemony, father, deceased; Ursula Hegemony, Evander Hegemony, Winter Hegemony
My most recent school picture from Walton-Bridge is paired with the simple bio, and a half dozen photos—candids, sports action shots, a group picture from the last dinner party with Ursula and my cousins—tail it before the next section, aka “Winter Hegemony, age 16,” begins.
When I’m done, Ruby is watching me, her dark eyes a storm, lips still rosy from my own trembling. “I’m so sorry.”
I back away from the phone. From her. Ruby takes a step forward, imploring. Her words are for us as a whole, but she refuses to look anywhere but at me.
Her perfect target.
“I’m sorry that we lied to you. I’m sorry that we’re here. I’m sorry about your families. Wren and I… we’re not your killers. We never were.” Then, because maybe the real Ruby appreciates a good callback, she uses my wording from yesterday after the truth spell. “We were pawns.”
“You weren’t pawns, you were willing participants.” Ada stabs an accusing finger at the pair of them. “You’re con artists .”
Ruby’s chin begins to wobble as she finds the words to respond to that, and a new tear spills over. She doesn’t even bother to bat it away.
“Not intentionally,” she rasps, voice brittle. Her whole body is shaking now, and she does nothing to soothe it away. Just stands there and lets the trembling take her. Like she deserves it. “We would never have said yes if we knew what Marsyas had planned. Never in a million years. We didn’t know we’d hurt you; we didn’t want to hurt you.”
The girl looks absolutely miserable and wrung out.
And that’s when Winter explodes.
“You pretended to be real people ! For days! As people died! Knowing that it would matter if you told us, ‘Hey, Marsyas hired us to sub for her granddaughters.’ You don’t think we needed that information? We needed it two days ago!”
Evander snatches the phone from Winter and stares down Ruby with that serious, stoic face.
“That information is just as important as the dead driver—Marsyas planned to murder Ursula and get out of here, and she confounded us by trapping her magically inept granddaughters here, whom she claimed to love. This same information from you days ago might have allowed us to figure out her plan and taken precautions.”
Evander scrubs a hand through his short hair.
“ Now we’re behind the eight ball and all we’ve confirmed is that there is a second part of the plan—something Auden pointed out a day ago… but I failed to fully investigate.”
He glances over his shoulder to me. I nod. “At first, I thought either Marsyas wanted to trap us in here forever and wreak havoc on the Four Lines from outside our bubble, or she was going to come back. Not for either of you—she’s probably hoping that we dispose of your lying asses for her—but for the relics. But with what we know now—”
“She’s already here,” Ruby says at the same time I do.
“But she can’t be!” Ada argues. “That’s not possible—the spell we did was definitive. Marsyas isn’t on the grounds.”
“But what if she is now ?” Ruby shoots right back. “I’m not a witch, but I understand enough to know that if Death magic is to blame for the murder of your parents, how can there not be a Death witch on the grounds with us in this very moment? Or at least when it happened?”
She isn’t Lavinia Blackgate, but it strikes me that her outsider’s perspective is still intact. And Ruby has just as much need to break the spell now as she did before her truth was revealed.
“The spell locks us in as well as it locks Marsyas out,” Ada answers, flatly. She looks to her brother but for once Hex doesn’t help. “No one can come in and no one has been here this whole time, unless they’ve been standing outside the gates since they locked, waiting to take us out the minute we solve this.”
“So what do we do?” Infinity cuts in, ignoring Ada’s ruminations. “Do we try to run the hunt spell again? See if we can find Marsyas this time?”
Evander shakes his head. “Something she’s doing is clearly tampering with the hunt spell.”
“Should we look for her?” Winter asks. “Like, spread out?”
“A waste of time.”
“So what do we do?” a frustrated Infinity repeats.
“We find the Death master, that’s what we do,” Evander confirms. Sorrow is etched into the hull of his brow, pulled low—if only that master was something he’d found that first night. “We have no choice. It’s just now nine o’clock. We have fifteen hours until we’re locked in. And if she’s already here? She’s looking for it. We need to find it first. Or fight her in the process. There is no other choice but forward.”
“And what about these two?” Hex asks, arms crossed and jaw tight as he tips his chin toward Ruby and Wren. “Fake Lavinia is right. We can’t just let them go—they’re a liability. For all we know, Marsyas may be using them somehow to control us from within or to spy on us further.”
It’s possible. And I let it happen, right under my nose. Just like Ursula’s murder. Just like everything else that went wrong the past two days. I was supposed to look out for the Four Lines and protect them, and I couldn’t even build a wall around my own weak spots.
“They’re both compromised,” Evander agrees, and I feel the weight of his attention on me again as my world cycles through a spectrum of purples under the weight of my hands. “We can’t leave Ruby loose on the grounds. And we should remove anything Marsyas gave them in case she’s using it somehow to beat Ursula’s spell. What else do you have?”
“In my purse there’s a card she gave us with the money.”
Winter riffles through the sisters’ wristlets on her arm and fishes out a small card on thick stock.
“ Saturday night. Formal. Wear solid black. I’ll be in touch. ” She flips it over. “ Tell no one .” Her eyes flash to Ruby’s. “You seriously accepted this and were like, ‘Yep, sounds good. Not fishy at all ’?”
Ruby immediately blushes. Even though it’s ridiculous, my body reacts with a surge of warmth. She’s still exquisite. No denying that despite the circumstances. “I—no. Just. I wasn’t the one to say yes. But I went along with it.” Then, “The bracelets. You can’t get Wren’s, but you can have mine. Here, let me—”
“Don’t touch them. We’ll remove them.” Evander nods. “Auden?”
