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“You knew, didn’t you?” Kami whispered. “You had to know.”
“When you were a baby,” Mum said, in a low voice, “I used to watch you, the way you could lie there for hours, absorbed. It never went away, seeing my daughter look off into the distance and talk to someone only she could hear. I didn’t know it would happen, Kami. I didn’t! I’m so sorry. I couldn’t think of anything to do but try to hide it from you.”
It was one of Kami’s earliest memories, the look of fear on her mother’s face as she watched Kami.
“I’ve been scared all my life,” Kami said slowly. “I’ve thought I might be crazy all my life, and you did it to me.”
“I didn’t know what else to do!” Claire whispered. “I couldn’t tell anyone. The Lynburns were gone, but there are others like them in this town. They don’t like it when you tell secrets. I couldn’t lift the spell. All I could do was try to minimize the damage the Lynburns could do to your life. They were the leaders, and without them the town seemed to settle into a different shape, a better shape. I hoped, I prayed they would never come back.” She began to cry.
She’d been very young and scared, and she’d done it for love. Kami remembered how she had felt seeing magic, and the magic had not been turned against her.
Kami could not say that it was all right, that she was all right. She slid her arm around her mother’s neck instead and held on.
Kami refused to drop Jared at Aurimere House and pointed out that Dad was bound to notice a boy sleeping on the sofa. So her mother reluctantly agreed to help get Jared up to Kami’s room.
“Unconscious guys rarely assault people’s virtue,” Kami pointed out, holding on tight to Jared’s jacket as they hauled him up the stairs. “Besides, he almost never touches me. He doesn’t want to.” She looked at her mother, who was handling Jared as impersonally as she handled crates. “I’m safe with him,” she insisted.
“He’s a Lynburn,” Mum said. “I’ve seen what they can do. I don’t think you can trust him. And I don’t think you’re safe with him.”
She left Kami with him, though. Kami tried to tug the blanket out from under Jared so she could cover him, but her muscles were screaming in protest. She could barely move the blanket an inch, so she climbed onto the bed and sat beside him.
He looked better, she thought, his color back, the sweat in his hair dry. She laid a hand gently against his forehead. It was hot, but it didn’t seem dangerously hot.
Sleep smoothed out the lines of anger and wariness on Jared’s face. He looked younger, like the child she’d never been able to reach, and terribly vulnerable.
“Hey,” said Kami. “Hey. When you wake up, I have a lot to tell you.” She’d known there was an explanation for all this. She’d known it wasn’t that they were soul mates. She knew she would have to be very careful when she told him.
Jared turned his head on the pillow, murmuring something. It was soothing to have him there but unconscious, so she could touch him and he wouldn’t flinch. She could think about him and he wouldn’t know what she was thinking. She could be sure that whatever he felt was not bleeding into her feelings, that now her feelings were hers alone.
She could be almost sure.
“I wish I knew what was wrong,” she murmured.
“It’s nothing,” Jared murmured back.
Kami jumped and let her hand drop. She looked at him: his eyes were still mostly closed, but there was a gleam of gray under his lashes.
“I always get sick like this. Every fall.”
Kami thought of Jared in the woods, talking about being sick before he went home last year. She thought of the times in their lives he had reached out for comfort, and wondered how often it had been because he was ill. She leaned over him, and her shadow fell across his face.
“Don’t talk,” she said. “Just rest. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
“I remember last year,” Jared breathed. “I was—I remember lying on sidewalks that felt like frying pans during the day and like gravestones at night. My skin was crawling with fever and the only thing I could still do was listen to you.”
“I didn’t
know.”
Kami’s throat was tight. She hadn’t known what was happening to him, hadn’t known that he was real. She had just talked to him, and he had needed help.
“It’s all right,” Jared said. His voice was still hushed, but it was very clear. “Everything’s all right now. This was all I wanted.”
“What?” Kami whispered.
His chest was shuddering with his fast, shallow breaths. He did not lift his head, dark gold against the pallor of her pillow. She did not think he was able to. He just lay there, the moonlight making his eyes opaque silver mirrors.
“This,” he whispered back. “Nothing else ever mattered to me, and you weren’t even real. All I ever wanted was you.”
