Holly was the last one to arrive at headquarters, humming and carrying her motorcycle helmet under her arm.
By then Kami was already sitting behind her desk, where she retreated when she wanted to feel more secure. She was wearing a blazer because she wanted to be taken seriously, though it was possible the matching headband with the bow ruined the effect.
Angela was standing on the other side of the desk, a tower of orange silk and outrage. Jared was behind Kami, arms crossed over his chest, looking like he was her bodyguard.
“No,” Angela was saying as Holly walked in, “I don’t believe you. And encouraging her to spin some crazy story isn’t helping me like you,” she added, to Jared.
Kami stood. “He isn’t encouraging me,” she said. “I make up my own mind, and I’m not crazy. Neither of us is crazy. It’s true.”
“Oh, magic is real?” Angie said scornfully. “That’s true?”
Holly’s helmet slipped out from under her arm and tumbled to the floor. Everyone turned to look at her. Holly stared at the gleaming blue helmet rolling at her feet.
“Do you know something about this, Holly?” asked Jared. There was an edge to his voice that made Holly look at him and flinch back.
Kami glanced at Jared, and then at Holly. Holly had always seemed to like Jared, to think, in her words, that he might be fun. Kami couldn’t blame Holly for the way she was staring at Jared now. The remote look in Jared’s eyes wasn’t fun, it was frightening. Kami understood that Holly might like the illusion of danger and not want danger that was real. She couldn’t blame her for that.
“Only what everybody says,” Holly said, low.
“And what does everybody say?” Jared demanded.
“I’ve never heard anybody say anything,” Angela announced.
“You’re an outsider,” said Holly.
Angela’s face was both angry and hurt for a moment, before she forced her expression back into pure anger.
“You are,” Holly told her, looking desperate to make her understand. “You and Rusty only moved here six years ago. Most of the families have been here for generations and generations. Some have been here since the start.”
“The start of what?” Jared snarled. “Since the Lynburns founded their private kingdom of all the sorcerers together? Since then?”
“They’re just stories,” Holly said. “Stories about settling in Sorry-in-the-Vale because it was a good place, a magical place. Where we were all meant to be, and the price paid is worth it. They’re just local legends, though, just stuff my dad says when he’s drunk. They’re not true. Nobody can really do magic! The Lynburns are gone!”
It was something Kami had heard other people from the Vale say. They said it when they were wishing for crops not to fail and storms to pass, but she realized now she’d heard her mother say it when something happened to scare her, as if to reassure herself: the Lynburns are gone.
As if the Lynburns were genies who could grant wishes, and monsters waiting to leap, all at once.
Jared watched Holly with cold eyes. He said, “Now we’re back.”
At Holly’s feet, her helmet shattered into pieces of crystal and bone. Holly bit her lip and looked to Angela as if she was her only possible source of comfort, as if Kami and Jared were her enemies. Angela stared at the pale and translucent shards on the floor, and her expression grew even more outraged.
Kami got up, with her hands placed flat on the desk. “You’re paying for that, buddy,” she said mildly.
“I don’t believe you can read each other’s minds. You can be a magician or a criminal or a balloon-animal giraffe for all I care,” Angela told Jared, and then looked at Kami. “But you’re my best friend in the world. And that controlling freak is not convincing you that he can talk to you in your head, for God’s sake.”
Kami could not help smiling, even though it made Angela look even more furious. Angela was asking for proof, and that Kami could handle.
“What we need to do,” Kami said, “is run a test. I want you to come downstairs with me, Angela, and tell me something you’ve never told me before. And then Jared will tell Holly what you told me.”
“I will do no such thing!”
Kami tipped up her face to look Angela in the eye. “You’re so sure it’s not true,” she said. “Don’t you want to prove it?”
Angela held her gaze for an instant longer. “Fine,” she snapped, and turned, her black hair flying like a cape from her shoulders. She went for the door, her legs eating up the ground in four long, smooth strides, and stopped beside Holly at the threshold. Angela’s curled mouth softened a little. “You all right?” she asked.
