If that was their plan, there was nothing he could do about it. Here he was, laid out and helpless, the perfect sacrifice.
Jared turned his face away, toward the records of Lynburn deaths. REQUIESCAT IN PACE, he saw in a stream of candlelight: Rest in peace, like a promise, and beneath that a long epitaph for an Emily Lynburn who had died in the 1800s.
Shiver not as you pass by
For as you are so once was I
And as I am so you will be
So be prepared to follow me.
“I am not prepared,” Jared muttered.
He had no other choice than to be prepared. Maybe they would lay him to rest here, afterward, not hide him away like Edmund Prescott. He was a Lynburn, after all.
He wondered where Rob had put his mother.
Low as the light flickering from grave to grave, a chant rose around Jared. He could not quite make out the words, though “gold” and “bound” were both in there, but he could make out the intent.
Rob had already let him know he was going to be punished.
“You have no idea what’s coming,” Rob told Jared, his voice the only clear one in the crypt. “No idea at all.”
Shadows blotted out the pale candlelight as Rob drew in, and his followers drew in after him, a circle closing in all around Jared. Most of the faces surrounding him were familiar: the sergeant who had questioned him once in the police office, both of Holly’s parents, Ross Phillips, and a man who worked at Crystal’s gift shop. Jared had bought a notebook for Kami there once, and never had the nerve to give it to her.
Rob drew the golden knife from his belt and laid the point with tender care against Jared’s bared shoulder. The cold point made him shiver, and pain followed.
Jared felt the chill slide of a blade against his stomach, tracing on and wavering against the skin. He tried to force himself not to look down, but he could not help a swift, horrified glance. The knives shimmered in the candlelight, and both pierced the place where they rested. Two thin trails of blood gleamed against his chest.
“Follow the pattern, Amber,” said Rob. “You know what you have to do.”
Amber knelt on the stone floor and looked up at Jared with wide imploring eyes. Softer than the sound of the candles burning, so softly that Jared almost thought he was imagining it, she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Rob touched the side of Jared’s face, tried to cup it, but Jared jerked his chin savagely away.
“My boy,” said Rob fondly. “You’ll learn.”
He nodded to Amber, and they both lifted their knives. The flares of candlelight dragged along the bright blades: Jared saw them blaze as they plunged toward him.
Agony ripped through him, two gouged pathways in his flesh. Jared roared like an animal, no sense left, only pain. Pain that both drowned out everything and burned through all that he tried to grasp.
It went on and on. He had nothing left but pain.
Chapter Three
Desperate Measures
“Rusty,” Kami said. “Either you want to talk to me or you don’t.”
He, Kami, and Angela were in the Montgomerys’ kitchen. Holly had slunk tactfully away, and Angela had forbidden Ash to enter her home.
“I do, I do.” Rusty chewed his lower lip. “It’s difficult to know how to put this. You have to break things to ladies gently if you are a proper gentleman.”
What did Rusty have to tell her that would have to be broken gently? What else, but the thing everyone had been trying to tell her, the thing her mother had said this morning?
Jared Lynburn is dead.
Kami held on tight to the back of the stool; the loop of iron cut painfully into her palm.
“What is it?” she forced out between stiff, reluctant lips. She had to want the truth. She wasn’t a coward: she wasn’t going to hide from it, even now.
“Rusty!” Angela said, her voice sharp. “You are really upsetting her.”
“Kami, no,” said Rusty, and whirled away from the smoothie machine and toward her. He clearly meant to take her in his arms, but she went stiff, rejecting comfort. Rusty took a gentle hold on her arms instead. “Kami,” he said. “No. He’s alive. He was alive last night.”
The relief was so deep that Kami wanted to collapse, her knees going out from under her, but Rusty’s hold on her suggested that was what he was expecting her to do. Kami had had enough of guys holding on to her for today: she was not going to fall apart.
“How do you know?”
Rusty hesitated, then looked down at her and said in a rush, “You remember that girl Amber Green, the sorceress?”
