Unspoken

Kami had a wall up automatically between Jared and these thoughts, but there hadn’t been a wall during the kiss. So everything was even more complicated than it was already. Everything was always more complicated because of this terrible link.

Kami could feel Jared’s emotions, so tangled that even he wasn’t sure which one was prevalent, jealousy or anger or confusion, as he recognized that she’d responded to the kiss. Kami did not know what to say to him.

The door of the school creaked open again. Kami looked up from the floor. She saw fingers of shadow creep in, like the shadow of a giant’s hand. As she watched, everything the shadow touched was consumed by its darkness.

Jared! Kami screamed silently. She backed away and the darkness came inexorably closer, taking pieces of the corridor in sharp hungry gulps. It was as though Kami’s world was made of paper and someone was hacking at it with a vast pair of scissors.

Kami backed up another step, breath sobbing in her throat. She knew Jared was coming for her, running, but he was sure to come too late. Her back met the cold wall, and she felt Jared reach for her in his mind. It was all he could do.

It gave her a moment of warmth and calm. It was enough. She thought of facing Rosalind across a sea of flying glass. She thought of how she had felt seeing the aosaginohi, blue heron fire, and afterward, when she had sat at her window and looked outside. Built for sorcerers, woken woods and all, this town was hers too. She was a source of magic. This was just an enemy too cowardly to show their face.

“No,” Kami said to the shadow crawling toward her, feeling the magic flow through her, from her to Jared and back again. She held out her hand and saw light fill it as if she held water cupped between her palms. The light brimmed in her hands, glowed between her fingers. She let a little light slip from her hand. The tiny points glittered like grains of sand turning into stars as they tumbled through the air toward the creeping dark.

“Don’t you dare,” Kami commanded. “I’m not scared. I’m the source.” She let her hands fall open. The light poured from her palms and rolled down the floor, the color of sunlight on stone in her town. It washed the shadows away.

Chapter Thirty-One

Trust the Sun in Me

Kami stood panting and shaking. Then the door opened again. The creaking sound sent horror flashing through her, making every nerve burn. Against the pale sky outside, there was another dark shape, casting a long shadow on the shining floor.

Kami was terrified for a split second. Then she felt the brush of emotions not her own. When she turned toward the touch, it went all through her like sunlight: relief and love and joy. She ran down the corridor, down through the fading glow of magic. For once she was simply glad that Jared was real, his feelings flooding through her and her arms sliding around his neck.

She closed her eyes and held on, as she had when they found Nicola. This time she was able to keep holding on, her cheek laid in the curve of his neck, cool leather and warm skin on either side of her face. He had his arm around her, his breath was stirring her hair, and for a long moment they were both safe and warm in a space with no walls between them.

Then Jared stepped away from her, held her back with his hands on her shoulders. “You’re all right?” he demanded.

Kami’s walls all went back up. She said, knowing he could tell that she was lying, but not why: “I’m fine.”

“Being able to hold whoever this is off with magic doesn’t matter,” Kami said, once they got to her headquarters. “Whoever this is could still go after anyone in town who doesn’t have magic, or after one of us when we’re asleep. Who has the most magic chops is irrelevant. What matters is finding out who the sorcerer going after us is. Which means that what matters, lucky for us, is elite investigative reporter skills.”

A flash of Jared’s amusement, subdued like lightning seen from far away, made Kami look up from her notebook. She was sitting behind her desk because she felt better there. Jared was on Angela’s napping couch, one knee drawn up and his arm around it, watching her.

Only Kami’s desktop lamp was on, the better to stay in school after hours without being discovered. She was sitting in a pool of light and had to blink to make him out. The light was dying outside the window, caught in the gray time between sunset and twilight. Jared was all in shadow, except for his eyes. They shone colorless as glass with moonlight striking it.

Kami brought her mind closer to Jared’s, questing. She came in contact with a wall as high as hers. She blinked again.

He never mentioned her walls. She could not comment on his.

“The problem is,” Kami said, and heard her voice crack, “I keep panicking. I thought that being a reporter would mean being able to—keep some distance from the story, that it would all be really interesting and I would care a lot, but it wouldn’t be personal. Today I couldn’t stop thinking that Angela or Holly might be the sorcerer. I can’t suspect the people I care about, but I can’t seem to trust them either, and I have to trust someone.”

“You can trust me.”

Kami tested the wall again. She could not read a thing from him. “Yes,” she answered all the same, and they both heard uncertainty in her voice. “But I can’t just trust the people whose mind I can read. The list is somewhat limited.”

“I don’t see a problem with that,” Jared said. “I only trust you. But if you want to be all emotionally healthy about it, I’ll try to understand. That’s just the kind of relationship we have.”

Kami smiled. Then she glanced down at the frantic scribbles in her notebook, the black loops of letters tangling like briars. She’d worked out ways to suspect everybody in town.

“Maybe the problem is that you’re too close to it,” Jared said. “The idea of Angela or Holly just has you rattled. It doesn’t mean you’re not an elite investigate reporter.”

“Damn right,” said Kami.

“So make it a story,” he suggested. “Step back from worrying about Angela and Holly and think about it. If it was something on the news or in one of your mystery novels, who would you think did it?”