Holly reached out and touched Angela’s hand, fingers twining briefly around hers.
“Yeah,” she said, and smiled back with an effort.
Angie nodded at Holly and walked on.
“This is all going to be totally fine, I have a plan,” Kami assured Holly, brushing by.
“Right,” Holly said. She looked doubtful, but that was possibly because Kami and Angela were abandoning her with a guy who looked on the edge and ready to jump.
Angela did not look doubtful in the least as she and Kami walked down into the shadowy stairwell. Her high-heeled boots sounded like gunshots, going down every step.
“You’re my best friend,” Kami said, looking up into Angela’s stern face. “I could always trust you never to think I was crazy.”
“Your faith is touching but totally misplaced,” Angela said. “I believe you to be a permanent inhabitant of cloud-cuckoo-land, and this year you may be getting elected mayor.” She reached the bottom of the stairs and wheeled on Kami, her eyes boring into Kami’s. “But you can trust me.”
“So trust me,” said Kami. “Tell me a secret.”
Angela hesitated for a moment, looking down at Kami. She still looked furious, but she leaned forward. Her face was still set and angry, but she brushed the hair gently back from Kami’s face and whispered in her ear.
When they got back, they found Jared kneeling before Holly. Kami raised her eyebrows at the sight: Holly was pretty popular with guys, but in Kami’s experience they seldom literally threw themselves at her feet. They all looked down at Jared’s bowed blond head and saw he was gathering up the shards of crystal and fragments of bone in his hands, and his hands were shimmering with magic.
The air in their headquarters seemed thin suddenly, like being up on a high mountain. The Lynburns were gone, Kami thought. But not anymore.
The crystal sparkled like sun hitting snow, while the bone glowed ivory as if discovered by candlelight at night.
Jared looked up. “I can’t fix it,” he said. The corner of his mouth came up in a tired, crooked half smile. “No surprise that I’m better at breaking things than mending them. I’m sorry. I’ll buy you a new one.”
“Okay,” said Holly. “I like bright colors. Maybe red or orange.”
Jared’s eyebrow lifted. “Okay.” He stood, crystal and bone falling from his open hands. He was one of those boys who made you think about how very differently guys were shaped from girls. And now he could do magic. Kami could not blame Holly for stepping back.
“Nicola Prendergast?” Holly wanted to know, her voice very soft.
Jared flinched. “I didn’t kill her. My aunt Lillian says we’re going to find out who did.”
He looked at Kami, and then at Angela, who nodded. Holly took a deep breath.
“What is Angela’s secret?” she asked.
Kami recognized the look on Jared’s face, intent and withdrawn. She’d seen the same expression on her own face a hundred times. She was grateful to him for speaking quietly, as if he didn’t want to invade Angela’s privacy, though Jared and Kami had so little real privacy of their own.
He said: “Angela’s never kissed anybody.”
Holly laughed. “What? But of course Angie’s—”
Angela, standing still beside Kami, glared at Jared. Her cheeks were burning red in her pale face. Holly shut her mou
th.
“What a coincidence,” Jared said calmly. “Me neither.”
Kami could not help a startled exhale.
Jared looked mildly surprised. “You knew that,” he said to her.
“I know,” Kami said. “I just hadn’t—I guess I hadn’t put it together.”
Holly looked as if she did not care much about kissing revelations, no matter how shocking. She looked like she was concentrating on not having a panic attack. “Okay,” she said, exhaling. “So the stories are true. Magic really does exist, someone magic is killing people, and Kami’s imaginary friend is real too.”
“There’s something happening in the woods, as well,” Kami said. She gave Holly a beseeching glance. “There are creatures in there. Creatures from stories. Ash called it ‘waking the woods.’ ”
Angela was vibrating with indignation at the world. Holly seemed as if she was about to cry. And Kami did not know how to deal with any of it: she had thought her friends would want to know the truth, that they would want to help her.
