Page 131 of The Lies We Conjure
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 ismine.”
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,stupidsetbacks. 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.
