“Thank you for telling me,” she said at last, voice clear and firm, trying to banish fear for both of them. “Look, you may not have noticed, but with my elite sleuthing skills I’ve detected that it’s raining. Can a lady get a walk home, or what?”
One corner of Jared’s mouth curled. “Be my privilege to escort you home,” he said, in the same casual tone she was affecting. “Or something.”
The light rain was turning to glistening mist above the cobbles and making her hair a dark cloud. Kami thought of knives and could not suppress a shiver.
“Here,” said Jared.
Instead of slinging a casual arm around her as Rusty’s would have been, Kami felt the weight of his jacket settling on her shoulders. The lining of the jacket was warm from his body, and though he was close enough so his breath stirred her hair when he spoke, he did not touch her. She reached for him in her mind and felt his deep, calm rush of relief.
He was glad she hadn’t asked him anything more.
Chapter Twenty
The Forgotten Sacrifices
The next morning, Kami found Jared leaning against her garden gate. “I don’t require an escort to school,” she told him severely.
“Holly got attacked last night,” said Jared.
“So why aren’t you at Holly’s house?” Kami demanded.
“Several reasons,” said Jared. “One being that Holly has a motorbike, and she can run over anyone who tries to attack her. Of course, if you’d take a spin on my bike with me …”
“It’s too dangerous. Your bike isn’t equipped to drive on the ice,” Kami told him. “Which I’m assuming there will be plenty of, since hell will have frozen over the day I get on that thing. I fancy a stroll through the woods to school.”
The air was cool and fresh, a leaf-filtered breeze blowing. They walked under the trees, some branches making curved appeals to the sky and some held out straight as if to catch something. Before getting to school, before thinking about what had almost happened to Holly, and before tracking down and interrogating Nicola, it could just be morning. They traded off feelings of contentment, forming a loop that fed on each other. Kami would not have guessed that Sorry-in-the-Vale would suit Jared so well.
Eventually Kami said, “I’m sorry about Rusty.”
“So am I, generally.”
He doesn’t understand that things like you looking at me and being silent are in fact you making an incredibly dumb joke in my head rather than counting all my eyelashes.
A hundred and seventeen, said Jared, his amusement teasing up the corners of Kami’s lips.
“Seriously, if I couldn’t read your mind,” Kami said, “law enforcement would be summoned. Immediately.”
They went through a glen of black trees with red-and-purple-tinted leaves. When she looked up at Jared and their eyes met, there was that shock, but she was growing used to it. Their awareness of each other hummed in the air.
The movement in the corner of Kami’s eye should not have caught her attention. It was just a flutter up in the tree branches. Something about it struck her as wrong, and she found herself turning and creeping closer to the tree, with Jared beside her. They were very close by the time they were able to believe what they were seeing.
Perched on a branch, small and terrible, was a creature made entirely of eyes. It was half the size of a thrush. It should have looked silly, its body wobbling in a way no other creature’s body did because so much of it was jelly, but it was disturbing instead.
Okay, either we have both been drinking before breakfast, or that’s weird, said Jared.
Hyakume, Kami thought. Sobo used to tell me stories. Creature with a hundred eyes.
The woods did not seem like a safe haven any longer. Kami took one slow step back, and another. Then she was running through the woods, Jared beside her. They ran for the light breaking free of the trees at the edge of the woods. There they paused, panting, in the middle of the road.
Jared glanced at her and their minds surveyed the situation together, all senses making sure they were okay. Their breathing slowed and went regular in sync. They headed up the hill to the school together, toward safety.
Kami went through the school gate first, and they saw they had escaped nothing. Horror washed through her, and from her to Jared and back again. Kami was drowning in horror. She could not breathe.
Nicola Prendergast was lying, arms outflung, on the merry-go-round in the playground. It was painted blue and yellow, cheerful colors. She was still wearing her clothes from last night, though they were cut or torn open to show her skin, all scarlet on white.
There was so much blood.
Blackness flashed in front of Kami’s eyes as if she was blinking. Nicola’s face was imposed on the dark. She thought of Nicola at age six, pouring mud into a teacup for Jared, before Nicola grew too old for imaginary friends and Kami chose Jared over her.
Jared turned Kami, one hand light at her waist, away from the sight of Nicola, and she was grateful. He used the tentative touch to draw her in carefully, neither of them daring to move much. Kami’s fist closed on the leather of Jared’s jacket. Jared leaned down and rested his forehead against Kami’s, and Kami was able to breathe.
She only caught one desperate breath, one that was their breaths mingled together. Then Jared shuddered away from her. Kami turned her face to the wall that surrounded the school, not bricks and cement but slates stacked together so that they never fell. She stared at the stones and stood with her back to Jared and the dead girl as she called the police.
The police kept Jared in the station much longer than they kept Kami, who had a brief interview with kind, wire-haired Sergeant Kenn. The sergeant made her a cup of tea and patted her hand and told her that her statement was very helpful.
They kept asking Jared about his past, about his father, about his relationship with Nicola. Even though they had both said that Jared barely knew her, that they had never actually exchanged words. Everyone had heard the stories about his father. The police thought he was the one who had attacked Kami. And Kami would not be able to convince anyone Jared was innocent without proof.
