“Hey,” she said, and when his eyelids did not even move, she barged into his mind. Hey, Jared. Come on.
Sick pain flooded through her, his pain. She wondered grimly how long he had been feeling this bad.
Jared! she shouted in his mind, blazing urgency everywhere. I’m right here. Jared, please!
Jared opened his eyes with a groan. They were unfocused and blurry, lashes trembling as if his eyes might close again any moment. Kami?
Come on, get up, Kami pleaded. Come on, try. We’re going home. It felt like she was pulling him up with mental as well as physical effort, dragging him out of unconsciousness as she hauled him to his feet. Jared grabbed at the wall and tried to stay upright, but he was leaning heavily on her.
“You don’t understand,” Henry mumbled from the floor. He looked as if he was fighting a losing battle against unconsciousness as well. “You don’t know what—what he is.”
“I know what I am,” said Kami. She started doggedly on her way down the corridor, fighting to keep Jared on his feet. “I’m on his side.”
She got a cab to the train station, where she cajoled and shoved Jared onto the train. She even got him onto the next bus, though as they were boarding, Jared’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. She had to take all his weight, and for a second she thought they would both go down.
Kami sat in the bus seat with Jared collapsed against her, his body limp though every breath was a low sob in her ear. She could feel the clammy sweat on his skin, rising hot and cooling fast on his cold face. He wasn’t having very many thoughts. There was just pain, and him still trying to hold on to her.
She knew she would never get him onto the last bus to Sorry-in-the-Vale. So she did the only thing she could think of at that point. She took out her phone with shaking hands and called her mother.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Happy in the Hour
Kami was sitting on the ground by the bus stop with Jared’s head in her lap when her mother’s car came around the corner, raising a cloud of pale yellow dust.
Mum did not bother with parking: she stopped the car in the middle of the street and threw herself out of it. “Kami!” she shouted, bronze hair flying like a flag. “How dare you run off without telling anyone, the day after a girl died!” She strode toward them, her face white with fury.
Kami sat on the ground, hunched her shoulders, and waited for the storm to break over her head. She felt too wretched and drained to do anything else. Mum stood over her, her shadow on Jared’s slack face, and was silent.
“I’m sorry,” Kami said quietly. “Please let me get him into the car.”
Mum sighed and knelt down. She was taller and stronger than Kami, so together they were able to wrestle Jared into the car. He tried to help, to please Kami, even though she could tell he wasn’t even aware her mother was there.
After they tipped him into the backseat and the car started, Kami felt his fall into darkness. She wrenched her neck turning to look at him. Jared lay in the backseat, his hair almost black with sweat, his face pale. But she saw his chest rising and falling, so she could breathe again.
When Kami turned back, she saw her mother’s face. She dropped her eyes to the crimson T-shirt that said CLAIRE’S and was smeared with dust and flour. Kami did not know what to say.
They drove until they crested the west hills and Sorry-in-the-Vale lay spread out before them, pale buildings and lights cupped in a giant’s green hand. Then her mother pulled over by the side of the road.
“Mum, we need to get Jared to a hospital,” Kami said.
“A hospital won’t help him,” Mum said distantly. “I don’t think he’s sick, not the way normal people get sick.”
Kami thought of how Henry had been sick too, and could not argue with her. This wasn’t normal.
“Kami,” her mother whispered, “what were you thinking, going off with him? A girl was killed!”
Kami closed her eyes against the onslaught of images, but all the bright colors of Nicola in the playground rose up in the darkness toward her.
“I know that. I’m sorry to have worried you.”
Mum smacked her fist against the wheel of her car. “I don’t want you sorry. I want you safe!” she said. “Do you want to get yourself killed? Haven’t I told you enough?”
“No!” Kami shouted back at her. “No, you haven’t! You haven’t told me anything! Nobody in this town will tell me anything! All you’ve done is keep secrets.”