“Have you, uh …” Holly pushed her hands back through her hair. “Have you seen a unicorn in the woods?”
“I imagine that’s next,” Jared muttered.
“Right,” said Holly. “Well. If the unicorn is pink, about two feet tall, with a sparkly mane, we’ll know my imaginary friend is real too.”
Kami blinked and then burst out laughing. She felt the pleased relief spreading from Jared to her and knew without looking that he was smiling too. She kept her eyes on Angela, and a few moments later, Angela smiled reluctantly as well.
“We did lose touch when I was seven,” Holly admitted. “But Princess Zelda and I really had something back in the day.”
“If we see Princess Zelda,” Kami said, “I’ll be sure to tell her to call you.”
Kami seized a few minutes before class with Angela and Holly later, repairing to the bathroom to try to make some plans.
“We can’t really go to the ladies’ room anymore,” Angela remarked.
“Well,” said Kami, “that’ll get very unfortunate very quickly.”
“I mean it,” said Angela. “We can’t get away from guys now, not really. Not all of them. Jared will always know what we’re doing. I barely know him, and he knows details from the last six years of my life that I thought nobody knew but me and my best friend.”
“Imagine how I feel,” Kami said dryly.
Kami saw Holly exchanging looks with Angela, trying not to be openly horrified about Kami’s life in front of her. She felt her mouth twist.
Someone tried to open the bathroom door and was unable to do so because Angela had her back against it.
“Plumbing got backed up, all the toilets exploded!” Kami yelled. “Go use a different bathroom.”
A voice said suspiciously, “Kami Glass, is this your idea of a joke?”
Angela kicked the door. “Go away or I’ll kick you in the head.”
“We’re so stealth,” Kami said. “It’s what I admire most about us.” She was sitting in one of the sinks, her legs dangling. Her hands were gripping the edge of the sink. “It’s okay,” she added. “He won’t know what you’re saying unless I tell him, and I wouldn’t do that. Jared wouldn’t eavesdrop on you guys either.”
“I don’t care about him,” Angie said fiercely. “I care about you.”
“I have to care about him,” Kami told Angela.
“I can see that,” Holly said slowly. “You would have to love him or hate him.”
The one thing Kami could not feel was indifferent to him. The one thing she could not do was escape him. She saw Holly shiver.
“The idea of it’s kind of romantic,” Holly said. “But it wouldn’t be, would it?”
Kami felt her cheeks burn. “It’s not romantic. We’re not romantic. Why do I have to keep saying that?”
“Because he wants it to be,” Angela said. “Doesn’t he? It’s obvious you’re all he thinks about.”
“Yes,” Kami snapped. “Yes, I matter to him. He wants to keep me to himself, he asked me to go out with him when we’d barely met, and he doesn’t want to touch me.”
Holly blinked. “What?”
“Him being real and me being real,” Kami said. “It’s been hard for us to get used to. Him having a body, it’s been like being thirteen, when you can’t get over how strange guys are, and you can’t look at them when you sit next to them, and when your hands brush you almost have a heart attack.”
“I remember that.” Holly nodded. “Except I was eleven.”
Kami and Angela both looked at her with raised eyebrows. Holly shrugged.
“It’s been like when Holly was eleven, then,” Kami said. “Except worse. Neither of us has known how to handle it, but I’ve wanted to. And he hasn’t. I don’t know what to do about someone who only wants me for my mind.”
Holly slid down the wall to sit on the floor. “I can honestly say it has never happened to me.”
“Yeah,” said Angela. “Guys, always trying to kiss me. I have to beat them off with a stick. Seriously, I keep the stick behind the door at home.”
Kami tried to smile, even as the skin between her brows pinched. “I hate you guys. And I hate talking about this. It’s so humiliating.”
“No,” Holly protested, reaching out a hand to her.
“Yes, it is,” Kami said fiercely. Embarrassment clutched her by the throat, but she swallowed and surged ahead. “Let’s just talk about the investigation. Unless you guys have any leads on who might be the sorcerous murderer, I was thinking of investigating something Ash let drop. He talked about something happening at Monkshood.”
