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 should 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.
He wanted to send out envoys, conjure up goblin scouts or magical messengers, anything that would help them search this forest. As he thought that, he saw the tendrils of smoke slide out of the sky into the woods, spilling through to the brown tangle of the undergrowth, rasping with a dry whisper through the bright leaves. They went combing through the forest. Jared could feel them going searching.
He heard a soft indrawn breath and looked at Holly. She was looking at him, blue eyes wide and her mascara smudged by tears she had been brushing away as they walked, surreptitious as if she was stealing.
“Looks like an octopus made of smoke,” she said, and gave him a sliver of a smile.
“I was feeling like a pretty badass sorcerer until you said that,” Jared told her. He could feel something else in the air hunting through the forest. For a moment, he thought that the searching thing was what they were looking for, but then he glanced at Aunt Lillian’s face, intent as his mother’s when she was reading a book. The cool, searching air felt like Aunt Lillian looked.
Holly’s hand gripped Jared’s arm, startling him. Her fingernails dug into his skin. “Can you please hurry?” Holly said tensely. “We have to find her.”
Lillian nodded in unexpected agreement. “It has to be us who find her.”
Jared nodded and tried to concentrate. Holly’s hand on his arm was anchoring him to his body, and airy messengers were coursing through the woods because of his power, but Kami’s thoughts were the most important thing of all.
Jared, Kami said in his head, and he could tell she was wary. Ask Lillian why.
“Why—” Jared said aloud, and then caught up with Kami’s thought. “Why do you want it to be us who find her?” He glanced at his aunt, her restrained profile that should have looked out of place in the woods and yet did not.
She regarded Jared with a considering air. “Rob wants to be the one to do it,” she answered slowly. “If a sorcerer goes rogue, turns vicious—it’s the responsibility of the Lynburns at the manor to deal with it. It’s the responsibility of the Lynburn heir, and that’s me. Rob would want to spare me.”
Spare you …, Kami prompted.
Spare her from killing Ash, Jared thought bleakly back to her. Isn’t it obvious?
There was a sense of urgency in Kami’s fear, a cold current in the stream of her thoughts.
“Spare you …,” Jared prompted, echoing Kami.
“Spare me from executing Ash and Rosalind,” Lillian said. “Rob knows what I’ll have to do. There’s a place outside Sorry-in-the-Vale called Monkshood Abbey. Rob’s parents used to live there. You might call them the cadet branch of the Lynburns.”
Jared knew all this, but he tried to look encouraging and repeated Kami’s thoughts: “What happened to them?” he asked quietly.
“They wanted more power,” Lillian answered, just as quietly. “They broke the law Aurimere made and started killing people in the cellar of their house. My parents had to go and fight them to the death to stop them. My father died a year later; my mother was never the same again. But they had to do it. It’s our duty to protect the town. Nobody else can.”
Jared thought about the crest of the Lynburns fastened in a cellar floor, covered in dried blood. He thought of Uncle Rob saying that his parents had displeased the Lynburns of Aurimere, and not mentioning that they had done so by slaughtering people. He’d called the Lynburns of Aurimere judges and executioners.
“Rob would know what has to be done,” said Lillian. “He’s been there before. He understood then.”
The Lynburns of Aurimere had come to Monkshood and killed his parents, Uncle Rob had said, and taken him “as sorcerer breeding stock for one or the other of their daughters.” It didn’t sound to Jared like Rob had understood all that well. Horror pierced Jared as he thought of what that meant, and who he had trusted with Kami.
Kami! he said. Run!
A wall between them fell. Jared saw what she had been concealing from him, what explained the urgency she had been feeling and why she had been forced to interrogate Lillian through him.
Rob’s not here, she told him. I turned around and he was gone. I don’t know where he is.
Kami was alone in the woods. Of course, she told herself firmly, that was a great deal better than being in the woods with the man who might have killed Nicola. This was absolutely fine, in fact.
A rustle to her left made her spin around, and she saw a bird burst from the trees in a flurry of wings. Her heart felt as if it was trying to copy the bird. Kami pressed a hand to her chest and told herself to calm down. She could feel Jared coming, Holly and Lillian with him.
Kami reminded herself that she was a source and could send shadows away on her own. But just because she could do it by herself did not mean she wanted to be by herself. She saw light sifting and sparkling through the autumn leaves, and thought of Nicola Prendergast’s eyes, staring blindly up at a different sky.
A crack of wood made Kami spin again, waves of heat and cold breaking over her. Sweat prickled at her temples. Leaves played in the wind over her head, mocking her in soft whispers. She did not know where the magical threat might be coming from. The only thing being a source did for her was let her know it was near.