It’s posed as a question but it’s an order and an atonement.
I’m the one who trusted this person so completely. I’m the one who opened my cousins up to trusting them too. My gut knew they were out of sorts, and yet it failed me, just as my heart had, finding solace in this person who was no longer my childhood opponent. This person who had over the past day or more become a friend. A new and surprising light in this terrible darkness.
You aren’t going to ask me if I have a secret? A lie?
What would Ruby have told me if I had asked? Did she want me to know before this terrible moment? To place her truth alongside the rest we’d learned, another piece of ugliness bared to the light after Ursula’s death.
It doesn’t matter now.
That warmth in my chest snuffs out as I bow my head and approach. Ruby’s still watching me, sorrow heavy in her sable eyes, and I force myself to greet her back. To look at this person who is not the person I know at all. Her kindness and beauty need to mean exactly nothing to me. That’s what I tell myself.
“Hold out your hands.”
Without a word, she obeys, raising them in front of her body. This close, her pale cheeks aren’t rosy, but splotched with color, the wells under her eyes damp and tinged lavender, color bitten into her lips. Her wrists are delicate and bare save for the bracelets, which sway heavily beneath her pulse points.
I can’t touch them, not directly, without shocking my system with the power of death. It’s been said long-term contact with a Death Line relic can render the life element useless in an Elemental witch like me. The chain and clasps are, like most things in our Four Lines world, rendered of pure silver, and therefore highly conductive of not only electricity, but magic. Meaning the metal is just as destructive as the charged rabbit’s foot itself.
“I can’t remove these bracelets in a normal way,” I say, describing like I did that first night when I healed her injured hand exactly what to expect from my magic. It’s something Ursula taught us to do, a kindness and a way to inform consent, and I can’t stop myself from doing it again for Ruby now. “I’m going to burn them off.”
“You’re going to light my wrists on fire?”
“Yes. Don’t flinch and I won’t burn you.” My fingers brush hers. “May I?”
Ruby nods. I arrange her arm so that it’s angled away from her body and parallel to the ground, the top of her wrist presented for me to work with. Then, bringing my right hand in close, I focus my powers to a hot pinprick, a thin spout of flame cutting the metal chain in a burst and blink. The bracelet thunks to the garden tiles.
I check her wrist for auxiliary burns. The pale skin is pristine.
She presents her other wrist in a mirror image to how I arranged the first.
When the second relic drops to the ground, and her skin is again untouched, Ruby catches my fingers in hers.
“Auden, thank you and I’m sorry.”
I swallow and drop her hand. “I’m sorry too.”
I step away from her, and though I don’t turn my back on Ruby, I firmly align myself, shoulder to shoulder, with my cousins, Infinity, the Cerises. My unusual, unbreakable family. As one, we assess what must be done now.
“As I see it,” Evander starts, and everyone is listening now, our priorities straightforward, “first we contain our guests—”
“Contain them how ?” He might be the de facto leader, but hell if I won’t challenge him to be as thoughtful as possible. The sisters are liars, yes, but human beings in a terrible situation too. “Wren isn’t going anywhere for at least a day, which is past the deadline for Ursula’s tasks. Both sisters lied but it is our duty to protect them, which means if we’re ‘containing’ Ruby, it needs to be in a way that keeps her safe.”
“Sod cell.” Winter gestures to the dew-slick, dead grass, matter of fact. “Open up the earth, drop her in, wrap her tightly. We can even maneuver it so she can keep an eye on Wren.”
“And exposed to the elements, and perhaps Marsyas, if she attacks when the spell lifts,” I point out. “Not to mention it’s completely claustrophobic to have your chest cavity corseted by actual, unmoving earth. It isn’t a weighted blanket, it’s hundreds—thousands—of possible pounds of pressure if you do it wrong. She might hyperventilate while she fries in the sun.”
For the first time, Ruby fidgets, shifting her weight. Awaiting her punishment.
Evander blows out a deep breath. “Okay, too harsh. We could lock her in a room within the manor? Create a guard rotation, and reunite Ruby with Wren after Ursula’s spell wears off?”
I’m surprised he’s posed these musings as questions—Evander’s unsure.
Good, because it’s a terrible idea.
“It’s cruel to keep Ruby from seeing Wren while her sister is trapped and vulnerable. Not to mention, do we really want to sacrifice someone on the relic retrieval crew to play guard? Especially if, again, Marsyas is somewhere inside. Dangerous for the sisters and dangerous for the guard to be alone.”
“Okay, wait, stop.” Evander waves his arms. “We’re not doing this right now. We have fifteen hours. The sun’s up. We need to go.” He turns to Infinity. “Is there a spell you can use to keep Ruby safe but still? Like Kaysa’s—Wren’s—situation but something we can easily remove?”
“Sunlight would work,” Hex points out.
“I don’t like this—”
“And I don’t care, Auden,” Evander snaps. “It’s the best we have. It won’t hurt her; in fact it might protect her.”
“By taking away her free will. Making her a statue? That’s what you plan to do?”
Evander turns the full force of his anger on me. “Any way you spin it, I’m the bad guy and it’s the wrong choice. Add it to my tab, Auden, I don’t care. If we get out of this alive, every choice we made up until that moment of freedom, including the wrong ones, will have been the right choice in my book. Infinity, do it.”
“But—” I begin, but Infinity is quick, decisive, and clearly in agreement with Evander.
Before I know it, they’ve drawn a measure of sunlight in their palms, and with a quick flick of both wrists, Ruby is draped in a prison of pure, impenetrable sunlight.