Page 92 of The Lies We Conjure
“Keep eating. Fall on a rock, and we’re leaving you there to heal yourself and sober up. Say a word to me edgewise about what I’m about to do, and I’ll shove you down myself.”
Hex grins sloppily. “I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said I love you.”
“That’s your cross to bear—you know my heart’s taken.” Winter shoves him ahead. “Now walk.”
CHAPTER28
RUBY
The bobbing of lanterns feels like a step back in time. And maybe it is.
We’re not the first to walk this path in the dead of night, flames flickering, doing little to keep the shadows at bay as they’re as much inside the mind as they are in the encroaching blackness.
Clouds have swept in, fat and low, swallowing the surrounding peaks. A stiff breeze rustles the trees loud enough to muffle the crunch of our footsteps and the low moan of conversation.
Twice, Evander’s lantern blows out from the leader’s position, and twice, I assume, he rekindles it with a spate of near instantaneous magic. It doesn’t escape my notice that he keeps his right hand unencumbered at his side, the set of it supple but engaged, like the hand of a cinema knight sitting atop the pommel of his sheathed longsword.
Wren is next to Evander, stride for stride, chin bowed nearly to her chest, both her head and her heart taking very seriously her role and what we’re about to see. I appreciate this in her even as I wish it hadn’t taken so long. Winter is knotted with the Cerise twins. I don’t miss how Hex keeps glancing at her.
Auden has stayed beside me in the rear, as alert and on guard as Evander, though his attention is on the twins as much as it is his footing. And with those threats accounted for, he worries over me—over Lavinia.
I worry about her too.
How would it change a person to come to a dinner party as a family and leave without your dad? Standing under a summer sky like this one, losing him forever in the blink of an eye? That’s a bitter pill I know well from my mom’s death, but still Lavinia hadit worse, I think. The shock and searing pain heightened by the run-up of humiliation among people deemed family.
Watching helplessly as he’s tried. Sentenced. Executed.
It isn’t any wonder no one has questioned our scattered memories.
It isn’t surprising thateveryonewas shocked to see the Blackgate girls again in the flesh.
To me it’s almost more stunning that Marsyaskeptarriving to the annual dinner. Kept slapping on a Blackgate smile and her familiar relics, returning to the scene of her greatest heartache, over and over.
“Did Nona ever come here when she visited over the years?” I ask Auden as we wind past a gated cemetery full of Hegemonys. Two dozen graves at least, maybe more. It’s impossible not to notice that at the front are three identical graves so new their stones have not darkened or softened with age, the marble pristine obelisks reaching for the sky. Ulysses. Callum. Lana.
“Not to my knowledge. Marsyas was very consistent—drinks, dinner, disappeared by midnight. She never stayed until morning or explored the grounds.”
“And she didn’t visit any other time during the year?” Then I add, truthfully, “We never talked about Ursula.”
“Not to my knowledge.”
There’s no sign announcing the official execution site of the Hegemony estate. It’s surprisingly close to the house, separated by a massive boulder, covered completely with paint—one of Shadrack’s murals from the courtyard. Facing the cemetery and the manor—though a steep drop obscures it from easy view—is what appears to be a depiction of dawn or dusk. It’s fuzzy around the edges and ghostlike in the faded, inconsistent illumination of our lamps and phone flashlights, and the reflection of the earth upon the low-hanging silver of the clouds. Though, on the side where Evander halts our procession, the boulder is swathed in rich black, like the endless depths of death.
It smells of blood.
Auden and I are the last ones to arrive. He’s so close, the sides of our hands brush.
And though I’m not Lavinia Blackgate, though this isn’t the killing ground that took my dead parent, though this isn’t my pain, the sharp realness of what happened here ten years ago drives into my chest—I find myself grabbing for the safety of Auden’s hand.
He stiffens at the contact. Then the surprise fades as quickly as it came, and his hand shifts until he has me cloistered in his own grip.
“Lanterns around the platform,” Evander says, an order and a direction.
It’s a relief Auden doesn’t let go as he obeys.
Before us, a platform and an adjoined post are awash in overlapping lamplight. The post is iron and shackles are attached to it, too short for comfort or struggle. The length of them won’t reach the black expanse of the painted boulder, which almost serves as a backdrop as much as a void. The platform is wooden and low enough that there are no steps—it’s perhaps no more substantial than a few shipping pallets laced together. There are wide slats built in. Drains.
Bile rises in my throat. I swallow hard, nose stinging with a flush of heat that makes my eyes water.
