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“It’s like you have no other use for me but this connection,” Kami said. “Without it, what would I be to you? Just some ordinary girl. Nothing special about me at all.” She remembered the first time he had seen her. He hadn’t been impressed by her. She looked away and saw birds bursting from the trees, taking wing from the sorcerer’s wrath or just fleeing because winter was so close.
“That’s ridiculous,” Jared said curtly. “And this whole conversation is ridiculous. There’s a murderer on the loose. If we weren’t linked, you would have died in that well. We can’t afford to break the connection now.”
Kami could see the fact that there was a sorcerer killing people was a great relief to Jared. She thought of Nicola Prendergast and felt nothing but fury.
“So we have to keep it for now,” she said coldly. “We can break it later. I want to find out how.” She turned her back on him and strode back across the garden before he could answer, through the iron door with the drowning woman on it, and back through the stone corridors to the flight of steps that led to the parlor.
Lillian Lynburn’s voice echoed clearly against the stone. “Now Jared’s powers are explained, and we have no idea of who is killing people in my town.”
Kami stood still, Jared beside her. Despite how desolate and angry she felt, she reached out in her mind and he reached back. They stood at the bottom of the steps under a light shaped like a caged star, soothing each other with their thoughts as they had done for years and years, since they were swapping
lullabies in cradles across an ocean.
Jared’s family had believed he was Nicola’s murderer all this time.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Yours to Break
Kami woke the next morning while Jared was still asleep, his dreams chasing each other in the back of her mind. Sunlight, strained by autumn leaves, left a lacy pattern of shadows on her pillow. Kami uncurled from the warmth of her sheets, her toes making the unpleasant journey from bedclothes to fuzzy slippers, and found her giant pink robe, which she only wore at the times she was most in need, because it made her look like a bright pink woolly mammoth. She went downstairs wrapped in comfort.
Even if there was a shadow town lurking beneath the bright surface of Sorry-in-the-Vale, home was safe, she thought. Then she opened the door of the kitchen and saw Rob Lynburn sitting at the table with her mother.
Kami raced across the floor, grabbed his arm, and tried to haul him to his feet. “No!” she snapped. “Whatever you threatened her with, whatever you want, she’s not going to do it. This family doesn’t serve the Lynburns anymore.”
Kami saw her mother’s hands tighten on her coffee cup, but Rob’s gaze was calm and steady. She suddenly felt ridiculous for descending on him like an avenging angel with pink flannel wings. Or a very short, fuzzy version of Batman.
“I wish it didn’t,” Rob said. “I have never hurt or threatened your mother. We’ve always been good friends. Haven’t we, Claire?”
“If you say so,” said Mum, as easy to read as the Mona Lisa. She reached out a hand to Kami.
Kami took the hint and let go of Rob’s arm, let her hand be clasped in the strong comfort of her mother’s fingers.
“Well,” said Rob, sounding regretful, “as good friends as we can be, under the circumstances.”
Mum lifted her head and smiled a smile as bright as winter sunlight, and about as warm. “That depends on what you want with my daughter.”
Kami had seen her stiff posture when Kami had come in. Mum was afraid of this Lynburn, as she was of every Lynburn, but she was trying to protect Kami anyway. She sent her mother an encouraging smile. “It’s okay.”
“I mean her no harm,” said Rob Lynburn. “I just want to undo what Rosalind did to you both. Let me have a word with Kami in private.”
Kami had to protest again that it was okay and pull her hand out of her mother’s grasp before Mum let them go out into the front garden, but she did let them go. Kami figured Mum couldn’t turn down a chance to have the connection severed. Kami could see the pale curtains in the kitchen moving as she stood against the garden gate.
Kami looked at Rob Lynburn, who was gazing down at her in a kindly way. In some ways, he seemed the most normal of the Lynburns, but she remembered his upturned face, wakened to magic hunger by Jared’s thunderstorm. She’d do best to keep in mind that none of the Lynburns was all that normal.
She focused on the words cut into the stone by her gate, ivy hanging over the blurred message. THE G——HOUSE, it said. Kami had grown up assuming that the “G” stood for “Glass.” Her mother had known all along that it stood for “Guard” and that the word meant heavy responsibilities and dark consequences.
“Well,” Kami said, “what have you got to say that you didn’t say yesterday?”
“Only this: that yesterday I was very impressed by how sensible you were being,” Rob told her. “Many young people would be drawn to the thought of such power in their hands. But you see that the magic does not belong to you. I wish Jared could see as clearly, but he’s blinded by the connection. I was so glad you had realized that the emotions that come with the connection are not real.”
Kami pulled ivy leaves savagely off the stone. “Not real?” she asked, trying to keep her voice neutral.
“Not entirely real,” Rob qualified. “How could they be? A connection like this would make anyone feel close to anyone. Yours is the worst case I can think of. All the links I’ve heard about contained some element of choice. You were children.”
Kami looked at the movement in her kitchen window and thought about what their mothers had done.
“My boy is lonely and impressionable, and now that you two are together, magic is flooding to him through you. I’m not surprised he got so worked up when we suggested the severance. But you’re wiser than that. You’re sensible to know the connection you feel is based on nothing but magic misused, and any power you gain would be tainted and not yours by right.”
