Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
ALSO BY AMANDA A. ALLEN
AUTHOR'S NOTE
COPYRIGHT
Yule Graves
A Rue Hallow Mystery, Book 5
By Amanda A. Allen
For Shawn Allen
I love you brother—
even if you have spiders in your brain
and
your soul is full of gunk.
CHAPTER 1
My name is Rue Hallow, and I’m the eldest of the eldest of the eldest of the Hallow line. This wasn’t something I knew six months ago. And it wasn’t something I was prepared to deal with when I left home for college. I had been prepared for homework. For eating in the cafeteria and missing my family.
I hadn’t expected supernatural callings, inheritances, unexpected magic. I hadn’t expected murders, dark witchcraft, or my family to fall apart. None of that was something I could deal with right now, though. Essentially, I had been an idiot. And I still was one. I’d let the circumstances of my birth distract me from what I had wanted—to go away to school and learn. The series of…what? Happenings? Strikes of fate? Bad luck? Whatever it was…it brought me to the school board offices today.
I had tried to pretend I was something else for today’s ‘court.’ My costume included loafers I’d purchased especially, black slacks, and gray sweater. I’d completed my look with a french braid after trying leaving it down, a bun, and a chignon. I thought I looked too much like an intern at an office, but these people didn’t know me. I didn’t normally wear makeup, but today I was wearing a little blush and mascara—something I regretted since my face was burning in fury from the way Leander Hallow was attempting to intimidate me.
“Who do you think you are?” Leander Hallow was leaning over the chair where I sat in the center of a jury of my peers, my professors, and what seemed to be all of both the college’s board of directors as well as all of the Hallow Family Council.
The problem was, of course, that I was the Hallow heir. Which really ruined the control he’d been building over the course of his life. He'd thought since my mother took off that he could be the king of the Hallows. And that was fine with me. The secondary problem was that he didn’t believe I didn’t want what he had. He couldn’t see how someone wouldn’t want to become the leader of the town, college, and family. But that wasn’t really how I thought.
The tertiary problem was that I was flunking Necromancy 101 and barely scraping by in World Lit. I had a scholarship by virtue of my bloodline. A scholarship they couldn’t technically pull from me, but it didn’t prevent them from making me explain myself. There was so much irony in that given that they knew exactly why I was flunking. By sheer luck, I’d survived the first part of school. But they wanted to make me pay regardless.
Maybe it was the irony? I was flunking basic Necromancy and I’d taken up the talisman of the St. Angelus Thinning making myself the keeper. If you don’t know why that’s ironic—in other places, keepers were the best necromancers that could be found. Yet, I was at a college that specialized in necromancy, was failing, and it was me who had the calling. For the moment, I hoped, but I could see how that would tick off a whole lot of someones. Especially because I’d sworn time and again that I didn’t want to be the keeper and that I didn’t have the talisman.
Then, when my sister needed to be stabbed in the side with a supernatural slayer of ghosts—I’d found that talisman in moments. So…I got their point. But I also knew that protest as I might—they were never going to believe that I wanted to be semi-hermit, living in Hallow House, and brewing potions. Possibly while also learning to fly.
I arched my back as if I weren’t bothered by his intimation. I wasn’t bothered by him at all, but I was still recovering from being attacked by a haunt that had been cursed into my sister. In order to save her, I’d taken up the stupid, unwanted talisman of the thinning and then stabbed her with it. My attack had broken the bond of the haunt on Bran, drawn it to me, and given her the merest ghost of a chance. We’d both made it. Emphasis on survive instead of triumph.
“I am,” I said quietly, “Veruca Dominique Hallow-Jones. Eldest of the eldest of the eldest of the Hallow.”
Leander’s eye twitched, but I carried on. He was the one who had picked this fight, so he could suck it. “Keeper of the St. Angelus Thinning and student of St. Angelus College.”
No one heard anything beyond thinning though. That declaration had been entirely unexpected and shocking. The murmurs in the room were in complete opposition to the expressionless faces of those who knew. Portia Hallow. Martin Hallow. Leander Hallow.
“Thank you for joining us today, Veruca,” Dr. Martin Hallow said. He was somehow related to me. A cousin, perhaps, of my Mother’s. I never had quite figured it out. But, he was also Dean of the College of Necromancy and the third highest member of the Hallow Family Council.
I nodded. I had no intention of speaking until they made me. I didn’t want anything to come out like pleas. Their bylaws said they couldn’t kick me out. That was all that mattered. Everything else was posturing and power plays.
The weight of the gazes on me was distracting. Purposely, I knew. Leander had planned well. He wanted me to…what? Confess to being unfit? Gods and monsters, I thought as my eye twitched, but no one other than Portia Hallow noticed my weakness. She was the second in command of the Hallow Family Council, a professor of the healing arts, and she ran the witch clinic in St. Angelus. She had also been treating me since the attack of the haunt and tended to notice every little thing that might be associated with my health.
