“You know me better than that,” said Kami. “I’m on a mission. And you really do not appear to have been losing sleep.”
Rusty levered himself up on his elbows and opened his eyes. Firelight made his hazel eyes gleam; he seemed almost alert. “The stuff you were saying, about people doing rituals to get what they want,” he said, “except the rituals won’t work, because they are crazy and magic isn’t real. I don’t like thinking about how frustrated crazy people might get.”
Kami was silent, because she knew something Rusty didn’t. She knew about herself and Jared, and their connection. If that was real, who knew what else was? If the rituals were working, what did they do, and what else might these people sacrifice?
“I’ll be careful,” she said at length. “I’m just going to do an interview.”
Rusty collapsed back on the hearthrug. “Have fun, and don’t be home late. I get dinner out of babysitting, right?”
“I’m buying a shotgun tomorrow,” said Dad. “Rusty, you might as well call your sister if we’re feeding you. Kami, you really should sit and tell me more about this ill-advised social outing—”
“Gotta go! Love you, bye!” said Kami, and fled.
You had your fun for the day, Kami told Jared severely. By which I mean that you punched your cousin in the face. That means I get to go around Aurimere House and have Ash tell me everything he knows about the Lynburns.
Ash was the one who had asked Kami up to Aurimere. If he wanted to show her around and spend a little time alone with her, she thought that was only fair. He’d had a bad day. And if in the process he spilled any dark family secrets, she was ready to hear them. She was investigating, after all. Reporters did what they had to do to get their story. But it didn’t hurt her ego that Ash seemed to actually like her. So she ignored Jared’s sulking, tucked her hand in the crook of Ash’s arm, and let him show off the manor.
Aurimere was all long corridors and huge rooms. Ash escorted her into one room that was drenched in light because one wall was a vast casement window. The small rectangular panes stretched from stone floor to the white ceiling, each of them yellow and filtering in the sunlight dyed twice with gold, translucent rather than transparent.
The ceiling was painted white, but its surface was raised, covered with shapes and symbols. Kami made out stars, flowers, satyrs, and a woman’s face, repeated over and over until the ceiling finished with the elaborate cornices at each end. It gave her an uneasy feeling. She glanced at Ash, who smiled down at her.
“I know,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
Kami blinked and took comfort from the fact that not every boy could read her mind. “Settling in easily, then?” she asked as Ash led her up a short flight of steps to another room. This one had to be the fanciest parlor in the world. It had sofas with scarlet canopies.
“I’ve been waiting my whole life to get here,” Ash said. “Ever since I was small, it’s all I can remember my mother and father talking about. Once Mother found Aunt Rosalind, we were going home to Sorry-in-the-Vale. We never stayed anywhere long, and I never wanted to. We were always coming home.” He gave her his charming smile. “Just taking the long way around.”
“Your family’s lived here a long time,” Kami said encouragingly. “You must know a lot of stories.” Or incriminating secrets or whatever.
“You’ve lived in Sorry-in-the-Vale all your life,” Ash said, politely encouraging in his turn. “You must know a lot too.”
“What, me? No, hardly any. You should tell some,” Kami said. “I think your dad knew my mother back in the day. Claire Glass?”
Ash shook his head. “He’s never mentioned her.”
They passed through a little hall, the ceiling curving over their heads. The light fixture hanging from the center of the ceiling was a sphere cupped by ringed hands.
Kami tried to think of leading questions, and caught sight of the Lynburn family crest over the door. It was a foursquare shape. The outline of Aurimere House on a hill was in the top left, the wood on the top right. On the bottom left was a square of pale blue, and on the bottom right was a woman’s profile. Cutting through the pictures was a sword hilt with a hand wrapped around it. Below the crest in gold letters were the words HAUD IGNEUS, HAUD UNDA.
“Gosh,” said Kami, in the innocent tones of one who knew no Latin, none at all. “What is that?”
“It’s the family motto,” Ash said.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Kami said, since Ash showed no signs of telling her. “Your motto is ‘Blonds really do have more fun.’ ”
Another Lynburn motto possibility, if her mother was to be believed, was “Hot Blond Death.”
