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“I want you to tell me the thing you’re hiding from me,” Kami said. “About your father, or your mother, about your family. There’s something. I know there is. Once I know what’s going on, I can handle it.”
“You always think you can handle everything.” He said it slowly, but with no doubt.
She felt his fear for her and his faith in her coursing between them. “You think I can, too,” Kami said. “Come on, Jared.” She stood looking at him, near the statue under the streetlight. He turned his head away, toward the triangle of the church spire against the rain-bright sky.
“It might be nothing,” he said at last. “She’s my mother.”
Kami was silent, willing him to continue and knowing he could feel it.
“It was a long time ago,” he went on. “I was a little kid. I don’t even remember which apartment it was, or how old I was. I only remember the sound of my mother crying in the kitchen, and being in my parents’ bedroom. She had left her wardrobe door open. She didn’t wear nice things, but she had them in her wardrobe. I liked to put my face against her fancy fur coats and think about her being happy. I was just a dumb kid.”
Kami reached out for him. He avoided her touch but accepted her reach in his mind, the comfort between them like clasped hands, but not quite.
“Behind her coats and her nice shoes, there was a box. It was a long box, made of pale yellow wood, like a coffin for a child. I knew I shouldn’t do it. I knew it wasn’t allowed. But I opened the box.”
The rain was so light Kami could scarcely feel it, but by now she was wet through. Her coat and dress were weighted with rain, cold seeping through to her bones. “What was inside?” she asked in a whisper.
Jared said, “Knives. There were two long golden knives with grooves cut along the blades. There were handles with carvings, of ivy, I think, and one was big enough that it looked like a scimitar. Finding something like that, I should have been scared. But I wasn’t. I reached out. I wanted to touch them. Only Mom came in and pulled me away.”
When Jared said I wanted to touch them, a shiver went through Kami, down to her cold bones. She could feel he meant it, as if he still wanted to.
“When I was older, I asked her about those knives,” Jared said. “She told me they were family heirlooms. She told me she threw them away.”
Kami did not ask if Jared had believed his mother. She did not say that someone had come at Holly with a knife, or speculate on a family that had knives as heirlooms. Jared already looked wrung out, his shoulders braced and his body taut, as if he wanted to bolt like he had from the lift when they had first met. There were walls up in his mind, and he had hidden this from her, something that had happened to him when he was a child.
Kami wondered what else he was hiding. She had been wrong: she was scared to be hurt, and scared to hurt him. It was so close to being the same thing.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said at last, voice clear and firm, trying to banish fear for both of them. “Look, you may not have noticed, but with my elite sleuthing skills I’ve detected that it’s raining. Can a lady get a walk home, or what?”
One corner of Jared’s mouth curled. “Be my privilege to escort you home,” he said, in the same casual tone she was affecting. “Or something.”
The light rain was turning to glistening mist above the cobbles and making her hair a dark cloud. Kami thought of knives and could not suppress a shiver.
“Here,” said Jared.
Instead of slinging a casual arm around her as Rusty’s would have been, Kami felt the weight of his jacket settling on her shoulders. The lining of the jacket was warm from his body, and though he was close enough so his breath stirred her hair when he spoke, he did not touch her. She reached for him in her mind and felt his deep, calm rush of relief.
He was glad she hadn’t asked him anything more.
Chapter Twenty
The Forgotten Sacrifices
The next morning, Kami found Jared leaning against her garden gate. “I don’t require an escort to school,” she told him severely.
“Holly got attacked last night,” said Jared.
“So why aren’t you at Holly’s house?” Kami demanded.
“Several reasons,” said Jared. “One being that Holly has a motorbike, and she can run over anyone who tries to attack her. Of course, if you’d take a spin on my bike with me …”
“It’s too dangerous. Your bike isn’t equipped to drive on the ice,” Kami told him. “Which I’m assuming there will be plenty of, since hell will have frozen over the day I get on that thing. I fancy a stroll through the woods to school.”
The air was cool and fresh, a leaf-filtered breeze blowing. They walked under the trees, some branches making curved appeals to the sky and some held out straight as if to catch something. Before getting to school, before thinking about what had almost happened to Holly, and before tracking down and interrogating Nicola, it could just be morning. They traded off feelings of contentment, forming a loop that fed on each other. Kami would not have guessed that Sorry-in-the-Vale would suit Jared so well.
Eventually Kami said, “I’m sorry about Rusty.”
“So am I, generally.”
