Almost every time he touched her, he hesitated, and she was scared too: she remembered being in the shower thinking about her skin as new territory. She thought about his skin now like a land to be discovered, and her grip on him loosened. Her hands trembled.
“Of course.” Jared stepped away from her and made a gesture toward the door. “You should go.”
Kami nodded and hesitated. She’d already been gone a long time. She really should be getting home. She went toward the door, and looked over her shoulder to where Jared stood leaning against the window, looking after her as she went. She put her hand on the brass hand doorknob. Then she let go of the metal hand and ran back to Jared, so fast that she almost knocked him backward. He caught her by the elbows and she ignored the fact that gravity had just almost defeated them both, and kissed him until she felt his mouth curve against hers, until she could forget for a moment that the world was closing in dark all around them, that the sorcerers were coming for blood tomorrow. She did not know how he felt, but she knew how she did: she was no longer scared to want him, intensely and absolutely, to keep and to the exclusion of all else. She felt like he had taught her how to want: she had never felt even a shadow of anything like this for anyone but him.
“Remember,” she said, “I will not let you die.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Kami’s Sacrifice
The sun was setting on the bare branches and frost-touched stones of Sorry-in-the-Vale. It was almost the night of the winter solstice.
Three hours before Rob Lynburn was due to appear in the town square, they were getting into position. Kami had already rung the bell and looked through the windows of the Kenn household and seen that the house was empty. Their garden was up for grabs.
“When you called me and said bring garden shears, I really thought it might be for decapitation purposes,” said Angela. “I truly wish that had been the case.” Despite her words, Angela wielded the shears effectively, able to reach branches of the fir tree that Kami simply could not stretch up to. Across from them, Jared and Ash, and Holly and Rusty, were, respectively, shearing at a holly bush and a yew tree. They were stacking branches up on the low stone wall to make a screen to hide behind.
Kami had noted that Holly had come with Rusty and Angela, on quite a different path from the one that led to where she lived.
“Did Holly stay with you last night?” Kami asked in a low voice.
“Yes.” Angela saw Kami’s look. “No,” she added very firmly, “it’s nothing like that. Things are so bad with her family, and there’s other stuff too. I’m just being a friend.”
“Okay,” Kami said.
Angela’s lip curled. “I don’t want to be anything besides friends,” she stated. “Not anymore.”
When annoyed, Angela was not a mistress of stealth. She spoke a little too loudly. Over Angela’s shoulder, Kami saw Holly register the words. Kami couldn’t quite read Holly’s expression: Holly moved toward Jared, handing him another branch with a smile and removing herself from earshot.
Kami could read Angela’s expression perfectly well: it said that Kami had been silent for much too long. “Whatever you say, Angela,” she said hastily.
Angela narrowed her eyes. “I don’t.”
“I believe you,” Kami said, making her voice even more innocent.
“I’ve been your friend for years with no ulterior motive,” Angela reminded her, scowling.
“I don’t know that,” Kami said. “You could secretly harbor a fevered passion for me. You could have bodaciousasianbeauties.com bookmarked as one of your favorite sites. This could have been your motive for friendship all along.”
Angela rolled her eyes. “I first met you when you were twelve. You were not exactly bodacious at twelve.”
“I had hotential,” Kami said.
Angela pinned her with a despairing look.
“When you see somebody who is too young to be actually hot, but you can tell they’re going to be one day? Hotential. Like potential, but hot.”
Kami set another branch on top of the wall, this one screening her face. When she looked back at Angela, she saw Angela regarding her with an odd expression on her face.
“What?”
“You always make jokes about your looks,” Angela said. “You really shouldn’t. You’re all right. You know, fairly fanciable.”
“I knew it!”
“But not to me,” Angela said. “Not ever. Not because of your looks, because you are half a ton of crazy in a five-pound sack.”
“Ah, but is it a bodacious sack?”
Angela sneered at her. Kami grinned back, and after a minute, Angela’s sneer turned into a smile.
