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I love you, Kami told him, and cut.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Nothing Gold
The smoke Jared had created raced through the leaves ahead of them, spreading out dark tendrils. They were the shadows of retribution, coming for Rob Lynburn.
It was the only thing Jared could think of: rage and retribution.
And then Jared went down. The crash startled Angela and made her spin to one side and turn on him, chain clanking in her hand. Jared did not even care. He wished she would bring the chain down, beat him unconscious, and end the wrenching pain and echoing silence in his mind.
“Easy, Angie,” Holly said. “Jared, what’s wrong?”
Jared lay on his stomach, struggling to lift himself on his elbows. He could hear his breath rattling in his throat, a terrible uneven sound.
“Where are you hurt?” Holly demanded, moving closer to him without letting go of Angela’s hand.
“I’m not,” Jared began to lie, and then bowed his head, shoulders hunching in agony. He could taste earth, bitter between his lips. He could feel the woods, the whole world, twisting and going wrong around him. “It doesn’t matter! Get Kami.”
Angela leaned down and looked into his face.
Jared gritted his teeth and stared back. “I’ll catch up,” he promised, and dropped his head again. He made a pathetic sound, crying out like a dying animal. “Leave me!”
Angela stood straight and said, “All right.”
Behind her were Ash and Aunt Lillian. Jared was distantly amazed to see how concerned they looked, and furious that they seemed to have forgotten anything else was happening.
“You want that scum to kill another girl?” Angela demanded. “I’m going.”
“So am I,” Holly said.
Angela began to run, Holly holding on to her hand, and Ash ran after them.
Aunt Lillian stooped down and touched Jared’s hair. It was the strangest thing: only Kami had ever touched him like that before, so gently.
“Go,” Jared snarled, and turned his face away.
She did. She left him on the ground, struggling and failing to get up.
Kami had not expected it to hurt. But it hurt worse than anything she had ever experienced in her life. She supposed through the haze of red agony that it made sense. This was surgery, after all, surgery of the soul or the mind or both at once. And she had done it to herself and to him. Worse than the pain was the sudden wrongness in her mind and in her bones, in every part of her.
Silence filled Kami now, like the silence after words failed and someone stopped breathing. She was gasping, lost as a fish thrown onto dry earth, lying on her side on the chains and scrabbling on the rock trying to get up, because in spite of all this she knew what was coming.
Rob Lynburn’s shadow fell on her, blotting out the sun. She could not see his face, only darkness, and the bright light of the knife as he brought it down. Only the blow never fell, because Rob staggered and had to catch at the quarry wall to keep his footing.
“Rob,” said Rosalind Lynburn. “You can’t kill her.”
“Rosalind!” Rob exclaimed furiously. “I asked you to go to the town and wait there.”
Rosalind flinched away from his tone, even though she’d had the strength and conviction to hurl herself at him and force down his arm. Kami could see, suddenly, the ingrained habits of a lifetime. She saw how Rosalind might have chosen a violent man to take her away, because men who hurt her were the only ones she knew how to love.
“I went to the town,” Rosalind murmured, her fair hair hanging like a veil before her face. “I did what you told me. Then I came back, and I’m sorry, but you can’t kill her!”
Every muscle of Rob’s bloodied, wounded face went tight. Kami recognized, with a cold crawling feeling, that he had been crossed too many times today. She forced herself to sit up and pushed herself staggering to her feet. She still had the knife in her hand, even if all the magic in her was dead and lost.
“That’s right,” said a voice at the lip of the quarry, a voice that was used to obedience without question. “You’re not going to kill her. You’re not going to kill anyone.”
Lillian Lynburn cast a look at the loose rocks of the quarry, and they rolled to form rough steps. Behind Lillian, coming like an army of one, was Angela swinging a chain. Behind her came Holly, and then Ash.
