“That lady is a weirdo,” Tomo observed.
“You’re an astute judge of character, Tomo,” said Kami. “Okay, get ready, because I’m coming for your snakes and your ladders.”
She knelt down on the floor, about to lie down on her stomach and commence the game, when she heard the front door open below. The Wrights ran an inn and customers were always going in and out, the door constantly swinging open and closed. If it wasn’t for her current state of hyper-vigilance, she would never have noticed that the creak of the hinges was softer than usual, as if someone was trying to be stealthy.
Kami looked across the colorful little square of the board game and into her brother’s small face. She put a finger to her lips. Tomo wasn’t dumb. He gazed back at her, eyes liquid and steady, and nodded. Kami raised herself from a kneel to a crouch and grabbed Tomo by the shoulders. The pieces of the game scattered across the floorboards as Kami pulled him quietly into Jared’s room.
She heard Lillian’s scream of rage from below, like an outraged pterodactyl. She couldn’t pay any attention to that, not when she had her little brother with her. She opened Jared’s window and pushed Tomo out of the windowsill and onto the roof. She scrambled out behind him, closing the window as well as she could, and followed him.
The roof seemed different in daytime. She did not feel above the town, but in the midst of it. The rooftops seemed like streets, both familiar and strange, their golden slopes like hills and their weathervanes like street signs. But Kami did not start jumping from rooftop to rooftop. She made for the big brick chimney at the side of the roof, and sat there, as hidden as she could be. She drew Tomo’s small sturdy body into the curve of her own and felt him tremble against her.
She reached out, as she always did in times like this, for Jared. She’d been without him long enough to know what to do now when she found nothing instead of support, like leaping for a missing step and feeling her stomach plummet before the rest of her fell. She just had to grab onto something—she just had to act as if the courage was still there.
The window scraped open. Kami tensed and clung to Tomo with one hand, feeling the hammer of his heart against her chest, listening to the sound of shoes scraping on the roof tiles, coming around the chimney and toward her and her brother. She freed her other hand.
“Just give us one of them,” said Sergeant Kenn, and reached out for her.
A blast of wind knocked him off his feet and off the roof. Kami heard him hit the cobbled street below and the long low groan that told her he was still alive. She stayed curled up on the roof tiles, clutching her little brother tightly, waiting for Sergeant Kenn to come back or one of the other sorcerers.
She was actually grateful to Amber Green for her annoying, unclear warning, for frightening Kami enough that she had watched her family. If it hadn’t been for that warning, Kami would not have been on high alert—they would have been caught off guard.
She could not believe she had not realized it before. Of course Rob Lynburn wanted a source to sacrifice—he wanted the most power and the most revenge he could get. He didn’t want Kami, because killing Kami meant killing Ash. What he wanted was worse.
Rob Lynburn wanted her brothers.
He had asked the town for a sacrifice, and Kami had assumed that meant the sacrifice would at least be someone grown up. If she had ever dreamed of something as evil as this, she would have thought the town would rise up against Rob.
But maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe nobody in town cared, so long as it was not them, so long as their own families were spared.
Kami held on to Tomo and felt him crying, his hot tears slipping down her neck. He did not make a sound.
Sergeant Kenn did not come back. No other sorcerers came, and Kami felt Ash pushing reassurance at her, telling her it was safe to come out. She and Tomo left the shelter of the chimney, and Ash put his head out the window.
“Is Ten all right?” Kami demanded.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. Jared went after Henry,” said Ash. “He said he thought they’d gone into the woods.”
“We’ll go after them,” Kami said with resolution.
It was a comfort to have a next step, even though everything ahead was darkness. They could go into the woods, but Rob’s people had come to find them here at the Water Rising, and they would be bound to search for them at Claire’s, and at Rusty and Angela’s. She did not know where they could possibly go next. Nowhere would be safe.
Jared ran into the woods with a wild wind chasing him. A flurry of wet leaves slapped him in the face. He only realized that sharp twigs had left scratches on his skin when he felt them stinging as he ran on.