“Holly’s lucky to have you,” Kami said. “So am I.”
“I know, right?” Angela asked. “I have no idea how you got so lucky. Speaking of which.” Her eyes slid over to the holly bush, where Jared and Ash were cheating by using magic not to get cut by the spiky leaves. “What’s going on with Jared?” Angela asked.
“I can’t . . .” Kami didn’t know how to explain it, hope and fear, wanting and shrinking from touch, kissing and talking about love but not talking about anything in normal, casual ways. She didn’t know if she had a boyfriend.
“It’s complicated,” she said. “But I’m—I’m really happy.” It was confusing, but it hurt significantly less than the confusion of him wanting nothing to do with her.
“Well,” Angela said, “that’s good.”
That was when Kami realized that Angela had tricked her into having one of those in-case-we-die moments. She glared over at Angela, who naturally glared back.
She was lucky, Kami thought. Her friends had all followed her lead: she’d said they should hide so they could surprise Rob and his people, try to help Lillian and her sorcerers. They could have done what Lillian had wanted, could have run away.
They’d trusted Kami, even though she didn’t know what she was doing. She couldn’t let them down: she couldn’t let any of them die.
* * *
Both of the adult sides followed the rules. They came when the last light of the sun had died, Lillian’s people sweeping down from Aurimere and Rob’s coming from Monkshood in the west. They had to take Shadowchurch Lane to get to the square, and that was a bad moment: Kami and her friends crouched in a huddled row behind makeshift screens of foliage sheared from their enemy’s garden, which seemed all at once utterly fragile and foolish.
She saw Rob’s profile through a framework of leaves as he passed, his pale blond hair and his carved Lynburn features. In some ways the Lynburns all looked like variations on a theme, different expressions of personality set in the same ivory and gold.
Rob looked like the nice one. His face as he went by was set in pleasant, determined lines, like a good man set on a worthy task. It made Kami’s very bones feel cold, as if they had been turned to iron inside her skin.
Rosalind followed Rob, hair floating, eyes fixed on Rob’s back. After her came the stolid profile of Sergeant Kenn, the ice-and-copper face of Ruth, the sorcerer living at the Kenns’, the fox-colored haze of Amber Green’s hair, the dark head of her boyfriend, Ross, following behind. One sorcerer after another after another, moving in single file.
There were so many of them. Kami had known the number of sorcerers, but now, seeing them—there were so many.
They stood together in the town square. And Lillian came walking down the High Street, fair hair shining like a helm, not standing at a man’s back but striding in front of her followers. Kami had never actually liked Lillian, but she admired her for a moment with all her heart, and then her heart sank.
She looked so gallant, so much the leader of a forlorn hope. Even with Henry added to Lillian’s army, Rob had so many more people, it made Lillian look pathetic. They were ranged on either side of the town square, a stretch of gold cobblestones their battlefield, and Rob lifted a hand to the single streetlight.
It made a popping, splintering sound and blinked o
ut. Darkness descended. The stars, clear in the sky, pulsed white and strong. There was a line of faint luminescent green along the horizon, and it illuminated the square enough so that Kami was able to see the glimmer of Lillian’s and Rosalind’s hair, separated by a wide stretch of blackness.
She was able to see the glint of teeth as Rob smiled.
“Lillian,” he said, “where is my sacrifice?”
“This town does not live by the old laws anymore,” Lillian said. “It lives under my laws. Because it is my town. If you want it, you have to take it from me.”
Kami jumped as she heard the crackle in the night, the hungry sudden hiss.
A flame leaped from the broken streetlight, brighter than the bulb had been, a red pillar on top of what looked like a metal spike. The flame rose high and dangerous, the curling scarlet tongue at its tip painting the sky with its own colors. Leering faces in orange and blue surfaced and sank in its heart.
Everyone could see Rob’s smile now. He said, gently, “Then I will.”