Ignore Portia, I told myself and glanced around again. The feel in the air was distinctly chilly. I wonder what Leander or Martin had been saying to give me such a frigid reception. Probably, the truth, but spun heavily towards the spoiled little entitled witch. The key, I reminded myself, was ruthlessness and confidence that they could not take away what was most precious to me. I could get educated anywhere. It wouldn’t make me any less the heir of the Hallow line.
Which had only mattered since I’d fallen in love with my new home with—if not a new family—a second family. I had friends who had proven themselves so true, I trusted them as I trusted my sister and father.
“Veruca,” Leander Hallow said. He knew I hated the name—we’d argued about it before. But he said in such a way to draw it out, to make it snide, to take what was mine and make me lesser with it—to own me. My jaw tightened. No, I thought, no that isn’t going to work. Leander Hallow was the most threatened by my existence.
It was my right—eventually—to be what he was. I didn’t want those things. But he didn’t want to give up my money and he still technically controlled my house. To say we were cordially disdainful was a mockery of the word cordial. I don’t like him. He doesn’t like me. That would probably never change.
I didn’t let the use of my full name irritate me. I simply made the polite smile that didn’t even try to pretend it was anything other than forced.
“You are showing a distinct lack of remorse regarding your poor performance.”
“I assume that you mean my grades and not resolving the dark witch problem, the evil necromancer on your own council, let alone the possessed creature who had destroyed generations of our family.” There was no give in my
voice and I heard the snake in it. We were, after all, family and as cold as a family comes.
Leander smiled his snakey smile, “As if your survival was anything other than luck.”
“I don’t claim anything else. I know exactly how much skill I have at necromancy.”
My necromancy professor snorted and Portia crossed her legs, catching my eye. Her little smile conveyed nothing.
My face also did not reflect a thing. I reached down, lifted the mug they’d provided, and took a long sip. It was lukewarm coffee and as it hit me so did the realization of what they’d done. I looked up, truth pounding at the back of my teeth and met Leander’s gaze.
His snake smile was full of teeth. I met Martin’s gaze, and it shifted to the side. The bastard. And then Portia. She simply leaned back, expressionless as myself, and still not a flicker appeared in her gaze.
“Indeed, perhaps you’d like to tell your peers and the board why you feel the right to continue to attend St. Angelus College when you don’t bother to attend classes?”
I licked my lips and considered. Only the truth. The desire to pour out my every thought hit me hard. They were banking that those truths I would truth-dump would shame me into leaving or, perhaps, shame me into letting them take power over me.
Yet again, the arsenal my mother had created for me was coming to my rescue. I had been truth-serumed far, far too many times for that to work.
“Perhaps,” I said clearly, “because my family built this school specifically for the use of their progeny.”
And then I clamped my mouth shut and ground my teeth. I did have the right to go to school here because of that. It was in the college’s very bylaws. But I had been unable to give him my own snake smile—that would have been a lie.
“And yet your own mother abandoned the school and her family disinheriting herself and blocking that same family from Hallow House. You think you can just step in and ignore that slight.”
The murmurs in the room rose again, and I had to wonder just how many people here understood what my mother had done and how that affected our family. The thing was—witch families didn’t work so much like modern american families. Here and there, magical lines existed. With estates and magical treasures that were conveyed more like feudal titles than anything else. For a witch to be the heir of one of those great families and abandon that—that kind of action was big news. It was also the kind of thing the ones who had been abandoned hid.
And yet here I was. Living in Hallow House. Proof of their obfuscations.
“I am not my mother,” I said and met his gaze. He was attempting to stare me down. To make what my mother had done my fault. To make me take responsibility for it. I had to, but only to an extent. I had helped with things like that dark necromancer that put me at risk. And that risk was directly due to my lack of necromancy skills. But, I had been raised by a woman who had love-potioned a man every single day for her own convenience. She had truth-serumed her daughters randomly. What I was trying to say here was—I had long since learned to reject responsibly for what my mother did to others.
I was NOT my mother. But I had been raised by her. And that meant I had a skill with truth-serum that I doubted anyone else in the world could duplicate except for my sister. That let me do things like control the truths I unleashed. “But she did not lock you out of Hallow House.”
“Didn’t she?”
“She locked Hallow House for the rightful heir. And left it open to anyone who the house would accept. It’s not my fault that the house didn’t accept you, Leander Hallow. You or any of the rest of the Hallow Family.”
His gaze narrowed. And the murmurs were back.
So, I challenged him, “Say it isn’t true.”
He cleared his throat and said, “The house was certainly locked from the family.”
“It is true,” I said. “I contacted Presidium lawyers about it. And learned that the Presidium itself had examined what my mother did to Hallow House. They said it would open when it accepted an heir and that acceptance would be iron-clad.”
“That’s true,” Martin Hallow said, with perhaps, an edge of conscience. He seemed to feel guilty. Good. He should have felt guilty for what they’d done to me. Truth-seruming me in this way—it was unethical, and he well knew it. The witches in this room would be appalled if they knew. But who would they believe?
