“Help me,” she rasped, pulling their white linked fingers apart and plunging her now-free hand back into the water.
Ash reached into the water again too, grabbing fistfuls of Jared’s shirt. Together they dragged him out of the pool and laid him on the moonlit-white broken grass.
Jared lay still as the dead. He should have been dead, Kami realized.
The tiny gold lines of his eyelashes were kissed by frost. His hair in her lap was glittering with ice crystals. But he was still holding on to her hand, grasp sure and strong.
“Jared,” Kami said, desperate and commanding.
Jared opened his eyes suddenly. They were paler than she had ever seen, white and treacherous as the winter ice she had shattered to get to him.
“Jared, can you hear me? How long were you down there?”
Jared’s lips moved, shaping her name. Drops of water landed on the silvery lines of his face. Kami could not tell if it was lake water dripping from her hair or tears.
She bent over him as he shook in her arms and started to breathe like a human being again, in shuddering gasps as if he might live.
“You can’t keep acting like this,” Kami told him fiercely. “You cannot continue to be this stupid.”
Lightning flashed overhead like an answer to her, that he would keep being this bitter sorcerous stranger, that perhaps he had never been anything else.
It bleached the whole world white, the pools turning into diamonds. The drops of water on the planes of Jared’s face, on the pale line of his bared throat, gleamed like broken glass.
Kami covered her eyes with her trembling hand and thought: I can’t keep acting like this. I cannot continue to be this stupid.
PART III
PLOTTING A COURSE
. . . mystery down the soundless valley
Thunders, and dark is here;
And the wind blows, and the light goes,
And the night is full of fear. . . .
—Rupert Brooke
Chapter Eleven
A Drop of Blood, a Single Tear
Kami and Ash helped Jared back to Aurimere as early morning flooded the sky with pale, sickly light, making the woods and even Aurimere look gray as ashes.
Lillian opened the door. When she saw Jared propped up between them, wet hair sluicing tracks like tears down his face, Kami saw her go as white as Jared.
She opened the door wide, holding it with fingers gone white too. They were across the hall and halfway up the stairs when she spoke.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Lillian said, still at the open door. Her back was to them. “I do not want either of you stupid children attempting the ceremony. You’re all too young and too criminally foolish to be of help to me. I can do this myself.”
“Mum,” Ash said from Jared’s other side. Kami couldn’t see his expression.
“No, Ash,” Lillian snapped. “Don’t argue with me. That’s the least you can do. It’s decided, do you understand me? It’s done.”
They put Jared into his room. Ash went to get some of his own clothes. While he was gone, Kami wrestled Jared up onto his pillows and dragged off his soaked T-shirt. He leaned heavily against her, and she tried to steady him, one hand on the nape of his neck and one against his stomach, feeling the muscles there clench. He mumbled something into her hair. It took her a moment to recognize her own name.
“What?” she whispered back. She wanted to hold him, but he wasn’t a part of her anymore. She couldn’t keep pretending he was.
He murmured, “Make it stop.”
Ash returned. Kami smoothed a sheet over Jared’s shoulder before she left; it was the last gesture she permitted herself.
Kami texted Angela and rescheduled the meeting at Rusty’s for the next day. She went home and found her father sleeping on the sofa. She walked upstairs in the sleeping hush of her home and climbed into her cold bed. When she woke, it was evening, and she called Ash. He said that Jared’s room was empty; the bed did not even look slept in, as if he had never been there.
Kami sat looking at the phone in her hand. Lillian’s voice echoed in her mind, saying It’s done.
* * *
On Thursday morning Kami walked her brothers to school with her father. Dad had to pry Ten’s hand out of his.
“You’re not going in?” Dad asked.
Kami hesitated, because “I’m skipping school” was never a good thing to say to parents. Though this was an unusual situation and it was possible Dad would write her a note saying “Excused due to sorcerers.” She looked up at her father.
He was young for a dad, and had always looked young to her before, carefree and easygoing. Today his face seemed older. Kami wondered if she wore her own dark night the same way.
“Were you hoping to talk to me?” Dad said before she could think of how to answer his first question. “I’m sorry, honey. I can’t talk to you right now. I just don’t know what to say.”
It had not occurred to Kami before that her father might blame her, too, for keeping the secret from him. The possibility of that, of being locked away from his love, shocked her so much she could not speak.
Dad nodded at her as if they were acquaintances who had met in the street; then Kami watched him walk back toward home and the woods. All the trees were bare and lonely as abandoned bones. She waited until he was gone, then set off for the High Street, and the rooms above Hanley’s grocery shop where Rusty held his self-defense classes.
Rusty’s gym did not appeal to her the same way her headquarters did. It consisted of two small rooms, painted an unsightly shade of turquoise, which you reached by walking up small dark stairs leading from the grocery store. Rusty claimed the ladies of the town often paused in their shopping and took trips up the stairs to look through the door, which was half glass and wire mesh, to admire his manly form.
Right now it was a bright square in the dark, the lights on inside. Kami had walked briskly through the streets, able to nod to people as she passed and act normal with no conscious effort. She was surprised to find she could not stand the idea of facing her own friends.
She sat down at the top of the stairs and cried instead, thinking of her mother and father and her home, that she had never known how true the word broken could be for a home, how a home could be left useless and in pieces. She cried thinking about Jared under the ice, and cried for how alone she felt.