Obviously there would be no school for anyone today. Kami’s dad had collected her and taken her home, and she’d asked to be alone and slipped out the back door.
She went to the library. Dorothy wasn’t working behind the desk, so Kami could not ask her about the new laws of the Lynburns. But that didn’t matter. These weren’t animals being killed now. This was a person being killed, and dead people meant records.
Kami found big bound volumes marked LOCAL HISTORY, with old newspapers fixed to the heavy cardboard like pictures in a photo album. She remembered Dorothy saying, “This boy’s grandparents made a law that nobody would hurt the people of the Vale.” She went back fifty years, and then a few years more, until she found a tiny note in a list of obituaries. It read, “Adam Fairchild,” listed the dates of his birth and death, and said, “He will be remembered for his sacrifice.” Almost every year before that date, there was a similar obituary.
Sacrifice.
Kami stopped writing notes for her article, her lists of all these deaths. She laid down her pen and remembered the children’s skipping song, the one they’d sung in the same playground where she had found Nicola.
Almost everyone grows old.
She remembered Jared’s story about the knives that were Lynburn family heirlooms, and her mother calling the Lynburns creatures of red and gold: red blood on their gold knives. She remembered Nicola asking for protection from the Lynburns—but protection from who, or what? Nicola had not, in the end, been protected from anything.
She sat with her head bowed over the obituaries for a long time. Then she got up and went back to the police station.
Rosalind had not gone down to the station to collect her son.
You shouldn’t be here, said Jared. Kami continued sitting on the bench outside the station because he had said that at least a thousand times.
Kami, said Jared. Look up. Kami looked up and he was there in front of her, looking tired, with a hollowed-out feeling when she reached out for his mind.
He did not seem surprised that they thought he might have done it. He crouched down by the bench, close to her knee like a guard dog, but not sitting beside her. Kami sat with her hands folded, and they were silent outside the police station together. The people passing by knew that Nicola was dead. Everyone in town did, those who were haunting the school grounds and those who had shut themselves in their houses, like Kami’s family.
Only Kami and Jared knew that there might be magic involved. A wash of light in the air, an impossible creature in the woods, being able to speak to a boy in her mind. They had all seemed like innocent things—magic that did not hurt—that Kami could dismiss even if she could not explain them. Torturing an animal was sick and wrong, but this was terrifying.
“We’re skipping school tomorrow,” Kami said. “We have to go to London and find Henry Thornton.”
Chapter Twenty-One
From Year to Year
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t take the bike,” said Jared.
“I’m sorry,” Kami told him. “I have this irrational fear of fatal road accidents. Anyway, getting here by public transport was perfectly simple.”
It had meant waiting an hour for the rattling bus out of Sorry-in-the-Vale, then switching to another bus, and finally catching a train at Moreton-in-the-Marsh. It would have been fine without some fool grumbling in her brain about the speed of his motorbike.
“Oh yes,” Jared said. “Perfectly simple.”
The redbrick walls and greenhouse ceiling of Waterloo Station gave Kami heart. She was acting at last, doing something to help. She grinned up at Jared, who was standing with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders braced. The feeling of discomfort she’d been getting from him since they got on the second bus (which she had put down to crankiness about his bike) niggled at her. She pushed at his defenses and Jared pushed back, not letting her in. He did smile back at her, though.
“Shall we be on our way?” he asked.
Henry Thornton’s apartment in South Ealing was more accessible by bus than by train, so they had another walk.
“And another bus,” Jared moaned.
“We have to work through your thing about public transport,” Kami said. “Did you ever take a bus on a school trip as a child? Was it a nice safe journey, driving at reasonable speed, being environmentally sound, and leading to an educational experience? I shudder to think.”
They walked over Waterloo Bridge. In the distance on either side bristled metallic buildings, like weapons in the hands of enemy forces. Kami realized whose mind that thought had come from and glanced up at Jared. The wind blew in from the river and ruffled his blond hair; his profile beneath was inscrutable.
“And here you’re supposed to be the glamorous city kid.”
“I just like Sorry-in-the-Vale,” Jared said.
“Sure, it’s nice,” said Kami. “But I like London too.”
Cars ran on either side of the river, every second one a black cab. Big posters stood against the sky, flickering from a picture of a bank to another picture of a woman laughing with parted scarlet lips. People went by, some with their heads down, some with their umbrellas pessimistically up despite the fact that there was no rain. There was an Indian man in a red turban, and two girls walked by talking in a Chinese dialect.
Her dad had attended only one year of college in London before he had to come back and marry her mother. The times she came to London with him were the times when Kami wondered if he regretted it. Here nobody knew who she was, that she talked to imaginary people or that she was the daughter of the son of that Japanese woman, one of theirs and not quite one of theirs. Nobody looked twice at her or Jared. It was just the two of them, passing unnoticed by the whole world.
Kami reached for Jared’s hand. She barely brushed skin with her fingertips, the contact sending a jolt through her, when Jared flinched automatically back. She felt his regret a second later, but by then she had snatched her hand away.