“Yes,” I said, nodding and ensuring that the rest of the school board and family council were paying attention. “The house didn’t accept you.”
They were of course, but I wanted the room to know that I knew they were here. I didn’t want to play power games, but they were forcing me. So I would play my incumbent heir card.
The day would come when I would control the trust my ancestors had set up. I would be the one who would control funding for projects. Who would be able to ruin so much for them. The one who would own the college, the ancient grounds of the Hallow Family, the Oak Grove. It turned out that being the one who opened Hallow House was a much bigger deal than I had ever realized. I would have worked with them. I didn’t want to play these power games. They were forcing it.
“But, you already knew that the transfer of heirship could not be challenged,” I told the room, adding, “Despite how Leander tried to challenge it four times. And four times the Presidium declined your attempt to fully take over the trust and the inheritance.”
Leander flushed. There were quiet whispers in the room around us. I’d have felt sorry for him if he had not set this up. He was their king and he’d just been found without clothes. But, it wasn’t my fault that he hadn’t expected me to be prepared. Little did he know I had been preparing for my mother. In his mind, he had decades on me. He should have been able to control me. And even if he couldn’t, how could he expect me to know how to contact the Presidium and find someone who would talk to me. Of course, it hadn’t been me alone. My former coven leader, Hazel, was well-connected to the Presidium. She had helped me, and they hadn’t expected me to have such friends.
I continued, “Just as you know that the Hallow House, though historically significant to the school, is not linked to my attendance or grades.”
“Perhaps not,” Leander said.
I had no doubt, given his expression, that he was not done with me.
“Your peers go to class.” An attempted side-track. He really did think I was stupid. And he was so convinced of his own superiority that he hadn’t even considered that I would do anything other than wait for his next attack.
I nodded once and then said, because I had to say something, “Some of them do.”
“Quit sidestepping, Veruca Jones and tell the truth.”
There was a spark of command in that voice and I realized a few things in the swiftest of moments. A few of the students and the other witches cast him aghast glances which meant that they’d felt that spell and they weren’t his toadies as I’d thought. That he thought my truth would be debilitating. And that I had quite of bit of truth to say.
“I think,” I said clearly and precisely. “That you are a power-hungry megalomaniac. I think it bothers you that I’m not impressed by you. I think that you’ve set this up knowing that you don’t have the right to do anything to me, but hoping to intimidate me and steal my inheritance from me. This school doesn’t have the right to expel me or remove my scholarship as long as I merely want to keep attending.”
“That might be true,” Leander scoffed, but I cut him off.
“I think you’re furious with my mother for turning her back on what you wanted the most. You wanted Hallow House, the Hallow inheritance, and the positions you now have. And even the roles that you gained through hard work and—I would guess—manipulation. These things were only possible because she turned her back on the family.”
He cleared his throat and stood, leaning forward again to intimidate me. But for the love of Hecate, he had not been raised by my mother. I did not intimidate.
“And,” I added with stark, terrible hone
sty, “You are right to despise her. She was wrong to leave St. Angelus the way she did. She was wrong to turn her back on her obligations. She should have turned to you and Martin and Portia and Elspeth. She should not have left this town or these people handicapped by the lack of a keeper. She should have done something.”
Leander sat again, leaning back as I leaned forward, facing off with him. But I noticed a shifting in the others, the professors, the students and most of all the school board. The flavor of the audience had changed and it had changed to benefit me.
“But I remind you that I am not my mother. I am not guilty of her crimes. I am guilty of missing too much class, of being distracted by other…events. But was I wrong to do what was necessary?”
“That’s enough,” Leander finally said. But it was too late. He was so sure that I’d tell him my dirty secrets. Some terrible plan my mother had set up with me as her minion. But he was wrong. They always were when they assumed I was her stooge.
My mother had manipulated me for the last time and I was not her stooge any more than I would be his stooge.
“I suppose it makes you angry,” I continue speaking to Martin and Portia Hallow. “To know that the talisman accepted me when I used it. That I was able to find it. But I remind you that I am flunking Necromancy 101, so I didn’t know it could be transferred until Hiro Knotley told me it could be.”
“I wonder,” I said and there was so much gentle rage in my voice that everyone but Leander seemed surprised. “What would have happened if you’d just told me? You’ve truth-serumed me. Here’s the truth then. I would have given you the talisman. I wasn’t joking when I said I don’t want to be keeper. I was never playing games. I would have been happy to see someone like Finn as keeper, even if you all are his puppet master. With a real keeper, I wouldn’t have been forced to face off with a dark witch and a corrupt necromancer. Maybe Chrysie wouldn’t have died, and maybe she wouldn’t have lost her hand. Maybe I wouldn’t have the memory of digging up Gwennie Thorpe when she had been buried alive. Maybe, I would have had the time and ability to focus on schoolwork as I wanted.”
Yule Graves: A Rue Hallow Mystery (The Rue Hallow Mysteries Book 5) Page 1