Rob had made enough sacrifices, and now the wood was waking for him, as it had woken once for Jared and Kami. The world was being shaped by Rob’s thoughts, according to his design.
Jared was not afraid the wood would hurt him, not one of Rob’s sons. Rob had had many chances to kill him, and was welcome to try. Ten was a different matter.
He ran up the sloping ground toward the quarry, the place where he remembered Kami playing when she was a kid, and hoped that Ten might have felt drawn there.
The air smelled of damp earth and crushed greenery, with a faint bitter edge as of faraway smoke. Roots kept catching at his boots, like malicious imps trying to trip him. He saw the glint of golden stone among the trees and heard the splashing of the Sorrier River. His footing on the slope was suddenly snatched away from him, mud sliding and dry grains of earth crumbling away like old cake. He ended up flat on his back, winded and staring at green leaves pinwheeling against a blue sky, and a hoarse scream echoing in his ears.
He scrambled up, snatched a fallen branch off the ground, and launched himself back up the slope, refusing to let the woods stop him any more than he would’ve let Rob himself stop him.
When he reached the clearing, Jared paused and his breath shuddered hard out of his chest. It was a half circle surrounded by trees, like a horseshoe, with one side broken by the side of the quarry.
Ross Phillips, Amber’s boyfriend, was standing in the long grass above the quarry. He was holding on to Ten’s arm, though Ten was struggling like a trapped wild animal. Henry Thornton lay in the middle of the clearing. His face was black, as if he had been strangled. His glasses had been knocked off and his eyes were open, staring blindly up at the clear blue sky.
Jared wrenched his eyes away from Henry and toward Ten. Jared had saved him once. It had seemed worth dying for to save him then—and now.
“You don’t have to do this, Jared,” said Ross.
Jared didn’t look at him. He kept advancing, eyes still on Ten’s small tear-wet face. “Yes, I do.”
“You think this is brave?” Ross snapped. “It’s just stupid. You’re my leader’s son. I don’t want to hurt you, but I can. You can’t do a thing to stop me. You don’t have any magic!”
Jared came closer. Ross hesitated, either too frightened to hurt his boss’s son or too sure that someone with no magic must be no threat. It didn’t much matter to Jared, because it let Jared get just close enough. He didn’t lift the branch to hit Ross; instead, he kept it low and scythed Ross’s legs out from under him, the way Rusty had taught him to unbalance someone.
Ross toppled back into the quarry and Jared lunged, snatching Ten out of Ross’s hands and hurling him to safety. Jared was only just able to catch himself from falling into the quarry after Ross by grabbing hold of a tree. He stood on the very lip of the stone, and looked down at Ross, who lay pale and stunned on the stone.
Jared was pretty sure Ross had broken bones. He grinned down at him.
“Abracadabra, moron.”
Ross rolled painfully onto his front with a grunt and a stifled cry of pain, and then disappeared the way Kami had said Amber had disappeared—there one moment and nothing but dissolving shadow the next.
Jared looked over at Ten. “Are you all right?”
Ten was sitting at the base of a tree, curled up in the roots as if he wa
s a fox cub seeking shelter. His arms were locked tight around his legs, and he was shaking. He stared back at Jared, and Jared got the impression that Ten would have looked at anything, just so that he could avoid looking at Henry.
“I hate sorcerers,” he said. “I hate them.”
The woods were quiet as evening fell and they buried Henry Thornton. Lillian chose the spot, a birch tree pale as a gravestone, and they laid him among the roots and earth and covered him over.
“The woods will always take us back again,” Lillian murmured, and laid her hand on the smooth bark of the trunk.
Kami looked at the heap of turned earth at the base of the tree. She could not escape the feeling that this was all her fault. She had been the one who asked Henry to come from his safe home in London, to help them for no other reason than that it was the right thing to do. He had died for her brother. He had been so kind to her always.
And Kami could not mourn him as he deserved, because she was so overcome with fear for her brothers.