Both sides moved, inevitable as two opposing tides. Ruth Sherman of the crimson hair and fierce face was the one who joined battle first. She was almost close enough to touch Ms. Dollard, but not quite, when she passed a hand through the air, pale in the fire-tinted darkness. Somehow that gesture turned the air twisted and sharp, made a slice of night into a knife.
It cut Ms. Dollard’s throat.
The blood was nothing but a slender black line across her neck for an instant. It didn’t look deep, didn’t look serious, and then there was a dark gush over her white blouse. There was a spray of blood, ebony in the night, an obscene splash of darkness against the golden cobblestones.
Ms. Dollard toppled, and Lillian lunged forward. She raised her hand and Ruth staggered back as if she had been slapped.
Mrs. Thompson stepped forward, a small bag Kami recognized clasped in her hand, and when Mr. Prescott raised his hand against her a wind rose and then died as she spoke. Mr. Prescott looked stunned.
Lillian looked stunned too, but she caught on fast. She stooped to where Ms. Dollard had fallen, picked the bag out of her hand and held it fast. She spoke the words of a spell, lost in the howl of wind and the hiss of flames, and magic died all through Rob’s ranks. Lillian and her sorcerers began cutting through them: Kami saw one of Rob’s sorcerers fall, then another. Her plan was working, small successes won at every turn.
Unfortunately, Rob was quick on the uptake as well.
“Burn those,” he ordered, and the bag in Lillian’s hands burst into flame. Then he lifted a hand and Lillian stumbled. When she looked up, her lip was split and her teeth were stained with blood.
All at once the square was a maelstrom, people throwing themselves at each other, people standing or cringing back, people falling. The square was filled with dark figures and chaos and blood, all of it lit with the writhing red flame of Rob Lynburn’s torch.
There were so many more of Rob’s sorcerers, and their magic was powered by blood. It was like seeing people try to fight against knives bare-handed. It was so much worse than Lillian must have thought, so much worse than Kami had feared. This wasn’t going to be a brave last stand, wasn’t going to be something that would decimate the enemy even if it led to defeat.
This was going to be a slaughter.
Kami pressed her hand to her lips so hard she felt her teeth cut the inside of her mouth. It did not look like joining in the fight would make any difference at all.
Except for the fact that they would die too.
Kami remembered, clear as if she was hearing them all over again, Lillian’s words to her son. You and Jared cannot take part in the battle tomorrow. You have to hide. You have to run.
Maybe, Kami thought, thinking it and hating to think it, maybe Lillian had been right.
The movement at her elbow made Kami jump. She heard stirring in the garden, in the dark cool space where they were hidden, a whisper in the grass that was someone crawling past Angela toward her.
“Kami,” Ash’s voice said, so low she almost couldn’t hear him. “I don’t know if I’m being a coward, but I can’t help but think we have to run.”
Kami lowered her hand from her mouth, rubbed both her clammy palms against the knees of her jeans.
“You’re not being a coward,” she replied at last. “It’s what your mother would have wanted.”
Ash did not move. Kami could not summon the words to say that they all should.
She had not seen the shadow behind Ash until Jared moved forward, lunging the same way Lillian did, and caught Kami’s face in his hand, capturing her windblown hair against her jaw and around his fingers. They looked at each other in the firelight broken with the pattern of leaves. Jared’s eyes were longing and intent, as if he had only this one moment to memorize her face.
He placed his other hand, briefly, on the back of Ash’s neck.
“Both of you go,” he said.
Then he was on his feet and racing across the dark garden to Shadowchurch Lane. The ghost of his warmth lingered on Kami’s lips, but he was nothing but a shadow lost in shadows.
“Okay,” said Kami to the friends clustered around her, hushed and fraught in the silence. “Okay, whoever wants to run should run, but if you don’t want to run you should fight.”
Silence stretched between them all. Then Angela rose, cat-silent with her hair a darker flutter against the dark sky, and of course Rusty went after her. Both of them went onto Shadowchurch after Jared, and Kami saw them run into the town square.
