Kami saw faces at the windows, peering out, and people on the street stopped and looked at them as they went past, curious but afraid. Many seemed taken aback to see a Lynburn as a stumbling wounded child, or maybe they were just surprised to see Jared alive at all.
Jared kept his head down and walked doggedly on. Kami held on to Jared’s arm tight.
They were a few steps away from the Water Rising, the inn where Ash and his mother were staying, when they heard the sound of a commotion. It sounded like a few tables had gone flying into a few walls.
Kami tried to use her hold on Jared’s sleeve to push him behind her, but he wouldn’t move, and then the door of the inn opened and Lillian Lynburn came hurtling out, hair a loose golden sheet around her shoulders and her blood-red-painted mouth trembling.
She stopped like a bird that had hit a window, and stood on the step staring at Jared. He stood looking up at her, and Kami remembered that Lillian had his mother’s face, and his mother was most likely dead.
“I’m sorry,” Lillian said in a harsh, abrupt voice, more like Jared’s own voice than Rosalind Lynburn’s soft tones had ever been. She came tumbling off the step into Jared’s arms. Kami felt Ash’s surprise, greater than Kami’s own, and shadowed with envy.
Jared had always dealt best with his aunt, perhaps because words and gestures of affection did not come easily to either of them. Lillian Lynburn had put Kami’s brother in danger and Kami had not forgiven her for it, but she knew Lillian meant something to Jared. She was happy he had her.
He put his arms around Lillian, smoothed her tumbled hair, and laid his scarred cheek on top of her head.
“I’m sorry too,” Jared murmured. “Aunt Lillian. Edmund Prescott didn’t leave you. There’s a priest hole behind the mural in Aurimere. Rob put me down there. Edmund’s been dead for years.”
Kami looked at Holly, whose whole family had been punished because her uncle had—as everyone thought—dared to leave a Lynburn. Holly had grabbed onto Angela’s hand and was holding on tight, but there was no grief on her face: she’d never known the boy who died in the priest hole. She only looked tired.
When Kami’s gaze returned to Lillian and Jared, Lillian had detached slightly from Jared but still had his face cupped in her hands.
“Maybe Edmund didn’t mean to leave me,” Lillian said. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re here, Jared. You’re back.”
She pressed his head down on her shoulder, and Jared shuddered slightly and then leaned against her. Kami thought he’d relaxed in his aunt’s arms, before she realized that he had lost consciousness.
There’s blood between us, love, my love,
There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood;
And blood’s a bar I cannot pass.
—Christina Rossetti
Chapter Six
Call-Me-to-You
Jared had a fever for three days and two nights. Lillian led Ash and Kami in spells for healing, sending air to cool him and water to soothe him, and putting herbs under his pillow.
Eventually Martha Wright, who ran the Water Rising with her husband, mustered enough courage to stand up to a Lynburn and said that Jared was worn to a bone and needed rest, and completed this act of courage by shooing Lillian out of the room.
Lillian was admittedly not a very restful person. Even the way she smoothed Jared’s sheets was peremptory, tugging at them in small irritable jerks as if she could tug health out of him that way.
On the second day, Martha Wright told Kami that Jared had woken up calling out with night terrors, and after that they took turns sitting with him. Holly and Angela were exempt because they had volunteered to go through the books from the Aurimere library, but Kami, Ash, and Rusty split their time.
Kami was uneasily aware that both Ash and Rusty were better nurses than she was. Kami suspected that she was only one step up from Lillian. Kami didn’t like staying still for too long, while Rusty power-napped with one eye open. Kami was nervous about hurting rather than helping Jared, while both the boys had charming bedside manners.
Of course, Jared was not a particularly charming invalid.
Kami sat on the horsehair armchair that she and Rusty had carried up the dark stairs of the inn, curled up with a mystery novel in Jared’s narrow, whitewashed room. Bright sunlight filtered through his single tall window in a thin yellow rectangle, half spilled on the wooden floor and half across his white linen bedsheets.
Kami wondered if she was a terrible girlfriend—if indeed she could be called a girlfriend, when it was basically a decision she’d come to entirely on her own—because she did not want to spend all her time gazing upon Jared as he slept.
He’d been sleeping a lot. Kami did like looking at him: every so often she peered over her book and checked on him, lying on his side in the tumbled sheets. He had one arm flung over the pillows as if he was reaching out for something, and the sun shone on his brown arm, on the slope of his back and the fresh-washed gold of his hair, curling soft against the pillow. She filled her eyes with him like taking a drink of cool water, and returned to what she was doing refreshed.
She couldn’t help Jared. She couldn’t quite banish Ash from her mind. She could not even see her mother: she had gone to Claire’s restaurant and found it closed, with nobody answering the door no matter how insistently Kami knocked. What she needed right now was a mystery she could solve.
There was a mad butler hiding in the rafters of her book. It was very exciting. When she looked up from the pages the next time, she saw Jared was awake, his gray eyes shadow-dark and calm.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said, his voice a sleepy rumble. “And I’m glad Ash is gone. He was just in here trying to force-feed me oatmeal.”
