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Jared opened his eyes with a groan. They were unfocused and blurry, lashes trembling as if his eyes might close again any moment. Kami?
Come on, get up, Kami pleaded. Come on, try. We’re going home. It felt like she was pulling him up with mental as well as physical effort, dragging him out of unconsciousness as she hauled him to his feet. Jared grabbed at the wall and tried to stay upright, but he was leaning heavily on her.
“You don’t understand,” Henry mumbled from the floor. He looked as if he was fighting a losing battle against unconsciousness as well. “You don’t know what—what he is.”
“I know what I am,” said Kami. She started doggedly on her way down the corridor, fighting to keep Jared on his feet. “I’m on his side.”
She got a cab to the train station, where she cajoled and shoved Jared onto the train. She even got him onto the next bus, though as they were boarding, Jared’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. She had to take all his weight, and for a second she thought they would both go down.
Kami sat in the bus seat with Jared collapsed against her, his body limp though every breath was a low sob in her ear. She could feel the clammy sweat on his skin, rising hot and cooling fast on his cold face. He wasn’t having very many thoughts. There was just pain, and him still trying to hold on to her.
She knew she would never get him onto the last bus to Sorry-in-the-Vale. So she did the only thing she could think of at that point. She took out her phone with shaking hands and called her mother.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Happy in the Hour
Kami was sitting on the ground by the bus stop with Jared’s head in her lap when her mother’s car came around the corner, raising a cloud of pale yellow dust.
Mum did not bother with parking: she stopped the car in the middle of the street and threw herself out of it. “Kami!” she shouted, bronze hair flying like a flag. “How dare you run off without telling anyone, the day after a girl died!” She strode toward them, her face white with fury.
Kami sat on the ground, hunched her shoulders, and waited for the storm to break over her head. She felt too wretched and drained to do anything else. Mum stood over her, her shadow on Jared’s slack face, and was silent.
“I’m sorry,” Kami said quietly. “Please let me get him into the car.”
Mum sighed and knelt down. She was taller and stronger than Kami, so together they were able to wrestle Jared into the car. He tried to help, to please Kami, even though she could tell he wasn’t even aware her mother was there.
After they tipped him into the backseat and the car started, Kami felt his fall into darkness. She wrenched her neck turning to look at him. Jared lay in the backseat, his hair almost black with sweat, his face pale. But she saw his chest rising and falling, so she could breathe again.
When Kami turned back, she saw her mother’s face. She dropped her eyes to the crimson T-shirt that said CLAIRE’S and was smeared with dust and flour. Kami did not know what to say.
They drove until they crested the west hills and Sorry-in-the-Vale lay spread out before them, pale buildings and lights cupped in a giant’s green hand. Then her mother pulled over by the side of the road.
“Mum, we need to get Jared to a hospital,” Kami said.
“A hospital won’t help him,” Mum said distantly. “I don’t think he’s sick, not the way normal people get sick.”
Kami thought of how Henry had been sick too, and could not argue with her. This wasn’t normal.
“Kami,” her mother whispered, “what were you thinking, going off with him? A girl was killed!”
Kami closed her eyes against the onslaught of images, but all the bright colors of Nicola in the playground rose up in the darkness toward her.
“I know that. I’m sorry to have worried you.”
Mum smacked her fist against the wheel of her car. “I don’t want you sorry. I want you safe!” she said. “Do you want to get yourself killed? Haven’t I told you enough?”
“No!” Kami shouted back at her. “No, you haven’t! You haven’t told me anything! Nobody in this town will tell me anything! All you’ve done is keep secrets.”
Her mother was still very pale. “Surely,” she said, her voice low and shaking, “surely I’ve told you enough that you know to stay away from the Lynburns.”
“I can’t!” Kami said, and could not stop the tears coming. She gulped and tried to fight them back, but they burst through anyway. “I can’t. It doesn’t matter what you say. I can’t get away from Jared. If something hurts him, it hurts me too. And I don’t know what’s going on! You haven’t told me anything at all, except to do something that is impossible. You have to tell me something else! What is it that I’m not supposed to tell Dad? What did you do?” Kami couldn’t stop shaking.
Her mother sat looking at Kami, and for a moment Kami thought she would simply sit there, so still, as if she was a painting with desperate eyes.
Very quietly, her mother said, “Rosalind Lynburn and I did a spell.”
It was such a shock it made Kami stop crying. She gaped instead. “You did what?”
