“Holly, of course.”
“You’re not just putting up with me because Angela likes me?” Holly said.
“What are you talking about? Why would I do that? Angela likes a lot of stuff I don’t like. Angela likes documentaries about deadly spiders and having eighteen hours of sleep a day. I’m pretty comfortable with not liking everything Angela likes.”
Holly gave a small laugh, which made a brief frosty cloud shape in the air between them. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Kami reached out and put her hand on Holly’s where it lay on the fence. Holly turned her hand under Kami’s and linked their fingers, holding on tight. “Can you do magic?” Kami asked.
Holly blinked.
“Can Angela do magic?” Kami asked. “You said that you weren’t interested in where she was or what she did, and Rusty said he didn’t want to tell any of Angela’s secrets. I feel like I can’t trust anybody. I wrote down a list of suspects and it was the whole town. Anyone could have magic, anyone could be trying to hurt us, but I have to be able to trust my friends. Will you please tell me what’s going on?”
Holly’s hand clasped Kami’s tight. “Angela tried to kiss me,” she said.
It was Kami’s turn to blink. “What?”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Holly said. “Maybe I should have been, I mean, I’m meant to be the girl who knows about all that stuff, but I—but I don’t. I wasn’t trying to lead her on or anything. I didn’t even know she liked girls.”
“What?” Kami repeated. She was truly the worst investigative reporter in the world.
“I’ve had guys I thought were my friends turn out not to be after their real friend decided I wasn’t so great after all,” Holly went on. “I guess I’m not sure how it works with girls. I was confused and I got angry. Look, I’m sorry. Is Angie all right?”
“I have no idea,” Kami said. “I mean, I literally had no idea about any of this. I thought Angela’s secret might be that she was a sorcerer.”
She and Holly stood staring at each other. Then Kami pulled her hand gently out of Holly’s grasp, pulled out her phone, and called Angela’s house.
Rusty answered on the first ring. “Angela?”
Kami hung up the phone. “Angela didn’t answer her phone all day yesterday,” she told Holly, speaking slowly because she didn’t want to bring her thoughts any closer to reality. “She didn’t come home last night. I might not know everything about her, but I know her. She wouldn’t run away, even if she was upset. She’s stood and fought everything she ever came up against her whole life. She’s not with Rusty, and she’s not with me, and she wouldn’t go anywhere else.”
The color drained from Holly’s face. She was very still. The light of the sun caught her hair at that moment and made her look like a marble statue crowned with gold. Only her eyes looked alive and afraid.
Kami said what she hadn’t wanted to say, what she had been too scared to say. She felt cold, as if by uttering the words out loud, she was making them true: “Someone has her.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Shine and Entwine with Me
Holly and Kami raced through the woods. Holly was faster than Kami and she had to keep pausing, hanging on to tree branches and gasping, for Kami to catch up. Kami was running as fast as she could without stopping. Her lungs were burning, her heart was hammering, and she could not stop herself from thinking of what could be happening to Angela, of all the things that could already have happened to her, while Kami had been busy suspecting her best friend of being a murderer.
There was no time to feel guilty. Kami kept running, twigs snagging on her clothes like children catching at the material with small clinging fingers. Ahead of her, she saw Holly, and past Holly she saw the hut where she had found the fox.
There were thin bare branches between her and the hut, dark lines that fragmented the world, as if she was looking through a window where the glass had shattered but not fallen out of the frame. Holly waited for her to catch up. Kami could not blame her for not wanting to go into this place of potential horror alone. She joined Holly as quickly and as quietly as she could. They tiptoed toward the door of the hut in silence.
The only sounds were the dry crackle of twigs and dead leaves beneath their feet, the dry rasp of their breathing. Kami put out a hand and pushed the door of the hut in. It was empty, the tabletop dusty, and leaves blown in on the dark floor. It did not look as if anyone had been in there since she and Jared had found the Surer Guest key card.
Angela was not there.
