Chapter 40
C HAPTER 40
AUDEN
My own throat burns with Lavinia’s magic, the throbbing pain of it the only part of me moving. I’m not even sure I’m breathing.
Evander has pushed up on one arm now, fighting for consciousness from his spot on the ground, Wren at his side.
Winter and Infinity are back-to-back and stock-still. Hex, with an unmoving Ada draped in his arms, is being escorted by Kaysa’s ghosts and their disheveled corpse parents, the skeletons fanning out behind them.
They’re circling us. Closing us in.
“Look at them, obeying. They must like you much more than they ever did my Lavinia,” Marsyas muses to Ruby, approaching. “None of these brats ever would’ve been so kind to my girls. Playing pranks on them, provoking them, doing anything they could to get them in trouble. Turns out the adults were of the same mindset.”
Something twists in my gut.
Marcos Blackgate, the scapegoat.
The penance for what Ursula lost. For keeping the Four Lines together.
Marsyas crosses to Ruby and takes her closed fist in her wizened palm. “Give it to me, girl.”
A muscle in Ruby’s jaw ticks, her mouth drawn thin and hard. Her hand is swallowed in Marsyas’s own, but the tendons in her forearm tense and flash, her grip tightening impossibly over the relic.
“Silly girl,” Marsyas tuts, that Blackgate grin spreading across her face as dangerous as a knifepoint. “Just because they like you doesn’t mean they will save you. Loyalty means nothing to these people. Power, though, that is everything.” She leans in close. “And in this moment, their power is mine .”
Death magic, smoking and acrid, bolts out of Marsyas, branding Ruby’s hand. She shrieks, her ashen fingers fly open, and the final master relic falls into Marsyas’s palm. Wren cries out from her kneeling spot next to Evander, as tears squeeze out of eyes pinned upon her sister. “Don’t you dare!”
The matriarch chuckles at the outburst, as if Wren has performed a trick instead of admonished her cruelty.
“Too late and too ill-informed, young one. What I do is never a dare.” Marsyas pats Ruby’s cheek. She can’t so much as wince away, ensnared in Lavinia’s ferocious grip. “It wasn’t worth it. It would’ve been mine anyway.”
With that, Marsyas whirls around, hands raised triumphantly over her head and toward the ominous, silver-clouded sky.
In them, the four master relics once hidden upon these grounds.
“The masters are mine, despite certain stubborn, stupid setbacks. Which means I’m one acquisition away from everything I’ve wanted since the day you cruel idiots took my son away from me. Power over you, power over every Four Lines witch in North America, the power to do with all of you as I wish. And I wish for you to pay.”
Marsyas slips all the relics except for her own bone shard away into the stretchy confines of her black clothing and turns her attention to Evander and Wren, huddled not six feet away from her.
“Evander, I could’ve killed you five minutes ago, but I thought keeping you alive would be worth it just for the look on your face when you became the last Hegemony to hold the High Sorcerer’s ring, and the first Hegemony to acknowledge Blackgate control over the Four Lines.”
Evander tries to right himself to something of a sitting position, Wren supporting his arm as he shifts from a lean to a slouch. He wets his cracked lips still tinged blue from her spell and glares at her with all the intensity Evander Ulysses Hegemony has ever mustered.
“I don’t have it.”
His voice is hoarse but determined.
“Dear boy, I know your play is to be gruff, stern, manly . It’s not in your nature or at least in your act to give in, especially to a soft, little old woman. Yes, I know.” Marsyas flings her arms out wide. “But, Evander, look around you. You’ve been conquered by your moldering elders. You are literally pinned in by the ghosts of Hegemonys past. Auden’s poet of a father would’ve loved the metaphors abounding here—thank you, sweet Kaysa, for the perfect motif.”
The youngest Blackgate beams from her place among her undead army.
“Evander, just do it.” Winter’s voice breaks as her plea lands flat at his feet.
Marsyas’s lips twitch at this turn of events, a Hegemony begging, but her granddaughters don’t even try to hide their widening smiles. The matriarch shakes her head at him. “The Death Line has you at bay with our very power, and holds the master relics. Evander, you are beat. You have my ring. Either you die and I pull it off your corpse, or you look me in the eye and transfer power like the man you’re trying to be.”
She’s right. We’re surrounded on all sides by the dead. She has every relic, and they’re amplifying her power with each and every use. We’re outnumbered, outgunned. Too fragile.
But Marsyas Blackgate is wrong.
Not just about who holds the ring. But about who holds the power.
I drag my gaze from Ruby to Ursula. My grandmother’s corpse hovers, inert, like a fetid store mannequin, her rotting flesh and animated bones waiting for instruction, lifeless cerulean eyes focused on her master, Marsyas.
When Ursula gave me my key and told me of my role, she gave me a set of instructions too.
Now, here is what you must do.
Slowly, as not to draw attention, I fish the chain out from beneath my collar. I watch Marsyas challenge Evander wordlessly. I’ve got it fully in my grasp as her expression wavers, frustration seeping into the set of her shoulders. “Lavinia, kill the girl.”
