Not exactly a welcome mat, Kami thought as she grasped the iron knocker, wrought in the shape of a woman’s head with weeds in her hair. She brought it down hard four times.
The door to Aurimere House creaked open.
Framed in the doorway stood a woman who was tall while giving the impression she was small, beautiful while giving the impression she was plain. She had long pale hair rippling from her pale face. She looked like the ghost of Aurimere.
“Um, hello,” said Kami.
The woman’s eyes went wide, as if she really was a ghost and she was startled that Kami could see her. “How may I help you?”
“My name’s Kami Glass,” Kami said. She saw the shudder that went right through the woman’s thin frame.
“I’m Rosalind Lynburn, Jared’s mother.” Rosalind Lynburn bowed her fair head, as if admitting to a crime. “I heard something happened on Friday night,” she almost whispered. “If he hurt you—if he scared you, I am truly sorry. I don’t know what I can say.”
Kami glared. “He saved me. I came to thank him. Is he here?”
Rosalind hesitated, wavering like a reflection in water, then turned with a shimmer of her pale skirts. Kami could barely hear her feet on the stairs.
Rosalind had not invited Kami in, so Kami just poked her head inside and saw the wide gray flagstones and the vaulted ceiling, its arches dark with age and shadow. There were a couple of narrow windows with diamond panes that alternated crimson and clouded glass.
The sound of footsteps was clearer now, above Kami’s head, retreating to the back of the mansion. Kami counted the steps and tried to measure where Jared’s room might be.
The manor was all stone and arches, turning echoes into ghosts. Jared heard his mother coming long before she knocked. She didn’t wait for him to tell her to come in. He’d always wondered why she bothered knocking, until he met Aunt Lillian, Uncle Rob, and Ash and saw that they all did it. Being polite and imperious at the same time was the Lynburn way.
The curtains were closed. He had actual velvet curtains like you might have at a theater. Jared thought it was ridiculous. He hadn’t opened the curtains; the show wasn’t going on, not today.
Jared leaned against the wall and watched his mother walk over to the window, the point of the room farthest from where he was. Rays of sunlight stabbed like golden knives through the chinks in the curtains, toward her bowed head.
“That girl is here,” she said. “The one who took that tumble down the well.”
It was not exactly a surprise to Jared. Awareness of her kept tugging at the edges of his mind, as if her voice was always just on the cusp of his hearing. He had to choose not to listen, or he would be able to make out the words.
“I didn’t push her,” he told his mother. Not for the first time.
“Oh no,” she said. “She fell down the well. Your father fell down the stairs. Funny how people fall down all around you.” Her lip curled.
Jared thought of Kami, suddenly and terribly real. He’d had his arms around her in the well, knew the precise dimensions of her. She was so small he could crush her.
“I knew we should not have brought you,” Mom said. “The Lynburns built this town on their blood and bones.”
“That was their first mistake,” Jared said. “They should’ve built a city on rock and roll.”
Uncle Rob would have laughed, and Aunt Lillian would have smiled her chilly smile. His mother looked at him, and he saw her lips tremble with the effort of doing so, with how afraid she was.
“This town will only make you worse,” she whispered. “Being a Lynburn means we hurt each other. Being a Lynburn means we hurt everyone.”
Jared turned his face from the sight of his mother. He stared at the curtains, the velvet drapes that seemed black in the gloom, shutting all the brightness out. “Send her away.”
Chapter Eight
Yet She Says Nothing
Kami heard the sound of Rosalind’s steps returning and leaned away from the threshold, hands behind her back, trying to look as if she was admiring the weather.
Rosalind looked even more wavering than she had before. “He doesn’t want to see you,” she said, her voice barely there. “He doesn’t want you here.”
It was weird, having a parent be rude to you, even if she was just delivering someone’s message. Kami flinched. “Okay,” she said uncertainly. She waited for a moment, expecting Rosalind to offer excuses or apologies, but Rosalind did nothing but stand at the threshold, watching Kami with her pallid eyes.
Jared, what the hell? Kami demanded.
Jared was as silent as his mother. Kami bowed her head and retreated. On her way down the road, she turned at the sound of footsteps and looked up into Rosalind’s face.
“Don’t come back,” Rosalind whispered, and fled. The door to Aurimere House slammed behind her.
Kami stood stricken.
How dare she? How dare Jared?
Her own mother couldn’t warn her off, and neither could his. She was not going to have a piece of her soul closed off from her. She was not going to be chased away.
Kami ran back up the road and headed around the rear of the mansion, pushing open the unlocked gate to the garden. The gate towered above her, depicting delicate wrought-iron women with flowers falling from their hair, but it swung open easily at her touch. She stumbled as she came into the garden. It had once been the kind of garden tended by gardeners. The curves and rectangles of it could still be made out, but order had been drowned in vivid floods of poppies, dahlias, and cornflowers. The deep red sunburst of a crape myrtle exploded through the dark boughs of a yew to embrace a bridal autumn cherry tree.
