“I once told you I was always on your side,” she murmured. “I will always be on your side, even in times of ultimate epic failure. I’ll see you in the morning and I’ll be glad to see you, even on a ruined morning. Good night.”
Jared did not kiss her, but he leaned his forehead against hers and let out a long weary breath, as if he had reached a refuge where it was safe to rest and breathe for a moment.
“Night,” he said, and after a moment: “Thanks.”
She walked home through the night with her father, the boys walking between them. Her father had seen her face and not asked any questions.
The night was dark and deep: the stars seemed lost somewhere. The sound of their steps seemed like the only sound in the world, or at least in the still quiet of the town that was now at once both home and prison.
None of them looked at Aurimere on the horizon.
“I propose that we just stop letting Lillian ‘Bad Idea’ Lynburn make plans,” Jon said. “I know she means well, but this is a lady who seems to never have had a good idea in her life.”
“She was the one caught off guard, not Rob. She didn’t know that the people she loved and trusted would betray her, or that her home would be taken away from her. She’s doing the best she can, and it’s all turning to dust in her hands.” Kami did not like the too-perceptive way her father was looking at her, and added, “She is basically the most insensitive person who ever lived, though, and she and her plans can keep the hell away from my brothers.”
Tomo looked up at them anxiously and said, “I want to help.”
“You are helping by being awesome,” Kami told him.
Tomo nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true.”
Ten said nothing. His hand was cold in Kami’s, but when she looked down at him all she could see was the glitter of his glasses and his solemn, unreadable face.
There was a clatter and the sound of glass breaking near them. Dad spun both the boys behind him and Kami stepped forward, hands uplifted. They saw a man stepping out of the grocery store, carrying paper bags full of food. Under the hood of his coat, Kami recognized Timothy Cartwright, one of Dad’s friends.
He started when he saw them, stared at them for a guilty moment, then mumbled, “I left the money in there.”
Timothy slipped away down the street, until he was nothing more than a shadow among shadows. They were all shadows, crouched in the shadow of Aurimere, making useless plans and slinking around afraid to be seen.
They were a town under siege. The people of Sorry-in-the-Vale were going to give up, to give in and do what Rob wanted, under the pressure of sheer fear.
When they were home and Tomo and Ten were in bed, Kami and her dad sat down on the sofa together. Kami curled against his side.
“When Jared was sleeping and Rusty was watching him,” Kami said in a small voice against his chest, “I went to see Mum, at Claire’s, but it was shut up. She wasn’t there.”
Dad said nothing for a long time. Kami waited.
“The word is, your mum is up in Aurimere,” Jon said at last. “She’s cooking for them, seeing to the sorcerers’ needs, being a good little villager and the example that every citizen of Sorry-in-the-Vale should copy. So I hear.”
Kami did not know what to say to that. But she knew she did not have to speak; her father felt the same desolation.
“Are the Lynburn kids all right?” Dad asked, after another pause. “I know they had to hurt themselves, for that spell.”
“They’re okay,” Kami said. “I can feel Ash sleeping. I’m a bit worried about Jared. He shouldn’t even have done this spell when he’s still sick, and now he’s going to feel like this is all his fault, and he—he tries so hard.”
Once again the way her father was looking at her was too perceptive, saw too much of her that she hadn’t meant to betray. Kami put her head down onto his shoulder, hiding her face, and he sighed and stroked her hair.
“None of you should have to do any of this,” Jon murmured. “You’re all far too young.”
Kami woke up alone on the sofa, a soft woven blanket pulled up to her chin and a soft sound in her ears that for a moment she did not recognize.
Until she sat upright on the sofa, scrambled off it, and ran to her window. She saw her father swinging open their gate and realized that the noise that had woken her had been the door shut stealthily behind him.
Ash! she screamed in her head, wrenching him out of sleep. You have to come watch the boys. I have to go after my father.
