Page 74 of The Lies We Conjure
Evander and Lavinia as targets.
My cousin gets there before I do, his mind churning forward as his body completes its renewal with my life element.
“Heirs,” Evander says. “Someone’s going after the heirs.”
I look to Lavinia then. She cups my shoulder, her face farther from mine now and pale. Blood covers her opposite arm as it lies limply in her lap. I press my fingers to the wound, fully expecting her to shrug me off, to tell me not to, with what I’ve just done. Evander beats her to it.
“No, you don’t, I can heal her. Lavinia, don’t let him,” Evander barks. “Lavinia?”
“The heart.”
That’s all she says. Quietly, almost to herself.
She blinks up, her lips falling open. We’re all staring at her now.
“Straight in the heart. The gaping center.”
I nod at her. “The clue—yes. With the sun, its reason, its heart, the gaping center.”
“The master’s not inside me, I can assure you,” Evander responds in what I think is a joke? Thoughts churn across Lavinia’s fine features, and I watch the white kiss of teeth as she bites her full lower lip. As a sudden light appears in her dark gaze.
“The gaping center—could the master relic be in the courtyard?” Her voice is breathless. “Is there something with a bear on it? The moon? The sun?”
Her attention flies from my face to Evander’s, and another surge of wooziness slows my guess, my mind spinning forward at a pace my body can’t keep.
“Plenty of somethings. Sundial, gargoyles that could be bears—oh shit.” My mouth goes dry as the muscles in my legs fire and I try to get them under me to stand. My body won’t move properly, and I knock into Lavinia. She steadies me just as the answer finally falls out of my mouth.
“Shadrack’s mural.”
The Blackgates stare at us with twin pinched expressions of confusion.
“Speak in non-Hegemony, please,” Kaysa begs.
Evander is already refitting his waist pack, ignoring the question in favor of getting a move-on. I swallow, my parched throat catching.
“Shadrack painted four murals in Hegemony Manor.” Though I’m exhausted, a smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. “One in the foyer, one in the dining room, one on the boulder marking the cemetery, and one in the courtyard—a map of the night sky.”
CHAPTER23
AUDEN
Evander looks like a dead man walking. The entire back of his lacrosse jersey sticks to his skin, the blood heavy and stinking of iron and earth, pasting the fabric to his skin.
Yet it’s me who receives a cautious prod about my well-being.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
Lavinia whispers it as the four of us traverse the narrow trail back to the house in a slow, tight slog. Our bodies are packed together under a shield created by Evander, his healing body able to manage the spell and forward movement, and not much more.
I, however, am having a very hard time masking my utter exhaustion.
Though my life element has rebalanced enough that I’m no longer catatonic, it hasn’t refilled. I’m drained in every sense of the word. Dehydrated, nauseous, shaky. My vision blurs at the edges, plummy spots casting through the center. Any thought I have of gaining information from the Blackgates has gone out the window as I struggle to stay upright.
Altogether my symptoms have manifested to produce a stumbling, weaving performance on this hike no matter how much I focus. The toes of my running shoes snag every rock and root, stumbling through smashed pine cones and brittle leaves crunching over the trail, and as a result, I weave here and there, palming the sturdy firs as I pass.
“I’m fine.”
“You literally just bounced off that tree.”