“The sorceress you have drinks with because you are a fraternizer with cute evil people,” said Angela. “My own brother. A fraternizer. I can hardly bear the shame.”
“Ah,” said Rusty. “But I’m not, am I? I’m more like Mata Hari.”
Kami was slowly beginning to regain feeling in her extremities. He was alive: she wanted to run to him, as fast as her legs could carry her, and scream at the sky in triumph.
Instead, she offered Rusty a faltering and hesitant smile. “So you go to the enemy and you do belly dances for them until they offer up information?”
“More or less,” said Rusty. “Except instead of belly dances, what Amber needed was a sympathetic shoulder. The fact that it was an attractive masculine shoulder didn’t hurt, I don’t think.”
“A sweetly humble shoulder too, I note,” said Angela.
Rusty shrugged and smiled back at Kami, reassuring and obviously pleased that she was smiling. His voice was light, but his eyes were steady and kind. “Never since the days of King Arthur and Superman have such handsome and manly shoulders existed in the land. How could she resist? Made for weeping on and leaning against. If either of you ladies would like to try? Cambridge?”
“Pass.”
“My hopes dashed, I’ll continue with my tale,” said Rusty. “Amber was slow to tell me anything about Jared, but she did tell me she thought Rosalind was dead, and she didn’t say the same thing about Jared. I didn’t want to push, which was why I was doing all of this solo. You are both charming ladies, but you are pushy. Charmingly pushy,” he added hastily, when he was fixed with two identical glares.
“Your shoulders and your lack of push got you the goods; you were clearly the right man for the job,” Kami told him. “I applaud your initiative, now just please tell me what’s happened to Jared.”
Rusty hesitated, and fear crawled through Kami’s body, lacing her blood with ice. It felt, she thought wildly, stupidly, like someone was trying to make a margarita of dread in her veins. She grabbed Rusty’s arms, just as he had grabbed on to hers, and held on.
Rusty took a deep breath and said, “Rob walled him up alive. He’s been feeding him drugs to inhibit his magic and dragging him out occasionally, and yesterday he let Jared out for almost the whole day. That was what made Amber come to me.”
Kami refused to deal with the horror of what Rusty had said. She could not be crushed by horror now. She had to concentrate on the fact that Rusty had said he was free.
“Amber came to you because Jared had been let out?” she asked, and heard her voice come out thin and furious, when she’d thought she was being so practical. “She has some sort of moral objection to people not being buried alive?”
“She said that Jared looked awful,” Rusty told her, seeming to choose his words carefully. Kami wanted to snap, “That would probably be a result of the being buried alive,” but she knew she had to stay quiet and listen to what Rusty had learned. “Not only sick and pale, but that his eyes were—staring, that he looked half out of his head. He terrified all the other sorcerers. He tried to strangle Rob with a piece of rope from his curtains, and Rob put him back behind the wall.”
The thought that Jared was not free, that he had been walled up somewhere by his own father and was still trapped, suffering and going slowly mad, was like a punch in the stomach. Kami tried to breathe through the blow and the sickness that
followed.
“That’s not all, Kami,” Rusty said, so gently, as if she might need a minute.
“Go on,” she ordered him.
“They took him out that night and tortured him,” Rusty said in a hushed voice. “Rob got Amber to help, and gave her one of the Lynburn knives. Then he put Jared …”
“Let me guess,” said Angela. “Back in the hole.”
It was Rusty and Kami’s turn to glare at Angela, but Kami stopped glaring as soon as she saw Angela’s face. Angela was even paler than usual. She looked like she was going to be sick.
They all had their own ways of coping.
I should have known, Kami thought. I did know. I knew he wasn’t dead, but I listened to everyone telling me he was, I listened to Ash, and all the time he was alive and he needed my help.
“Amber was so upset,” Rusty said, and continued in his slow, steady voice, ignoring the scornful noise Kami could not suppress. “She was so upset that she called me and asked me to come to Aurimere. She brought me inside and we sat and talked in the garden. She was crying. She wasn’t thinking straight. She took my hand, and because I was touching her—touching one of Rob’s sorcerers—I could walk through the fire.”