Chapter Nine
A Glass Heart
Kami could intuit where her father was going: down the road by the woods and up the hill to Aurimere, but she didn’t know what his plan was. To see her mother—to beg her to come home? What if she didn’t? What if she did, and Rob Lynburn didn’t like it?
She did not know what her father intended, or what she should do. She didn’t try to stop him, but she did follow him so she could try to protect him.
It was a clear spring morning, bright as if the sun was a lamp whose brilliance had been turned up a few notches, white rays stretching out across a sky lucent as glass. Kami had had to stop to find her shoes and her coat, and she was trying to be subtle as she hurried, so her father was well ahead of her on the path. No matter how clear the morning, she could barely keep him in sight.
There was no way her father could pass through the flames around Aurimere.
But she was only a little way up the hill when she saw her father reach Aurimere, a small dark figure outlined against the fire, and the living leaping walls of fire flickered and parted like a red sea. Jon passed through the flame. The sorcerers at Aurimere had let him in, and Kami did not know why, and she could not see him at all.
Kami charged up the hill, racing as if she could stop him though he was already gone. She mentally apologized to Angela and did not stop as she ran straight into the fire.
The sorcerers must have strengthened their spells since Jared escaped. It hurt, as it had not hurt last time, and as she felt tears roll down from her smarting eyes to her scorched cheeks and smelled the smoky scent that was the ends of her hair burning.
Maybe you should wait, Ash told her, and she could feel the wash of his nervousness against her walls.
Maybe you should shut up, Kami suggested. That’s my dad.
Lillian had told Kami about the magical ways to hide yourself, how to wrap yourself in shadows and fade into stone. There were not many shadows on a morning like this, but as Kami pushed open the door and walked into the vast hall she found a few. She took the darkness lurking in the alcoves where marble busts stood, the shadows in the corners of the high ceiling and the dark stairs, and wound them around herself.
She did not think it would stand up long to a sorcerer’s scrutiny, but she went running through the hall toward the sound of voices anyway. If they were distracted, they might not notice, and her father had no magical protection at all.
The voices were not her mother’s and father’s. This was no private meeting between them.
Rob Lynburn had been redecorating Aurimere, Kami saw, to be more appropriate for his evil-masterminding needs. In the parlor there was only one of the red sofas left, pushed up against the farthest wall, where the windows were tall, curved at the top like church windows. There was stained glass, too, like a church, but instead of saints and angels the windows showed a blue glass river, a girl’s face, and vivid green leaves in the drowned girl’s sun-yellow hair.
Rob was sitting on the red sofa, talking to other sorcerers, who were standing. Kami recognized Hugh Prescott, Holly’s father, who was laughing at something Rob was saying.
They all stopped laughing when they noticed Ruth Sherman at the door, holding Jon Glass’s arm.
“He came to the house and asked to be let in,” said Ruth. “He asked to serve you.”
Rob leaned forward in the same instant Kami hurried forward, through the door, hardly caring if she shoved into a sorcerer or if they all saw through
her cloak of shadows.
Nobody did. They were all focused on her father, who was standing in a puffy black jacket, his black hair ruffled by the wind outside, and giving Rob Lynburn a little crooked smile.
“Did you?” Rob asked.
Jon nodded.
“How interesting,” Rob said. “Tell me more.”
Rob did not even bother to climb to his feet. He was a big guy, bigger than either of his sons and a lot bigger than Kami’s dad. His shoulders strained against the material of his checked shirt, his smile was genial, and he looked like a perfect down-to-earth example of English manhood. All except for the cold gleam of contempt in his blue eyes.
“I’m not an idiot. There’s no point fighting you,” Jon said. “I want my wife back, and my kids to live happy and safe. You seem a reasonable man. Your family looked after mine once, didn’t they? I’m willing to offer my services as a source. I’m willing to do whatever you want.”
Kami didn’t know what her father thought he was doing. Lillian had already examined him: it might run in the Glass bloodline, but he wasn’t a potential source for any sorcerer. Kami and her brothers were.
