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“The twins?” repeated Kami.
“Rosalind and Lillian Lynburn,” her father said. “I knew who they were, of course, but I don’t think they ever spoke to me. They held themselves apart, being the girls from the manor. Rosalind Lynburn got together with an American and moved away, and Lillian married Rob Lynburn and they moved as well. I heard Lillian and Rob went to check on Rosalind, but I guess they went traveling, as you don’t have to search for family for seventeen years. Even your mother answers her email more often than that.”
Kami grinned up at him and asked, “Who is Rob Lynburn?” Aside from Ash’s father and not Jared’s, since Dad was talking about him as if he was still alive.
“He was a cousin, I think,” Dad said. “He lived with the Lynburns. Everybody always said he was going to marry one of the twins, though Lillian was dating someone else for a while. Edmund Prescott, I think it was, but he left town. People were a bit nasty about it. Said he was running away from Lillian. I don’t think it broke Lillian’s heart. She married her cousin Rob a few years later.”
Ash was shockingly attractive for someone whose parents were cousins, Kami thought. “Strange they’d want to move back, if they don’t have any friends here.”
“I know, there’s nothing for them here,” Dad said. “Except the mansion.”
Kami snorted and her father turned Shepherd’s Corner, down along the road by the woods.
“I may know why they came back,” Dad said slowly. “They didn’t have friends here, but you know how this place is, occasionally forgetting we don’t live in medieval times. There is always a trace of that feudal worship for the lords of the manor. People never gossip about the Lynburns; they talk about them a lot in reverent tones. They won’t get that anywhere else.”
Kami remembered Mum’s face in the stark lights of the ambulance. Maybe everyone talked about the Lynburns in hushed tones because they were afraid.
“If you want information on the Lynburns, you’re asking the wrong parent,” Dad added, parking outside their gate.
Kami tried to keep her voice casual as she asked, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Rob Lynburn had an office above Claire’s,” Dad said. “He’d have lunch at the counter so he could talk to her every day. Who could blame the guy? Your mother always was the most beautiful girl in town.”
Like Angela, Kami thought with a tiny sigh. It was just her luck that she spent her life surro
unded by amazingly beautiful women.
“You okay, kiddo?”
Kami blinked and looked over at her father. The expression he wore was unusually serious. Her parents had been so young when they had Kami; her grandmother had always been the adult of the house, and her father mostly joked around with her as if he was Angela or Rusty, as if they were just pals together. It was strange and touching to see him protective.
Kami gave her father a piteous look. “I’m just really tired. I can’t wait to go up to my room and sleep.”
Dad held open the door for her. “You got it,” he said. “I’ll keep those mini mutants we found in the sewers and pretend are your brothers downstairs, okay?” He put an arm around her shoulders as they walked into the house, and Kami leaned against him a little more heavily than she had to. He kissed her on the forehead before she climbed into bed, and gently closed her bedroom door as Kami lay there feeling guilty.
The instant she heard him walking down the stairs, she jumped out of bed. Jared was resolutely silent in her head, all his walls up, but Kami couldn’t stay furious at someone who had saved her life, and she couldn’t let things continue like this. She was shrugging her coat back on when it occurred to her that she had just been in the hospital, and her parents would be legitimately frantic if they discovered she was gone. So she tore a page out of her notebook and wrote her parents a message: “Dear Mum and Dad, I hope you don’t read this, but if you do, you should know that I haven’t been kidnapped or abducted by aliens. I had to run an errand that can’t wait. I’ll be home before dark. Kami.”
She left the note on her pillow and crept downstairs, past the living room, where she could hear the television and her family’s voices blaring. She opened the front door quietly and slipped down the path. She went up the road by the woods, headed straight for Aurimere House.
It was a fifteen-minute walk until the road rose sharply up and away from the woods, and Kami started to feel nervous as she ascended. The road to Aurimere was so steep that anyone who made their way to the manor would be bound to arrive out of breath, hot, and already not at their best, struggling the most at the exact moment when the road curved and the wall of the manor appeared. Following the curve, Kami’s line of sight hit the front of the mansion just as the sunlight struck it full force. Since the fifteenth century, the Lynburns had been building onto the house. It was a mass of contradictions: medieval and Tudor and Georgian architecture, all made of the same pale gold stone. The great bay windows blazed, the wood of the door glowed, and above the door was a carving in stone: a gate with a sword struck through it. Beneath the carving there were words engraved in the stone: YOU ARE NOT SAFE.
Not exactly a welcome mat, Kami thought as she grasped the iron knocker, wrought in the shape of a woman’s head with weeds in her hair. She brought it down hard four times.
The door to Aurimere House creaked open.
Framed in the doorway stood a woman who was tall while giving the impression she was small, beautiful while giving the impression she was plain. She had long pale hair rippling from her pale face. She looked like the ghost of Aurimere.
“Um, hello,” said Kami.
The woman’s eyes went wide, as if she really was a ghost and she was startled that Kami could see her. “How may I help you?”
“My name’s Kami Glass,” Kami said. She saw the shudder that went right through the woman’s thin frame.
“I’m Rosalind Lynburn, Jared’s mother.” Rosalind Lynburn bowed her fair head, as if admitting to a crime. “I heard something happened on Friday night,” she almost whispered. “If he hurt you—if he scared you, I am truly sorry. I don’t know what I can say.”
Kami glared. “He saved me. I came to thank him. Is he here?”
Rosalind hesitated, wavering like a reflection in water, then turned with a shimmer of her pale skirts. Kami could barely hear her feet on the stairs.