“I think brunettes are cute, personally,” said Ash. “Something like, neither fire nor water. It’s meant to convey—I think—‘We neither drown nor burn.’ Of course, that might mean we were all born to hang.”
Kami glanced up at him. His face was oddly serious. “I doubt you were,” said Kami and squeezed Ash’s arm.
“Well, thank you, ma’am,” Ash remarked, exaggerating his Southern drawl. Kami laughed, delighted, even though Ash went back to being serious the next instant. “The way my parents have always talked about this place, and about what it meant to be our family …” He hesitated.
“Yes?” Kami prompted, and gave him a “Give me a clue, you big, strong, handsome man” glance under her eyelashes.
“It’s a lot of responsibility” was all Ash said. “I want to do it right.”
Kami sighed. “I’m sure you will.”
As they explored further, Kami saw rooms that showed how long Aurimere had stood empty. In the sitting room where Ash stopped and sat in a window seat, Kami noticed the peach curtains were a little tattered. There were no sofas or chairs, and the built-in bookshelves were empty, but there was a fire guard before the large carved mantelpiece and a wooden statue of a lady in draped medieval dress with a stain in the center of her forehead like a bullet hole.
“You have now seen almost all of the house that has fancy things, like actual furniture, in it,” Ash said. “I spend most of my weekends with my parents at antique fairs. Wild, I know.”
Kami smiled down at him. He smiled back up at her. His hair glowed in the sunlight, and the garden was a riot of color below.
Ash smiled back and began to rise, face turned up to hers, when two things happened: Kami felt the sharp spike of Jared’s unhappiness, and she saw someone walking through the garden.
Kami turned her face away. “Who’s that?”
“My dad,” said Ash.
“Oh, I want to meet him,” Kami said instantly. “Not in a loopy ‘I want to meet your parents, I want your babies’ way. For the interview! Let’s go.”
Ash took this gracefully, giving her a rueful grin and taking her hand when she offered it. He let her pull him from the window seat and back down the stone steps.
There was a black iron door standing open in one of the hallways, light streaming through it. All Kami saw at first glance were the flowers on the door, tiny flowers and lines as if the flowers were caught in a river, but then she made out, in the lower right-hand corner of the door, a woman’s profile. She was drowning, the flowers caught in her hair.
When Kami pushed the door open, she noticed that the doorknob was a clenched fist. She didn’t want to say “Wow, creepy architecture you have going on here” to Ash. There were so many times it was excellent that a boy could not read your mind. She just kept smiling as they walked into the garden, and she saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with straw-blond hair and Ash’s blue eyes coming toward them, pushing a wheelbarrow.
“Hey there, son,” said Rob Lynburn. “Who’s your friend?”
“Kami Glass.” Kami offered a hand.
Rob let go of the wheelbarrow and shook it. He had callused hands, a farmer’s hands rather than the lord of the manor’s hands. When he smiled, she saw where Ash had inherited his charm, though his father’s was less polished. She had not expected a Lyn
burn to look so normal.
“Well now,” said Rob. “Not Claire Somerville’s daughter?”
“Yes,” Kami said thankfully: information was beckoning at last! “Claire’s daughter.”
“Of course, of course,” Rob said. “Now I look at you, I see you’re just as pretty as Claire.”
“Not really,” said Kami. “My mother said you used to have an office over Claire’s before you moved away.”
“Between you and me,” Rob confided, “not so much an office as a hidey-hole. Sometimes a man needs to be by himself, no matter how lovely the ladies he’s living with are, and Rosy and Lillian were always that. Of course, I had your lovely mother’s company for lunch every day. Claire Somerville!” He turned to his son. “We’ve been all over America, practically, haven’t we?”
“Practically,” said Ash.
“In all that time, I never saw a face like Claire Somerville’s.” Unlike his remark about Kami being as pretty as her mother, this Kami believed. She had seen the way men could not forget her mother and Angela, always wandering back for another look as if every man was a compass and beauty was true north.