Of course, Lillian and Rob were not exactly on speaking terms right now, and maybe Ruth Sherman did not know how to read the signs that identified a source.
“Come here,” said Rob, which meant Kami was right but also that Jon’s bluff was being instantly called.
Dad did not look dismayed. He kept smiling—like a small black terrier stepping up to face a golden retriever, recklessly confident that he could handle the situation—and walked over to the very edge of the sofa. Rob leaned back farther into the sofa cushions, hair gilded in the light of the stained-glass windows, looking up at Jon. For a long moment, blue eyes focused on black, and held.
At last, Rob said softly, “You’re no source. Did you think you could trick me? What were you hoping to do?”
Jon Glass’s smile spread into a grin.
“I was hoping to get close enough to do this,” he said, and Kami’s father—the graphic designer with funny T-shirts, the man who always laughed at farmers and their guns and made jokes about getting one that nobody took seriously—produced a gun from under his puffy jacket. He took aim in one smooth expert motion, moving quicker than anyone in the room, and shot Rob Lynburn.
He jerked the gun down at the last moment and hit Rob in the leg. Kami’s breath exploded from her lungs in shock, as if she had been punched.
Her gentle father, who carried his kids up to bed, who made dumb jokes and played computer games and who she was sure had never aimed a gun at a person before. Dad might have hesitated at the last second and missed killing Rob, but now Rob had fallen from the sofa on his hands and knees, making a guttural noise of rage and pain as he scrabbled to rise from the stone floor where blood was pooling. His leg was a mess.
Jon stood over him, sucked in a deep breath, and aimed the gun again. This time at Rob’s head.
Hugh Prescott rushed forward, both hands outstretched. Kami abandoned shadows and all hope of hiding and threw herself bodily at him, knocking him and his spell off course.
All the stained-glass windows blew outward, glass shards vanishing into the sunlight.
Ruth Sherman raised her hand, and Jon’s gun spun out of his grip.
“Grab them,” Rob said thickly. “Girl, you break the bond between yourself and my son right now, or I will kill your father before your eyes.”
“I can’t!” Kami shouted, and thought fast as Ruth aimed her hand at her dad. “I can’t, I truly can’t,” she said, her words stumbling over each other. “You outwitted Lillian … you tricked us all, when you did the blood spell to mess with Jared’s magic. Ash and Jared did the ceremony to share power, and now none of us have any magic! Not me, not Ash, not Jared. I can’t cut the link between me and Ash. I don’t have any magic to do it.”
She stayed kneeling on the floor and hardly daring to even hope that Rob would be deceived. It was just possible that Kami had followed her father without magic, and Lillian hadn’t expected Kami to keep her magic when Ash lost his. Nobody had expected Kami to be able to walk through the sorcerous fire. None of them knew anything, really, about sources. The Lynburns had not had a source for five hundred years.
She knew Rob would always underestimate her, and thought Rob’s vanity would make him want to believe.
“Sir,” said Alison Prescott humbly—Holly’s mother. “You’re bleeding, we have to help you—you could bleed to death, and I don’t even know if magic can do anything for the bone—”
“Shut up!” bellowed Rob, with rage and pain and what Kami thought might even be fear, beneath it all, that someone whom Rob considered so beneath him could walk into his home and very nearly blot him out. He tried to rise again, on his shattered leg, and cried out. “Take them away,” he said eventually, through his teeth. “Keep them safe. I’m going to break the bond between that girl and my son, and then I’m going to punish them.”
Ruth and Alison raised their hands in unison: Jon jerked around, as if the very currents of air around him had turned into puppet strings.
Hugh Prescott clambered up, one hand clamped hard around Kami’s arm. As he dragged her out of the room, he made sure to bang Kami’s hip hard enough on the doorframe so that the pain resounded down to the bone. It was such a spiteful, bullying little gesture that Kami refused to give him the satisfaction of showing she was hurt. She bared her teeth at him instead.