Angela touched her wrist.
“We can go to my house, if you want.”
“They’ll look for us there,” said Rusty.
Ten was clinging to Dad, and Tomo to Ten, but Tomo was also holding on to Rusty’s jeans, so Dad and Rusty were bookending the boys, keeping them safe. It was clear to Kami how desperate the situation was if Tomo wanted to be with Rusty, who had babysat and shared naps with him a thousand times, rather than Ash, his shiny new favorite. It was even more clear because Rusty’s expression, for once, was somber. This was the first thing Rusty had said since they found Henry.
“I have an idea,” Holly volunteered. “We could go to my house. My sister Mary said none of my family are living there now. And Rob thinks of them as on his side.”
There seemed nothing else to do. They could not live in the quarry. The boys were already cold and tired.
As they began the long walk to the farmhouse, the night drew in closer, like an old woman drawing a black cloak tight against the cold. With the night came reminders of Rob Lynburn’s power, the woods waking at his touch and looking at them with dark eyes.
Kami watched the silent silvery shapes of Rob’s wolves when they appeared: saw the leaves of the trees cluster above them, blocking out the light of the moon. There were small dark faces surmounted by blood-red caps, peeping out at them from behind boughs. She was certain she was not imagining it. She and Jared had woken the woods once, and she had not been able to see through the eyes of any of the creatures who had stirred from her mind into life: she did not think Rob could use the wood as his spies. But it was bad enough to be reminded that this town was Rob Lynburn’s little world now.
Turning her head at a sudden light, she thought for a moment that it was the moon, but it was not. It was a light warmer and closer than that.
The others turned toward the surrounding woods, and Kami saw brief flashes of light reflected on their faces. Racing among the trees, fewer than the wolves but faster, were lithe bright shapes glowing like campfires, their sharp noses held up to the hidden moon.
“Kitsunebi,” Ten whispered.
“Fox fire,” Tomo translated helpfully, with a look at Ash as if he wanted him to be impressed.
Did we do that? Ash asked her in the privacy of their minds, and she felt his wonder travel to her, his awed happiness that they had been able to accomplish such a thing together.
“I remember these,” said Angela. “Kami’s Sobo told us a story about them once, and Kami was obsessed with painting foxes with luminescent paint for months.”
They still had a Hiroshige print that showed golden glowing foxes assembled at the base of a tree. Foxes were a symbol of bad luck, sometimes, and sometimes good. Kami had liked how they were mysterious. She wished she could take them as a sign of good luck now, but they hadn’t had much good luck lately.
“Was that what painting Mrs. Singh’s cat blue was all about?” Dad asked.
“Obviously,” said Kami. “It was a celebration of my cultural heritage and everyone was extremely and unnecessarily harsh about it.”
She walked on, her path illuminated by strange lights.
Henry was dead, and the woods belonged to Rob Lynburn. But Kami found the gentle candlelight flicker of the foxes woke a flicker of hope in her own heart. The woods might belong to Rob Lynburn, but they were not wholly his. He thought he had all the power, and he was wrong.
Rob Lynburn might want her brothers, but he was not going to have them.
If only she could think of how to save them.
Chapter Seventeen
Remember You’re My Sweetheart
It was dark in Holly’s house, with spoiled food in the fridge and the kind of heavy cold that settled in after too long without the heating. Even after they turned the lights on and huddled together on the stone flagstones of the kitchen, they were somehow colder than they had been outside. It was clear nobody had been home in weeks. Holly’s whole family was living in Aurimere.
“It’s not much,” said Holly.
“It’s so great,” said Kami. “Thank you so much.”
She meant it. Having a refuge of any sort was a huge relief. But Kami could not help hugging herself against the cold when Holly went out, intent on checking on the animals. This remote farmhouse seemed like the last bolt-hole for their little band of soldiers. Rob Lynburn was not going to stop, when it was a couple of days before the spring equinox and Rob had decided who his sacrifice was going to be. Rob might well think to look for them here, but Kami could not think of where else to go.