Kami almost fell over the husk of a tree trunk, swathed now with the red ribbons of love-lies-bleeding. She waded through the garden until she was at the back of the house. Kami didn’t actually have to figure out which room was Jared’s. She knew which one was his because the curtains were closed and she could feel him sulking behind them.
Kami strode through a froth of daisies to a half-fallen wall that might once have been part of a fortress, but was now a tumble of stones studded with spiky yellow blooms. She bent down, rummaging in the wild tangle of garden around her feet, and chose a pebble. A large pebble. Kami wound her arm back, took careful aim, and threw.
The “pebble” crashed through both glass and curtain.
There was the creak of an old sash window being thrust open, and Jared’s head and shoulders appeared at the window. “Hark,” he said, his tone very dry. “What stone through yonder window breaks?”
Kami yelled up at him, “It is the east, and Juliet is a jerk!”
Jared abandoned Shakespeare and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Throwing a pebble,” said Kami defensively. “Uh … and I’ll pay for the window.”
Jared vanished and Kami was ready to start shouting again, when he reemerged with the pebble clenched in his fist. “This isn’t a pebble! This is a rock.”
“It’s possible that your behavior has inspired some negative feelings that caused me to pick a slightly overlarge pebble,” Kami admitted.
Jared’s gaze softened slightly. His voice did not. “I saved your life, and you broke my window!”
“You had me turned away from your door like someone selling insurance,” Kami said. “And I won’t have it. Come down here. We need to talk.”
Jared glared at her again, then glared at the ground under his window instead. “Okay,” he said abruptly. “I’ll come down.” He glanced at her once more and amusement touched his face, but not quite a smile. “Don’t break anything else until I get to you,” he said, and something about his tone was more like the voice inside her head.
Kami thought for a moment that everything might be all right. But as soon as Jared came through the back door, she knew everything was still wrong. He stood in front of her, fists clenched by his sides. He was really tall, too tall, and his shoulders were much too wide. It made her feel on
edge just to look at him. She found all her muscles locked in sheer physical discomfort. Here he was, her oldest and closest friend, and she couldn’t help wishing him out of existence.
“See?” Jared said quietly. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“That’s not true,” said Kami. Their eyes met and they both flinched. Kami stared over Jared’s shoulder and swallowed a lump in her throat. “It’s just weird,” she whispered, her voice thin.
Jared laughed bitterly. “No. Really?”
“What I mean is it’s strange for now. All we have to do is get used to it,” Kami said, gathering conviction. She knew from years of listening to him that this was the kind of situation where Jared got too tangled up in his feelings to act. It meant that she had to control her own feelings and make a plan to get them through this. “We need to take this in stages,” she announced, spinning away from him. She went to stand on one side of the half-fallen wall.
“Kami?” Jared asked, sounding taken aback.
“Go stand on the other side of the wall,” she said, and peered through a chink in the wall until she could see the flash of faded blue cotton that was Jared’s T-shirt. “And now stoop, you ridiculously tall person.”
She saw him move, the glint of his hair as he sat down in the grass. She sat down too, feeling him reach out tentatively in her mind. She reached back.
His voice in her head was familiar and soothing. You’re just tiny. It’s probably why you’re so bossy.
“You know, Napoleon complexes are entirely misnamed,” Kami said. “Napoleon was actually average height. He just had tall bodyguards who stood behind him all the time. Also, we should probably talk out loud as part of the first stage of my plan.” She wasn’t happy about having to say that to him, not when he had talked to her in her head for the first time since the well. Kami laid her cheek against the crumbling, sun-warmed stone of the wall.
“So, what’s going on with you, Kami?” asked Jared, with an effort she could feel. It was a subtle difference, but his voice sounded rusty now, instead of rough, as if he wasn’t used to speaking this way out loud.
Kami’s mouth curved against the stone. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
“Yeah,” said Jared. “I don’t—I hate—” He stopped.
“Talking like this is very classical of us,” Kami suggested. “Think of Pyramus and Thisbe.”
Jared spoke again, sounding helpless, but less like he wanted to hit something. “I might, if I knew who they were.”
Kami hesitated. “You do read, don’t you?”
“I haven’t lied to you,” Jared said, and his voice was angry again. “I read. I just haven’t read that.”
“They are characters in a Roman myth who had to talk through a wall. Then there was a misunderstanding about one of them being eaten by a lion.”
“I hate it when that happens,” Jared said. “Also, considering the way things have been going, I am thankful there are no lions in England.”
There was a wall between them, but the wall of silence in Jared’s head wasn’t there anymore. Kami still did not quite dare to come to the place where their minds met, for fear of being shut out again. She skirted the edge of what he was feeling, and stretched out her hand so he could see it on his side of the stone wall.
After a moment, she felt the brush of Jared’s fingers against hers. The light touch of skin on skin made electricity crackle through her blood so that it burned and stung in her veins. She had never been so aware of anyone in her life, or so uncomfortable.