Don’t tell your father, Mum had said. Kami wondered for the hundredth time, Don’t tell him what?
“My mother said you two were great friends back in the day,” Kami lied enthusiastically. “You must have some fun stories from before we were born.”
“Oh, a few, a few,” Rob told her. “Come to think of it, my other boy has mentioned your name a couple of times. Kami, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Kami said, caught off guard by feeling guilty at the mention of Jared and being pleased by the way Rob called Jared “my other boy” so casually. She smiled up at him.
He used her moment of weakness to escape. “You give your mother my best, now. Ash, give me a hand with this load of clippings, and then I’ll let you get back to the lady.”
Ash complied, with an apologetic look at Kami. Kami was dispirited enough by her lack of investigative skills that she watched them go without protest. She followed the rockery wall, counting stones and preparing interview questions that would elicit some information. The rockery ended and a climbing frame for roses began. Kami began to count blooms.
A voice behind her said: “And who, may I ask, are you?”
Kami spun around twice, so she was dizzy when she saw that the climbing frame was in fact an arch, making an alcove of roses in the depths of the Lynburn garden. Among the roses and the shadows was a figure in black. If Rosalind Lynburn was a ghost, this was the living woman. No one had told Kami that Lillian and Rosalind were identical twins.
Lillian Lynburn stayed sitting, legs crossed, a picture of elegant composure. Ash might have got his charm from his father, but he had gotten his polish from Lillian. And yet she didn’t remind Kami of Ash, or of her own twin. Her presence was not like Rosalind’s but Jared’s. She exploded into the senses like a punch in the face.
On Lillian, Rosalind’s pale veil of hair was pinned up in a smooth chignon. Rosalind’s soft mouth was painted red and pursed impatiently, waiting for Kami’s response.
“Oh,” said Kami. “Oh, hi. I’m Kami Glass.”
Lillian raised her darkened, sculpted eyebrows in what seemed to be an utter lack of recognition. “All right,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Ash invited me,” Kami said uncertainly.
“Did he,” said Lillian, with a vague air of surprise that Kami found insulting.
“You knew my parents,” Kami forged ahead. “Jon Glass and Claire Somerville?”
Lillian’s face remained perfectly blank and indifferent. “They were more likely to know me than I was to know them,” she offered. “I was the Lynburn.” The nerve of her, able to state such a thing so coolly, made Kami almost laugh. Lillian’s eyebrows lifted; they were the only expressive feature of her face.
“My mother was right about you,” Kami said.
“What did she say about me?” Lillian inquired.
“She said you used to think you were queen of every blade of grass in the Vale—” Kami stopped, horrified at herself.
Lillian’s mouth curved in a slow red smile. “I still do.”
Her gaze shifted to a point above Kami’s shoulder. The brief warmth in her eyes, like a glint of sunlight on a frozen lake, made Kami unsurprised to look around and see Ash. She was also not surprised to see he looked alarmed. Ash put a hand on Kami’s back as he came up to her, as if in apology for anything Lillian had said. He was naturally kind, she was starting to realize, which was better than being charming.
“Mother, this is Kami,” said Ash.
“So I am continually informed,” Lillian murmured.
“Kami, Mother,” said Ash in an undertone. “Let’s go see some more of the garden,” he added, and used the hand on her back to guide Kami away.
“I am fascinated by gardening,” Kami agreed solemnly. “Tell me about fertilizer, Ash.”
“I dunno, we haven’t known each other that long, that’s kind of racy talk,” said Ash.
They walked to the other side of the garden, where Rob was pruning, more because it was far from Lillian than because Ash had anything special to show her. There was a gate there. Kami peered over it and saw the dip and slope of the fields below the hill.
All Lynburn land, she was sure, and she thought of the piece of paper at home in her jeans pocket. She looked at the ground and saw a dark object sticking out from the bottom of the gate. It was a life-size hand, part of the gate, its fingers reaching up to Kami as if in appeal.