She did not know who else in town might have agreed that Kami’s brothers should be the sacrifice.
Jared, apparently brainwashed by his time working in an inn, had insisted that he would make up all the beds. Ash and Lillian had been sent out into the woods to take the first watch, and Kami’s dad was putting the boys to bed in one room for security.
Kami gave up standing alone in the kitchen worrying and waiting and went to find Angela and Rusty in the small sitting room down the hall. Angela was curled up against Rusty’s chest, sleeping on the sofa like a cat who had found a lap and needed nothing more in the world. Rusty was rubbing her back, rocking her a little in the circle of his arm, as if she was a child. Kami recognized the old ingrained habits of love, thought it was for his own comfort as much as hers.
She was comforted, just being with them.
“Hey,” she said softly. She crossed the carpeted floor, which had been blue but had white tracks worn on it, and looked out the window.
She could feel Ash’s anxious thoughts as he patrolled the woods with his mother, but he seemed very far away. Across the fields and woods, an ocean of indistinguishable darkness in the night, the faint lights of Sorry-in-the-Vale seemed far away too.
“Tell me,” said Rusty, and Kami glanced around to see him extricating himself gently from Angela. He laid a blanket gently over his sister, and his voice was gentle too. “If the Lynburns had never come to town at all, if none of this magic war had ever happened, do you think you and I could have made it work?”
Kami hesitated. “Do you mean romantically?”
“No, I meant as a pair of professional race car drivers,” Rusty said. “Or ballroom dancers.”
Kami had thought this was settled. Well, she’d thought that she had brushed the matter off with a joke, and he had let her do it, and she wished that happy state of affairs could have continued.
“So romantically, then,” she said.
Rusty seldom acted, seldom wanted to. Kami did not know how to do anything but act, to be consumed by an ambition for action. Her whole life was dreaming of acting and then doing it. She did not want to hurt him, but she did not see any world in which they would not have driven each other past the point of frustration.
“There was always Jared,” she said. “Before he ever came, before I ever met him. I don’t know what I would be without him. It’s like wondering who I would be if I grew up in a totally different pl
ace, or if I’d had a different grandmother, but it’s more than that. Every thought I ever had, for years, I shared with him, and they were different from the thoughts I would have had on my own. He shaped the way I think, and the way I think is who I am. Maybe you wouldn’t have liked me if I was someone else.”
She’d lost her first best friend when she was twelve because of her strange imaginary friend, and that had made Kami reach out to the new girl in town. She didn’t know if she would have tried so hard to befriend someone as aggressively unfriendly as twelve-year-old Angela if she’d had other company. She could have missed out on so much.
“I like you pretty okay as you are,” Rusty conceded. “I remember when you were just Angie’s friend who I vaguely thought might be high on cough syrup all the time. But then I saw how you were with Angela, and what you meant to her. I saw your home, the warmth of it, how different it was from mine, how much I wanted a home like that for Angela. I loved you, and the thought of all that came with you. I wanted to make that love mean something. For the first time in my life, I wanted to do something, and I wanted what I did to matter. I wanted to take what I felt for you and build something beautiful.”
Kami glanced nervously up at his face.
“That’s, um, that means a lot to me, but you have to know I’m not looking to settle down and build a home with anyone until my mid-thirties, if ever, because I am going to be pursuing my career as a hard-hitting reporter.”
Rusty smacked her lightly on the top of her head. “You were a beautiful dream to me, you brat; please cease inserting your unpleasant and hurtful reality into my dream. It was the kind of dream that’s not supposed to come true. It was the kind of dream that does something else. It taught me who I wanted to be.”
It was so different from what she had expected to hear that it surprised a laugh out of Kami. She laughed, and was so tired she swayed, and Rusty caught her. They wrapped their arms around each other and held on.
“Thank you,” said Kami.
“No, thank you, Cambridge,” Rusty murmured. “But, sweetheart—and I say this with love—I really think it might be time to get off the cough syrup.”