It was like a little piece had been cut from hell and thrown in the center of her town. And there were people she loved in the chaos of flickering firelight and spilled blood. She had sent them out there. Angela turned like a dancer on the stained cobblestones and kicked Sergeant Kenn in the head from behind. Rusty and Amber Green stood staring at each other across a small flame-lit distance, and then Amber’s boyfriend Ross threw a ball of fire from his hands at Rusty. Rusty had to throw himself on the stained cobbles to escape it. Even then Kami was sure it scorched through the ends of his dark shock of hair.
Angela wheeled on Ross, shouting “Noli me tangere!” so his fire died in his hands, and springing at him. Kami saw Mr. Prescott lift his hand in Angela’s direction: the air coming at her turned into something that glittered, sharp and terrifying.
Holly charged through their screen of branches, leaving a mess of broken twigs and crushed leaves in her wake, and hurtled in between Angela and her father.
Kami and Ash ducked to make sure they were not seen, both of them on their hands and knees in the dead grass and cold earth. She had waited to see if he would run, but he hadn’t. She looked at the desperation and the red shimmer of reflected flame in his eyes.
She looked again over the broken branches. The glass shop fronts on the High Street were all shimmering walls of fire, and the side streets black slashes.
Crimson-haired Ruth did her trick of turning the air into a knife. Jared made a casual gesture and knocked it away, so that it became a whirl of shining sharpness that dissolved into night; then he knocked her away with another gesture and without another look. He stalked through the sorcerers as if he hardly saw them, toward his real objective.
Rob Lynburn saw Jared coming toward him through the burning night air, and beckoned.
Kami reached over to touch Ash’s hand where it lay on the ground clutching the grass. His skin felt ice cold. “Ash,” she whispered.
Ash tore his eyes away from the square where Lillian was lashing out and dodging away, her sheet of hair a silver banner flying against the dark as she went down.
Kami met his gaze and swallowed down her fear, determinedly fought back her furious, terrified instinct to recoil. “I’ll be your source,” she told him. “Do the spell now.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Cruel Bonds
The words of the spell fell on Kami like shards of glass. They rained down around her, cold and sharp, and she could not get a grip on any o
f them: she knew doing so would hurt her too much.
It felt wrong and unnatural, like being stripped naked and stitched to someone else, someone fighting just as much as she was, cringing where every inch of exposed skin touched.
She had never felt someone touch her mind who didn’t want to, who she viscerally did not want to touch it.
She found herself clutching Ash’s hand for comfort, and bizarre and unreasonable though it was, he clutched hers back, fingers pressing down to bone even as they struggled frantically away from each other in their minds.
A phrase she had heard or read somewhere drifted through Kami’s mind: Take this cup from my lips. What was in this cup was too bitter: every sense she had told her it was poison, and she could not make herself swallow it.
Jared was out there. Angela was out there, and Holly and Rusty. She had to help them.
Kami thought, with terrible clarity, the last thought she would have to herself: This is the worst mistake I will ever make.
She stopped struggling against the spell and let herself be drawn into hideous closeness. Two people made into a ghastly parody of one creature, something that should be displayed in a nightmarish carnival.
Jared didn’t say it would be like this, Ash told her, outrage and anger and betrayal that wasn’t hers in her head like an invading army. The way he talked about it, it was different. I don’t want this!
Kami wouldn’t talk to him like that. She couldn’t. Not yet.
She dragged herself up until she was sitting, and opened her eyes. The world was still the same world of fire and darkness and horror. It was she who had changed, and that could not matter now.
“You’re the one trained in magic,” she said, her voice a thread of sound. “You have to be the one to use the power.”
“I can’t,” Ash choked out. “I don’t know how—I’m not—”
He was even less used to this than she was, Kami reminded herself. She had catapulted them both into this and she was the one who had to control it, whose responsibility it was to deal with the situation.