Ash ducked his head in abashed assent, and Kami felt guilty for snapping at him.
“I guess I can understand that too,” she conceded.
“We both had a lot of things we had to hold back,” Ash said. “But now we don’t.”
He was gorgeous and sweet, and his sudden reawakening of interest in her was making Kami suspicious. She was either becoming a paranoid freak or having a perfectly reasonable reaction to the world going mad around her. “Yes, openness is a beautiful thing. You do realize we have a murderer to catch.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“That was not the impression I was getting,” Kami said slowly. Unless Ash had been about to confess that he had some sort of fetish for sassy girl detectives. Maybe he’d read Nancy Drew at an impressionable age.
“I think you should cut the connection between you and Jared,” Ash said.
Kami stilled, halfway across the room. She laid her hands down gently on the surface of the nearest desk, Holly’s, as if it was breakable. “Oh?” she said.
So that was what all this was about.
“Haven’t you considered,” Ash asked softly, “that you are not safe?”
“Why would I be less safe than anyone else?” Kami returned defensively, but even before Ash replied, she knew. Nobody had tried to take her, nobody had wielded a knife to sacrifice her for power. But somebody had tried to push her, tried to eliminate her. Somebody else knew about her and Jared’s connection and did not want a Lynburn to have such power.
“This sorcerer doesn’t want anyone else to have power,” Ash said, echoing her thoughts. “Why should anyone else have power? Why should you, when the sorcerer is the one killing for it? If they kill you, they kill Jared. Source and sorcerer, taken out with one blow.”
So that was Jared’s excuse for staying connected gone, Kami thought. He wouldn’t like that. He already didn’t like it. She could feel his anger and his fear for her, chilling her own blood.
“Working out a motive is progress,” she said, her voice shaky in her own ears.
Ash’s expression cracked. Beneath the broken surface of his calm, Kami saw emotions more desperate than she’d ever suspected Ash felt. He dropped his gaze back to the map. “I don’t care about progress,” he said in a low voice. “I want you safe. And as long as you’re his source, you’re not safe.”
“And I’m sure pure chivalrous concern for her safety is your only reason for wanting the connection cut.” Jared sneered from the doorway.
Kami did not know why she was surprised. Naturally Jared would skip out of class to go after Ash for this. He was standing in the doorway bristling, hair going in all directions. He looked as if he’d run all the way there.
Ash stood up. Kami saw Jared’s eyes flicker, felt his ripple of suspicion, and knew he’d seen both the fact that Ash was sitting at Kami’s desk and the map.
“What do you mean by that?” Ash asked in a soft voice. He did not rise to Jared’s challenge, his tone staying level. It gave him a dignity that made Jared look bad.
Jared heard Kami’s thoughts. Their feelings tangled together. She felt his fury flame higher and tried to keep control. “Uncle Rob told me more about sources last night,” he said. “People who are suitable to be sources are rare. Interesting that you’re so anxious to free Kami up.”
“You think I want to use her for power?” Ash demanded. He looked sick. “I agree with my father. He says that sorcerers who use sources are no better than leeches. He says they’re pathetic. And weak.”
“Weak?” Jared tilted his head. “Really?”
Now that Kami knew what was happening, she could feel him do it. The sensation was as if he was leaning on her for balance, but with his mind and not his body. It was just a slight pressure. The map rolled up in front of Ash, and then lifted and laid itself at Kami’s feet, unrolling there like a carpet.
Ash’s mouth curled. The light on Kami’s desk turned on by itself. Her glass full of pens tipped over with a clink and all the pens rolled out. Then a box of paper clips turned over. Pens and paper clips spread out, made a glinting and colored pattern below Ash’s spread palms.
Kami had only seen Jared, whom she trusted, and Rosalind, whom she hated, do magic. She had felt wonder with Jared and fear with Rosalind. She did not know how she felt seeing Ash do it. Disturbed, perhaps, seeing the world be so manifestly different from the way she had always believed it was. She was not sure she could trust Ash’s magic any more than she was sure she could trust Ash. But she wanted to.
Ash moved his hands and the paper clips rose, folding themselves out into little hooks that danced through his fingers. The threat was clear.
“You’re not the only one who’s a sorcerer, cousin.”
Kami took a step closer to Jared. His mind reached for her, welcoming as a hand held out to catch hers. It was the only way she knew that he registered her move toward him, because he was still glaring at Ash.
One of the paper clips unfolded completely, stretching into one long needle-thin, needle-glittering strip of wire. It moved like a tiny bolt of lightning, a too-bright flash in the air and across Ash’s face. It left behind a dark streak of blood, welling from the same place Jared’s white scar stood raised against his cheek, and Ash flinched back.
“No,” said Jared. “But I’m the only one with a source.”
Kami stumbled away from him, wrenching her mind from his, not putting up any walls, just wanting distance. She lifted a rejecting hand, and map, paper clips, and pens all hit the wall. She took three more strides, making for the door, and threw a furious look back at Jared. “You might not have one much longer.”
PART VI
CLOSING THE STORYBOOK
Chapter Thirty
Source of Light
Kami couldn’t go home to the mother who loved her but had lied to her, and she certainly couldn’t go into town. So she went into the woods where she had seen her first death instead. There was nowhere safe left, and she could think there at least.