Jared’s hand closed around hers, their fingers linking. From a careful touch of fingertips, they were suddenly both clinging as if the other had fallen off a cliff and they had to keep hold or risk them slipping away. Jared’s hand was a lot bigger than Kami’s, fingers callused. It was just a boy’s hand, blood and flesh and bone, she told herself fiercely. It wasn’t such a big deal.
“I’m sorry I was a jerk,” Jared ground out, sounding as if someone else had made him say it against his will. “I just—I hate this.”
Kami ventured, not quite meaning to, I thought you were going to say “I hate you.”
It was like being back in the lift again. She did not have to try to sense what he was feeling: he threw it at her and she could not hold back the storm that enveloped her.
“I don’t hate you,” said Jared, and I do. I hate this, I want this to stop, how are we supposed to live with this, and how am I supposed to walk away? You’re real and I hate you for it.
“Stop,” Kami whispered, her forehead pressed against the stone, her hand gripping his so hard her bones hurt. She was shaking. “Calm down. There has to be something we can do.”
“What?” Jared demanded, through gritted teeth. “What can we do? How can we fix this when reality is the problem?”
Feeling was rushing through her like a tidal wave, something dark and ferocious that might knock her off her feet and drown her without even meaning to.
There weren’t words anymore, just a rush of hate and love and rage and such fear, the black terror that had overwhelmed Jared in the lift, the fact that she had never been real and it had been unbearable and now she was real and it was just as unbearable. The thought that someone who existed in real life might betray you.
You were always on my side, said Jared, putting the dread into silent words. And now …
Kami felt it too, the horror of someone knowing all her secrets, every petty insecurity and small meanness she had ever felt. She felt the dread of Jared as an independent person, of what he might do, what he might think of her, and that she would have to live with those thoughts in her head. Kami wrenched her hand out of his, though he tried to hold on.
Then Kami slid her hand along his arm, her touch light, trying to be reassuring. His breathing had gone harsh and almost panicked. The soft rustle of grass and the sound of her own heart beating were loud in her ears. Her palm traveled over his elbow, followed the tense curve of his bicep, and hit the pulled-taut material of his T-shirt sleeve. She leaned forward and left the shelter of the wall.
Then there was nothing but them, unprotected and real together, both on their knees. She clenched her fist in his T-shirt, put her other arm around those too-broad, too-real shoulders. When he tried to pull away, she held on tight. Kami felt the surrender in his mind a moment before he laid his face in the curve of her neck. The whole world was so real it hurt.
Kami whispered into Jared’s hair: “I’m always on your side.”
Chapter Nine
Real Now
On Monday morning, Kami sat in the newspaper headquarters, scribbling a quick list of the articles she had planned for the week. Angela was reading out the interview she’d done with the school nurse.
“So in all circumstances, she just hands students a pain pill and says to tell her if they’re having hot flashes,” Kami observed.
“Pretty much,” said Angela.
“How about that time Ross Philips fell out of the window in the gym and cracked his skull and broke his arm?”
“Ross wasn’t having hot flashes.” Angela smiled. “I like Nurse Tey’s style.”
Kami hummed in agreement and wrote herself a note that said INFIRMARY EXPOSÉ! Then she resumed writing her list. She was chewing the end of her pencil over article number nineteen when Jared threw open the door, strode into the room, and announced, “We should date.”
Kami bit her pencil in two.
Angela rose from her chair like the wrath of God in a red silk blouse and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”
“Hey, Angela,” Jared said without sparing her a glance. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and continued, glaring at Kami’s desk. “I was thinking.”
“I see no evidence of that, Jared,” Kami said. “Sorry, Angela! He’s crazy! Excuse us, we have to go talk in the hall.” She pushed her chair back from the desk so fast that it toppled over. As she came toward him, Jared gave her a little crooked, awkward smile.
“I’m not going to l
et you go talk to some lunatic alone in the hall,” Angela said furiously. “Who are you?”
“Jared Lynburn,” said Jared.
Angela slipped out of her chair and circled Jared like a panther.
Kami intercepted the prowl and patted Angela’s red-silk arm. “I’m off to go do an interview with him in the hall.” She patted Angela again. “Trust me. I will explain everything.” She made shepherding gestures to get Jared out of the door without touching him.
Jared let himself be shepherded, glancing at her over his shoulder as if he was uncertain she was coming with him.
You idiot, she said fondly. She saw his mouth curve before he turned his head. Kami followed him out the door, which she shut and then sagged against. “Now tell me,” she said. “What the hell was that?”
In addition to leaning against the door, Kami was also keeping a firm grip on the doorknob. It was reassuring to have a firm grip on something. Jared stood in the echoing hallway as if his presence in the world was perfectly normal. Which it was, and she was going to have to get used to it.
Jared watched Kami. He was wearing the same blue T-shirt he’d been wearing in the garden, and the sight of it made her additionally uncomfortable. She wished again that he wasn’t quite so tall.
“I said, we should—” Jared began.
“I heard what you said!” Kami yelped. “I guess I was hoping I’d got it wrong and you hadn’t said the crazy thing you said. Since you did say the crazy thing you said, do you mind explaining it to me?”
Unspoken Page 6