Which meant they had no idea where she was.
Kami turned away from that dark little room. She looked at Holly and saw the same desperation there that she felt.
“What we need are reinforcements,” Kami said. She remembered her fight with Jared and stopped cold. She hardly dared reach out to him. It was like holding out her hand in the dark, uncertain as to whether he would take it, or if he had his back to her.
The answer came as soon as she let her walls down, showing Jared what was happening. Support was hers, absolute reassurance, a hand—his hand—catching hers in the dark and holding fast.
Come here, Jared’s voice said clearly in her mind. You think it’s one of the Lynburns? Time to find out which one.
“Come on,” Kami told Holly. “We’re going to Aurimere.”
I’ll wake the family, Jared said. Let them know that we’re expecting guests.
Kami’s thoughts ran through his mind, her terror turning his throat dry and making his head pound. Jared could not get Kami’s visions of Angela in that dead girl’s place out of his head. Except that Kami, of course, was planning as well as panicking. He wasn’t going to let her down.
Jared came out of his room and into the corridor with its arched stone roof. It was like walking through a church every day, this place, as if he was always coming to confess his sins. “Mom!” he yelled. “Aunt Lillian! Someone!”
There was no answer. He went down the stairs three steps at a time, past the doors to the library and through the parlor. His voice, calling for his family, echoed off the wall of windows.
“Jared, this is not an appropriate time to run around screeching your head off,” his aunt Lillian remarked, shutting up a large dark desk-slash-table in swift, economical movements. “In fact, I’d prefer if you refrained from screeching at all times.”
“Another girl has disappeared,” Jared said.
Aunt Lillian’s eyes narrowed. “All right. Let’s go get the others. I would lay a considerable amount of money that the sorcerer will be doing this in the woods. We’re all drawn to the woods.”
“Kami already checked the hut where the dead fox was found,” Jared told her. Aunt Lillian blinked at him, and Jared rolled his eyes. “My source.”
“Oh,” said Lillian, already moving, a blur of black and blond heading straight for her son’s room.
Jared ran after her. “Kami and I were talking. She thinks the person killing people is a Lynburn. I agree with her.”
“That’s utter nonsense,” Lillian said contemptuously.
“Is it?” Jared asked. “You thought it was a Lynburn too, until you found I had a source.”
Aunt Lillian turned on the step to face him. Jared, climbing the stairs after her, was pulled up short, her blue eyes on a level with his. He backed down a step: his mother would not have wanted him this close.
“Jared, don’t,” his aunt said, and Jared blinked at her, not sure what she meant. “I did not want to suspect you.”
Jared raised an eyebrow. “But you did.”
“You’re my responsibility,” Aunt Lillian said. “This whole town is, but especially my family. I know how you grew up, with a city poisoning you and with your parents both hating you. I wanted to take you back here, back to our home. I wanted to make things right for you.”
Jared looked away from her face, too like his mother’s but wearing an expression his mother would never have worn, at least not when talking to him. He wanted to please
her, like he wanted to please Kami: he wanted it so badly it hurt to think about. He just didn’t know how. “It’s fine,” he ground out. “I get why you thought it was me. I wouldn’t trust me either.” Even Kami did not trust him.
“I do not believe it was you anymore,” Lillian stated. “I do not believe it was one of our family at all.”
Jared looked away from the stone wall and back up at Aunt Lillian. “Or is it just that you still don’t want to suspect us? You do know about the knives?”
“Rosalind took them and threw them away to punish me for a wrong she thought I had done her,” Aunt Lillian said. “Maybe I did. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” said Jared, “if she didn’t throw them away.”
His aunt held his gaze for an instant longer, then snapped to attention like a soldier, returning to her mission up the stairs. “You will see,” she informed Jared, each word punctuated by the slap of her boot heels on a step. “Ash—” She went still on the threshold of his bedroom.
Ash’s room was always neat, which Jared thought was unnatural but also very like Ash. In the early morning, that perfect room was so perfectly still, so absolutely empty, that it was frightening.