She sat down by the lip of what Jared had joked was called “Really Depressed Quarry.” The hollow of Cotswold stone looked like half of a pear with its flesh scooped out. On her other side, the trees stretched out, plum and yellow and red in the graying light. She could hear though not see the Sorrier River, water rushing and leaves rustling together like people whispering secrets: Shhhh, shhh, shhh. Sorrier, sorrier, sorcerer.
Kami drew her legs up to her chest, under her long skirt patterned with yellow bees and red flowers. She pulled the material tight around her ankles.
You shouldn’t be out there alone, said Jared.
But I’m never alone, am I?
Her constant companion was silent. He was sorry, and still angry, and Kami could understand both those things but she couldn’t understand him lashing out and making Ash bleed for no reason.
For trying to separate us!
He’s entitled to an opinion, Kami said. So am I.
Jared had no answer for that but fear that she would want to be separated, and his rage. The rage that had cut Ash’s skin. The rage that had sent his father tumbling down those stairs to his death.
No, Kami said. I didn’t mean that. You didn’t know what you could do then. It wasn’t your fault. But now that you know what you can do, you’re responsible for it. You can’t hurt anybody else.
I’ll do whatever you want. As long as she didn’t leave him. And I won’t let anything happen to you, Jared promised. You do not need to worry about anyone coming after you because you’re my source.
I wouldn’t cut the connection because I was afraid. I wouldn’t do anything because I was afraid.
Yeah, said Jared. I know that.
Kami was as close as she could get to alone, but she still sat wrapped in someone else’s thoughts, his watchful affection and concern. It was not so bad at this precise moment.
Shadows were gathering in the gold cup of the quarry. Kami looked down and could not see any of the curves and spikes of the quarry where she and Nicola Prendergast had played hide-and-seek when they were kids. When Nicola was alive. Kami closed her eyes for an instant and then rose.
Now she could see the river through the trees, a snake of silver motion fringed with the jewel colors of the leaves. She saw something else as well. Delicate as something painted on china, balanced on one leg at the edge of the river. It was a heron, but not an ordinary heron. Each line of it, the thin legs and the curve of wings and neck, burned bright blue, like the hottest flame from a Bunsen burner.
Sobo had not been the kind of grandmother who loved to tell stories, but Kami had heard one or two and interpreted them in her own way, shaping the legends of a country she had never seen into her private personal stories.
Aosaginohi. Blue heron fire. A night heron, softly illuminated against the darkening sky.
She had not thought much about Ash’s words to Jared, about waking the woods. Certainly not in connection to herself. Only here was the aosaginohi. Now Kami thought about the little creature made of eyes. Hyakume, guardian with a hundred eyes.
Jared had not woken the woods alone. She had done it too. Source and sorcerer, creating a storybook land out of Sorry-in-the-Vale. Only the stories were different this time, because they were her stories too. For the first time, Kami saw what Rob Lynburn had feared she would see: the lure of power.
Kami’s mother was home for dinner every Tuesday, so the rest of the family was always home then as well. Dad had made lasagna, and they all sat around the table and fought over the dregs of the lemonade. Tomo won, of course.
Ten primly drank ice water and focused on his salad. “I am considering becoming a vegetarian,” he announced in a low voice. “Not that this isn’t excellent and nutritious,” he told Mum, blinking worriedly. “But I might owe it to my conscience.”
“Whatever you want,” Mum said.
“I do half the cooking, and by ‘half’ I mean three-quarters,” Dad pointed out. “And if you’re going to turn up your nose at all my carnivorous delights, ingrate child, you can sit under the table and gnaw sadly on a raw Brussels sprout at mealtimes.”
Ten smiled a tiny smile. He always knew when Dad was joking, though strangers’ jokes puzzled him.
Kami reached for the salad dressing and met her mother’s fingers stretching across the table for the same thing. Kami pulled away. Her mother’s hands were icy cold. Her mother’s gaze met hers.
“How was your day, Kami?” she asked, and picked up the dressing.
“Oh, fine,” Kami said. “The paper is going well. I’m working on a really big issue right now. I’m going to do an article on the old families of the Vale.” She looked at her parents.
Her father raised his eyebrows at her, and her mother’s gaze trembled and slid away.
“I heard that some of the old families were very powerful,” she added. “Can either of you help me? Any word about families who’ve got their own way a lot over the years?”
“That’d be all of them, wouldn’t it?” Dad said, rolling his eyes. “Especially the Lynburns. The other families say, ‘My way or the highway.’ The Lynburns say, ‘I am unfamiliar with the concept of the highway, so that leaves you with only one choice.’ Ha-ha.” Dad’s voice softened then, as it did every time he spoke of his mother. “She always said they weren’t important: that they knew so little they thought this small town was the world.”
Kami thought about the Lynburn boys, fighting over her as if they were dogs snarling over a bone and she had no choice in the matter. “Forget the Lynburns,” she said sharply. “Who else?”
Who else might be able to do magic? Who else might have wanted to kill Nicola?
“A lot of families in the Vale intermarried over the years,” Mum told her, staring at her focaccia. “There’s no real way to know who has inherited what, or who is descended from whom anymore.”