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The dark figures drew away. Even the mist was receding by the time Jared appeared, walking slowly through the pale shreds of mist, as if they were ghosts who loved him, clinging to him and refusing to let him pass. He looked as drawn and sick as Kami felt. He did not look at Kami, but he looked at the chains and blood, at Lillian unconscious, at Ash and Rosalind shaking as if they had fevers.
“What happened?”
“We had a moment of triumph,” Angela informed him. “Unfortunately, it was short-lived, and you missed it.”
They all went back to Aurimere House, passing through the arched doorway bearing the warning YOU ARE NOT SAFE. Ash carried his mother up the wide flight of stairs from the hall to her room. He did not come back.
Kami sat in a chair in the parlor, aching all over, and fell into an uneasy, exhausted sleep. When she woke, Jared was gone. Holly and Angela were stretched out on the canopy sofas, both asleep. Angela’s chain was still knotted in one hand. Kami stood over her best friend and touched Angela’s shoulder lightly, just enough to feel her there, solid and real and safe. Then she tiptoed out of the room. Her whole body felt like the empty place where a tooth used to be, a phantom ache that she had to keep investigating.
She went down a set of steps, across a hall, and into the library. There was no light except the dying sunlight from the bay windows. Kami passed the glass-fronted cabinets full of leather books and armchairs with backs high as thrones to sit on the window seat.
The library was on the ground floor, on the side of the manor near the cliff. Kami could not see the path, but she could see Sorry-in-the-Vale. Everything about her, body and mind and soul, hurt. She didn’t know what to do about it.
Except she knew they all had to do something. She had to think of something. She wished Jared was with her. He had stayed by the door of the drawing room, not looking at anyone, while she was awake. She had not known what to say to him in front of the others.
She could go and find him. She remembered that morning in her bedroom, and she thought she could rest if he was there, if they were together. Only she was not sure of her welcome.
They were not linked anymore, Kami told herself, and suppressed a pang of desolation. The tiny creak of the door made Kami look up.
Jared had never surprised her like this before. She breathed in fast, taking a gulp of air to ease the shock. It was terrible to see him and have him so far away, all his thoughts and feelings locked to her, as remote as a star. It reminded her of when they had first met, and how his physical presence kept startling her. Now that was all she had.
He was here, though, and that was what she wanted.
He looked the same, gold hair in shadow, scar the thinnest of white lines, and gray eyes at their palest and most disturbing. The harsh lines and angles of his face looked harsher tonight: he must be in as much pain as she was. She wondered how she looked to him and how, with everything so changed, they would manage to comfort each other.
At least he was here. At least, now that he was with her, comfort seemed possible.
Kami forced herself to smile. “Is Lillian awake?”
“I don’t know,” Jared answered. His voice sounded very loud in her ears, now that she knew there was no way for him to speak to her silently. His mouth twisted. “But my mother’s gone.”
Kami opened her mouth to ask where, and then closed it. She turned her head back toward Sorry-in-the-Vale, where Rob waited for the other Lynburns to see the error of their ways and come to him.
She, like Jared, knew perfectly well where Rosalind had gone. “I’m sorry,” she told him. She wanted to reach out and console Jared, but she did not know how to any longer. She couldn’t reach out with her mind, and he had always shied away from her touch. She did not think she could bear for him to do that now.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jared said. “Except that it means there’s another sorcerer out to get us.”
“At least we know who she is and what she looks like,” Kami murmured. “There are at least twenty-six other sorcerers.”
“You counted them?” Jared’s mouth curled at one corner, and the ache in Kami’s chest turned almost sweet, the sudden force of hope a welcome pain. “Of course you did.”
“They might be people from Sorry-in-the-Vale, or they might be newcomers. I saw one of each. If they’re new, we can find out about them, but otherwise—we have to find out which of our neighbors are secretly sorcerers who want to kill us, and I’m not sure where to start the investigation.” Saying it that way lifted her heart. It all sounded slightly more doable. Kami thought she knew how to handle an investigation.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Jared said.
Had his voice always been this hard to read before, and Kami had never noticed because she knew how he felt? She thought he sounded detached, but perhaps it was that he was so removed from her. She didn’t know. Kami decided to take his words at face value and smiled at him again, though her lips were trembling and it was oddly hard to do.
Jared crossed half the room and then stopped, leaning against one of the glass-fronted cabinets full of books. Even when he was walking slowly and she knew he was in pain, he was graceful. She had never noticed that before either.
“Jared, I want to talk,” she began, and stopped helplessly. She did not want to talk. She wanted it not to be necessary to talk.
“Let me say something first,” Jared said. “Thank you.”
Kami blinked. She had an absurd impulse to tell him that he was welcome, but she said nothing. She could see his reflection in the glass cabinet, an iced-over doppelgänger of Jared, turning his eyes white and the curl of his mouth cruel. She felt it would be as impossible to reach out to this Jared as it would be to reach through the glass and touch that one.
“You were right to sever the connection,” Jared continued. “You were right all along.”
Kami was numb. It seemed for a moment as though by cutting away Jared, she had cut away every part of her that felt anything. All she could think of was what Rob had said to her in her garden one morning: that the emotions that came with the link, Jared’s emotions, were not real. “Was I?” she whispered.