“Careful, Hugh,” Alison said, to Kami’s surprise. “She’s Holly’s friend.”
“And where do you think our girl got the idea to mess with the Lynburns, you stupid woman?” Hugh demanded. “Not out of her own fluffy little head.”
“Why not? Holly’s smart,” Kami said, and got banged against the wall of the stairwell for her trouble.
“Like father, like daughter, I suppose,” said Ruth as they pulled them both down the stairwell and into an underground stone hall. Hugh pushed at one of the walls to reveal—oh God, Kami thought, were the Lynburns competing for some sort of title in creepiness?—what seemed to be a family crypt.
“Thank you,” said Kami.
She looked at her father. He didn’t seem to have heard Ruth. He had been looking at her, in love and horror, and at no one else, since she had revealed herself.
They threw Dad down on the stone floor, and Kami wrenched out of Hugh’s arms so she could go to him.
“By that I mean you’re both stupid,” Ruth told them. She closed the door with the heavy scraping sound of stone on stone. Her red hair, the last light Kami could see, was lost. “And doomed.”
It was dark in the crypt. Kami did not mind, honestly, since what she had seen of it—engraved stone tablets and the faces of the dead rendered in stone—had not made her want to see more. She was not a fan of crypt décor.
Dad had his arm around her, tight and warm.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Kami whispered. “They don’t know I still have magic. We just need to wait a little, until they’re not suspicious, and then I can break us both out.”
She spoke to Ash in her head, saying the same thing, at the same time as she spoke to her father. Ash was frantic to do something, to tell someone.
No, said Kami. It will only worry Jared and Angela and the others. I can get myself out of this. Nobody needs to know. Nobody needs to do anything stupid. Are you with the boys?
Yeah, Ash said. Ten took one look at me and shut himself up in his room, but he’s okay. I’m playing Scrabble with Tomo, but, Kami, I have to do something besides playing Scrabble.
You’d better watch out, Kami warned. Tomo cheats.
“Ash is with Ten and Tomo,” Kami told her father. “They’ll be okay.”
Dad’s arm tightened even closer around her. “I thought you’d all be okay,” he said, in her ear. “If I’d just managed not to mess up, you would all be safe now.”
“You didn’t mess up,” Kami said, curling up small, but not letting her voice be anything b
ut fierce. “Not being ready to kill someone isn’t screwing up.”
“Isn’t it?” Dad asked softly. He rocked her a little, almost absently.
“I don’t even know where you got a gun,” Kami whispered.
“I took it out of your room,” Dad said.
“Oh,” said Kami. “I took it from Henry Thornton once. I never shot it. I didn’t know what I was doing with it.”
“I barely knew what I was doing,” Dad whispered back to her. “I just wanted to make things right for you. When you have a kid, you think, Oh my God, I’m not grown up enough for this. I’m going to mess this up.”
“Because you and Mum were really young when you had me,” Kami said, hesitating.
“No,” said Jon. “I don’t think anyone ever feels grown up enough. But who is there left, to be a grown-up?”
He was silent for a minute in the dark with the Lynburn dead, and Kami thought of who there had been, once: Kami’s grandmother and her dad’s mother, the woman who had died last summer and whom Kami had always wanted to be like.
A few years ago, Kami had tried to learn all about Japan and would come rushing to tell her all about The Tale of Genji or kintsugi, the art of repairing pottery.
“I suppose you know this already, Obaachan,” she’d said to her, crestfallen.
“No, why would I?” asked her grandmother calmly. “Do you know everything about England?”
“Did you know that pottery can be repaired with gold?” Kami asked. “Then it’s meant to be stronger than before, and more beautiful. Which is awesome, though it seems expensive.”
Her grandmother had nodded. “Makes sense to me,” she said. “Why be broken when you can be gold?”
Kami clung to her father. She could not answer him. There was nobody left to fix anything.
“I’m sorry,” Dad whispered. “I always wanted to be able to solve all your problems and keep you safe forever. I couldn’t do it.”