Lillian’s face went white and her eyes looked blind as a creature’s that had lived underground all its life and only now emerged into the horror of the sun. Jared stepped up and cupped a hand under her elbow. She walked away from him, into her son’s room.
“I am not going to faint. I would never dream of fainting. There is a perfectly good explanation for this. I know my son. He would never hurt anyone.”
Aunt Lillian stared at Jared as if daring him to speak. He said nothing. She did not look reassured. Instead she glanced furtively back at her son’s bed, so obviously not slept in, and then she walked past Jared as if he was not there. That felt familiar to Jared at least.
“Rosalind,” Lillian said.
Jared started. She wasn’t reading his mind, he realized. She was simply calling for her sister because she was in trouble, and she was sure Rosalind would help her.
Aunt Lillian moved fast. She was halfway down the corridor before Jared decided to follow her again, despite the fact that she was seeking out his mother. Mom had chosen to live in a different wing from the rest of the family. Lillian had to go up and down a set of the back stairs, past a tarnished suit of armor.
Jared, following her, saw a light in the wall casting a black shadow in the shape of a hand on her fair hair. Aunt Lillian ran on, not even noticing it.
“Rosalind?” she called out again once she was in the right corridor, the one above the portrait gallery. “Ros …” It was not a nickname. The name had died, half formed, in Aunt Lillian’s mouth.
The door to his mother’s bedroom was open. Light from a small window in the corridor across from the room cast a pattern of diamonds and dark diagonal lines on her empty, rumpled bed.
“Where is she? Where is everyone?” Aunt Lillian demanded, turning on Jared as if he might have abducted her sister and her son both.
“What’s happening?” It was Uncle Rob, standing behind them in the corridor.
Jared couldn’t take his eyes off the light and shadows playing on his mother’s sheets. As soon as Kami said she thought the murderer was one of the Lynburns, he’d thought of his mother. He had feared it behind the walls he put up, and now he realized it could not have been just fear. He had seen the knives in his mother’s possession. He must have known all along, really.
His parents had both been monsters, then. No, his whole family were monsters, but his parents were the worst. There was nothing but poison in his veins, and the potential for violence. He thought of lightning cutting a wound across the sky, and all that blood on the girl’s skin. When he did look away from his mother’s bed, he saw Aunt Lillian standing by Uncle Rob, her hand on his arm, as if she was reaching out for help. He had never seen her touch Uncle Rob that way before.
But she was not looking at Uncle Rob. She was looking at him. “Rosalind is your mother,” she murmured. “Yet you’re not surprised.”
The sound of a door opening made them all start. The girls’ voices made Aunt Lillian’s shoulders slump for an instant as her brief hope was taken away.
Jared walked past Aunt Lillian, who was stiff with despair, and Uncle Rob, looking both confused and concerned. Jared stopped at the top of the stairs that would lead him to Kami and looked back at his aunt’s pale face, the mirror of his mother’s. “No,” said Jared. “I’m not surprised.”
Jared’s feelings were like a beacon in Kami’s mind. His distress burned so brightly she barely saw the stone hands and drowning women of the manor. Holly had to run after her up the stairs, then across flagstones and to the corridor where Jared stood with his aunt and uncle.
Kami did not look at the open door and the empty room. She ran to Jared and Jared lifted his hand, warding her off.
I’m so sorry, she told him, trying not to care. I’m so sorry, but it’s not your fault. Nothing your parents ever did was your fault. You misunderstood me last night, but you have to understand me now. I know you’re not like them.
Jared had so many walls up, she could not tell what he was feeling, except that the burning beacon of his distress had gone dark. And how do you know that?
Because I know you, said Kami. Nobody knows you like I do.
Jared tipped toward her, as if they were reading something together, and she pictured again her thoughts as an illuminated manuscript. Kami needed some things to be clear to him. Her heart was almost an open book.