They had a way in.
Hope and horror were twisted and sharp as barbed wire in Kami’s chest, but she could also feel Ash’s soaring joy, when he had had no hope at all. She found herself smiling with clenched fists.
She looked at Rusty, who was regarding her with concern. He had not given up or surrendered to despair. He had kept following his one lead, getting this girl to talk to him, and it had paid off.
“Thank you for telling me,” she told him. “Thank you for finding out. You are the best and handsomest man in all the world.”
“Stop, you’re embarrassing me,” said Rusty. “Except by ‘stop,’ I mean ‘please go on.’ ”
“Do you know what Amber’s schedule is?” Kami asked, remembering talk of training young sorcerers that she had overheard once in Monkshood Abbey, Rob’s childhood home. “She must get trained in Aurimere now. Do you know when she’s due there next?”
“A couple of hours,” said Rusty.
“Then I’ll spend the next couple of hours getting some supplies and getting Ash,” Kami said. She hesitated, reached out and set her hand on Rusty’s arm. “Rusty, you’re the one she trusts. I have to ask you to come with me.”
Rusty smiled at her. “No, you don’t, Cambridge. You never have to ask.” She beamed up at him helplessly, so grateful, and he looked away and yawned with an almost-convincing air of lazy nonchalance. “I am going to spend the next couple of hours having a power nap before my next spy mission, though, and you can just run your errands all by yourself. What do you have to say to that?”
Kami stood on her tiptoes and kissed Rusty on the cheek. He started slightly and her lips caught mostly jaw and dark hair. “Sleep well, sweetheart,” she told him. “Thank you. I mean it.”
She did not say: I know you did this for me.
“I am also going to nap, but please do not demonstrate physical affection toward me,” Angela announced. “I don’t want to get feelings on this shirt.”
Kami found herself hesitating again. A smaller group could be in and out faster—and she did not want to think about what would happen to the people without magic if they were discovered. “Angela, you and Holly don’t have to come.”
Angela rolled her eyes. “Holly is coming, and I am too,” she said. “Don’t be more stupid than you can help. I refuse to ever let you wander off like an idiot into danger without me. Who knows what could happen?”
“I know what’s going to happen. We’re going to Aurimere,” Kami said, and felt her courage rise with every word she spoke. “We’re going to rescue Jared.”
“Kami, you have to wait,” Ash implored.
“Nope, don’t think so,” said Kami.
Ash and Holly had come quickly, walking together toward them, blond heads bowed close as they talked, under the shadows of budding horse chestnut trees. Holly had heard Kami’s story and glanced at Angela to confirm she was in, then nodded.
It was just the boys who were being wusses.
“We need to talk to my mother,” said Ash.
“I won’t,” said Kami. “She might not think it’s worth the risk. And I’m doing this today.”
“I hate to say it, but I think maybe you should listen to Blondie,” said Rusty. “You don’t understand about Amber, Cambridge. She’s so scared of the Lynburns. It took me so long to get her to trust me, and even then all I could get her to do was talk. She’s not going to help us. She’s terrified of Lillian, so she might help her.”
“You don’t understand about me,” Kami said, sweeping both Ash and Rusty with a comprehensive glare. “Jared’s being tortured in there. And Amber’s going to help me. I’m not planning on giving her a choice.”
Amber went to riding lessons at noon every day, according to Rusty, and then came back to Aurimere to learn magic and dance attendance on Rob. Torture at night, Kami thought, human sacrifice in the morning, healthy exercise at noon. What could possibly be on the schedule for the evening?
Kami thought she would pencil in a surprise.
Are you with me or not? she asked Ash.
I’m with you, said Ash. For Jared. He paused, and added, It’s nice to … feel you be happier.
