He spoke instead, intoning the words of the spell in a steady voice.
“Pain buys power, power pain
Mine to you and back again.”
Ash breathed in again, released his hold on Jared’s shirt and straightened up. He was even paler, sweat beading on his face as blood had on his arm, but he looked at Jared and saw something there that made him square his shoulders. Jared pressed the knife into Ash’s palm and held out his arm: the underside was as pale as Ash’s and looked unexpectedly vulnerable.
Kami’s hands formed into tight fists, fingernails biting into her palms. She didn’t want Ash to touch him.
The only thing that helped was Ash’s expression, and the feeling coursing toward her beneath his pain: he didn’t want to hurt Jared either, not at all.
The knife came down, and Kami had to set her teeth as she saw how Ash flinched and slipped, the hesitation surely causing Jared more pain, the slash on his arm jagged.
Ash’s voice was shaking too, but the words of the spell rang out clear.
“That which was whole, now make it part
That which was hidden, show the heart.”
No sooner was he finished speaking than Jared took hold of Ash’s injured arm and pressed the insides of their wounded forearms together, each of their hands clasped around the other’s elbow. Their labored breathing was coming in sync, the blood dripping between their locked arms, dappling the rug where the knife lay now.
Jared wound the rope around their arms. As he did so the moonlight crept in through the glass door and wound around them in shining tendrils: shimmering around their sealed arms, moving like the lines of light cast on water along their backs and circling their fair heads, bowed together so their bodies formed an arch.
They spoke together, and Ash’s voice was no longer trembling, and Jared’s was a little less rough.
“Blood to blood and breath to breath,
Until spell’s breaking or our death.”
The rays of moonlight shivered and rippled around them. Kami felt a strange sensation, as if what was happening with the moonlight was happening inside her. As if the light that lit the world within her was changing, expanding and luminescent, and on the edge of darkness but moving into the light was a loved one she had not seen in too long.
Kami leaned forward on the chair even farther. Jared turned to look at her.
Their eyes met, and Kami felt the spark between them turn into leaping flame, recognition and yearning twisting together at the same time. She could feel Jared’s familiar feelings, brushing at her consciousness. She could not be mistaken: she knew the exact edge of his anger, the rush of his surprise, the taste of his grief, and the enveloping warmth of his affection. Nobody else felt the same.
Ash had not been able to fill the space Jared had carved out in her heart: he could not fit the place made by someone else, and it hurt to have him there.
But now Jared was almost back, where he had been before.
Ash was there too, a rush of feeling like a channel separating her and Jared, but she could almost reach Jared, as if they both had hands outstretched and there was only an inch between the very tips of their fingers.
And then Kami found herself drawing back in her mind, in alarm that she did not for a moment understand.
It was like seeing a loved one coming toward you, and seeing a shadow behind him, having your joyous desire turn to fear even before you realized that the shadow was an avalanche.
Kami threw up the mental walls she had spent so much time constructing with Jared, had used so often with Ash, trying to protect herself. She concentrated on shielding the small bright place in her mind that she used when she was writing, which she thought of when she tried to do her magic. She could still feel them, but more distantly, as if she had taken a hasty step back.
The rays of moonlight wrapping around Jared and Ash were turning darker, from ribbons of smoke to what looked like trails of ink, circling them in, binding them tighter and tighter.
Until they disappeared, leaving only a faint grayness in the air like traces of ash.
Jared was still looking at Kami, but his expression was wary.
“Did it work?” Ash asked, his voice hoarse.
Jared unwound the rope from around their arms. “I don’t know.”
Lillian moved from her place at the door and strode toward them, stepping over the fallen knife and spilled blood until she was by Ash’s side, her fingers hovering over his wounded arm.
That was something Kami could do, at least. She jumped up and hurried over to Jared, kneeling down beside him and taking hold of his wrist as gently and carefully as she could. He’d been hurt too much, by too many people: she did not want to be one of them.
She shut her eyes and concentrated. It took more of an effort than she had thought, but she had healed someone only once before.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that Jared was breathing more easily, and when she touched the blood on his arm it came away on her fingers, showing whole skin beneath the stain.
“If you want to know if it worked, do a spell,” Lillian suggested. “Test your new power.”
Ash glanced from Lillian to Jared, and got up, stumbling as if he had forgotten how to walk, uncertain on his legs as a newborn foal. He lifted a hand and gestured at the balcony door.
Kami could feel it even behind her walls, the strange void where once there had been something that surged.
She did not know what Ash had been trying to do. Nothing happened.
“I don’t understand,” Ash said, his voice rising with panic. “What’s going on?”
“You can’t do the spell?” Lillian inquired sharply. “You don’t have the power?”
Ash shook his head. The light through the glass door of the balcony illumined his face: he looked lost. “I can’t do anything. I don’t have any power.”
“That’s impossible!” Lillian snapped.
“Is it?” Kami asked.
Nobody answered her. Kami looked at Jared. She didn’t want to say this, didn’t want to seem as if she blamed him when none of this was his fault, but she had to speak.