Her mother was still very pale. “Surely,” she said, her voice low and shaking, “surely I’ve told you enough that you know to stay away from the Lynburns.”
“I can’t!” Kami said, and could not stop the tears coming. She gulped and tried to fight them back, but they burst through anyway. “I can’t. It doesn’t matter what you say. I can’t get away from Jared. If something hurts him, it hurts me too. And I don’t know what’s going on! You haven’t told me anything at all, except to do something that is impossible. You have to tell me something else! What is it that I’m not supposed to tell Dad? What did you do?” Kami couldn’t stop shaking.
Her mother sat looking at Kami, and for a moment Kami thought she would simply sit there, so still, as if she was a painting with desperate eyes.
Very quietly, her mother said, “Rosalind Lynburn and I did a spell.”
It was such a shock it made Kami stop crying. She gaped instead. “You did what?”
“We did a spell,” her mother repeated, her voice clearer, almost normal but with an edge.
“So, people can do spells,” said Kami.
“No,” said her mother. “The Lynburns aren’t people. I’ve told you how things were back then. The whole town was terrified of the Lynburns. We don’t talk about what they are. We all knew that they weren’t supposed to hurt us. But we also knew that they could. We knew what they could do to you. Nobody ever crossed a Lynburn.” Mum bit her lip and plunged on. “The last person who tried was your grandfather, Stephen Glass. The family who live in the house at the edge of the woods, they’re meant to have a special relationship with the Lynburns.”
“The family who live in the house at the edge of the woods,” Kami repeated. “Us.” She slid a look back at Jared but could only see the faint outline of his face in the shadowy backseat, turned away from her. “What kind of special relationship?”
“Being their servants,” Mum said bitterly.
“Well, that’s not happening,” Kami said.
Mum did not even seem to hear her. “Doing their bidding, being their—their front guard against the world. Stephen Glass said no, struck out the word ‘Guard’ on our house, and left Sorry-in-the-Vale. He came back years later, thinking it was all ridiculous and that he was a man of the world who didn’t believe in fairy tales. He came back to his childhood home with his new wife by his side, thinking nothing could possibly happen to him. He was dead by morning. Nobody crosses the Lynburns.”
“But you weren’t even born then,” Kami stammered out. “How do you know he didn’t just die? How could they kill him? Sobo would’ve told me if he was murdered!”
“She never believed in any of it. They can kill you without touching you,” Mum whispered. “They can make rain fall from an empty sky. They can make the woods come alive. That’s what people whisper about them. I didn’t know anything, not for sure. Not until the night Rosalind Lynburn left Sorry-in-the-Vale.”
The whisper came involuntarily from Kami’s dry throat: “What happened?”
Shadow was falling across Sorry-in-the-Vale, evening drawing over the town like a veil. Her mother stared at the horizon, the dying sunlight reflected in her eyes.
“I was on my way home from the restaurant,” she said. “I was walking down our High Street. And—I have never told anybody this, I know it sounds crazy—all along our High Street the shadows came alive.”
“What?” Kami whispered. Her mother did not even seem to hear.
“Shadows unfurled from around flags and weather van
es like they had wings. They curled around gates like cats and they slithered toward me like snakes. The shadows came apart from the night and came alive and came toward me. Then Rosalind Lynburn came walking out of the darkness, pale as a ghost. She meant it as a display, you see? She meant to scare me.” Claire laughed a short laugh. “She succeeded.”
Rosalind Lynburn. Jared’s mother, deliberately terrorizing Kami’s. But she couldn’t have any unearthly powers. She would have done something about Jared’s father if she did.
“Rosalind came to me and she said that she thought it was time Jon showed the Lynburns some allegiance. She said he didn’t want to end up like his father. Jon had just come back from London, had just given up college to marry me because—” Mum gave Kami a quick, scared look.
“It’s okay, Mum,” said Kami. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t your fault. I get it. Go on.”