Jared could tell she was holding back, and something dark passed from him to her, like drops of ink in running water, even as he made an effort and smiled at her. “No,” he said. “Nobody does.”
You’re all right?
You’re here, said Jared. So I’m all right.
“Jared,” said Kami. “We have to—”
“We have to find Angie,” Holly finished, before Kami could say it.
Kami looked at Holly, who was staring warily at Lillian and Rob Lynburn. Kami took her first real look at them, Rob standing by his wife, Lillian with her pale face and wide cold eyes. They were sorcerers, sorcerers Kami did not know and could not trust.
“The woods,” Lillian said abruptly.
“What?” Jared asked.
Kami realized that while he hadn’t touched her, his body was angled toward her, aligning himself with her and Holly. She glanced at the other Lynburns and saw the same realization passing over Lillian’s face, turning her eyes into dark lakes. Kami could tell that she didn’t like seeing one of her precious Lynburns on the side of the lowly mortals, not at all.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know, Jared,” Lillian said, her voice low. “You have the same blood in your veins as the rest of us. It draws you to the same end. Don’t pretend you are not drawn to the woods. If Rosalind has the girl, she has her there.”
“If Ash is with her,” Rob told her, his big hand closing on her thin shoulder, “it will be all right, Lillian.”
Lillian nodded sharply once, staring out the window into the woods.
Kami glanced over at Holly, who was glaring defiantly at the sorcerers, trembling with eagerness to be gone. “Do you mind if we stop talking about Ash?” Holly asked. “And start thinking about the person he might hurt? None of you Lynburns seem to care about Angela at all. Or is it that you don’t care about anyone but yourselves?”
“There’s no time for this!” Kami shouted. Everybody looked at her and she lifted her chin. “They’re in the woods?” she said. “Let’s go. There are five of us. Four of us can do magic, and two of us can read each other’s minds. We can split up. If my group finds Angela, I’ll tell Jared, and if the other group does, Jared will tell me.”
A flash of protest went through Jared as she suggested separating, but he knew when she was determined, and he knew sense when he heard it. She felt that he hated it, at the same time as she watched him nod.
“You sho
uld all stay here. Rob and I will handle this,” Lillian said. “You’re children. Jared hasn’t done the ceremony of the lakes, and that means he doesn’t have the magic we do. He wouldn’t be able to stand against Rosalind.” She said her sister’s name forcefully, as if she was terrified she would not be able to get it out.
“Jared has a source,” Rob reminded his wife. “They will be able to stand against Rosalind. We might need them.”
Kami did not wait for Lillian to argue. “Then it’s settled. Jared and another magician should go with Holly; one magician come with me.”
“Go with her, Uncle Rob.”
Kami looked up at the tense sound of Jared’s voice, saw his eyes, and said quietly, “You protect Holly.”
“I don’t care about being protected!” Holly shouted. Tears and fury together made her eyes glitter. “I only care about Angela.”
Kami spun away from them all and headed for the stairs, down toward the woods. She heard Jared and Holly fall into step behind her. She heard Lillian’s whisper echoing against the manor walls: “It may be too late for Angela.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Red and Gold
Jared could feel the lure of the lakes as if there was a magnet in his chest, pulling him toward metal. Pulling him toward the cold waters of the Crying Pools. Something kept telling him there were people waiting for him there.
“You have the same blood in your veins as the rest of us,” Aunt Lillian had said. “It draws you to the same end.”
He resisted the impulse. He reached for Kami instead, touched the scared uneasy hum of her mind from all the way across the woods.
They were combing the woods to save Kami’s best friend from his mother. Jared wanted to punch somebody when he thought about that: he could feel something building inside him that wanted to be a storm. He locked every muscle in his body and stood straining, looking up at the sky. There were wisps of cloud forming against the blue, like the curls of steam from a kettle. He knew that he had created those clouds. Surely he could use all this power they said he had, and do something useful for Angela.
Unspoken: The Lynburn Legacy Page 26