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It wasn’t a cellar. It was a whole other floor. In the dim light coming from the open door at the top of the stairs, Kami could see three doors in this room. One was open, and Kami went through it.
It was too dark to see much. It was empty, like every other room in the house, but Kami saw the silvery swoop of a curtain glinting in a corner. As she drew closer, Jared behind her, she saw it was an enormous tangle of spiderwebs, hanging in a pale descent from the shadowy ceiling. Kami’s foot banged against a metal edge. She stumbled and checked herself, then knelt.
“Kami, are you all right?” Angela asked from the door.
“She’s fine,” said Jared, just as Kami said, “I’m fine. I just found something.”
“You don’t need to answer for her,” Angela snapped. “She can talk.”
“I’m aware,” said Jared. “I just knew she was fine. So I told you. I always know how she is.”
The metal square on the floor bore ridges that suggested strange shapes. Kami traced them with her fingers, finding the square sectioned off into four parts. She was about to raise her head to ask for light, when faint greenish light touched the metal. Jared was standing above her with his phone lit up, pointing the screen helpfully downward.
The metal square was covered in a black patina, like old grease. Beneath the grime was a house on a hill, a host of trees, a woman’s profile like a profile on an old coin, and a square that looked empty. But when Kami scratched at the blackness with her fingernail, a gleaming blue was revealed.
There were words written in Latin beneath the pictures. Kami recognized the Lynburn crest. She recognized the Lynburn motto, could hear Ash’s voice translating it: We neither drown nor burn.
Kami looked at the black grains under her fingernail. Held under the phone’s light, they glinted brown and red. We neither drown nor burn, the Lynburns said, but everybody died.
She knew what dried blood looked like.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In the Shadow of the Manor
Kami knew of two ways to find out why the Lynburn crest was engraved on a metal plate in a different house. One was from the Lynburns themselves, so Kami sent Jared back to Aurimere. She figured they were more likely to talk to one of their own than to Kami, turning up with a notebook and saying, “I hear you’re a sorcerer. What’s that like?”
The other way was to go to the people of Sorry-in-the-Vale. Kami’s mother had done a spell with Rosalind Lynburn. Holly’s father spoke the name of the Lynburns as if he was calling on some dread power. Dorothy Cunningham at the library had said she did not trust the Lynburns, and Nicola Prendergast had asked the Lynburns for help on the night she died.
When Holly went home and Angela and Kami split up to cover more ground, Kami realized she had not walked through her town since Nicola died. She went around the woods-bristling curve of Shepherd’s Corner, nodding to a family she babysat for who were out taking a walk. She walked down the mellow golden line of the High Street, looking up at the roof of the Bell and Mist, where a weather vane in the shape of a woman’s head spun gently in the wind. Amber Green, who worked as a waitress there, was clearing the tables outside and gave Kami a friendly nod.
Kami felt as if someone was following her, their shadow on her back, and she did not dare turn and face them. It took her a few minutes to realize that Sorry-in-the-Vale was the shadow falling on her, as the manor cast a shadow over the town.
Kami had never loved or hated her town, any more than she loved or hated her shoes. Sometimes Sorry-in-the-Vale was comfortable, somewhere that fit her well; sometimes it was uncomfortable, making her feel too weird or too foreign or too ambitious. It was always familiar. She’d always thought she could trust it to be that.
The town looked different now, with blood in its past and Kami imagining secrets behind every smile. She passed by Mr. Stearn walking his elderly bull terrier, both of them walking in the same slightly jerky way, stiff legs moving in sync. He smiled at her, and she found she couldn’t smile back. What was he thinking? And what might he be hiding?
Kami went into the next building on the High Street that she passed, hearing the musical jangle as she pushed open the door of Mrs. Thompson’s sweetshop. It was a cheerful little cave of bright colors, shelves filled with jars of sweets: tiny apple drops in scarlet and green, tan and cream squares of toffee and fudge, black wheels of licorice, the rainbow spread of allsorts, and the speckled rounds of aniseed balls.
In the back of the candy-brilliant cave was Mrs. Thompson, small, round, and wrapped in her usual fluffy gray cardigan, looking like a very big sweet that had been dropped on a dusty floor. “Kami,” she said, in the way the adults of Sorry-in-the-Vale spoke to Kami, a little fond and a little wary, “what can I do for you?”
Kami wondered now if that wariness was all because Kami had spent her childhood holding conversations with thin air and because her grandmother was “that foreign woman.” She wondered if people thought of her family as the Lynburns’ servants, and if anybody knew of the bargain her mother had made with Rosalind Lynburn. Mrs. Thompson’s round, wrinkled face remained the same face Kami had known for years. She just couldn’t read it.
“Hi!” said Kami, with manic cheer. “I’m doing an article for the school paper on the history of Sorry-in-the-Vale, and I know you know everything there is to know about the town, so I was wondering if you had a minute?” She gestured with her notebook, as if it was the key to the kingdom of information. Then she surged on before Mrs. Thompson could speak. “I found a few old historical records that suggested the people in Aurimere House might be able to do magic. Isn’t that crazy?”
“What records?” Mrs. Thompson asked, her voice sharp. “Where did you find them?”
“Oh,” Kami said. “Here and there. Uh, on the Internet.”
There was a pause.
“I really don’t think you did,” Mrs. Thompson told her. “People don’t talk much about that sort of thing around here. And they would never write it down.”
Kami bumped her elbow into a jar full of peppermints. The pain shot up al
ong her arm at the same time panic shot through her chest. “Well, maybe I heard some people talking,” she ad-libbed. “I think they also mentioned Monkshood Abbey and the Lynburns. What happened to the people who used to live in Monkshood?”
“If you approach the wrong people and ask questions like that,” Mrs. Thompson said, “you might find out.”
