Page 29 of The Lies We Conjure
“Understood,” I bite out.
Wren turns first, arms raised and compliant. I follow slowly, darkness spotting my vision now, and my legs are seriously unstable beneath me. My hands are cupped out before my body, almost like one of those angel statues offering water in the waiting well of her palms.
When I present myself to Auden Hegemony, his magical eyes aren’t on my face—they’re on my wrists.
On the rabbits’ feet.
He’s watching them like cowboys in old Westerns watch another man’s gun. Ready to run or draw his own weapon the very second I reach for them.
That’s when it hits my pain-scrambled brain. The weight of what he’s said. What he asked of us.
Relics.
Our bracelets are relics—not masters but still. That’s why he doesn’t want us touching them. They’re magical andwhat? A shield? An amplifier? Something else?
Auden Hegemony truly believes we have magic. The same Death Line magic that Marsyas wielded on our poor driver. That can dissolve a man like acid.
Considering the way he flinched in the garden when he grazed the rabbit’s foot? Maybe itisa loaded gun in the right hands. Not mine, but Auden doesn’t know that and neither do the rest of them.
The Blackgates are witches.
Which meansweneed to be ones too. At least for the next three days.
If we survive that long.
CHAPTER11
AUDEN
Healing Lavinia Blackgate isn’t as simple as I’ve made it out to be.
Each magical line is amplified by its preferred specialty. In my case, the elements enhance my magical abilities, and my magic is at its best when they’re used in each spell cast. In this case, to heal Lavinia, I have to manipulate the fifth element, life, to do it.
Not her life—mylife.
The price is a balance between what’s been damaged and what I have to give whole. Sometimes, it’s a life for a life. In her immediate grief, Winter was ready to make that exchange tonight for our grandmother—a cost Evander and I thought was too great. Here, the price is small, but will mean big things to the Blackgates.
The Blackgates don’t know this—and I need an answer as to why they don’t.
It’s been clear since they returned to Hegemony Manor that not only have the girls been spelled to forget the execution of their father—and as someone with a dead father, I can’t blame them for being completely uncurious about that particular hole in their collective memory—but they’ve been left completely uneducated about both the Four Lines and their inheritance within them.
I want to know why.
And I want to know who.
Who murdered Ursula? Why?
And what does missing Marsyas Blackgate have to do with it?
Death witches aren’t typically a cuddly lot but still it seems too terrible to think that not only is Marsyas guilty and gone, which robs us of a chance to fulfill the necessary tasks to break Ursula’s final curse, but that she’d condemn her beloved granddaughters at the same time.
“Place your hand in mine,” I tell Lavinia, crosshatching my palms.
She takes a step forward and immediately sways as she tries to plant her foot, pain claiming her balance this time instead of the clumsiness I saw in the garden. On pure instinct, my left hand shoots out to steady her, cuffing her upper arm to keep her from tumbling to the grass. Her skin is cold and trembles under my touch, pain and adrenaline pulsing through her body.
Lavinia’s jaw unhinges, and she seems to attempt a smile, though it comes off like a grimace, the streaking lines of tears bracketing her full mouth as she calls back to our conversation in the garden. “I guess I’m not good to walk on my own after all.”
I can’t look away from the mixture of panic, pain, and resolve in the glassy darkness of her eyes.
