Page 60 of The Lies We Conjure
Solemn and meaning it, I shake my head.
Evander clears his throat. “Are you suggesting you were unawareMarsyas had used her magic to murder this man and escape before Ursula’s spell put Hegemony Manor into lock-down?”
Wren takes a step forward, nailing Evander with the doe-eyed innocence she used to weasel out of a speeding ticket on the last day of school while driving Dad’s car.
“Evander.” His name is delicate on her lips. “Don’t you think we would’ve told you if we knew? We had no idea Nona—”
“Bullshit,” Hex exclaims, rising from where he’d been squatting.
“Language, Junior!”
We all turn, and there’s Luna Starwood, sour-faced as she holds fast to Infinity’s arm as the pair of them navigate the driveway bricks. The front doors are thrown wide, the painted foyer of Hegemony Manor exposed and open to the real beauty rendered across its plaster.
“I apologize, Luna. I, just—you didn’t notice it last night?” Hex asks us, but he’s watching Auden. “When you were outsearching for Nonaand Auden marched you back inside fromthis direction?”
Aw, shit.Everyone rotates toward Auden.
Hector rises from his crouch to place an affirming hand on the back of his son’s neck, while Sanguine crosses her arms over her considerable chest, and Ada smirks.
Evander and Winter are harder to gauge. The cousins don’t look much alike, but their expressions are the same temperature—icy.
Luna and Infinity are silent, waiting.
Auden weathers it without a reaction that’s obvious to me, but it’s evident in the slight hardening of Evander’s jaw that he’s reading something in his cousin that the rest of us can’t distinguish.
“Is that correct, Auden?” Evander prods. “You walked them up the drive, past this driver, and didn’t notice? I saw this obscurement spell a mile away. Surely you would have too, even in the dark.”
“We wereverydistressed.” I can’t cry on command like my sister, but I’m so stressed my voice helpfully frays and scatters like light refracted. “So far from home, and then suddenly Ursula’s dead, and Nona’s missing, and we… we panicked and just ran around screaming her name.”
I grab Wren’s hand, which she clutches tightly to her chest—a little melodramatic but probably perfect—and look Auden straight in his too-handsome face with genuine appreciation. “Auden was a gentleman and guided us back to the house. Honestly, if we’d found this man, one of us would’ve probably fainted.”
I realize I’ve gone too far when Luna swipes a dismissive hand through the air. The woman could take out an eye with her sudden gestures. “Oh, none of you are the fainting type. No witch has been the fainting type since Salem. I don’t care what Marsyas did to wipe your memory and knowledge banks, you’re not built to be soft no matter what’s happened to your minds.”
Hex, though, has a much different angle of criticism.
“You were distracted and distressed, sure. But Auden wasn’t.” Hex pauses, letting the accusation sink over us like bonfire smoke. “Auden was observant enough to locate you both very quickly on the grounds. In fact, he was observant enough to be the first of us to realize you’d left the room.”
He has a point.
“I,” Sanguine says, voice like ice cracking in a cold glass, “find it hard to believe that you came out here looking for Marsyas at all. That story never made sense, and the timing was even more strange. You knew we were about to read the first clue, and you slipped out? Just to see if you could find her? Why then? Why not after the reading of the clue? You had all night. You’ve had all morning.”
“Because they weren’t looking for Marsyas,” Ada answers her mother, just adding to the pile-on. “They were probably supposed to cover up her tracks. Maybe perform a spell on this poor bastard and, I don’t know, supercharge their gross bracelets with his death rattle, then use that power to escape somehow because they were left behind aspartof Marsyas’s plan.”
I don’t know if we can “supercharge” our rabbits’ feet, and therefore I don’t deny it. In fact, I don’t say anything at all. Wren is silent too. We’re holding hands and it doesn’t escape me that though she’s putting on an amazing front, she’s trembling beneath my grasp.
Evander sighs, hands on the hips of his workout shorts and big shoulders slumping enough to strain the seams of his Walton-Bridge jersey. I realize then that even without magic, he could haul both Wren and me off and there’d be nothing we could do about it.
“I hate to say it, but I agree with this line of questioning.” Shit. “I don’t think you were looking for Marsyas. I think you know where she is, what she did, and you were simply executing part of the plan.”
Now I think Wren might actually cry.
“Evander, no. That’s not true.”
He scoffs, teeth bared and bright for the flash of a second. “My cousin here hasn’t said a word, which means he knows at least some of it is true and he’s not stupid enough to lie right now after being caught in one by Hex.”
Evander glowers at Auden who, to his credit, doesn’t look away.
Heisin trouble. It’s our fault. And now we all look guilty.