“The night before we saved you,” Kami said. She held on fast to his wrist, tried to hold her eyes with his. “When Rob was torturing you, when he and Amber hurt you, he was using the Lynburn knives. Wasn’t he?”
Jared nodded.
Lillian wheeled on him. “Have you done any magic since you were taken from Aurimere?”
“No,” Jared said. “Rob was drugging me, I got used to not using it. Also, you may have noticed I’ve been delirious most of the time.”
His voice was sarcastic, but it was obvious he understood the horror of what had happened as well as any of them.
They could all see the edges of the scars Rob had left on Jared’s skin, not quite hidden beneath the material of his shirt.
“I see he’s learned some new tricks from his strange sorcerers,” Lillian said at last. Her voice was vicious. “Rob used the Lynburn knives and your Lynburn blood to taint your power, to twist it so you could not use it again. Rob poisoned your magic, and now you’ve poisoned my son’s.”
“Yes, Lillian, this was all Jared’s idea,” Kami said sharply.
Lillian looked at Kami as if Kami was mad. “I am not blaming Jared. I am simply stating the facts. Try to use magic, Jared, if you can.”
Jared looked at the mirror hung above Lillian’s dresser. Nothing happened: his reflection stared balefully back at him.
Kami looked at it and it broke, splitting clear across, so he would not have to look at himself anymore.
“I can still do magic,” she said. “I put up a block between us, between me and Ash … and Jared, I think. While the spell was happening. It protected me.”
Lillian did not look greatly relieved at the news that Kami had been spared.
Kami could not blame her for despairing. Kami could not even blame Lillian for suggesting this spell, not really, no matter how it had turned out. They had all agreed to do it: none of them had thought it would work out like this.
They’d all known they were badly outnumbered before, and now the two Lynburn boys were powerless and helpless.
They had been desperate, and now they were more desperate still.
Kami was too tired to even despair. And from the look of Jared, he was more tired still: bleeding all over the floor could not be good for him.
“You need to go to bed,” Kami decided, and hauled him away and out of Lillian’s room. “Come on. Everything will still be ruined in the morning.”
It was a brief walk down the narrow hall to Jared’s little room. They did not speak until they were at his door.
“Can you believe that we screwed up everything about twice as much in the space of a couple hours?” Kami asked.
“I can,” said Jared. “But only because I truly believe in us, the utter depths of our incompetence, and that it must inevitably lead us to our ultimate epic failure.”
“Aw, sugar flower,” Kami told him. “You always know just what to say.”
“And just how to poison my brother,” said Jared.
She looked up at him, leaning against the doorway with his white shirt stained with blood and sweat, his too-thin face sick and weary of the world. She’d known he would take that to heart. Kami grabbed a handful of Jared’s shirt and stood on tiptoe so she could press their foreheads together. She closed her eyes and did not try to kiss him, because insisting on determining a relationship all by yourself was hard work and she didn’t, couldn’t, know if he wanted her to.
“I once told you I was always on your side,” she murmured. “I will always be on your side, even in times of ultimate epic failure. I’ll see you in the morning and I’ll be glad to see you, even on a ruined morning. Good night.”
Jared did not kiss her, but he leaned his forehead against hers and let out a long weary breath, as if he had reached a refuge where it was safe to rest and breathe for a moment.
“Night,” he said, and after a moment: “Thanks.”
She walked home through the night with her father, the boys walking between them. Her father had seen her face and not asked any questions.
The night was dark and deep: the stars seemed lost somewhere. The sound of their steps seemed like the only sound in the world, or at least in the still quiet of the town that was now at once both home and prison.
None of them looked at Aurimere on the horizon.
“I propose that we just stop letting Lillian ‘Bad Idea’ Lynburn make plans,” Jon said. “I know she means well, but this is a lady who seems to never have had a good idea in her life.”
“She was the one caught off guard, not Rob. She didn’t know that the people she loved and trusted would betray her, or that her home would be taken away from her. She’s doing the best she can, and it’s all turning to dust in her hands.” Kami did not like the too-perceptive way her father was looking at her, and added, “She is basically the most insensitive person who ever lived, though, and she and her plans can keep the hell away from my brothers.”
Tomo looked up at them anxiously and said, “I want to help.”
“You are helping by being awesome,” Kami told him.
Tomo nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true.”
Ten said nothing. His hand was cold in Kami’s, but when she looked down at him all she could see was the glitter of his glasses and his solemn, unreadable face.
There was a clatter and the sound of glass breaking near them. Dad spun both the boys behind him and Kami stepped forward, hands uplifted. They saw a man stepping out of the grocery store, carrying paper bags full of food. Under the hood of his coat, Kami recognized Timothy Cartwright, one of Dad’s friends.
He started when he saw them, stared at them for a guilty moment, then mumbled, “I left the money in there.”
Timothy slipped away down the street, until he was nothing more than a shadow among shadows. They were all shadows, crouched in the shadow of Aurimere, making useless plans and slinking around afraid to be seen.