“I wanted him to marry me and come back to Sorry-in-the-Vale,” Mum said in a thin voice. “I loved this town. I wanted my dream here, my restaurant, and I wanted him as well. I was getting everything, but I was terrified that he’d be sorry later. And I was simply terrified for him. Nobody ever told him or his mother about the Lynburns; they were left alone because there wasn’t anything they could do for the Lynburns. It was one of the things that I loved about him, that fear never touched him. Rosalind wasn’t going to touch him. I said I was a Glass now too, and then she smiled. It was just what she’d wanted me to say.”
“What did she want from you?” Kami asked.
“The only thing she ever wanted,” Mum said. “Rob Lynburn. She knew he came to see me every day. He was marrying her twin sister, and we all knew Lillian was going to have a baby. Rosalind wanted to get as far away from her sister’s victory as she could, and she chose some American tourist to carry her away, but she still wanted Rob. She said she’d do a spell so she could see him through my eyes. She said all debts would be paid off between our family and hers then.”
Kami remembered that the Lynburns owned their house. Her mother had been the same age Rusty was now, and alone in the face of magic.
Mum closed her eyes. “I said I would do it. She took me into the woods, and she used a golden knife on a bird, and had me taste the blood. She cut off a piece of my hair and took it away with her. Later I told myself that she was crazy, that I’d been humoring a madwoman, but sometimes in the year after she left, just in that year—sometimes I thought I felt her. Using my soul as a keyhole to look through. Coming at me again through the darkness with the shadows in her hair.” She shuddered, turning away from the car window.
“You think a Lynburn killed Nicola.”
Kami reached out and touched her arm, and her mother turned to her. “I don’t know. But I know any one of them might have. I know the Lynburns think our blood is their right. And so you are not going near the Lynburns again!” Mum hissed. “I won’t let them touch you.”
As she hadn’t let them touch Dad, Kami thought. The lights of Sorry-in-the-Vale below her turned to diamonds underwater as she tried not to cry.
Mum covered Kami’s hand with hers. “Do you hear me, Kami? Are you listening to me? It doesn’t matter how in love you think you are.”
“Oh, right,” Kami said, and tears were running down her face again, beyond her power to control. She could taste them, and they were bitter. “In love. That’s how it sounds, doesn’t it? His heart is my heart, nobody can ever take him away from me, I keep him in here!” She thumped her breastbone so hard it hurt. “People say stuff like that but they don’t mean it: they mean they’re in love. All except me. I mean it. Rosalind and you made me mean it. When you did that spell, linked each other’s minds. You were going to have a baby. And so was she.”
She’d known there had to be an explanation for this.
Mum’s hand closed convulsively on Kami’s.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Kami whispered. “You had to know.”
“When you were a baby,” Mum said, in a low voice, “I used to watch you, the way you could lie there for hours, absorbed. It never went away, seeing my daughter look off into the distance and talk to someone only she could hear. I didn’t know it would happen, Kami. I didn’t! I’m so sorry. I couldn’t think of anything to do but try to hide it from you.”
It was one of Kami’s earliest memories, the look of fear on her mother’s face as she watched Kami.
“I’ve been scared all my life,” Kami said slowly. “I’ve thought I might be crazy all my life, and you did it to me.”
“I didn’t know what else to do!” Claire whispered. “I couldn’t tell anyone. The Lynburns were gone, but there are others like them in this town. They don’t like it when you tell secrets. I couldn’t lift the spell. All I could do was try to minimize the damage the Lynburns could do to your life. They were the leaders, and without them the town seemed to settle into a different shape, a better shape. I hoped, I prayed they would never come back.” She began to cry.
She’d been very young and scared, and she’d done it for love. Kami remembered how she had felt seeing magic, and the magic had not been turned against her.
Kami could not say that it was all right, that she was all right. She slid her arm around her mother’s neck instead and held on.
Kami refused to drop Jared at Aurimere House and pointed out that Dad was bound to notice a boy sleeping on the sofa. So her mother reluctantly agreed to help get Jared up to Kami’s room.