Ash felt happier too, and that made Kami feel guilty. Ash wasn’t used to being linked to anybody, and though she tried to keep her thoughts separate from his, her every emotion came at him like a storm for someone used to a lifetime of calm weather. She hadn’t been easy on him, and that had swayed him into a dark mood. Maybe it was her fault that they hadn’t both been happier.
First things first, though, and the first thing on Kami’s mind was the rescue mission. She could be kinder to Ash once Jared was safe.
For now, she and Ash were united, a pounding of anxiety and tension thrumming between them like a shared heartbeat. Holly was looking to Angela again, and Angela was waiting, her body tense to spring. She saw Kami’s glance and gave her a nod.
“I’m with Kami,” she said.
Kami nodded approvingly. “Because we are best friends forever.”
“Also the longer we leave Jared there, the crazier he’s going to get,” Angela remarked. “Let’s face it, he was not the mayor of Sanityville to start with.”
She said it with a certain measured amount of fondness, and she had looked genuinely sickened by Rusty’s story. Kami was glad: she had never been quite sure how Angela felt about Jared.
It was warm for the first day of February, or maybe it only seemed warm because Kami was sweating, her skin hot and clammy at once. The budding trees offered her no useful shade, and having her friends around her did not help. Maybe Angela would understand what she had to do. Nobody else would.
What are you planning to do? Ash asked.
Kami heard light footsteps coming up the path to the manor.
I’m sorry, she told Ash. Don’t stop me.
Amber Green came into view, kicking up dust as she walked. She was still in her riding clothes, hair shining bright as a new penny in the sun under the black velvet of her hat.
Kami thought of the penny she had sent Jared when they were children, which he always wore around his neck. She thought of her mother, allowing terrible things to happen out of fear.
This girl had actually done terrible things; whether from fear or desire for power, Kami did not care. She had lost her claim to Kami’s pity when she picked up the knife: Kami had someone to save, and she had to stop Amber and everyone else from hurting him.
Amber halted when she saw them all standing under the shadow of the trees. She had a riding crop and a purse in her hands, and she dropped both in the dust.
Maybe she was scared enough, or foolish enough, that she did not think of the crop as a weapon. Maybe, as a sorcerer, she knew her best weapon was having her hands free.
“Hi,” she said unc
ertainly, her eyes flicking uneasily from Ash’s face to Kami’s—the magical threats—and finally landing on Rusty, not in appeal but with the realization of betrayal and a promise of vengeance.
Kami recalled having no magic and being cut up and scared by this girl. Rusty had been brave to approach her, and clever to get her talking. Rusty didn’t have any magic: Amber would have seen him as helpless.
But Rusty wasn’t helpless, and he had led her to this moment.
“I’m going to give you a chance,” said Kami, taking a step toward Amber. “I know that you hate all of this, and I know that you’re scared. But you must see that Jared needs help. He’s scared and alone and in pain, and that is partly because of you. We cannot cross the fire without one of Rob’s sorcerers. You have a chance to save him. Will you take it?”
“Rob would kill me,” said Amber, taking a step back.
Kami could feel her trying to call the wind to her aid. Kami quelled it with a thought, easy as blowing on the hot air rising from a cup of tea.
“We’ll make it look like we forced you,” she coaxed, being as sweet as she could, for Rusty’s sake and Holly’s sake and Ash’s sake, and for her own sake too. She did not want to hurt Amber.
But she would if she had to. For Jared’s sake.
The wheedling made Amber’s eyes narrow, as if anyone who tried persuasion rather than force must be weak.
“I can’t risk it,” she said with sudden decisiveness. “Jared isn’t my problem. And you’ll be sorry that you tried to make him my problem,” she added to Rusty.
Rusty met her narrowed eyes with a level gaze. “I don’t think I will be sorry.”
Amber looked at Ash, the Lynburn, again, and then took several steps forward, pushing past Kami.
Kami caught her wrist. “You’re the one who’s going to be sorry.”
Amber tried to break Kami’s hold on her wrist by yanking it away. Kami held on, and Amber looked down at her, both surprised and almost offended.