Kami, said Jared.
Kami pointed to a spot along the concrete-lined riverbank, where there were trees starving in little cages. Kami raised her eyebrows when that thought came to her: Jared really did not like London.
“Bus stop’s that way,” she said, and walked ahead of him.
Henry Thornton’s flat was in the middle of a residential area. They had to go past two schools, six corner shops, and innumerable houses squashed together before they found it.
Thirty-Two Cromwell Gardens did not have any gardens around it. It was an uninspiring gray block of flats, all the windows uniformly rectangular. There was a matching gray wall immediately before the building, with the gate standing ajar. Someone had grown climbing roses on the wall, but at this stage in autumn that only meant the stone was covered in dry brown twigs and thorns.
“What do we say when we press the button for Flat 16?” Jared asked, after they had stood looking at the building for a couple of minutes.
Kami looked at the way he was slumped against the wall and realized that she had been right at the train station. The closed-off feeling she’d been getting from him, with something rippling underneath it, wasn’t crankiness or anger. She did not usually look at Jared for long, stealing glances to match up with his thoughts in her mind. The reality of him always made her bite her lip and look away too soon. She studied him now; the shoulders she’d already noticed were braced, and the gleam of sweat at his hairline, darkening that already dark-blond hair.
“You’re sick,” she said, startled.
“I’m fine,” Jared said sharply.
“We can just go. We can go now.”
“We didn’t come all this way to run back because I’m feeling a little peaky,” Jared bit out. “Kami! Come on.” He didn’t say it, but that didn’t matter because she heard it in his mind anyway. I’ll be fine. Nicola won’t be.
“All right!” Kami said, pushing away the thought of what had happened to Nicola, because Jared was right: she’d come here with a mission. “We’ll talk to Henry Thornton. Then we’ll go home.”
“So, what are you going to say when we press the buzzer?” Jared asked.
“I’m not going to ring the buzzer,” Kami informed him.
Jared said, We’re breaking in? I’m so happy I never have to be bored again.
Kami slipped in through the open gate and waited, Jared beside her. She didn’t have to wait long, and her luck was better than she could have hoped for. A woman came out, pushing a pram. Kami held the door for her with a smile. The woman smiled back absently, and as she went out the gate, Kami and Jared slipped in through the door.
“Not looking like a delinquent is very helpful,” Kami told Jared serenely. “Which is why you should take a step back when I knock on Henry Thornton’s door. Once it’s open, if we have to, we’ll push our way in.”
Flat 16 was on the ground floor. Kami knocked on the green door and lifted her face to the level of the eyehole with a guileless smile.
The door opened.
“Hi,” Kami said warmly, and stopped, startled.
It was Henry Thornton. She recognized him from his Internet profile, dark curly hair above a thin serious face, but that was hardly a surprise. Henry’s profile had said he was twenty-four, but he looked younger just now. He also looked strangely helpless, his cheeks flushed and his eyes too bright.
Henry was sick too.
“If you’re here to ask me if I’ve accepted the love of our Savior into my heart,” Henry said, “I feel awful right now and I feel Jewish all the time, so—”
Kami laid her hand flat against the door, trying to maintain an ingratiating smile. Unfortunately, that made the door swing inward just a little too much.
Henry saw Jared. His eyes narrowed. He breathed, “Lynburn.” He didn’t shut the door; he bolted backward from it.
Kami hesitated, her palm sti
ll against the door, uncertain whether causing it to swing all the way open would be a mistake or not. Henry might be more inclined to talk if they didn’t seem too pushy.
She hesitated, but she only hesitated for an instant. Then Henry pulled the door wide open and came running through it, right at Jared. The back of Jared’s head hit the wall at the same time the side of his head caught a blow from the object in Henry’s hand.
Jared was on the ground, and Henry was standing over him with the gun trained on Jared’s face. “Did I not make myself clear?” Henry shouted. “I want nothing to do with it!”
Jared blinked slowly, about to lose consciousness. “What?” he asked in a thick voice.
“I don’t care what rewards you offer,” Henry said. “You disgust me. You and all those who follow you don’t deserve power. You deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth.”
Kami heard a little click, like a door closing. She knew what that was. It was the safety catch on the gun.
Kami ran in through Henry’s open door and right into his kitchen. She picked up the first thing she saw, which was a wooden stool. She charged back out, swinging it over her head and into Henry’s.
Henry stumbled and fell to his knees. The gun went flying. Kami hit Henry across his back with the stool again before she could lose her nerve. Then she dropped the stool, dashed down the corridor, and picked up the gun.
The metal slid in her sweaty hands. Kami swallowed the lump of panic in her throat and said to Henry Thornton, her voice emerging small and calm: “I wouldn’t move if I were you.”
Henry sagged on the carpet.
Kami didn’t understand why he’d done this, why he and Jared were both sick, but she wasn’t sticking around to ask him questions when Jared needed help. She decided that Henry was unlikely to be able to assault her with any success, fumbled at the catch on the gun, and shoved it in the pocket of her ruffled skirt. Then she stepped over Henry and knelt beside Jared.