Page 3 of The Lies We Conjure
I wish we could tell her.
Inside the barbed-wire perimeter and massive gates, there’s a beautiful brick drive that loops in a teardrop up to the manor and back out to the private road that leads to the property from the highway. I stand on that drive now, wedging my brand-new stiletto heels between the bricks as I stare back at Hegemony Manor, trying to find solid ground. Suddenly feeling nervous about this plan.
About what we’re about to do to the people who live here.
People who’ve been more rumor than reality in my life up until this very moment.
The rumors at school went like this: Three kids lived behind these great gothic walls and towering, treacherous gates. Two boys and a girl, orphans all. Cousins, adopted by their grandmother. Kept by nannies and tutors before calling boarding school home.
With a collection of rumors like that, as big and bold as the mansion that bears their name, it’s strange that we’re about to make rumor a reality and thenlie.
I wouldn’t have said yes to tonight if Wren hadn’t already done it—my sister and her habit of hoovering up experiences to fuel her dreams of stage and screen.
“Do you think they name their ghosts?” Wren’s amber eyes pop wide, false eyelashes like fireworks as she leans in. “Like, ‘That’s just Old Imelda, crying in the foyer again’? Or maybe they just ignore them—too numerous to bother?”
“Please make sure to corner an honest-to-God Hegemony and ask.”
The sarcasm in my voice practically drips onto her dress but she ignores it.
“I just might. They’d probably find that kind of innocent interest endearing after spending all semester with walking icicles in sweater sets and pearls.” Wren adds a self-indulgent hair toss while disparaging the entire female population of the Hegemonys’ boarding school of choice, Walton-Bridge Prep, before a shade of anxiety flashes across her face and she clutches my wrist. “Wait, what dowewear at the Baxter Academy for the Arts?” That’s where the real Lavinia and Kaysa go to school. “If they have some sort of awful green plaid as a uniform, I need to know about it for character development reasons.”
Wren is living for this.
I am not.
She whips out her phone. I pull out mine too, and my palms immediately slip with sweat around my phone case. I resist the urge to wipe my hands on the silk of my dress and try again, swiping away a “Made it to Boulder” text from Dad that I missed on the group thread twenty minutes ago. When my lock screen disappears, it reveals the document I have about the dinner party guests. It’s something Marsyas sent us after we’d accepted her opportunity—details on the families in attendance. Names, pictures, and surface information—employment, schooling, hobbies. Totally creepy, actually.
Evidently, no one besides Marsyas is related to “us,” which was much to Wren’s relief as she’d tagged literally everyone under the age of twenty attending as “so hot.”
Hot or not, these are people who need to believe we’re Lavinia and Kaysa Blackgate, at least for tonight. According to Marsyas, none of them have seen the sisters since the pair of them learned how to read and write. The girls aren’t allowed on social media, and, like everyone at this party, the internet has never heard of them.
“Do you have reception? This won’t load.” Wren stabs at her phone screen as if that will make it do anything. Looks like I don’t have a signal either. “I know, I know, if I’m quizzed on the specs of the Baxter Academy uniform, it’s my cue to recast the small talk to something far more interesting.” She waggles her eyebrows into her thick fringe of bangs. “Perhaps the ghosts.”
She’s about to laugh—until she sees my face.
I’m fairly certain I’ve begun to go green underneath my makeup. My heart is rabbiting against my breastbone, and when Wren ditches her phone to snatch my hands, they’re clammy against her dry grip. “Look, just because you’re allergic to fun doesn’t mean you need to be nervous. You’re going to do fine.”
I shake my head and try to put words to the unease uncoiling in my belly at the thought that this is actually happening. “I just don’t like this.”
Wren rolls her eyes. “It’s notactuallyhaunted.”
It’s not that Hegemony Manor seemsscary,per se, it’s just… tooright. Too stately, the grass too green and lush for the summer drought, the air too still. It’s like the whole thing is a mirage, and a little dose of reality will slough off the perfection like dead skin.
“I know, it’s just—” I tug on Wren’s hand. Pinky to pinky. “Promise you’ll leave with me if I need to bolt.”
Wren’s lips purse into a lopsided smirk. “Only ifyoupromise not to panic and at least make an effort to have a good time. It’s a party, not a funeral.”
“Girls,” calls a voice with a whisky-warm rasp—Marsyas, or tonight, Nona. Appearing from around the rear bumper of our SUV, Marsyas is a bowling ball of a woman punctuated by a tight chignon. She drops the keys into what truly looks to be a handbag fashioned from a decapitated raven. Like, with feathers and a wing and everything. Satisfied, she flashes that eccentric grin of hers, a mile wide and as treacherous as a canyon. “Let me have a look at you.”
Marsyas addresses my sister first—“Kaysa”—and Wren frowns. She isn’t a fan of the name she’s been given. The old woman’s fingers tug at Wren’s neckline, straightening the drape of silk across her collarbones and the flash of skin at her shoulders. At first I think she’s going for the price tag we left tucked under her collar, but then she removes the string of white pearls at Wren’s throat and deposits them into my sister’s open palm, the meaning clear—put these away. “There.”
As Wren drops Mom’s pearls into her wristlet without a word,Marsyas hits me with the full force of her critical eye. My dress is less complicated, an ankle-length A-line and belted, and it must pass the test because rather than a single adjustment she hums out a “mmhmm” and smiles again, teeth tea-stained and surprisingly wolflike for a grandma. I suppose I’m allowed to keep Mom’s pearl studs. “Perfect, girls. Now, take my hands.”
“Yes, Nona,” we answer in our accents now, as she’s instructed us to do, and sweep our hands into hers, stepping to either side. The black rabbits’ feet she’s clasped on delicate gold chains about our wrists tap gently into her own matching ones.
I’d declined my bracelets when she’d foisted them upon me, but I was informed wearing them was nonnegotiable. A Blackgate necessity.
My bracelets might go missing the moment Nona starts drinking.