Ash had been in there that morning, and the sunlight coming through the window was the mellow light of late afternoon. Kami did not mention that. It had been a while since Jared’s eyes were clear and since he had talked to her rather than muttering, believing he was still trapped in the priest hole.“Such an ungrateful brother,” Kami murmured back, and smiled at him. “Oatmeal’s good for you.”
“I don’t like it,” Jared said crankily, and rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. “What are you reading?”
“It’s called The Deadly Chandelier,” Kami said promptly and with satisfaction. “It’s very good. What with everything that’s been going on, I’ve really fallen behind on my reading. Want me to read it to you?”
“It’s called The Deadly Chandelier?” Jared repeated in a skeptical tone. “Sounds like if you do I will never recover. Read to me one of the fine works of Mr. Charles Dickens.”
“Shan’t,” said Kami. “Unless you want The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Charles Dickens left unfinished when he died, thus accidentally creating the most epic mystery novel of all time. I’m warning you in advance, I will be making up a solution to the mystery of my own.”
“Sounds good,” Jared murmured, sounding half asleep. His lashes skimmed his cheekbones, but he opened them with an effort and reached out, this time with purpose though with no hope of actually getting to her, in her direction. “Will you,” Jared began, and quietly, as if trying not to ask too much, “come here?”
“Sure,” said Kami.
She felt a little awkward about it, but she didn’t care: she scrambled out of the chair and sat on the bed, feeling it dip beneath her weight and the faint rasp of her flouncy cotton dress against the linen. Jared angled toward her slightly in the bed.
“You match the flowers,” said Jared.
There was a small table at the end of Jared’s bed with an earthenware vase on it, filled with wild pansies. Kami had always thought of them as love-lies-bleeding, but when Martha Wright had been arranging them she had called them call-me-to-you.
“They’re from Martha,” Kami told him, feeling a little embarrassed lest he thought she’d brought him flowers. Though she supposed she could have: maybe it would have been all right. “Your constant admirer.”
“Very gratifying,” Jared remarked. “But where are the posies from all my other callers?”
Kami laughed down at him and Jared smiled at her. He was touching her skirt, Kami saw with faint surprise, tracing the swirling yellow pattern on the dark purple material. His head was bowed, oddly intent, and all she could see was the fall of his lashes and the curve of his upper lip.
“I like the way you dress,” he said quietly. “You’re always—you look different from all the other girls.”
“Thank you,” Kami replied, uncertain, though she wanted Jared to like how she looked.
“What?” Jared asked. He was still lying down, but his eyes were open, more awake and concerned. “What did I say wrong?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
Kami aimed a punch at his pillow, which was meant to be fluffing it, but instead looked like random pillow violence. Jared had been tortured and buried alive. This did not matter.
“No,” said Jared. “Don’t—don’t go. Tell me.”
She hadn’t even realized that she was edging away across the bed.
“Of course I look different from all the other girls,” she said at last. “Anyone can see that. Half the town has suggested I date Raj Singh. Who’s thirteen.”
Because being part Japanese was the same thing as being Indian, and meant they didn’t belong with anyone else.
It was something Kami noticed, that she couldn’t help but notice: that she looked different from girls in pictures, girls on magazine covers, different from Angela and Holly and her own mother, who were all thin and pale and beautiful in what sometimes seemed to be the only right way. She noticed but tried not to mind, and didn’t mostly—just because she noticed didn’t mean she wanted to be someone else—but then she had met Jared and he hadn’t ever seemed to want to touch her. It was hard sometimes, not to be self-conscious.
“Raj Singh can keep his hands off sexy older women,” Jared said with conviction.
Kami smiled. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s not about vanity or anything. Forget it.”
“I’m awful at school,” said Jared.
“You just need to apply yourself more,” Kami told him sternly. “And speaking of applying, I don’t see how that applies to anything.”
“I hate school because I always want to be doing something more exciting than just sitting and staring at something or listening to someone,” Jared continued. “But it’s different with you. You do look different from all the other girls: I can always see you’re doing something, thinking of something, laughing at something, or dreaming of something.”
Kami found herself smiling even though she was blushing, and making a joke to cut him off even though she didn’t want him to stop. “Are you saying that I’m, uh, interesting looking?”
“Yeah, something like that,” said Jared, and she glanced over and saw the curl of his small smile. “Some synonyms come to mind. Fascinating. Captivating. I want to look at you all the time.”
Kami was at this point too embarrassed to look at him at all. Embarrassed but pleased. She rolled over to where he lay, head on his arm and eyes half closed, and hid her face down by the pillow, her smile almost pressed against his throat. She had not forgotten anything about him, but memory had paled and thus lost the precise vividness of how intense he could be, how what he felt still seemed to go right through her.
Kami had felt cautious about it at first, about him in her real life, how out of control it could be, but now it made her happy. She could not control how she felt about him, and she did not want to.
“So what you’re saying is that you’re tormented by my beauty,” she concluded. She felt him tense and touched his arm, in what was meant to be reassurance, but it only made him tense more. She looked up at him and said softly, “Don’t worry. I’m tormented by your beauty too.”