Page 91 of The Lies We Conjure
I clear my throat. “I still maintain we need a plan. We have the element of surprise, thanks to the twins. What if we go down there right now, wake them, and calmly reveal what we know?”
It’s as good an idea as I’ve got that shouldn’t get violent. Won’t get us any closer to finding the relics and getting out of here, but perhaps it will keep us alive long enough from Hector Cerise’s apparent lethal greed to do so.
“Maybe Hector will just be dying to tell us his whole intricate plan?” Kaysa agrees. “He does have ‘villain itching for a big monologue’ written all over his face. No offense, Cerises.”
“None taken,” Hex confirms, raising his mostly empty scotch glass. Winter snatches it away and gestures again to the beef.
“Wait!” Lavinia calls, eyes suddenly bright. “‘Out damn spot’!”
“Lavinia,” Kaysa tuts, “we all recognized the Lady Macbeth reference in the clue. It’s not like it’s obscure. It was literally a callout to one of the most famous lines ever written.”
“Gah—no! Hex said Ursula had literal blood on her hands.” Lavinia looks down and away. “I know I have a block, that I don’t remember, but—was there blood when Dad died? Was it on Ursula’s hands?”
I raise myself to standing and meet her eyes. “Yeah.”
The line is immediate, burned into my memory. On the paper set aside.“Out damn spot, blood will never go…”
Lavinia meets my eyes and speaks the clue’s finale.“But never gone, stained with what was.”
“I think—” Lavinia draws a deep breath and tries again, “I think the clue might be pointing to where Ursula punished our father. I mean, I know Shadrack wrote the clue, but, like…”
“Everything Ursula did, Shadrack did first,” I tell her. “In the same place.”
Several iterations of curse words fly through the air between all of us. Evander disappears down the hallway and returns with aset of old-timey lanterns that he lights with a magical snap of his fingers.
“Phones as flashlights if needed; let’s use these first to protect battery life,” Evander barks, passing them out, his warnings about the grounds’ treachery after dark forgotten. “Cerises, are you staying with us or returning to your rooms?”
Swallowing the last of Winter’s dinner, Hex pushes away from the table. “And let you have all the fun? Not on your life.”
“Are you people insane?” Winter cries. “You just spent the wee hours of this morning explaining in intricate detail how deranged Hector Cerise is, and now you’re going out in the pitch dark to free the relic tethering his power to the title he wants most in the world?”
“Yes,” Evander says.
“He’s asleep,” I point out.
Winter’s hands ball at her sides, color rising in her cheeks, her eyes bare fury. “No, no, no. You two need to stay right here. Until dawn. Until we can lay down the olive branch, tell Hector where we think the master is, and go together, in a sign of solidarity, so he doesn’t just pick us off forfun.” She stabs one fist at each twin. “And use our friends to do it.”
“That’s a chance we have to take. Let’s move.”
Winter curses and twines her arms around herself.
I agree with Evander, and yet I pause, Lavinia standing back, watching the movement as if from behind a two-way mirror. Kaysa is the one who immediately steps forward, collecting a lamp from Evander. “If you don’t want to go to where it happened, I’ll stay with you.”
And I will.
I know what’s at stake—we have less than twenty-four hours, another clue to decipher, another relic to find, and the increasingly complicated question of who killed Ursula to unravel.
Yet, it hits me like a falling rock that I’d stay with Lavinia. Door locked, silence descending, waiting for word.
Lavinia sighs with her whole body and when her eyes meet mine,there’s sorrow as deep as the ocean. “I want to be there. If what Hex said is true, he died because he helped the Hegemonys find these master relics. And then he lost his life because of it, within spitting distance of one. I need to pay my respects.”
With that, we head for the door. Leaving only Winter.
I hover in the doorway, Lavinia on one side, Hex on the other. He holds the jamb, the footsteps of his twin, Evander, and Kaysa growing softer as they move down the hall.
“Are you coming, Win?” he asks, beating me to it.
There’s a long pause before the answer comes in the form of her stomping over, palming a chocolate bar and Evander’s bag of chips—a bold choice indeed because he hasn’t had any—and shoving the salt-and-vinegar snack with a great crinkling sigh into Hex’s chest.
