Page 27 of The Lies We Conjure
“Jesus, Ruby, look at him.Thatis not the same.”
There’s a stiff inhale and a sob bracketing her words, and she’s become completely immovable. I yank hard, but she tenses up further.
“We don’t have time—”
She folds over andvomits. It’s wet and thin, and stinks of champagne and watermelon. “Wren, what the—”
My eyes land on the man’s face.
Wren’s right. It’s not the same at all.
The driver isn’t asleep. He’ll never wake again.
His face is a bloodied mess, still wet, but it’s clear by the sunken lines of his features that his eyes are missing. His mouth gags open, an empty void, blood all over his teeth—tongue ripped out. His neck has collapsed in on itself, like a jack-o’-lantern left out too long after Halloween. No windpipe. No throat. No Adam’s apple.
All the soft parts above his torso are just… gone.
Gone. Like Marsyas.
A spell. She used a spell to kill him and get away.
If Marsyas can do that, what can the others do?
My thudding heart rabbits in my chest as bile lurches toward my still-working throat. I swallow it down, a ringing in my ears now, the coppery scent of this man’s blood on the Rocky Mountain wind.
I turn to look at Hegemony Manor. The specter of downward movement is in those dead-eyed windows, right where the staircase coils around the massive chandelier.
Fuck.
“Wren, we need to run, or we’ll be just like him.”
We race for the gate.
“Hard right.” I guide us into the grass off the drive, hoping that we’ll be more difficult to spot, even if it’s slicker here, the fresh dew of evening clinging to each newly deadened blade.
There are footsteps behind us now. I don’t know how many. I don’t even try to guess, or look back, or even count them over the pounding of my blood in my ears, the rough churn of my breath, the yammering of my heart.
It doesn’t matter who’s following us, only that someone is, and though we haven’t seen exactly what the younger ones can do, it won’t be good for us.
We need to leave.
The property line is straight ahead. Fifty yards. Thirty-five. Twenty. Ten.
“It’s not there,” Wren says, her voice hoarse from vomiting, and laced with fear.
I squint at the barbed-wire section, obscured by the close brush, and shadows of the private road, which, like most anything that’s not in the city, has no streetlights.
“It’s there. We’ll get close and try to slide through the strands. I’ll hold it for you and then you for me and then we’ll be out.”
Five yards. Three. One.
We stutter-step to stop on the slick and uneven terrain, the manicured grass giving way to the natural roughness of Colorado at altitude. The barbed wire is there, black and purposefully dull. Impossible to see without being two inches from our faces. It’s too tall for us to scale, so we’ll indeed have to go through.
I squint to check the terrain on the other side—
Beyond the wire is literally nothing.
The same sort of nothingness of negative space and dreamless nights, and consciousness before life or after death.