Kami looked down at her notebook again and tapped the page with her pen. She let the pen drop from her fingers and tried to imagine that this was just another story. The kind of puzzle she’d always wanted to solve. “All right,” she said slowly. She got up from her chair and walked the boards of her headquarters, reached the wall, spun, and came back. “Holly got attacked at the Bell and Mist, or at least she said she did. She might have been lying. But if she was attacked, then the people I could see at the Bell and Mist aren’t the sorcerer. I was with Angela most of the time. It wasn’t her, unless there’s more than one sorcerer.”

Rusty’s voice came to mind, obviously uneasy, knowing a secret of Angela’s that Kami did not. Kami kept walking. “We can’t forget the timing of all this either. The dead animals, me being tossed into a well. The attacks began around the start of the school year—the same time the Lynburns arrived. The only people we know for certain are sorcerers are that man Henry Thornton, who hasn’t been in town since that one night; Mrs. Thompson, who has had seventy years to decide to start murdering people in a crazed bid for power; and the Lynburns. The ones with the knives, the ones with the past of red and gold.”

She was going full speed ahead now, almost bouncing off the walls as Jared stayed still and watched her. “It’s either a frame job or it really is a Lynburn. And in real life, unlike in mystery novels, the murderer isn’t always the one you least suspect,” Kami continued. “It’s usually the one the evidence points toward. Henry Thornton looked at you and knew you were a Lynburn. He saw that you looked like someone else, someone he was afraid of. I’m not sure. I can’t be sure. But if you ask me who I think did it? I think it was a Lynburn.” She stopped then. She was alone in the dark with a Lynburn.

“So we have four suspects,” Jared said slowly.

Kami thought, Five.

Jared stood up, and his shock rippled through her, with rage just behind it.

“I didn’t mean for you to hear that,” Kami said.

Tell me you didn’t mean it, said Jared.

“I don’t think it’s you,” Kami told him. “I don’t believe that, but—” She didn’t want to be the girl who just believed in the guy she liked, no matter what extenuating mind-reading circumstances existed. She didn’t want her feelings to blind her. She didn’t want anything to blind her. She did not know what her feelings were, or what his were, or how to separate the two. She did not want to drown in what was between them and lose control, or lose who she was.

Thinking about this objectively, things looked very bad for Jared. He was the one who hadn’t known how sorcery worked, the one who got furiously angry and wanted to take it out on the world. He had admitted to seeing those knives, admitted that he had killed his father. He had been the sorcerer who was furious with her the night she was thrown down a well. She didn’t know when they had last been completely open with each other. Maybe they never had been.

“Fine,” Jared said explosively, and Kami realized how much she had let slip in her distress. He took one step toward her. Kami had to tilt her chin to look up into his face. She could feel the warmth and tension of his body.

“Are you scared of me?” Jared whispered.

Kami whispered back: “I’ve never been as scared of anyone as I am of you.” She shivered, but the fear felt almost familiar. After all, she had been alone in the dark with him her whole life. Nobody could hurt her like he could.

“Take down your walls,” Jared said, his voice low and urgent. “I’ll take down all of mine.” He lifted a hand, fingers curled a fraction of an inch from her cheek.

Kami almost turned her face into his palm, but instead she held still and waited to see if he would touch her on his own.

“Kami,” Jared said. His voice was soft: she barely recognized it, and she realized this was what he sounded like when he was begging. “You are the only thing in the world that matters. You can trust me. Please.”

He did not touch her. She did not take down her walls.

His fury hit her like a blast of heat, strong enough to make her take a step back.

“I’m sorry,” Kami told him. “I can’t.”

“Fine,” Jared said. He didn’t linger, didn’t look at her again, just turned away and left her standing in darkness with his rage burning in her mind.

Kami tried to call Angela again that night, but she only got her voicemail. She tried the house, and when Rusty answered she hung up.

She woke up the next morning, the dawn light brushing the treetops outside her window with silver, more luminescence than real light. She could feel Jared’s unhappiness, even in his sleep. Kami picked up her phone.

Ten minutes later, she threw on a gray woolen dress and her winter coat. She ran out of her house and uphill through the fields that stretched away from the woods. The world was cold in the morning time, autumn drawing to a close. When Kami jumped a stile, the grass crunched, stiff with frost.

She had to trust someone.

The fields glittered as she crossed them and the sun rose higher in the sky. The morning light was still so pale that for a moment the farmhouse looked wrapped in mist. The door of the house swung open. Holly came out as Kami hesitated at the last fence. Holly’s hair was sleep-rumpled, and she looked tired and apprehensive. Kami knew the feeling.

“Hi,” said Holly faintly, and came down to the fence to meet her, shrugging on her fleece-lined jacket.

Kami glanced up into Holly’s face and took a chance. “I like you,” she blurted out. Holly flinched. “I know we haven’t been friends very long,” Kami continued, looking at the frosty fields. “And I know you were maybe trying to be friends for a while before, and I didn’t realize, and I’m sorry about that. I was being dumb. But I think you’re great, and I’m glad we’re friends now.” Kami took a deep breath so she could start explaining that she had suspected Holly for a moment.