“Unconscious guys rarely assault people’s virtue,” Kami pointed out, holding on tight to Jared’s jacket as they hauled him up the stairs. “Besides, he almost never touches me. He doesn’t want to.” She looked at her mother, who was handling Jared as impersonally as she handled crates. “I’m safe with him,” she insisted.
“He’s a Lynburn,” Mum said. “I’ve seen what they can do. I don’t think you can trust him. And I don’t think you’re safe with him.”
She left Kami with him, though. Kami tried to tug the blanket out from under Jared so she could cover him, but her muscles were screaming in protest. She could barely move the blanket an inch, so she climbed onto the bed and sat beside him.
He looked better, she thought, his color back, the sweat in his hair dry. She laid a hand gently against his forehead. It was hot, but it didn’t seem dangerously hot.
Sleep smoothed out the lines of anger and wariness on Jared’s face. He looked younger, like the child she’d never been able to reach, and terribly vulnerable.
“Hey,” said Kami. “Hey. When you wake up, I have a lot to tell you.” She’d known there was an explanation for all this. She’d known it wasn’t that they were soul mates. She knew she would have to be very careful when she told him.
Jared turned his head on the pillow, murmuring something. It was soothing to have him there but unconscious, so she could touch him and he wouldn’t flinch. She could think about him and he wouldn’t know what she was thinking. She could be sure that whatever he felt was not bleeding into her feelings, that now her feelings were hers alone.
She could be almost sure.
“I wish I knew what was wrong,” she murmured.
“It’s nothing,” Jared murmured back.
Kami jumped and let her hand drop. She looked at him: his eyes were still mostly closed, but there was a gleam of gray under his lashes.
“I always get sick like this. Every fall.”
Kami thought of Jared in the woods, talking about being sick before he went home last year. She thought of the times in their lives he had reached out for comfort, and wondered how often it had been because he was ill. She leaned over him, and her shadow fell across his face.
“Don’t talk,” she said. “Just rest. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
“I remember last year,” Jared breathed. “I was—I remember lying on sidewalks that felt like frying pans during the day and like gravestones at night. My skin was crawling with fever and the only thing I could still do was listen to you.”
“I didn’t
know.”
Kami’s throat was tight. She hadn’t known what was happening to him, hadn’t known that he was real. She had just talked to him, and he had needed help.
“It’s all right,” Jared said. His voice was still hushed, but it was very clear. “Everything’s all right now. This was all I wanted.”
“What?” Kami whispered.
His chest was shuddering with his fast, shallow breaths. He did not lift his head, dark gold against the pallor of her pillow. She did not think he was able to. He just lay there, the moonlight making his eyes opaque silver mirrors.
“This,” he whispered back. “Nothing else ever mattered to me, and you weren’t even real. All I ever wanted was you.”
Now he was real, and she was real, and they were together. No matter what nightmare explanation there was, what mistakes made in blood and darkness when their mothers were young, this year was better than the last.
Jared’s eyes had closed. Kami reached out, seeing her hand tremble in the shadow and moonlight, and stroked his hair very, very lightly. She traced the curling ends of his hair with her fingertips and murmured, “I’m here now. You’re safe with me.”
She lay down beside him. She curled close into the warmth of his body, not quite touching, listening to his breathing smooth out and become easy and regular. They spent the night together, safe.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Waking the Woods
Kami’s eyes opened and she stretched, both reflexive moves that woke her up a good deal faster than usual. The stretch brought her body into contact with Jared’s, lightly touching all along one side. It was very strange to be so fiercely aware of one edge of your body.
Jared was lying propped up on one arm, looking down at her. Good morning, he said silently, and the two things fused together, the voice in her head and the boy in her bed. They almost seemed natural.
Good morning, said Kami. You look better. She should have spoken aloud. It was too intimate, morning sunlight and rumpled sheets and silence. It made Jared think—or perhaps she was the one who thought it—of when they were fourteen.
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