She cried quietly, hands pressed to her eyes, and as she cried she was almost relieved. Here she was, lonely and miserable, and she was still going to go into the gym and do what needed to be done. She had wondered who she was without Jared, stripped of all her supports and forced to stand on her own. She had worried that she would break if her heart broke, but she wasn’t broken. She had lost everything, but she was not lost. It seemed a worthwhile thing to know.
Kami started at the sound of the door below slamming. She wiped her eyes hastily on her sleeve, but the thunder of footsteps up the steps was too fast for her: she had barely managed one swipe before Rusty was kneeling on the step at her feet.
He was the usual Rusty, a gym bag slung over his shoulder, hair rumpled and wearing a pink T-shirt that read I’M TOO PRETTY TO DO MY HOMEWORK. His expression was different, though.
“Kami,” he said, and his voice sounded different too. “Are you crying?” Rusty knelt there looking up into her face, hazel eyes clear and serious. He lifted his hand to her face, and his fingers captured a tear.
“I was just—” Kami batted him away, embarrassed. “It’s nothing. I’m all right.”
“You’re not all right!” Rusty said. “You’re crying. Come here.”
“No, really,” Kami said, pushing him gently back. She smiled at him, and rubbed her sleeve across her face, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with one sleeve edge. “I’m fine. It’s okay. You don’t need to make a fuss. We should go inside.”
Rusty kept hold of her shoulder, his move to take her in his arms cut off, but apparently not quite ready to let go.
Kami turned her face away, sliding the strap of her schoolbag back onto her shoulder. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but . . . ease up, Rusty.”
He stood and she lifted her face to his. Her smile was more natural this time. Rusty didn’t smile back. “Fine,” he said. “You’re fine. Everything’s fine. Fine.”
He strode up the steps past her and swung open the door with enough force that it was still standing open when Kami followed him. There were no chairs in the room, so everyone was sitting around on gymnastic mats. Ash’s eyes were on the door; he and Holly both looked slightly concerned. Angela was sitting up and trying not to nap on the mats at least, but she was wearing a pair of sunglasses and smiling an ironic, scarlet smile. Jared was leaning against the wall.
Kami took a deep breath and pulled herself together. Rusty crossed the floor in one swift movement.
Kami knew, in a vague way, that Rusty was tall and strong. She was so used to the fact, and so used to him flopping about in paroxysms of idleness, that she never really thought about it. Now, though, she saw as he approached Jared that he was actually taller and broader across the shoulders than Jared.
Jared tilted his head, as if he was noticing that too. He looked slightly interested in what was going to happen next.
“I’ve actually been waiting a long time to do this,” Rusty announced, and punched Jared in the face.
Ash and Holly jumped. Angela sat up straight and pulled off her sunglasses, lips parting in a startled grin.
Jared staggered, but the wall held him up. He looked up after a moment, and his mouth flickered into a bloody smile an instant before he launched himself at Rusty.
Jared and Rusty were off the mats and on the floor almost at once. The crack of flesh and bone meeting wood made Kami clench her teeth. Jared flinched every time just before one of Rusty’s blows hit, but then he threw himself at Rusty in return, a vicious whirl that Rusty had to expend all his energy holding off. Kami did not think Rusty had an instant to notice that Jared was afraid.
Jared tried to bash Rusty’s head open against a wall. Rusty threw him up against the door, so fast that Kami had to sidestep and so hard that she was afraid they would break the glass.
Then Jared was on the floor again, and Rusty managed to pin Jared’s wrists over his head on the mat. He knelt on his legs and shook his head like a disappointed grandfather when Jared snarled at him. Jared sank his teeth into Rusty’s wrist and managed to roll free and to his feet, winding back his fist. Rusty punched him in the stomach and Kami saw Jared’s minute flinch again.
Kami cast her schoolbag to one side. “Angela, help me!” she yelled. She leaped on Rusty’s back, seizing his hair and pulling his head back. “Stop it. Stop it! I’ll hurt you—you know I can.”
Angela was at Jared’s back before Kami had finished speaking, grabbing for his wrist, ready to bend it past the point of pain. Jared dodged away from her, stumbling into the door in his haste. His shoulder knocked against it hard and he winced, baring his bloodstained teeth. “Don’t touch me,” he said, his voice thick.
“Don’t worry,” Angela returned. “Rusty, cut it out, what are you thinking?”
“I was thinking that he made Kami cry.”
Kami abruptly let go of Rusty and gave him a shove. “No, he didn’t.”
“You were crying?” Jared asked. His voice was thick with blood and shaken with pain so Kami could not read it, but she thought it had changed.
“It’s nothing to do with you,” Kami snapped at him, and glared at Rusty. She was feeling uncharitable in every direction.
“But why were you—”
“What did you do?” Angela demanded of Jared.
“I didn’t do anything!” Jared said. “All I’ve been trying to do is what she wants!”
“My freaking hero,” Kami snarled.
Jared sent her a brief bitter glance. Kami returned the look with interest, then looked away, pressing her hand to her forehead as if she could push through her skull and put all her thoughts in order. She had goals she needed to achieve; fighting amongst themselves was not going to accomplish anything.