“That old place?” Holly asked.
“Ever go poking around there when you were a kid?” Kami asked.
Holly was silent.
“Me neither,” Kami said thoughtfully. “Time we did.” She hopped off the sink and started toward the door, but then stopped. “That is,” she said, “if you both still want to be part of the investigation. I understand if this freaks you out too much. I know it’s a lot to deal with.”
“It would be all right if it freaked you out,” Holly said cautiously to Angela, as if hoping for permission to admit she was freaked out herself.
Angela had not grown up with a father hating the Lynburns like Holly had, or a mother keeping the Lynburns’ secrets like Kami had. She had not had Aurimere waiting on the horizon all her life. Kami could understand it if Angela wanted nothing to do with this.
“It doesn’t matter,” Angela said.
“It doesn’t matter?”
“What matters is Kami,” Angela said, avoiding Kami’s eyes. “I do not trust that guy. He looks at her as if she was his heart, made of glass and suspended on a thread that might break. If the thread breaks, I don’t know what he’ll do.”
“His mother made me what I am to him,” Kami told them quietly. She did not want to discuss his heart. Whenever he looked at her, he looked away fast. He didn’t look at her the way he must have looked at Holly when they first met.
She felt ashamed for that moment of resentment when she saw Holly’s concerned expression.
“I don’t want Kami hurt,” Holly said.
“I won’t have her hurt,” said Angela. “Or you.”
Holly bowed her head and hugged her knees to her chest, as if she had been hoping that wouldn’t come up, that they would never have to discuss the fact that someone had tried to grab Holly the night Nicola died. Someone had meant it to be her, and they could not go to the police with a tale of magic and blood. They only had each other to solve this, and Kami did not know what she would do if Holly or Angela opted out.
There was a pause, and then Kami heard the click of Angela’s heels on tile, walking across the bathroom floor. Eventually Angela’s shining leather boots were touching Holly’s worn running shoes.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Angela promised her.
“Sure,” Holly said, smiling up at Angela, even if her smile looked
strained. “I still have several pairs of deadly high heels.”
They all laughed. None of their laughs sounded particularly convincing.
“So, Angie,” Holly went on, “you’ve never …”
There was a silence neither of them seemed inclined to fill. Then Angela said, “Ah, no.”
“Bit hard to believe,” Holly mumbled, and Kami saw her flush. “Since you’re about the most beautiful person in town.”
Angie’s scarlet-painted mouth tugged up at one corner. “You forget one small detail,” she said. “I kind of hate people.”
A real laugh was surprised out of Kami and Holly both—a laugh that started out a little wild, but ended up making Kami think that only having each other might just work out.
“No, you don’t,” Holly said.
“I really do,” said Angela, and Kami laughed again as Angela continued. “Have you met people? They’re very annoying.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Monkshood Abbey
Monkshood was a good hour’s walk from the town proper. The very narrow lanes meant that occasionally you had to throw yourself in the ditch to avoid a car, and once they had to throw themselves in the ditch to avoid a farmer coming by in a blue cart.
“The Americans have these inventions called sidewalks,” Jared noted.
“We call them pavements,” Kami said. “And we see them as luxuries that you just can’t have with every road.”
“You know what goes faster than us? Or even pretty, pretty ponies?” Jared asked.
“Your head, spinning through the air when detached from your shoulders after a grisly motorcycle crash?” Kami raised her eyebrows and Jared ducked his head, his ripple of amusement going through her anyway. It felt good. Not so good was the fact that Holly and Angela were rambling ahead, obviously uncomfortable about being near her and Jared. Kami could understand it. Just the fact that they could talk to each other silently must be off-putting, in the same way that speaking in a foreign language in front of someone you knew couldn’t speak it was off-putting—but worse, because a foreign language could be learned.
“You were the one who wanted to tell them,” Jared said, voice low as the sound of autumn-red leaves rustling on the trees along the road, whispering hush, hush to the sky.