Kami took a step back. “Have you noticed that a lot of your décor is kind of human-hand-based, Ash?”
“Uh, no,” said Ash, sounding puzzled.
Kami started to list off examples—the hand doorknob, the hand holding the sword hilt, the hands clasping the light, and now this. She refrained from mentioning the fact that the other Lynburn theme was drowned women.
They were standing by the manor wall. Ash was examining his own hands, held out before him, and calling comments over his shoulder to Rob as his father gardened, when Kami felt an impulse to turn around. Like a mental nudge.
Kami, said Jared, and then in an urgent, real whisper: “Kami!”
Kami edged toward the tower that stood nearby, joined to the manor but somehow apart from it, a bright column with a door into the dark. When she was a step closer, she saw Jared standing against the wall in that darkness.
“Come here,” he said, and grinned. He was fresh from a bike ride, hair ruffled, chest rising and falling hard, the glitter of a thin chain and a glint of sweat at the hollow of his throat. There was a thrill running through him, a feeling of discovery, something wild that crept into her blood as well.
I can’t, she said automatically, and looked toward Ash.
Kami, Jared protested, just as automatically.
Kami looked back at him, and then at Ash again. Look here upon this picture, and on this, she thought, calling up the line from a play about an evil brother and a good one.
It was a striking contrast, Ash standing in the sun laughing and calling out to his father versus Jared in the dim stairwell like Ash’s lurking shadow self, scar pale in the darkness. The worst part was that Jared saw it too, through her eyes, saw who looked like an angel and who looked like something else.
In a bleak rush of feeling, like an icy river with his thoughts tumbling jagged stones caught in the cold, Jared did not even blame her. He thought: No wonder.
Kami threw herself into the shadows and the stairwell. That’s not it, that’s not what I meant, she told him, grabbing his jacket.
Jared broke away from her and ran up the steep curve of stairs in the darkness. Kami ran along with him. They barely checked their steps when a storm broke out of a clear sky and sent shuddering pale reflections of lightning through a window Kami could not even see yet. Thunder followed and they kept running, even though Kami felt like the tower would be shaken by the storm at any moment. It almos
t made sense to her whirling mind as they ran: sunlight with Ash, and lightning with Jared.
They reached the top of the bell tower panting and breathless, Kami dizzy from the turns of the stairs. The bell was in the river, so it was just a room that had four vast glassless windows. Rain swept in from all sides in sheets. Jared and Kami stood in the center of the room.
“I was riding my bike really fast and I saw it,” Jared murmured, breath still ragged. He pointed and Kami saw it too, the dark curve of the wood from the foot of the hill where Aurimere stood, reaching in a perfect comma toward the little house at the other end of the woods. Toward Kami’s house, which the Lynburns owned.
“What does it mean?” Kami asked.
Jared said, “I don’t know.”
A moving gleam much closer caught Kami’s attention. She went to the side of the bell tower and peered into the lashing rain to see more clearly. Below, she saw Rob Lynburn abandon his wheelbarrow, Lillian emerge from her alcove, Ash lift his eyes, and Rosalind run out of the house.
The Lynburns came to stand in their wild garden, shuddering between storm-cloud darkness and washes of ghastly pale light. Their faces were turned up, tiny moons mirroring the lightning, their arms spread out, welcoming the storm.
Kami looked at Jared and saw his eyes had gone lightning-pale. His fear shuddered through her, like the ghostly light flooding the room.
What is wrong with them? And if there’s something wrong with them, what does that make me?
“Jared!” she shouted over the storm. When he did not answer, she grabbed his jacket again, with both hands this time, not letting him pull away, and yelled for him out loud and in her head until he turned his rain-slicked face to hers. “Listen to me. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what any of this means. But I know this much. It doesn’t matter. You’re not one of them. You never were. You’re not theirs. You’re mine.”
Jared bowed his head to hers, looked into her face, and calmed, as if he found some certainty there Kami could not find herself. “Yeah,” he said to her, as she’d said to him twice before. “I know.”