“No!” I shout.
All three Blackgates turn my way.
I brandish the ring, unmistakable. Silver band, slim cut, the four gems flashing in the daylight.
“He can’t give you the ring because I’m holding it.” I pin my gaze on Lavinia. “Let Ruby go and it’s yours.”
Marsyas tilts herself toward me, a bull finding its target. “A trade?”
“An exchange. You let Ruby go. Let her live. And I will give you this ring.”
“At the same time.”
Magic flickers beneath my skin, but I tamp it down and focus solely on Marsyas Blackgate. “No—you first. I need to see that Ruby’s safe and out of Lavinia’s hands. She’s innocent.”
Marsyas’s lips part and her teeth flash.
“I wouldn’t call her that, she’s lied to you for two days. But that’s beside the point. The point is I refuse to trust a Hegemony.”
Her eyes narrow, color rising in her throat, magic sparking in her palm around the Death master pinched between her fingers.
“How could I after what Ursula did to my Marcos?” she sneers. “Trust is a seed that will never grow between us again. And, frankly, it’s not one I need. Shall I remind you that you’re surrounded, you’re outnumbered, and, though I think it’s top of mind to you, my dear, sweet Lavinia, a girl you bullied for years, has hold of your little girlfriend. So, no—”
The magic beneath my skin flares into a fireball, engulfing my hand.
Devouring the ring.
Marsyas screeches at the sight of the metal at the heart of the flame, takes a step, hand outreached, a pitch-black twist of magic gathering—
And trips over Wren’s leg, kicked out across her path.
The old woman stumbles forward, hands flying open to catch herself before she face-plants on the ground. The bone shard in her hand skitters away. Lavinia shoves Ruby aside, depositing her roughly into the table, as she tracks the relic, pinging across the tiles and into the grass.
“Nona!” Kaysa shrieks, rushing forward as her sister falls away.
Her army of the dead advance too.
I spin, and, with everything I have left, shoot out a shield as wide and thin as I can make it. It won’t keep out the ghosts, but it can slow Kaysa and her skeletons.
“I’ve got this side, Evander,” Infinity yells. I look over my shoulder and they’ve thrown up a shield covering the rest of the gaps as Kaysa rushes forth. The dead rattle the shields so hard, I think they might shatter.
“And I’ve got the ghosts,” Winter announces—and, with a defense I missed, she harnesses enough wind to blow the ghosts up and away. It’s a shield of a different kind. Genius.
Between us, Evander and Wren incapacitate Marsyas. The girl sits on her back, while Evander grabs hold of her wrists and his power. The earth opens right beneath her hands, the tile cracking, two gaping holes sucking her arms in up to her armpits and clamping her in place. Marsyas is left face down, dangerous hands and rabbits’ feet relics trapped.
Evander wastes no time working with Wren to fish out all four master relics from the matriarch’s pockets as a hurricane of bones batters the magic Winter, Infinity, and I hold tight. I breathe a quick sigh of relief that Ursula’s spell isn’t triggered by their forcible taking of the Death relic. The magic didn’t trap Marsyas when she stole the others because she wasn’t under that spell, and now that loophole works in reverse for us.
A scream breaks from the direction of Kaysa.
I turn just quick enough to see the bodies of Hector and Sanguine Cerise bowl into the skeletons like wolverines, ripping apart the bones and flinging the skeletons aside as the younger Blackgate holds up her hands, trying to direct soldiers who are shattering one after one.
“What—”
“Blood will have blood, you asshole Death witches!” Hex screams, Ada slumped to his side—no shroud, so hopefully not dead—the picture of vengeance in his expression and posture, his anger standing on end.
With a flick of Hex’s wrist, his mother’s corpse hurtles straight at Kaysa.
I gasp—without a Blackgate in control, Hex’s magic can move his parents, just as they once were able to compel him. No master needed.
Sanguine rips the bone shard out of the girl’s hand and crushes it in her otherworldly zombie grip. Kaysa screams and tries to pitch away but is caught by Hector under Hex’s control.
From behind there’s a screech. I turn in time to see Ruby twisting her heel to crush the bone-shard fragment on the tile, Lavinia on her knees, hands in a panic. “Oh, you bitch !”
Ruby takes off in a run, Lavinia clawing at the ruined skin of her ankles. I race toward the Death witch, cuff her hand, throw up a shield, and—
There’s a bolt of green magic that whizzes past my ear. I turn to follow it, and in that moment, Lavinia is suddenly frozen in the same forced-air magical prison Ursula created as punishment. I track the magic back, and there Evander stands, our Elemental relic slipped around his neck, amplifying his power. Kaysa is next, frozen in a heartbeat.
And then, suddenly, everything stops.
The skeletons drop where they stand. The ghosts evaporate. The attack is over.
All is quiet except the pounding of my heart, the heave and exhale of my breath, and Ruby appearing beside me, her hand slipping into mine as she slumps into my side. Weak but warm—alive. “Is it over?”
I swallow and answer truthfully.
“Almost.”